[UNKNOWN]: In terms of redlings, four seals on a ridge, they like no gunship, no control or with them.
[UNKNOWN]: If there's a J-TAC on that team, how does that operation go in your mind?
[UNKNOWN]: to the air power has been a deciding factor, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You all the way back to the World War II.
[UNKNOWN]: You look at when Patton was going to relieve the Battle of the Bulge, and he kept the air core attacking everything on this side of the river, while he went, you know, basically unchecked on this side.
[UNKNOWN]: The Germans didn't want to surrender to Patton.
[UNKNOWN]: They wanted to surrender to the guy who'd beaten him, who was that air commander.
[UNKNOWN]: Do that man.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you think I said it had a, the J-Tac with them that we wouldn't even know the name of the operation.
[UNKNOWN]: Ladies and gentlemen, as always, it's both an honor and a pleasure to welcome my next guest to the podcast.
[UNKNOWN]: He was an Air Force Special Operations Tag P slash J-TAC on Active Duty.
[UNKNOWN]: Then the Air Force National Guard would combat deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines.
[UNKNOWN]: He simultaneously served as a Washington State Trooper undercover narcotics detective, swat operator, and swat team leader while completing law school classic underachiever.
[UNKNOWN]: Who ordered two brown stars for combat actions, he's the president of an international law firm based out of DC, where he advises security, defense, and risk consulting clients in 19 countries on six continents, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the stage, Conan Higgins.
[UNKNOWN]: The crowd goes wild.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, can't you hear him?
[UNKNOWN]: That's the applause button.
[UNKNOWN]: How are you doing?
[UNKNOWN]: And I want to thank you for taking time out of your schedule to come.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I appreciate you having me.
[UNKNOWN]: This is really an honor.
[UNKNOWN]: to the guys that I mentioned I was coming on the show and I got a mix of no way for you.
[UNKNOWN]: And then the others were like, oh, I'll tell us when you give us the link.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's not going to be today, you know, it's going to be a little bit, but so I do appreciate it.
[UNKNOWN]: This is this is a big honor for me and I'm doing great, you know, I'm happy to be here.
[UNKNOWN]: This is, I was, I have spent my entire adult life really not talking about myself.
[UNKNOWN]: And so this is a departure from that and hope I equip myself well.
[UNKNOWN]: I have no doubt he will given the list of accomplishments that you did at the same time if you can multitask doing that.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm pretty sure you can handle a one-on-one.
[UNKNOWN]: How many people have you killed with a radio?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, you mean actually with the radio?
[UNKNOWN]: Via a radio.
[UNKNOWN]: No idea.
[UNKNOWN]: Ballpark number.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I couldn't say, I mean, there's the problem is that we don't always see who is on the receiving end of the bomb in terms of the numbers.
[UNKNOWN]: I can tell you that one time in Afghanistan, I was with the OGA, all right?
[UNKNOWN]: We still call it that.
[UNKNOWN]: And we were trying to get some guys to come out of a compound.
[UNKNOWN]: We wanted them alive.
[UNKNOWN]: those you ask me, you know, can you do a little show of force?
[UNKNOWN]: I said, well, what am I going to do?
[UNKNOWN]: You said, well, can you put a bomb on the top of that hill over there?
[UNKNOWN]: And looking at it with the Mark one eyeball?
[UNKNOWN]: Sure, it's just this bald hill, nothing on it.
[UNKNOWN]: And I, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: got the A10s to circle in, they marked it with some rockets and then put a 500-pounder on it.
[UNKNOWN]: And later we determined that that was actually a cemetery.
[UNKNOWN]: So the report went in that they were troops dug in overhead cover.
[UNKNOWN]: I couldn't tell you how many were in there.
[UNKNOWN]: Wow, that's wild.
[UNKNOWN]: What an ominous place to hold up in.
[UNKNOWN]: You mean in the graveyard?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, well, we weren't.
[UNKNOWN]: We were offset.
[UNKNOWN]: We were, yeah, I guess maybe I'm confused where their enemy fighters were.
[UNKNOWN]: There were enemy fighters in a compound.
[UNKNOWN]: They were watching us.
[UNKNOWN]: They could see this hill if we,
[UNKNOWN]: You did the show of force by putting the bomb on the hill, essentially the implication is your next.
[UNKNOWN]: Make a choice.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: And they did make a choice.
[UNKNOWN]: And we thought it was pretty exceptional.
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't think it was that spectacular of a show of force, big deal.
[UNKNOWN]: But for them, it meant something that we were bombing.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: The place we want.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: No doubt.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, within the military spectrum, I think most, you know, viewers or just people that are into the specifically special operations have an idea what JTAC means or what it is, but most average citizens have no idea what a JTAC is.
[UNKNOWN]: Can you kind of give the layman's description of it?
[UNKNOWN]: I can, so you see it in movies, they kind of dramatize it a little bit, but it's the person on the ground talking to the aircraft, whether that's fixed wing or rotary wing helicopters, or even back to artillery to provide
[UNKNOWN]: munitions, fires, effects, if you will, on a target.
[UNKNOWN]: And so in the Air Force, most of what the Air Force does is support those who fly.
[UNKNOWN]: And I used to like to tell the pilots, they work for us, that they're up there only so they can help us.
[UNKNOWN]: But
[UNKNOWN]: But really, we're there to coordinate with the ground commander, whether that's, you know, big army, and that's a brigade size element, or that's an SFT, or sometimes we'd go out with, with your guys, so small unit tactics, and we are the person, in small unit tactics, if everybody has a job, right, and there's some overlap, we might be a senior in a junior, but,
[UNKNOWN]: For us, really, it was one guy, one guy in the Air Force, reaching back, coordinating for advising the ground commander on what was available, how to employ it, to further their scheme of maneuver.
[UNKNOWN]: So if we need to take that compound.
[UNKNOWN]: and we just can't get in and we need to pull back and hit it with something from standoff then I was the one making that happen.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I would, it's obviously a team effort within the realm of special operations.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: But to me, I would argue that J-Tak is probably the most important position on the battlefield for that reason.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, there's so many times where I know for me personally even, I mean, we got ambushed outside of to create
[UNKNOWN]: And within a minute and a half, maybe, our guy had a C-130 circle in that fast, and that kind of level of comfort and knowing that you have those eyes in the sky is beyond priceless.
[UNKNOWN]: What made you choose that path?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, that's a long story, and it news we got some time to do.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, so if you'll indulge me, I'll set the stage a little bit.
[UNKNOWN]: When I was a kid, as probably many kids,
[UNKNOWN]: Don't have a plan for the future other than Saturdays two days way, and I'm gonna go play ball or whatever I had a great uncle who was he was an ace in World War II He was squadron commander back in the the days of sack, you know strategic air command of the nukes, and that was really those were the The favored sons of of the Air Force back in those days And he told me that I should go to the Air Force Academy and I said, okay, we're gonna go to the Air Force Academy
[UNKNOWN]: And I left after three years, it's still a four-year program.
[UNKNOWN]: But the reason I did was because that was in early 90s, and they had too many pilots, not enough aircraft, so they were banking pilots.
[UNKNOWN]: And what that meant when I showed up to basic cadet training is that the class of 92 came back from vacation to find out that instead of 600 of them, who were all pilot qualified, only the top 200 were going.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, there's a scramble in class of 92, but they're pretty fixed in their order of merit.
[UNKNOWN]: And what can you really do?
[UNKNOWN]: The class of 93, 94, and then I was class of 95.
[UNKNOWN]: There was even more wiggle room.
[UNKNOWN]: And what you really had was people deciding that they were going to fight for the things that really mattered to them.
[UNKNOWN]: If they weren't going to get into pilot training, what were they going to do?
[UNKNOWN]: And I had no plan to get through the academy.
[UNKNOWN]: I had a plan to get there, I did.
[UNKNOWN]: So, but,
[UNKNOWN]: I had a prep.
[UNKNOWN]: I had to take a prep here at New Mexico Military Institute.
[UNKNOWN]: That's an army school.
[UNKNOWN]: I hedged my bets there, joined Army ROTC.
[UNKNOWN]: I went to the ROTC basic camp at 17 years old.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, usually it's college juniors, don't do that.
[UNKNOWN]: And I excelled, and I liked it.
[UNKNOWN]: I, you know, land and have shooting demolition, which we watched at basic camp, you know, but it still was exciting to me.
[UNKNOWN]: And the idea of then going into the Air Force and being an admin officer was,
[UNKNOWN]: was terrifying to me.
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't want to be some cubicle wizard.
[UNKNOWN]: And in those days, there was no pathway to graduate and go straight into what's now Air Force Special Warfare, as an officer, as a second lieutenant.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's changed now, which I think is great.
[UNKNOWN]: but I was told that if I resigned my opportunity to commission through the Academy and enlisted, they would take me tomorrow and no chance, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, then I started thinking about it, realize that this is what I want to do.
[UNKNOWN]: I want to be on the ground.
[UNKNOWN]: I want to...
[UNKNOWN]: break stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: I want to do the things that the JTACs do, and I made the decision to leave.
[UNKNOWN]: And I left, I enlisted, I went through what was then called the OLH operating location H, which was the PGA comeback control selection course.
[UNKNOWN]: I went with a couple of guys that you may have
[UNKNOWN]: And another guy Adam Vizzi who retired eventually as the second Air Force command chief and Just a fresh face date funeral kid named David Dawkins went through with him.
[UNKNOWN]: No doubt.
[UNKNOWN]: Yep So did you outrun him at some point?
[UNKNOWN]: I like to think I did, yeah, he must have been her.
[UNKNOWN]: He looked like the type of guy that would outright.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, you know, it's funny because I wasn't, I was the fastest guy on our team for a little bit.
[UNKNOWN]: And then got hurt.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, you used to run this this six mile or another 39 minutes.
[UNKNOWN]: Wow, yeah, that's awesome.
[UNKNOWN]: So I imagine that getting a billet to the academy and leaving is not something that, maybe it's something that's frowned upon.
[UNKNOWN]: Did you take any slack for doing that?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I was told I'd regret it.
[UNKNOWN]: I was told it was the worst mistake of my life.
[UNKNOWN]: My mother didn't speak to me that I was no longer going to be an officer in a gentleman.
[UNKNOWN]: It's just going to be just a gentleman.
[UNKNOWN]: The great unwashed.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a classic for sure.
[UNKNOWN]: In terms of your childhood, I know you had the relative that was an ace, were there other things in your childhood that were catalysts for wanting to serve in the military, like where are you from and did you do anything as a third dad or extended family that kind of steered you in that direction?
[UNKNOWN]: So that's a lot of questions.
[UNKNOWN]: Let me pick it apart.
[UNKNOWN]: I was born in New Mexico, we moved around a lot as a kid because my mother was very educationally oriented, she was driven to get her PhD, we moved to Tennessee, and then she finished her PhD up in Massachusetts, so because she had to study, my sister and I had to go play.
[UNKNOWN]: And those days kids played outside, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So I would just disappear after Saturday morning cartoons, which ended at eight.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, people of my age would probably remember that.
[UNKNOWN]: cartoons are over, right?
[UNKNOWN]: There wasn't a dedicated channel, and you needed to get outside or you got, you know, put outside.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I spent a lot of time outside, I've spent a lot of time by myself, or, you know, with friends, and verybly we played some version of Army, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You know, we'd chase each other around, we'd...
[UNKNOWN]: invent bad guys to hunt and shoot and fight.
[UNKNOWN]: Sometimes we fight each other.
[UNKNOWN]: That's I guess what kids did.
[UNKNOWN]: I grew up for the most part in Maine and there's a lot of wilderness in Maine.
[UNKNOWN]: We had in Maine they called camps, not cabins.
[UNKNOWN]: We had a camp way up on Moose Lake.
[UNKNOWN]: Have you been to Maine?
[UNKNOWN]: I love Maine.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean I would live there honestly.
[UNKNOWN]: That's one of my favorite places to go.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's beautiful.
[UNKNOWN]: Right, so have you been to a mucid lake area of not been there?
[UNKNOWN]: No, it's you can quickly find yourself in trouble, right?
[UNKNOWN]: There are things in the woods that will eat you still the mosquitoes being chief among them, but
[UNKNOWN]: But, you know, being out there, just spending time on myself taught me that I want to be outside.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not built for a desk job, which is, you know, kind of funny, given where I am today in my life.
[UNKNOWN]: We could talk about that, too, but I wanted to go into the military because, you know,
[UNKNOWN]: I thought it was honorable.
[UNKNOWN]: I thought it was prestigious.
[UNKNOWN]: And my dad had been enlisted during the Vietnam War and had come home to...
[UNKNOWN]: transition out, go to the guard in Maine, and proudly he used to say that Canada never invaded when he was in the main army guard.
[UNKNOWN]: But he went to Officer Candidate School and he finished first in his class and so fast forward to when I'm leaving the academy, my thought was there's always a way to be commissioned.
[UNKNOWN]: But I wanted to do what made me tick, what made me happy, what which
[UNKNOWN]: really made the difference.
[UNKNOWN]: If you're not going to test yourself when you're young and capable, it's pretty hard.
[UNKNOWN]: I couldn't make it to selection much less through it at this age with the knees and hips and back.
[UNKNOWN]: But I have those problems because I did, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I guess the childhood experience being a contributing factor outdoors-wise certainly makes sense.
[UNKNOWN]: Did your dad talk to you at all about joining the military, not joining the military?
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously, the Vietnam generation.
[UNKNOWN]: There's so many other kind of variables surrounding
[UNKNOWN]: you know the men and women that served in that war that I think were pretty negatively received and in such an unjust type of way, but were those conversations that you guys ever had that he tried a stereotype one way or the other?
[UNKNOWN]: I think he knew, he's really good at picking his battles, so talking me out of the military was not one that he ever attempted.
[UNKNOWN]: He did steer me to follow that Air Force Academy path, thought that that would at least be a better route for me in terms of just everything across the board.
[UNKNOWN]: But when I decided to push it to go,
[UNKNOWN]: The the advice he gave me was be the middle man middle row.
[UNKNOWN]: You do not want to stand out in basic training You don't want to be that guy good or bad Which That's I think safe advice the the people who excel are going to excel the people who Excellent the wrong direction.
[UNKNOWN]: That's you know, they're going to pick themselves out pretty quickly.
[UNKNOWN]: So But he he didn't try to steer me away from it if anything.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't think my parents really ever understood what I did
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine the, it would be tough, you know, being a father myself, being asked, you know, I had a thing about serving, what do you think?
[UNKNOWN]: You know, there's so many different emotions and thought processes, especially, you know, now in a later stage of my life than the gun hope, you know, 19 year old, you know, that would be a tough thing to navigate, I think, with kids.
[UNKNOWN]: Does he ever do any type of like field craft shooting, you know, anything like that with you?
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: So my dad was blessed to have a lot of friends that were far more, let's call it field oriented, right, for lack of a better term on the fly here.
[UNKNOWN]: And one of the ways that
[UNKNOWN]: So I was perhaps not the best behaved child, we would say that.
[UNKNOWN]: And pretty quickly my dad realized that the only way this kid's gonna learn a lesson is by smoking it.
[UNKNOWN]: And so how did he do that?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, farmed me out as cheap labor to his buddies who were clearing fields to build houses, digging ditches, French drains, helping them as unskilled labor to build decks.
[UNKNOWN]: I hauled all the heavy stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: One time, I know in high school, I came home from high school dance, drunk, he ate late, woke me up a couple hours later, and we went to the lake.
[UNKNOWN]: Because a friend of his had inadvertently dropped the ladder off their boat down in about 20 feet of water, my dad just volunteered me, said, we'll go get it.
[UNKNOWN]: So I did and that was the end of the punishment right then I was had a great day on the lake and and all was fine But you know, there was if you are going to choose a path there are going to be consequences and sometimes those hurt So I think if anything he taught me those lessons right be smart make better decisions But if you don't
[UNKNOWN]: You know, if you're going to be dumb, you got to be tough, and so between the mentorship I got from his friends in just the value of hard labor, because every time I was being punished, and I went on one of these jobs, they still paid me.
[UNKNOWN]: And this is back in the mid-80s, you know, I'm getting paid five bucks an hour, which is huge money under the table.
[UNKNOWN]: especially when I have no bills, but all I wanted them to say to my dad was at the end of the day, I'd done a good job, and so I knew I was there, I was there because I'd chosen to do what I wanted to do, and now you gotta pay the paper.
[UNKNOWN]: But in the interest of teaching me more than just hard physical labor and those lessons, I went hunting with these guys, I went fishing with these guys, I spent time trapping and snowshoeing cross country skiing, I did a
[UNKNOWN]: signed up for a four-day three-night winter cross-country backpacking trip through Baxter State Park when I was in high school I'd never cross-country skied my life.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm just I want to do that.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, have you done it?
[UNKNOWN]: No.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm good luck.
[UNKNOWN]: And I lived.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm here.
[UNKNOWN]: So I think it was more the spirit of
[UNKNOWN]: He provided me ways to kind of test myself and with some safety nets, with some built-in parachutes, if you will.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean to me, that type of upbringing.
[UNKNOWN]: is crucial, especially for young men.
[UNKNOWN]: Absolutely.
[UNKNOWN]: Not just kind of the tough love slash, let's make sure you understand that there are consequences for poor decisions, but growing up around other men that are kind of instilling those same types of values and
[UNKNOWN]: and moral principles of something that I think is largely lost today.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know why it is.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, I'm sure technology plays a big role, but I think that there's something else to it.
[UNKNOWN]: It seems like there's way less of that nowadays with young men as they go.
[UNKNOWN]: get into the team years being mentored by a small crew of good men who are capable and dangerous and kind of echoing the things that their dad would want echoed.
[UNKNOWN]: Why do you think that is?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I think there's a lot of reasons.
[UNKNOWN]: One, the war on masculinity, right, from the media, from society, call it toxic masculinity.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, those are the traits that settled America, those are the traits that conquered the wilderness.
[UNKNOWN]: that built civilization.
[UNKNOWN]: Those are the things that said, you know, you go ahead and eat kids, Ali, tomorrow, if we have enough food, it's the self-sacrifice.
[UNKNOWN]: It's the putting others before self.
[UNKNOWN]: It's knowing what the job needs to get done and doing it.
[UNKNOWN]: Sometimes, great pain to yourself.
[UNKNOWN]: I think we are a very comfortable society.
[UNKNOWN]: I think that young men don't really have the outlets, that
[UNKNOWN]: There was the phase.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm a dad.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm a dad to older kids and I'm a dad to younger kids.
[UNKNOWN]: And there was the period where participation trophies were a thing.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think that when everybody's special then nobody is.
[UNKNOWN]: So we invite mediocrity.
[UNKNOWN]: We invite complacency.
[UNKNOWN]: rather than reward individual effort and accomplishment, we poo poo that because we don't want little Billy to feel bad because he doesn't run as fast as everybody else or because he's not as quick to answer a question or to find an answer or to build a solution.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think that it's been a decade, even generations long,
[UNKNOWN]: campaign against men being men yeah i don't disagree at uh i think it's one of the most uh threatening and dangerous things to to american society um did you have a favorite thing to do growing up
[UNKNOWN]: So I started lifting weights at 11 years old.
[UNKNOWN]: I got a, you know, those old sand-filled plastic weights.
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I'm talking about in the garage.
[UNKNOWN]: And that really formed life-long association with picking heavy things up.
[UNKNOWN]: Either moving them or just picking them up and putting them down.
[UNKNOWN]: I was a competitive power lifter for a while as a Colorado State Open Champion about 15 years ago.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, wow.
[UNKNOWN]: The Colorado State Champion, I was 30 years ago, but 15 years ago, I'd bench press 600 pounds.
[UNKNOWN]: Wow.
[UNKNOWN]: And sadly, I'll just say this.
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't even double my body weight, because I weighed 306 at the time, so big fail there.
[UNKNOWN]: 306.
[UNKNOWN]: What do you weigh now?
[UNKNOWN]: 306.
[UNKNOWN]: Really?
[UNKNOWN]: But I'm just different now.
[UNKNOWN]: There was sculpted.
[UNKNOWN]: It was beautiful.
[UNKNOWN]: I promised my youngest daughter I would ask you this.
[UNKNOWN]: What's your favorite smell?
[UNKNOWN]: that's a good one.
[UNKNOWN]: So I would say that there is something very endearing to me about heat and dust and diesel.
[UNKNOWN]: That's your favorite combo.
[UNKNOWN]: Sounds like a good aftershave.
[UNKNOWN]: It does attract a certain time, but you don't think about it.
[UNKNOWN]: When we would be training,
[UNKNOWN]: You'd go out to the range, a lot of these ranges, you'll get yacamuff, you've ever been out in Washington State or down the Barry Goldwater Range in Arizona, it's hot, it's dusty.
[UNKNOWN]: And you get those low passes, we call them codec passes, after you've done training, aircraft who come in, F-16 guys loved it when they flew over and immediately kicked their afterburners on, we would key them out, you can get them a little stroke.
[UNKNOWN]: But you smell it, you smell jet fuel, and you smell the heat, and your own perspiration from working hard.
[UNKNOWN]: I think that, you know, that is a favorite.
[UNKNOWN]: Now I got to tell you, I went to Black Bear Diner today, and I had French toast, and that was pretty dang good.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not familiar with that.
[UNKNOWN]: Is that near here?
[UNKNOWN]: over a mesquite where I say yeah I don't spend a ton of time there but the name rings up it was close to the hotel and I've been to one in Vegas so I knew I you know it's gonna be okay yeah it's like an upscale denny's right yeah absolutely
[UNKNOWN]: Alright, so going back into your early military career, get a billet to the Academy, you leave there, and the goal is to become a J-Tac, can you walk us through the path of once you got in and went through with the guys that you mentioned, kind of leading into your first duty station and that first part of your career?
[UNKNOWN]: Sure.
[UNKNOWN]: In those days, it wasn't the same, well, let me back up, many thoughts, one mouth.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, today, it's a single starting point.
[UNKNOWN]: Everybody comes together for Air Force Special Warfare.
[UNKNOWN]: They start basic training together, then they go to a pre-selection, then they go through, then they branch out for their various career fields.
[UNKNOWN]: And the schoolhouses are where they are around the country.
[UNKNOWN]: They have moved the TACP career field to San Antonio for the most part, whereas it used to be in her Albert field for our initial class.
[UNKNOWN]: And then for follow-on, kind of finishing courses, which I'm sad that young guys don't get to enjoy that, because that's the Redneck River.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a great place to be young and stupid.
[UNKNOWN]: But here's the thing, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So I go through the TechP Schoolhouse.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm the Comin' Nons Award winner, which is the overall top guy.
[UNKNOWN]: David Goggins actually went with me through there, and he got, of course, the most physically fit in the shocker.
[UNKNOWN]: And then we had this one kid that he got the,
[UNKNOWN]: the academic honors.
[UNKNOWN]: He was kind of a nerd, but super smart.
[UNKNOWN]: So the point is I get to my first duty station, which they had just coincidentally had discipline problems, run-ins with the law, on-base, off-base, fights,
[UNKNOWN]: And so, no way they believed that some guy had left the academy after three years had smoked through the schoolhouse and wasn't a special agent from the Office of Special Investigations, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So, I signed in on a Monday, that Friday, a couple of the older guys took me on a run around the Wonderland Trail, which is around Mount Rainier.
[UNKNOWN]: It's 93 miles and they said we're doing it.
[UNKNOWN]: And I don't, can I say no, I don't think so.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I did it and I'd never run 93 miles in a weekend and I was not feeling great Monday at PT But they told me we're doing it, so we're gonna go do it and they're doing it So why would I quit all right and it believe me?
[UNKNOWN]: This wasn't blazing pace.
[UNKNOWN]: It's 93 miles, you know, through the woods and
[UNKNOWN]: Well, all that did was kind of put people firmly into two camps.
[UNKNOWN]: One said, of course, he's OSI because he had to have training to be able to do that, and the other was like, well, maybe this guy just really what he says.
[UNKNOWN]: He's just eager to be here.
[UNKNOWN]: And then so they decided to take me out to Yakima was our closest bombing range, and that was on the east side of Washington State, and they were going to take me to control air.
[UNKNOWN]: And of course I've been in the unit for about two weeks now.
[UNKNOWN]: But I went out and got an art boy or was so at Fort Lewis at those days because TACP do align with every maneuver element of the army from big green, conventional side to the special operation side, white and dark soft.
[UNKNOWN]: and at Fort Lewis, you've got Second Ranger Battalion, you've got First Special Forces Group, you also had in those days, ninth Regiment, which reflag to first Brigade 25th ID, you had third Brigade of Second ID, and so as a young new guy, one of the guys it was in charge of the element over it, first group.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, testing me, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Who is this guy?
[UNKNOWN]: Took me out the acamal with their team and controlled air.
[UNKNOWN]: And I did well enough that I didn't really dispelling rumors, right?
[UNKNOWN]: They're like, well, he must have practiced this.
[UNKNOWN]: And we did, at the schoolhouse, I had a radio.
[UNKNOWN]: You're an instructor.
[UNKNOWN]: We're in different rooms.
[UNKNOWN]: And we just practice talking.
[UNKNOWN]: So you don't sound like an idiot on the radio.
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't do great.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want to come across and say I was a natural at it, but I didn't embarrass myself.
[UNKNOWN]: And so again, all that did was this guy's definitely had practice.
[UNKNOWN]: I had, it's called the schoolhouse, maybe you've heard of it.
[UNKNOWN]: But then the others were like, well, you know, he didn't do great, so he must be new.
[UNKNOWN]: And all that changed about six weeks in, there was a huge party out in Spanaway, which
[UNKNOWN]: We can't call it suburbs of Tacoma, but it's it's not really the country, but it's not really the city, and I got a fight there and then they realized okay, this guy's he's just he's just a big dummy It right so he's legit.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, that's awesome Here's something I don't talk about enough, which is how much sleep actually affects everything else
[UNKNOWN]: Training, focus, mood, recovery, when your sleep is off, all of it is off.
[UNKNOWN]: I used to wake up with my back tight, neck stiff, feeling like I hadn't really rested.
[UNKNOWN]: He looks sent me one of their mattresses and I have to tell you it made a real difference.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm waking up feeling recovered in a way I just wasn't before.
[UNKNOWN]: Less of that grinding morning soreness, better mornings lead to better days.
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[UNKNOWN]: How did that experience then transfer into your first duty station and what did that look like?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, a couple of things came out of it.
[UNKNOWN]: One, they recognized, OK, yes, he's young.
[UNKNOWN]: He's not an OSI agent.
[UNKNOWN]: He's a product of our training, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So they accepted me more.
[UNKNOWN]: And two, they said, this guy's capable.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, we can mold this guy.
[UNKNOWN]: We can shape this guy into being something that other than just a four year enlistment and out.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's shape this guy into being something that will help the career field.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I got many opportunities to go to train with second battalion, second range of battalion with first group that some of my peers who didn't apply themselves as much.
[UNKNOWN]: They were stuck kind of handling the
[UNKNOWN]: the jobs with the conventional side, which is important.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want to, you know, downplay that.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's totally different, too.
[UNKNOWN]: Just the level of involvement.
[UNKNOWN]: One of the things that the TACP does is, there's the three-word motto, it vise assist control.
[UNKNOWN]: We advise the ground commander on the capabilities of air power.
[UNKNOWN]: We assist in the planning for the use thereof, and then we actually control the assets more, you know, in the fight.
[UNKNOWN]: And on the conventional side, it's just a bigger machine, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So there's a lot more briefings, a lot more wickets, a lot more planning.
[UNKNOWN]: I wouldn't say it's any different necessarily, but it seems to be streamlined on the special operation side.
[UNKNOWN]: And the ground commander on the special operation side seems more interested in how can you do what I want done.
[UNKNOWN]: Don't tell me I can't do it.
[UNKNOWN]: Tell me how you're going to get it done.
[UNKNOWN]: And so that really shaped my mentality.
[UNKNOWN]: It wasn't happy.
[UNKNOWN]: being stuck in an armored personnel carrier to put my head out the turret and control from there.
[UNKNOWN]: That seemed horrible.
[UNKNOWN]: But what did that mean?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, you're carrying all your gear, you're inserting by helicopter and usually walking out.
[UNKNOWN]: It was a lot more physically demanding, and I liked that.
[UNKNOWN]: Ever since I was a kid, and all through this, I wanted to test myself, you know, am I better than that guy than I am, and I'll prove it to you.
[UNKNOWN]: And sometimes I wasn't, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Sometimes, I mean, everyone's a spectrum.
[UNKNOWN]: So, but I always wanted to just like, you know, those jobs for my dad's buddies, I wanted to the boss to know I'd done a good job at the end of the day.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't need the pat on the back.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't need public praise.
[UNKNOWN]: I just need him to know.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, for sure.
[UNKNOWN]: And what year was this?
[UNKNOWN]: So I got to the fifth ace-offs in Fort Lewis in 95, 95, okay.
[UNKNOWN]: From 95 until 9-11, what did that part of your career look like?
[UNKNOWN]: I assume mostly training, but did you deploy it all in that window?
[UNKNOWN]: I did.
[UNKNOWN]: So in 97, I deployed to Kuwait as part of the operations Southern Watch.
[UNKNOWN]: Most people don't realize that we're actively flying in bombing Saddam.
[UNKNOWN]: after the Gulf War and before Desert Storm or excuse me before or Iraqi freedom I guess is what they call it.
[UNKNOWN]: But he would turn on his radar, he would do something that was prohibited, and they would scramble jets and go either smoke them, or they wouldn't, and planes don't like the land with live bombs.
[UNKNOWN]: So, you'd already range as a big range out there in Kuwait, and we would, as Jay-Tax, clear the bombs off them.
[UNKNOWN]: It was great training for us, but it also is a safety mechanism for them to be able to land and do their job.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, while I was there on that,
[UNKNOWN]: boring rotation.
[UNKNOWN]: It wasn't that boring, but nobody shooting at you.
[UNKNOWN]: Saddam really rattled his cage and they thought, okay, we're going to go smack him again and they started bringing a bunch of people and a bunch of more units, different types, operators, everything because they thought we were going to cross back in and hit him.
[UNKNOWN]: And that was Operation Desert Fox, I think,
[UNKNOWN]: I played a small part in that, but it was all training and what it told me so by the way, when I was there on that rotation, fifth special forces group was there as part of their regular rotation to the region and I linked up with them and I did a lot of training with them and I decided that when this enlistment's over, I'm not going to re-up in the air force, I'm going to go be a green beret.
[UNKNOWN]: and so I made that choice and I went that route and I joined Alpha Company first battalion, 19 special forces group, which is a national guard special forces group.
[UNKNOWN]: They had a unit in Buckley, Washington, it was about an hour away from my house.
[UNKNOWN]: But I was only there for a few months because I had a young, I had a wife, I had a new baby.
[UNKNOWN]: She said if I go through the pipeline, she's taking the kid back to Montana and I'll never see her again.
[UNKNOWN]: And I was young enough and ignorant enough to believe her.
[UNKNOWN]: So I went to my commander who also had gone into Mexico military institutes and kind of said, I need to get out and he said, nope.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'll give you a letter anywhere you want to go.
[UNKNOWN]: But you're not getting out of the military.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I said, OK, I'll go back to being a J.T.
[UNKNOWN]: and there was a guard unit across the street from Fort Lewis at Camp Murray.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I went and did that.
[UNKNOWN]: And then what that really did was it positioned me to be one of the most experienced
[UNKNOWN]: J-Tax in the Air Force, but also in definitely in the guard so that when the balloon went up, I was a natural choice, not for the first wave because I was in the guard, but to replace those guys who had gone first.
[UNKNOWN]: Interesting story.
[UNKNOWN]: So I was a state trooper at when 9-11 happened and during trooper-basic training sitting right next to me was a guy named Jim Hoteiling who was a combat controller and who eventually went on to be the Air National Guard Command Chief over the entire air guard and he disappeared on September 12th.
[UNKNOWN]: And we never saw him in uniform again.
[UNKNOWN]: But
[UNKNOWN]: Although I did see him like I came home one day and he had come home as one of the first guys to get relieved in Afghanistan and he was he was sitting there with stakes on my grill, cooking stakes for me because he was going to give me the dad a dump because I was leaving.
[UNKNOWN]: I was already called up, I was already heading out just doing the final train up.
[UNKNOWN]: So really I would say that my whole first duty station and let's put that in air quotes right because it wasn't just the active duty side It was also the the guard side was just prepping me to go to war.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and I mean it's such a a unique and fortuitous time for you to have come in Get all that experience prior to 9-11 and then be be pretty well positioned to Really act as an asset as a J-tech moving forward
[UNKNOWN]: During that time of being in the reserves and also going through a trooper school and kind of doing this dual-roll State-law enforcement and military when 9-11 hits how does that Complicate the the rotation of military versus patrol or patrolman time?
[UNKNOWN]: Well greatly right so imagine
[UNKNOWN]: you're on a team and you're deployed.
[UNKNOWN]: And one of your guys says, hey, I'm leaving.
[UNKNOWN]: And where are you going?
[UNKNOWN]: I'm going to do this other job.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, it's no different.
[UNKNOWN]: My detachment counted on me to be there.
[UNKNOWN]: And I was going to war.
[UNKNOWN]: And because we're in the guard, of course, they need to have some kind of assessment to make sure we weren't fat and out of shape.
[UNKNOWN]: And plus that was a pretty interesting time.
[UNKNOWN]: The Jdam had just come online and was being employed.
[UNKNOWN]: sometimes not well, right?
[UNKNOWN]: People gooening up the grids and, you know, calling it and on themselves, but there was also gear.
[UNKNOWN]: There was laser range finders, there were designators, so that little train up that I was talking about, that assessment was also familiarized us and teach us about this equipment that we were going to be using in Afghanistan.
[UNKNOWN]: Furthermore, the average rock was weighing about 100 pounds.
[UNKNOWN]: We don't train with 100 pounds, you know, we might
[UNKNOWN]: Pretty heavily loaded out be around 80 and that was for a specific mission set that we were training for but here You're carrying everything and if you don't have it you don't have it so people would tend to bring it
[UNKNOWN]: And there was a guy there named Greg Sospaniak who back to that Kuwait rotation.
[UNKNOWN]: He was one of the guys that had shown up and saw a new him and he knew me.
[UNKNOWN]: And he had an idea.
[UNKNOWN]: He was in the garden.
[UNKNOWN]: He had an idea of who you wanted to select for this rotation.
[UNKNOWN]: And I don't know if he was sending five or six or whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: But I pulled him aside and I said, you know, look, I don't know who's legs.
[UNKNOWN]: I have to break, but I'm going.
[UNKNOWN]: So if you're picking six dudes, pick five more because I'm one of them.
[UNKNOWN]: And what that did was,
[UNKNOWN]: I really was pushing for myself to go because I've been training all this time and my
[UNKNOWN]: aspiration of going to be a green beret was, you know, it didn't happen.
[UNKNOWN]: So I wanted to get in the fight.
[UNKNOWN]: And I did, you know, probably I did leave my detachment in a lurch being down a man, but it was more important to me to go and put all this training to use.
[UNKNOWN]: And again, test myself against
[UNKNOWN]: an environment I hadn't been in yet.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So for the entire window of your career as a combat J-TAC, Afghanistan 02 is kind of the first book end.
[UNKNOWN]: What year in location is the second?
[UNKNOWN]: Is the back book end?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, the last deployment in uniform was in 2006 and 2007.
[UNKNOWN]: And in those days, we were doing three month deployments, or she's been former deployments.
[UNKNOWN]: And I signed up for three in a row to go for an entire year.
[UNKNOWN]: I was also at that time, I've been commissioned, I call it my penance tour, I was supposed to spend one of those four months in the, in the, in the job at Siege of Sotoff, Afghanistan, and then head down range for one, and then even worse, go back to Kabul to be at the Air Support Operations Center, basically receiving all that, all those requests for air and processing and handing them out.
[UNKNOWN]: None of that happened.
[UNKNOWN]: I spent my entire time at the Siege of Sotoff as the, as the, as the, as the, as the, as the,
[UNKNOWN]: Alo for the entire theater.
[UNKNOWN]: So, second lieutenant is in charge of 52 J-Tax at one time.
[UNKNOWN]: As the senior J-Tac in country, one of the most experienced, we had some really good guys come through that had just been in the career field longer than me, but that was the last time in uniform.
[UNKNOWN]: I then went into contracting, and so I went, I kept going back, I was there in 8, 9, 10, and 11.
[UNKNOWN]: So I was there every year from 6 to 11.
[UNKNOWN]: But in uniform last time, it was when I left in the spring of 07.
[UNKNOWN]: And so from 6 to 11, even as a contractor, you're still doing JTAC stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: No, I was working a couple of different programs, so a couple of special access programs.
[UNKNOWN]: Before we get into the second part of the contracting side from O2 to O6, I'd love to focus on that starting with afghanistan of O2, at that point you've got a number of years under your belt, lots of training, some will call them pseudo real world and in Kuwait type stuff, but this is where kind of the rubber meets the road.
[UNKNOWN]: first day boots on the ground in afghanistan you're going to be a jatat going to the show what's going through your mind.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah good one right so have you ever been to a four-door one to the national training center okay so you know how bleak it is and there's mountains this felt like that on steroids.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean mountains are huge but they're so far away you don't really understand how high they go.
[UNKNOWN]: We land, your jet lagged, they put us, well, let me, I gotta tell this story.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's got him how Sullivan meets us, right?
[UNKNOWN]: He's one of these old heads, you know, probably had gray hair in high school.
[UNKNOWN]: And we land and this is back early days.
[UNKNOWN]: You don't step off the anything paved or they put down those metal grates because everything's mined, right?
[UNKNOWN]: 35 million air scattered mines by the Russians on their way out.
[UNKNOWN]: So he meets us at the plane and he bums a dip.
[UNKNOWN]: And I didn't dip.
[UNKNOWN]: But I brought some as trading stocks.
[UNKNOWN]: So I handed him a can, and I mean, this guy empties it and what you don't want.
[UNKNOWN]: And he's getting the pinky involved.
[UNKNOWN]: He's, he's, and then he's like dust in there and tries to hand me the can back.
[UNKNOWN]: And I said, no, I'll, that's, that's, that's yours.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I'll give you some money and we get to the tent.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, no, I don't want any money.
[UNKNOWN]: And he kind of looks at me and says, what do you want?
[UNKNOWN]: I said, I want to go someplace and we're going to get some work.
[UNKNOWN]: And he looks at me and he says, Higgins, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I said, yep, he says, all right, I got you.
[UNKNOWN]: So they take us over to these transient tents that I'm pretty sure the Afghans who'd put them up were told when they're done, you can go home, but all these guywires need to be tight.
[UNKNOWN]: And they were, all the guywires were tight, but the tents were all flat, and you know, poorly done.
[UNKNOWN]: So being jet lagged, not really knowing what's going on, being excited to be there, I wasn't sleeping.
[UNKNOWN]: and I go into the jock where they had paved this big pad and put down that thin, kind of industrial carpet on the top of it.
[UNKNOWN]: And they had linked all the screens to, they were watching plenty of the apes, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So those, you know, those days predator wasn't, wasn't a big thing.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, it was a few in country, but they weren't as ubiquitous as they are now.
[UNKNOWN]: And there was nothing really going on that night.
[UNKNOWN]: And I've just found the coffee, and I've just got myself a cup, and I hear this gunshot, and everybody looks over where it came from, and they had tables facing each other, right, guy on each side, working on their stations, doing whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: And this guy has his pistol out for some reason, and he's just discharged into the ground, and of course it hits the cement, scurries under the carpet, between the feet of the guy
[UNKNOWN]: That guy of shot, I mean, he left, right, he could buy.
[UNKNOWN]: But that told me a couple of things.
[UNKNOWN]: One, we're all supposed to be experts here.
[UNKNOWN]: We're all supposed to be professionals and you still have shenanigans like this.
[UNKNOWN]: So I have to kind of up my game, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Be aware that I can get hurt by my own people.
[UNKNOWN]: That sunk in.
[UNKNOWN]: The other thing is that, I mean, this is for real, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You know, these consequences are going to are going to matter.
[UNKNOWN]: It just changed my mindset from, all right, this is cool to, okay, it's still cool, but
[UNKNOWN]: If you play this wrong, you know, your kid's an orphan.
[UNKNOWN]: So yeah, yeah, that's a sobering realization.
[UNKNOWN]: When you first come in contact with that legit combat environment, no doubt about it, from the day you got there until you were actually going out with a unit.
[UNKNOWN]: How long was that?
[UNKNOWN]: Three days, three days.
[UNKNOWN]: And what unit did you go out with first?
[UNKNOWN]: It was an element of 19th group.
[UNKNOWN]: OK. Yep.
[UNKNOWN]: And they were already in place, so I was, you know, remember, I was coming in to rip out the guys that had gone first.
[UNKNOWN]: And, uh, I would say that, you know, I don't know what the right handoff is, but what I got probably wasn't it.
[UNKNOWN]: It was a high five at the airfield, uh, in J-Bad and the end game.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, just a, just a, just a, just a, just a, just a, hey, you got this man.
[UNKNOWN]: Cool.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Wow.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Uh, how did, how did that kind of first excursion with 19th group go?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, one of the things I mean, you mentioned, and we talked about it a little bit about, I'm the only JTAC, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I'm it.
[UNKNOWN]: You guys all know each other.
[UNKNOWN]: So every time I came to a new team was like going through selection again, you got to prove yourself.
[UNKNOWN]: You have to earn a spot there in the team.
[UNKNOWN]: And so you got to show up, you got to be humble, you got to be proficient two years, one mouth type of mentality.
[UNKNOWN]: And these guys had already been in the mix.
[UNKNOWN]: So they were pretty quick to give a yes or no to me.
[UNKNOWN]: And the yes was pretty quick.
[UNKNOWN]: But I felt like I had a lot of learning to do.
[UNKNOWN]: I knew how to do my job.
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't know how to integrate with our team.
[UNKNOWN]: And we were training 100 man force, mobile reaction force for the OGA.
[UNKNOWN]: And the OZSAS were training counterterrorism pursuit team that was kind of the genesis of the Afghan
[UNKNOWN]: So it was it was actually was kind of a good transition because yes, it's it's a combat environment things can happen But I'm training so for the most part Monday through Friday we were training these guys now
[UNKNOWN]: that changed when we would get some intel and we'd have to go out and do something but for the most part it wasn't you know let's go back to Vietnam the guys are you know they're landing they're getting their gear and like you're going on patrol tonight you good luck so it wasn't it wasn't quite that severe yeah do you remember the first time that you went out on a real-world gig and actually got on the radio and called in close air support yeah
[UNKNOWN]: Sure, I mean, I'll tell you that probably the most interesting one, it was...
[UNKNOWN]: We got worried that helicopter had gone down in the Kona River, and it was a pay-flow and it had a inflate refueling miss-app and damaged the rotor blades, and so it had to set down, and it set down on the only island, big enough to accommodate it.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, that's a big bird, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so the team said, great, we can load up.
[UNKNOWN]: We'll be at the airport ready to head up there.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, hmm, I can't do that because we already have a QRF that's now stranded on the island too, and they're taking fire.
[UNKNOWN]: It's okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, get us over there.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, no, you got to drive.
[UNKNOWN]: So driving there was like a three hour ordeal, and, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: didn't make any sense.
[UNKNOWN]: And those days, we had Toyota Tacomas, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So we didn't have gun trucks.
[UNKNOWN]: We had a homemade pinto for our heavy weapons, one truck had a 240, and I carried the saw.
[UNKNOWN]: And then I had slung my M4 with a 203 on it, which was really used more for marking than anything else.
[UNKNOWN]: But we drove up there.
[UNKNOWN]: It was kind of late afternoon by the time we actually got in the area.
[UNKNOWN]: We could hear the fighting before we got there.
[UNKNOWN]: We could see on both sides of the river firing towards the island.
[UNKNOWN]: So we engaged the guys on the western side because that's the side we are coming up and then occupied that space.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm in contact with the combat controller who's on the island with the bird and with the down crew and the QRF.
[UNKNOWN]: And there, I mean, it's all they can do to just stay low.
[UNKNOWN]: Because it's not a, if there's no trees on the island, it's the helicopter to put down in a bit of a defileate, but you could see the top of the rotor mask sticking up.
[UNKNOWN]: And then, you know, like a,
[UNKNOWN]: like a scene out of Vietnam, or remember D.N.B.
[UNKNOWN]: and Foo, the Viet Cong had pulled the artillery pieces up and in the mountain to fire down on them.
[UNKNOWN]: They were doing that.
[UNKNOWN]: They weren't any good at it, but you know, those are still artillery rounds, right?
[UNKNOWN]: They're coming in.
[UNKNOWN]: So I had a cast stack overhead with A10s.
[UNKNOWN]: I had a P3 that was really helping me kind of relay back to the AWACs and just also keep situational control because things are fluid
[UNKNOWN]: And we handled the artillery pretty quickly because the attendants are, you know, they're just, they're amazing cast asset, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So now we just have one side of the river to contend with, but now it's full dark.
[UNKNOWN]: And the moon is starting to come up.
[UNKNOWN]: And those mountains as I'm looking across the river, that's to the east.
[UNKNOWN]: Those mountains on the other side of it is Pakistan.
[UNKNOWN]: And we start seeing headlights coming down the mountain, you know, multiple, like a convoy.
[UNKNOWN]: And the P3 is asking me, you know, verify where you are, and I tell them, and he confirms that he says, okay, because we have, we have, I are signatures on the east side.
[UNKNOWN]: Talbin didn't have IR, you know what, what, who was that?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, and sometime in there, I don't remember exactly the time frame, but the eighteenths told me that they were gonna go high and drive because our MetaVac was coming in and I hadn't called for a MetaVac, so I talked to the guys on the island and I'm like, hey, did you call in a MetaVac?
[UNKNOWN]: They said no, and right about that time, I can hear rotors, and I look off to the west,
[UNKNOWN]: and there are cliffs off to the west, in some distance away, and hugging those cliffs at about the military crest of them, if you will, are two Medivac birds and two Apache's, and they are screaming north, mocks not, that's when I realized that we're the diversion.
[UNKNOWN]: So whatever the real thing was, it was happening somewhere else.
[UNKNOWN]: And there are some things that you look back and you have the V8 moment like, oh, you know what?
[UNKNOWN]: And I see that.
[UNKNOWN]: One of them was that they had us drive.
[UNKNOWN]: Another, but you know, look, they'd already lost a bird.
[UNKNOWN]: They'd stranded a QRF.
[UNKNOWN]: I got it.
[UNKNOWN]: There was a decision made.
[UNKNOWN]: We're driving.
[UNKNOWN]: But then they brought in a Chinook.
[UNKNOWN]: to repair the damage rotor blade.
[UNKNOWN]: And have you ever seen a Chinook at nighttime?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, there's just two bright halos from all the dust, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Hey, here we are.
[UNKNOWN]: So that didn't make any sense, but it all became crystal clear when the Medevac was heading north.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm pretty sure based on later experience that
[UNKNOWN]: whoever's loaded on to that MetaVac was probably chewed up by the dogs and full of bullet holes and they're taking them back for SSC or whatever, but you know, it's a little sobering when you realize that we're here doing something that we think is pretty important and it's not.
[UNKNOWN]: It's important to the main effort, don't get me wrong, it's not like we were wasted.
[UNKNOWN]: But, you know, everybody likes to think, you know, you're the bell of the ball, you're not, buddy, you know, stand over by the punch ball, we got, you know.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, I think to me, I guess the most unfortunate part of that is not knowing until, like the end of it, you know, it's like that.
[UNKNOWN]: We're not, you know, kind of, kind of moment, which is never good.
[UNKNOWN]: How long were you on deployment in that capacity during that trip?
[UNKNOWN]: Seven months total and I'd been asking when I was going to get ripped out because I was past the point where I had ripped people out.
[UNKNOWN]: And they said, you know, no idea.
[UNKNOWN]: And so then I got word, hey, your replacement's coming.
[UNKNOWN]: They're going to be on the ring flight this afternoon.
[UNKNOWN]: And then they're going to come back and pick you up a couple hours later.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm thinking about the poor hand off I had.
[UNKNOWN]: And all that has happened since then, and how if you were the guy showing up, I'm doing you a disservice, but not giving you a good familiarization, kind of left seat right seat.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's go out, let's do some stuff, let's get you familiar with the area.
[UNKNOWN]: So I said I voiced that and they said okay, we don't know when we'll get you so you stay as long as you want
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, I packed my stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: I met the dude at the airport, you know, high five, a little good game, you got it, buddy, we'll see you later.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: And that just, that seemed how it was in those days.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: In that entire seven-month trip where they're dynamic operations that you went on, where you called strikes in and actually took target out.
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: Those one of those operations stand out as
[UNKNOWN]: the most memorable for you that you would share.
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: We were supposed to be going after a guy named Normal Hammond.
[UNKNOWN]: He was
[UNKNOWN]: He chose the wrong side, right?
[UNKNOWN]: As if you remember the beginning, we were showing up with hockey bags full of money to pay warlords, basically fight with us, right?
[UNKNOWN]: If they were on the fence, if they were hardcore Northern Alliance, I mean, we were still paying them, but that was to get their equipment up and whatever reason.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, that's way above my pay grade.
[UNKNOWN]: But the decision was made to go get this guy normal,
[UNKNOWN]: That 100-man mobile reaction force was split into two.
[UNKNOWN]: They were going to essentially button up the east and the west approach to this little town.
[UNKNOWN]: And the Hazrot Oli was the warlord's name.
[UNKNOWN]: And we were using his guys and the OGA and the OZS.A.S.
[UNKNOWN]: We were going to be the main effort coming down from the north to the south.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's where the show of force happened.
[UNKNOWN]: But I remember there, I mean, it was the first time that I could really
[UNKNOWN]: Well, urban, and it's not urban like Folusa, don't give me wrong.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, this is building, but it's not open, it's not a field, it's not a country side.
[UNKNOWN]: We got into the town and immediately started taking fire.
[UNKNOWN]: And I remember, so they did, subsequent to that, they changed the ROE, only the ground commander can declare a tick.
[UNKNOWN]: But I'm in the back of this Toyota Tacoma feeling pretty exposed and the stuff's pinging around me and blowing up and I key the mic and I, you know, declare troops and contact.
[UNKNOWN]: And you know, I swear I could have heard the kid on the other end up in the AWACs set his Pepsi down and just this exasperated, what kind of contact.
[UNKNOWN]: So I just key the mic and hold it up and you can hear it, I mean, you know, b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b
[UNKNOWN]: But we're driving into that, and it was significant because we couldn't see where it was coming from.
[UNKNOWN]: I couldn't, again, I'm in the back of the truck.
[UNKNOWN]: So we're bouncing around, I'm trying to not fall out or get tossed out, and then we dismount, and we're kind of going street by street.
[UNKNOWN]: No, that's again, it's not fluja.
[UNKNOWN]: These are dirt roads, but it's still some of the same principles, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You have an obstacle, you can't see around it.
[UNKNOWN]: You've got to,
[UNKNOWN]: you got to engage that.
[UNKNOWN]: And we can hear, it was something big.
[UNKNOWN]: And it was just, um, um, and pine around the corner of this building, we can see down the road is, uh, Dishka.
[UNKNOWN]: All right.
[UNKNOWN]: So 12.5 millimeter.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's being used as a point defense weapon and it's shooting at the afghan's coming down that road.
[UNKNOWN]: And so remember, I've got the saw in just in the interest of trying to be more mobile, not that the weight was really any different.
[UNKNOWN]: But I just had the little 100-round nut sack on it.
[UNKNOWN]: And so one of the Aussies said, hey, Ox, can you put some rounds on that guy?
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm like sure, you know, so I kind of lean out.
[UNKNOWN]: And I start engaging and I'm seeing these flashes, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So there must be another guy, he's shooting back at me.
[UNKNOWN]: So I just get it, I'm on it, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And I rip off the nut sack and I'm putting a mag in and he's smacking me on the helmet.
[UNKNOWN]: He's like, I think you got him, lad.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm like, so they teased me about that because I put a hundred rounds into this dishka.
[UNKNOWN]: Got him.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, but it was that was memorable to me because I hadn't been in that situation before and and there were other things too We had to cross some linear danger areas, right dried creek beds and and I mean the Aussies had
[UNKNOWN]: their kit and laws.
[UNKNOWN]: They were still carrying laws, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And this one guy, Russ Sullivan, he retired actually later as the Regimental Sergeant Major for the entire OZS.
[UNKNOWN]: He still is a great buddy, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I just talked to him yesterday.
[UNKNOWN]: But he's bouncing on like rock to rock like a gazelle and I'm sitting there running, you know, as fast as hard as I can and he's done and I'm halfway across this riverbed and it feels like I've twice as far to go.
[UNKNOWN]: And so
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I get to the other side and I'm trying to make myself as small as possible.
[UNKNOWN]: By the way, I'm carrying the radios, right.
[UNKNOWN]: So there's extra weight there and I'm not small anyway.
[UNKNOWN]: So me hiding behind a rock is, you know, it's an art form.
[UNKNOWN]: And I never wanted to repeat myself on the radio because that's just, that's where mistakes happen.
[UNKNOWN]: So like Michael Jordan, getting to the foul line, you got to calm yourself.
[UNKNOWN]: And so on.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's play boy 93.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and the guy up there was was obviously pretty seasoned a ten driver and he was he was good He he could sense I mean he'd been with us.
[UNKNOWN]: He knew what we're going through So he just said hey buddy, I'm up here.
[UNKNOWN]: I got you take a breath and It all changed after that, you know, it's just like okay look it's gonna happen.
[UNKNOWN]: It's gonna happen But I'm not gonna spas out
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[UNKNOWN]: And, uh, what, I guess what, uh, if you mentioned it, and I forgot it already, what Airframe was that?
[UNKNOWN]: That was in 1810.
[UNKNOWN]: Was there in that deployment?
[UNKNOWN]: Was there either preferred or most predominant air frame that you relied on in those situations?
[UNKNOWN]: It really, a patchy, really.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you think that it had more to do with the mission, the environment?
[UNKNOWN]: What was available, combination of all the things?
[UNKNOWN]: All of those.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, again, this is O2, and so they later had, so there were the gunships, the AC-130s were in Uzbekistan.
[UNKNOWN]: and we weren't getting those because a lot of our fights were at hawk in the day, you know, you got to get sick, death approval to fly them after sunrise.
[UNKNOWN]: So that was never a consideration.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, by the way, again, you know, we're white soft.
[UNKNOWN]: So we're, you know, we have an important job, but those assets are going to be reserved for somebody else.
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: Atens were great when we
[UNKNOWN]: We got a lot of F-18s and they were good to the problem is right in A10 is built to loiter and have those turns and cases it's main mission set whereas the F-18s were pretty much yo-yoing to and from the tanker right seemed one was always going you're coming and one was on station and and then we had some F-16s we did have some coalition F-16s and we had the French
[UNKNOWN]: I did not.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I did pause.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, because I do speak French, but I don't speak fighter pilot French, and they don't really speak J-Tac English.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, good combination.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a necessary combination.
[UNKNOWN]: And so we needed to do things in English.
[UNKNOWN]: really, you know, I could never feel comfortable enough to employ them kinetically, flying around, given us intel, about the best I could do with them.
[UNKNOWN]: So, kind of an odd, odd ball question, how slash-wide do you speak French?
[UNKNOWN]: I grew up in Maine, I went to Catholic school, we had French Canadian nuns, and so we, and then my dad and I spoke it in the house to basically go secure for my mom and my sister who did not speak it.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a trip.
[UNKNOWN]: All right, so as that deployment wraps up to seven months, you finally rotate back.
[UNKNOWN]: Did you rotate back into going right back into the state trooper position until the next deployment?
[UNKNOWN]: It's a difficult transition for any warfighter to come home from an environment like that and just integrate into society.
[UNKNOWN]: It's hard to wrap my mind around having to transition to
[UNKNOWN]: Limited ROEs compared to what you're dealing with use of force-wise and a law enforcement.
[UNKNOWN]: 100% how did you manage to do that effectively?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I'd love to be braggadoscious and say I'm just good.
[UNKNOWN]: But, you know, like the state patrol is pretty smart.
[UNKNOWN]: They recognize quickly that they don't know what they're doing.
[UNKNOWN]: They have no frame of reference, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So let's put this guy with a seasoned trooper and put him on another coaching trip, essentially.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's make sure he's okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's make sure he's not doing anything.
[UNKNOWN]: outside of the lines, and that piece was actually pretty easy, because we didn't just walk around Afghanistan, blasting people, and I don't think of myself as a shooter, I'm not a shooter, if I'm shooting something, it's because it's essential, I'm the radio guy, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So in that sense, you know, I wasn't trigger happy, there may have been some situations where
[UNKNOWN]: It was good having the other troop there just to say, but let me handle this one.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm like, okay, you know, and he would talk the guy into wearing the bracelets and keeping his teeth there.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, how long were you home and in that capacity before you deployed again?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I kind of engineered my next trip.
[UNKNOWN]: So I was, it was, it was January of O3.
[UNKNOWN]: And I went down to the unit to, I don't know, I was filling out some paperwork or, you know, I don't remember exactly why I went there, but a couple guys came in from, they'd been doing some PT, Ruck marching, and one of them was limping.
[UNKNOWN]: And so what are you doing, man?
[UNKNOWN]: He said, I stepped off the road and rolled my ankle.
[UNKNOWN]: I was, I'll be okay.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, oh, okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Good luck, man.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I go into the commander's office, because he wanted to talk to me, and he gives me, he tells me that there's gonna be a jump into Northern Iraq.
[UNKNOWN]: and it's coming up.
[UNKNOWN]: And they don't know when it's going to be, and he's not going to tell me it's office, but I'm going to be the alternate.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm thinking myself, wait a minute, hold on.
[UNKNOWN]: There's gonna be a combat jump, and I'm the alternate, like no way, buddy.
[UNKNOWN]: So I go back out there and start my SILP campaign against this dude who's rolled his ankle, and I'm like, hey man, how's it feel?
[UNKNOWN]: He's like, it's getting stiff at her.
[UNKNOWN]: It's like, try running on it.
[UNKNOWN]: He's like, are you nuts?
[UNKNOWN]: I said listen, you're gonna hit the ground and you're probably gonna injure it again.
[UNKNOWN]: You need to test it right now, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You need to check it.
[UNKNOWN]: He's like, I'm not doing that.
[UNKNOWN]: It's okay, well good luck, man.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, they probably won't leave you on the DZ, but it's fine, it's cool.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, by the end of the day, you'd have thought his foot was falling off and he, you know, withdraws as I need to get it checked and then, you know, suddenly they're talking about maybe having a surgery, a repair.
[UNKNOWN]: Whatever, but now I'm the guy, so I'm in the slot.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, you know, I engineered that.
[UNKNOWN]: And then I think sometimes active duty kind of sticks it to their guard, brethren, because it turns out I was the only guy from the guard that actually jumped in to Iraq.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, really?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: All right, so I'm curious about the jump into Iraq and then the subsequent, you know, almost two months there.
[UNKNOWN]: You managed to slide in and replace the guy.
[UNKNOWN]: What was the build-up to actually doing the jump and kind of walk us through the night before leading up into going over and then going over and what happened afterwards?
[UNKNOWN]: OK, so a couple of things that were revealed to me while I was still state-side went into the shift to get the security about what was happening and when get a more concrete idea of it.
[UNKNOWN]: They air force at the battalion level, slowly back up, the 173rd Airborne Brigade was the unit that was going to be jumping in.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's obviously conventional army.
[UNKNOWN]: And the air force is responsible to provide
[UNKNOWN]: attack pee at all levels of that element, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so a lot of people think attack pee is a person.
[UNKNOWN]: It's not.
[UNKNOWN]: It's tactical air control party.
[UNKNOWN]: And in that party, there's an early asian officer.
[UNKNOWN]: In that party, there's a theater airlift officer.
[UNKNOWN]: There's the J-Tax.
[UNKNOWN]: There's, you know, intel.
[UNKNOWN]: There's other things.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a party of people that are brought to assist with the fight.
[UNKNOWN]: There aren't, well, where do those officers come from?
[UNKNOWN]: Now, they come from the career field.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, we have TACP officers.
[UNKNOWN]: In that time, they came out of a cockpit.
[UNKNOWN]: And they were called Baylow's, Battalion Air Liaison officers.
[UNKNOWN]: But there weren't enough of those.
[UNKNOWN]: Because remember that story about too many pilots, none of the cockpit's?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: They got the math wrong in that.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, they didn't have enough pilots.
[UNKNOWN]: So,
[UNKNOWN]: pulling them out to go do a ground job, it wasn't going to happen.
[UNKNOWN]: So in there, infinite wisdom they decided, okay, we're going to make the enlisted guys bellows and they called us e-bellows.
[UNKNOWN]: So I was a tech sergeant and I had the responsibility for the job of a senior captain or junior major, but remember, I'm an E6, you know, so the army who's very rank-conscious looks at me like, go sit in the corner and don't talk.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, that's cute, I'm part of the senior staff, you go sit or make coffee, do
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm in this briefing and I'm told that the only person who is going to jump from the guard is the e-bailo.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't know me.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't know that I'm sitting there listening to this briefing.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, they know I'm there because there's a list, but they don't understand who's who in the zoo, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So before I even left home, I realized
[UNKNOWN]: I'm the only guard guy who's going to be jumping in and we're bringing, you know, handful of guys.
[UNKNOWN]: And these guys, if you think about it, they're walking away from their civilian jobs, from their families, because they're volunteering, they're stepping up.
[UNKNOWN]: And they're under the, I guess misconception that they're going to jump into Iraq.
[UNKNOWN]: So we get on, we get on the ground at Camp Adderley and in those days, we were wearing DCUs, but much like our seal and other soft counterparts and we had modified uniforms, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It's sleeves on the pockets.
[UNKNOWN]: Now everybody thinks that's a good idea and it is.
[UNKNOWN]: slick, no names, no rank, I had, you know, Velcro rank that I could put on if I needed to.
[UNKNOWN]: Had a big Fumantju, and whenever I'd take the helmet or hat off and sweaty hair and just stick it up, like one of those troll dolls, all right.
[UNKNOWN]: So, part of that was just to make sure they understood that, you know, who's who?
[UNKNOWN]: He's that guy.
[UNKNOWN]: And so we're doing the final practice on the parade field, and then the sergeant major gets up and he's given his who y'all speech about we're going to war and
[UNKNOWN]: And he says, all right, there are any questions.
[UNKNOWN]: And I raised my hand and it looks at me and, you know, one of these kids is not like the others.
[UNKNOWN]: And he says, uh, Air Force, and I said, Roger that sergeman.
[UNKNOWN]: So, all right, what do you got?
[UNKNOWN]: I said, well, since 10th group's already on the ground with the Peshmerga.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, why don't we just air land?
[UNKNOWN]: We could have everybody on the ground in an hour or two and, you know, and get to the fight.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, you thought I'd ask to have sex with his mother in church.
[UNKNOWN]: He is shaking the veins are coming out, he's freaking out.
[UNKNOWN]: He's like, we're jumping.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm like, oh, Roger, that's our manager.
[UNKNOWN]: So now we move down to Aviano, where it was pretty cool.
[UNKNOWN]: They had shut down transatlantic resupply to have enough C-17s there for the heavy drops and for the personnel drops.
[UNKNOWN]: on the runway and it's our what the taxiway and it's pretty cool and I ask a question you know we're in one of those briefings and I said so the heavies are growing in first right and they look at me like I'm stupidly yeah of course you know we're dropping home fees and connex boxes we don't drop those on people I'm like yeah and how are those marked and they look at me like I'm really dumb they're like chemlights I say yeah
[UNKNOWN]: And what color are those?
[UNKNOWN]: And they look at me like I'm absolutely retarded.
[UNKNOWN]: And they said, they're going to be IR.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, yeah, the problem is this is a static line jump dummy.
[UNKNOWN]: And we're not wearing knots.
[UNKNOWN]: So how do we see the IR Kim lights?
[UNKNOWN]: And you just see them kind of glaze over.
[UNKNOWN]: And they're like, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: OK, more on that in a minute.
[UNKNOWN]: So then I find out, you know, that we're going to have the ubiquitous kind of obligatory steak and lobster feed before you go off to war, and we go to eat that, and they have the manifest.
[UNKNOWN]: And they ask my name, and you know, oh, yeah, here you go, go on an insurgent, and so I step aside in the next guy, you know, comes up.
[UNKNOWN]: And none of my, none of the rest of my guys are on the manifest, because, you know, as I said, I'm the only one that's jumping.
[UNKNOWN]: And so they won't let him eat.
[UNKNOWN]: They won't let him eat the steak and lobster.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, they're going to, they're coming in day two.
[UNKNOWN]: I only got a sorry man, you know, it's Sergeant Major said only people on the manifest get to stake in lobster.
[UNKNOWN]: So in protest, we went over the base Burger King and had a double offer with cheesy and content.
[UNKNOWN]: So could eat it in the fewest bites and I won with three, but word of advice, you got to make that first bite really count because
[UNKNOWN]: Anyway, so the next day we're getting ready and, you know, they want to issue shoots, and, of course, I'm trying to delay that as much as possible, so, you know, thinking back to your static line days, you know, the biggest you can adjust it is a five, and so this private comes over and asks what size I need and I told them to get me a six.
[UNKNOWN]: And he runs off and I don't see him for a while and I'm just sitting there, you know, fat dumb and happy.
[UNKNOWN]: And finally he comes back and he's got one and it's a five and he says, the biggest one I could find sergeant.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, okay, is it the triple canopy?
[UNKNOWN]: He's the, we talked about.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, well, they just weighed my rock and it weighs 141 pounds and my kit weighs 60 pounds.
[UNKNOWN]: So that's already 200-1 pounds and I weighed 295
[UNKNOWN]: That's 496 pounds, a single shoot maxes out at 500 pounds and I could have catastrophic failure.
[UNKNOWN]: So can you go get me the triple canopy?
[UNKNOWN]: and off he runs, and I see some NCO just knife hand in him until he points down the flight line towards me and he comes over and he's like, Air Force, what are you doing messing on my private?
[UNKNOWN]: I'm like, man, I'm just trying not to wear this is more than I have to.
[UNKNOWN]: So, but we get on the bird and they told us we're going to jump at 1200 feet, which is not a combat jump.
[UNKNOWN]: So already, you know, this this immense what I had had known that 10th group is on the ground, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Like we're this is a show of force to who Well, to the Turks because the Turks had had closed their airspace to us.
[UNKNOWN]: They closed the port.
[UNKNOWN]: It couldn't come over land and then they opened up the airspace.
[UNKNOWN]: But we had to be at 35,000 feet until we hit Iraqi airspace.
[UNKNOWN]: And then it was a mad scramble down to jump altitude, which that's not fun, by the way.
[UNKNOWN]: If you ever been hooked up, facing the back of the plane, you really lean and into it to keep from falling over.
[UNKNOWN]: But it had snowed an hour before the jump.
[UNKNOWN]: They had cut the power to the closest town with the clouds and how dark it was.
[UNKNOWN]: It was tough to get any kind of horizon.
[UNKNOWN]: But we're jumping at 1200 feet.
[UNKNOWN]: I've done how many,
[UNKNOWN]: Pajumps back home.
[UNKNOWN]: So I know pretty much how fast I'm falling and I reach over or reach down to lower my rock and I hit foot, face, nap and I'm out and I busted my helmet and I don't know how long it was out but there were five minutes spacing between chocks and I woke up to planes overhead.
[UNKNOWN]: and some scramble and I did report I think three times to hire that I'd been injured and they're like, yeah, we know, okay, you know, move out.
[UNKNOWN]: So that wasn't.
[UNKNOWN]: I wasn't comforting to me, I don't know how I was looking for a hug or whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: But I get to the rally point and there's Peshmerga there making us hot chai.
[UNKNOWN]: The team dock that was there, he had really smoked in.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, one foot was going the other way and he's leaning on his rifle while he's giving me the...
[UNKNOWN]: horizontal gaze in the stagmas to check me for concussion.
[UNKNOWN]: He's like, you got a concussion.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, cool, can I get something for my hip?
[UNKNOWN]: And he says, no, it's a, well, I, it hurts.
[UNKNOWN]: And he says, yeah, but you've had a head injury.
[UNKNOWN]: I can't give you any pain meds.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, okay.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, well, I guess I'll just go to sleep and he says, you can't do that either.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, why not?
[UNKNOWN]: This is because you've had a head injury.
[UNKNOWN]: So I sit like forest gump and bubble gump back to back in the mud.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know if you heard about the mud up in the north.
[UNKNOWN]: It was, it was horrendous.
[UNKNOWN]: And we're just passing the mic back and forth, just radio watch.
[UNKNOWN]: Nobody shooting at us, it's not glamorous, it's just drudgery.
[UNKNOWN]: And dudes are showing up with no kit whatsoever.
[UNKNOWN]: And their answer was, well, you know, burned in.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's semi-plausible just because they put people out wide, they put people out short.
[UNKNOWN]: But they couldn't put anybody out long because they had to immediately climb when the light went red to clear the mountains.
[UNKNOWN]: And so if you're a tow jumper, like they're pulling you in on the way back to Italy, good luck.
[UNKNOWN]: My buddy Juan Valentino was put, he came down in the middle of the town, he was freaking out because again we don't know who's who in the zoo and he had to make his way to the rally point and anyway.
[UNKNOWN]: The next day you wake up and the sun is kind of up, it's foggy and overcast and littered across the country side are all these rocks and kit and people just covered in mud and it got heavy and they just jettisoned it and said screw this and walked in.
[UNKNOWN]: But then we sat and we took this airfield that was already taken.
[UNKNOWN]: but then we didn't move, we didn't go anywhere.
[UNKNOWN]: And part of it was told to me that there was a unit out of Germany called the Herc and Merck, which was kind of a contingency armor unit.
[UNKNOWN]: And the brigade commander wanted to wait for them to come in before he committed his troops.
[UNKNOWN]: So some element was moving just to kind of check staging areas again, not anywhere near the fighting.
[UNKNOWN]: But the thing that some people don't really understand
[UNKNOWN]: And the 10th group guys that had come in, they'd flown in on MC 130s.
[UNKNOWN]: And a lot of them had been shot at, had taken fire on the way in, and they'd been in there for a week or two weeks prior.
[UNKNOWN]: And they were fighting not the Iraqis, but the Ansar al-Asswam, Islam, he was a splinter group of geodists, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so they would engage, they would kill them, occupy their spot, do some SSE, and just keep leapfrogging that way.
[UNKNOWN]: And so while we were there just kind of reconning this assembly area, this truck comes up and these two dudes come out and they're wearing BDUs.
[UNKNOWN]: And we're all in DCUs, which makes no sense because Northern Iraq is green.
[UNKNOWN]: You know again about my pay grade.
[UNKNOWN]: So you're like, hey guys, what's up?
[UNKNOWN]: And they just came to refresh some meds and get some chow and whatever, you know, resupply.
[UNKNOWN]: And they looked at me and they were like, you're in the air force.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, yeah, I said, you were a J-tak.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, yeah, they said, you know Johnny Knight, and I said, yeah, they said, well, he's our guy, he's our J-tak.
[UNKNOWN]: You want to go see him?
[UNKNOWN]: I said, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So I grabbed my number two guy, we go over to the S3, we said, hey, we're going to go with these guys for a little bit and just see what's what I don't think you really liked me.
[UNKNOWN]: But I think you respected me enough and knew that this was a waste of everybody's time.
[UNKNOWN]: And so he just looked at me and he said, don't get hurt.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, okay, so off we go.
[UNKNOWN]: And that team was in a house.
[UNKNOWN]: One of the few houses still standing in this partially destroyed town of Debuzni.
[UNKNOWN]: got up on the roof and you can look south towards the conny dome and ridge it's obscured by hays and smoke because they had oil fires going to kind of obscure their their movements and they had been in a big gun fight the day before so the north south running road tease into an east west running road that kind of eventually been south off to the east of it of that intersection but at that intersection is what was an old prison
[UNKNOWN]: and they had been on the roof of that.
[UNKNOWN]: engaging, and the Iraqis were using those white, opal cars as taxis, or they were taxis, but they were using them to, as, for carrying whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, so the next morning we get up, and we go to the, to the, to the prison, and the stairwell that we, we're going to take to get up to the roof.
[UNKNOWN]: There's a 2000 pounder that has punched through the roof all the way down to the,
[UNKNOWN]: So, I mean, you get to go buy that, that's a big boy right there, and, you know, people are joking, don't keep the mic, you know, like, move, let's go.
[UNKNOWN]: So, you know, get up to the top, and we had a SIOPS team with us, and they had their loud speakers and all that stuff, and they were down, they would then come up to the roof, but they were down, you know, with their trucks and the power and all that stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, we're on the roof, and...
[UNKNOWN]: Ranger Nipe and me and my buddy that I brought Matt foot were we're on the roof and kind of a little guard watch tower thing right it's I don't know what it is and we're we're taking fire small arms some heavy weapons artillery rounds are being launched but they're not accurate but here come you know these these vehicles and so the the SF team that's that's with us or I should say we're with them.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm there engaging, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so that you javillins and whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: And now the small arms fires getting closer because they're moving and you really can't get a feel for the terrain and it's not very hilly but it's enough that they're masking their movements best they can.
[UNKNOWN]: But small arms, you know, the effective range of that, it's the heavy weapons that are now really concerning because you can hear them, you can feel them whizzing by you.
[UNKNOWN]: And then the artillery rounds, which they're firing from the reverse slope of the ridge, they're walking them in, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It was surreal.
[UNKNOWN]: There was, I mean, it was as close to, I think, to an arc-light strike in Vietnam, where these bombers are just unloading across the entire ridge, and, I mean, it's come in west to east, keep all effects south of the road, and we're dropping everything that we could never drop in training back home, because we don't
[UNKNOWN]: train with cluster munitions.
[UNKNOWN]: We don't get to employ J-Souths, to join standoff weapons, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Those, I think, at the time, and there was something like $750,000 a pop.
[UNKNOWN]: So they're not gonna let us just drop those, but we were dropping them that day, and it was surreal, it was awesome.
[UNKNOWN]: It was probably one of the highlights of my life, was that day.
[UNKNOWN]: And then the artillery is just getting too close, whether by choice or by chance they've figured it out and now they're impacting about 20 meters from the base of the wall.
[UNKNOWN]: So if they hit that and we make the decision to leave, we go back to the house and a rest and refit.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm up on the roof of that house, getting a little sun bath, about the Ed and MRE and
[UNKNOWN]: the word is, hey, we got to go pack up.
[UNKNOWN]: And you look over the roof and down on the road, there's just trucks moving south.
[UNKNOWN]: And they are loaded with dudes, with Kurds.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, water trucks, people hanging on to the sides, pickup trucks, and they're just stuffed in there, like cordwood, and what had happened was, during that engagement, the Siop's team was broadcasting that Baghdad had fallen.
[UNKNOWN]: And it had the day before, April 9th.
[UNKNOWN]: and telling them to quit, you know, there's no reason to fight, stop fighting.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, when we broke contact, they did, too.
[UNKNOWN]: And they grabbed up as much of their dad as they could and they got out of there.
[UNKNOWN]: But now the Kurds knew, too, right, that there's nobody stopping them from advancing on Kirkuk.
[UNKNOWN]: And so they were streaming and screaming down the road to get to Kirkuk.
[UNKNOWN]: And so all of a sudden, here comes the 173rd, right, like, hey, they got the word, too.
[UNKNOWN]: So we jumped back with them.
[UNKNOWN]: And we got to the air base there in Kirkuk.
[UNKNOWN]: So soon after they had left, the Iraqis had left, that
[UNKNOWN]: As we're clearing these buildings, in the dining facility, they were proofing bread.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's like, you know, those kitchen made things that you put on your counter, but it's huge, massive.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's just, the bread is just, the dough is just spilling out on the floor.
[UNKNOWN]: They've left minutes before we got there.
[UNKNOWN]: And then it's just quiet.
[UNKNOWN]: There's no fighting, there's nothing going on.
[UNKNOWN]: The ground commander wanted us to train the local police force to patrol, and he wanted to use us as relays, because we had sat-com, and I said, that's not what we do.
[UNKNOWN]: you don't put a brain surgeon on guard duty, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That's, we're not doing that.
[UNKNOWN]: He says, oh, well, if you're not going to do that, we don't have to feed you.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm like, oh, I think this is going to work out the way you think, but, okay, I'll report that up.
[UNKNOWN]: So that got a little contentious, but then this farmer comes to the gate and says there's a plane went down.
[UNKNOWN]: And initially, he's shoot away, because no plane is going down that we know of.
[UNKNOWN]: So the next day he comes back with a piece of it.
[UNKNOWN]: and it is a plane, and it turns out it's a piece from a strike Eagle and a 15-y strike Eagle.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, because of our reachback with the sackcams and everything, we, you know, fuel us jump on it and we go out and strike Eagle has two people in it, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Pilot and a weapon systems officer.
[UNKNOWN]: But you couldn't tell, I mean, it didn't end there for a while, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so they, you know, we collected parts, brought them back.
[UNKNOWN]: They'd flown a C-17 up to Kirkuk, to collect the remains.
[UNKNOWN]: We did an impromptu honor guard, but the remains on the plane salute, off it goes, and we don't think anything of it.
[UNKNOWN]: about six hours later, we're all called back to the airfield that plane has turned around, come back.
[UNKNOWN]: There's a pallet with coax, Kentucky Fried Chicken from Oliasselin Base, or one of the bases in Kuwait, chewing tobacco cigarettes, everything, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And it's for everyone who went and recovered and did the honor guard only.
[UNKNOWN]: That's it.
[UNKNOWN]: You haven't part of it, back up.
[UNKNOWN]: Poor Lieutenant, he would come up, he's made four trips now to collect the remains, take them back, bring us the chow and go back.
[UNKNOWN]: And the old Paul Harvey, rest of the story is years later, I'm on Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm driving by, and a person I'm with is talking about.
[UNKNOWN]: She was a weapon systems officer in the striking hole.
[UNKNOWN]: And I see this plaque.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's
[UNKNOWN]: I don't, we're driving it, but it's a big thing, and she says, oh, that's for boot and salty, and I said, who's that?
[UNKNOWN]: And like, oh, they went down in northern Iraq.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, northern, what, like, turn the war?
[UNKNOWN]: And she says, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I turned around, we go back and we read it.
[UNKNOWN]: And I didn't know salty, but,
[UNKNOWN]: The guy with the call sign boot was a guy named Eric Dawson, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Dawson, you get the joke, but Eric Dawson was my classmate at the Air Force Academy.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, wait.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be use pumps.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, so when did that plane go down?
[UNKNOWN]: At the beginning of the war, they figured it's spatial distortion.
[UNKNOWN]: They just flew into the target.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So, that's rough.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, but it's a small world, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So then seven weeks in, the fighting had stopped, and then it didn't pick up until the insurgency some months later, and so the decision was made to send some of us home.
[UNKNOWN]: During that entire engagement, there's a couple notes I have one in particular about an F-14 crew putting a bomb into a friendly position.
[UNKNOWN]: because they fixated on a rusted out T-55 instead of four live tanks.
[UNKNOWN]: Is that ringable?
[UNKNOWN]: No, no.
[UNKNOWN]: I guess from your perspective, what does a controller have to get wrong for something like that to happen?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, there's a lot of things that can go wrong, and especially when you're employing GPS guided munitions.
[UNKNOWN]: given them the wrong coordinate, passing them your coordinate, and I type it in if it's
[UNKNOWN]: not GPS guided, you know, if you're lazy in the target, there's ways that the bomb can acquire your position, right?
[UNKNOWN]: If it's within the fan, if it's not properly engaged, or just any number of reasons, a misunderstanding in the target, not paying attention to the talk on.
[UNKNOWN]: There's a number of reasons why it happens, and you know, usually they're all preventable.
[UNKNOWN]: And it sounds like, from a responsibility chain, a custody standpoint, there's several key points of failure or potential failure in that case.
[UNKNOWN]: Is there a way for you as the, as the JTAC to ensure that not just you are doing your job, but the other components are, too?
[UNKNOWN]: with the other components being the people flying yeah or responsible for that mean that is that is inherent to the job that we're not just there to give them the green light to pickle off all their bombs and go home they have to be responsible employed and so if you're the ground commander and I'm next to you and we're
[UNKNOWN]: in this fight, just because the pilot sees the target and I'm confident he sees the target sees us.
[UNKNOWN]: There's no issue.
[UNKNOWN]: I still need to get your permission to actually employ, because maybe things have changed and we don't need to do that anymore, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So there are checks and balances that that happen.
[UNKNOWN]: Have you ever had a pilot refuse a call?
[UNKNOWN]: They wouldn't drop?
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: And was it always because it was a danger close or was there any other reason?
[UNKNOWN]: they just couldn't they didn't understand what I was saying.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: So, for instance, that show force I was talking about at the beginning with the bomb on the hill.
[UNKNOWN]: Lead had no idea what I was talking about.
[UNKNOWN]: Two was pretty sure that he got it, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So, he came in, marked it with rockets.
[UNKNOWN]: One said, okay, I got to the hill now and he came back around.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: What is there a secret or a methodology that you subscribe to to be able to communicate
[UNKNOWN]: you know I mean it's it's try but keep it simple and talk from big to small.
[UNKNOWN]: And also, it really helps to understand the terrain you're operating in, right?
[UNKNOWN]: If you haven't done some at least decent half way map recon to know what it looks like or have an idea of what it looks like from the air down, and we're talking about a road running north south at intersection and east west surrounding road, he probably sees three or four of those, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Which one are you talking about?
[UNKNOWN]: So you have to get his eyes in the area and then narrow that field even further.
[UNKNOWN]: until you are confident that he is seeing the road you're talking about.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's, it seems obvious, but remember, I mean, this is a two-way firing range.
[UNKNOWN]: So things are happening.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: All right, so you spent seven weeks there, you go back home.
[UNKNOWN]: And now you spend some time back in the saddle,
[UNKNOWN]: Can you walk us through that period of being back home and the law enforcement capacity?
[UNKNOWN]: Is that when you were doing some of the swat and undercover stuff for us?
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: So we can kind of switch gears for a minute.
[UNKNOWN]: Sure.
[UNKNOWN]: Tell us about your experiences with that.
[UNKNOWN]: So I came back in May of O3, and...
[UNKNOWN]: When I went back to the patrol, again, they had another coaching trip to just to make sure, especially that, you know, I was not going to go mental, not sound severe and dramatic, but, you know, it was just really, it was sound practice.
[UNKNOWN]: But, at the same time, have you been to Fort Lewis to go my area?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, all right, so City of Lakewood, you familiar with that?
[UNKNOWN]: So that's a small city with big city crime, and they had been contracting for their police services with the county.
[UNKNOWN]: until I don't know if it was whistleblower kind of an inside nudge or something, but they realized they were actually funding about 70% of the sheriff's department.
[UNKNOWN]: So things that were happening out in the mountain division, things that were happening in the port, those were all being paid for by Lakewood.
[UNKNOWN]: And so Lakewood said, we're not doing that anymore, we're going to stand up our own department.
[UNKNOWN]: And it was a great opportunity for me because when you stand up a department, if you need 60 patrol officers, you got a higher 60 patrol officers.
[UNKNOWN]: If you need 14 detectives with Lakewood, it was a civil service test versus the state patrol you were appointed.
[UNKNOWN]: So that was not only who you knew, but who knew you and what was your body of work to date with Lakewood.
[UNKNOWN]: during one of those informational town hall meetings where they're trying to get people interested in coming on to the department that the chief said, look, apply for any position you feel you're qualified for.
[UNKNOWN]: And as a trooper, we didn't get the hand things off to detectives.
[UNKNOWN]: You you caught it, you cleaned it.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I solved investigations on my own and and I so I put in for patrol and I put in for detective and
[UNKNOWN]: 44 people met the or applied to be a detective 29 met the requirements to actually be invited to test and only six of us passed and they have 14 positions.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's looking pretty good for me.
[UNKNOWN]: So I did get hired.
[UNKNOWN]: I was made a detective and initially I went into a unit called Special Assaults and I had no idea what that is.
[UNKNOWN]: What is that?
[UNKNOWN]: And I said, well, that's, you know, crimes against the children, elderly, disabled, domestic violence falls under that, not anything that was appealing to me, but you know, what am I going to do?
[UNKNOWN]: I'm brand new.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, about a month into it, my sergeant pulled me aside, and she said, hey, they've got an opening in the proactive property crimes unit, and I said, okay, what's that?
[UNKNOWN]: you wear a non-standard police appearance.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, come on, just speak English.
[UNKNOWN]: And she says, OK, you can be under cover.
[UNKNOWN]: You long hair, whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: And you're going to be investigating chop shops and theft rings and the beautiful people.
[UNKNOWN]: So I said, yes, I'll do that.
[UNKNOWN]: I'll go do that.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I had long hair, big Fumanchu.
[UNKNOWN]: invariably in Pierce County in Lakewood, there's a big math problem, and the invariably part is, there's a couple things you can count on when you encounter math, right?
[UNKNOWN]: There's going to be some kind of accompanying crime, whether that's stolen goods, or, you know, some other...
[UNKNOWN]: If it's in a house, and there's kids involved, those kids are probably victims, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And there's always porn and just the most disgusting things.
[UNKNOWN]: You can imagine in these houses.
[UNKNOWN]: But we would encounter some of these people in these kind of flea bottom motels with bags of mail.
[UNKNOWN]: They've been mailboxing and stealing people's mail, and what they would do is they would come to your house, they'd steal your mail, they'd go through it, they'd find an offer for a credit card.
[UNKNOWN]: They would sell that for their next fix to somebody up the food chain.
[UNKNOWN]: who would essentially start building a dossier.
[UNKNOWN]: And so they would tell them, go hit that place again because they would apply for the credit card.
[UNKNOWN]: It would come, they would get the credit card.
[UNKNOWN]: The pen is usually sent separately.
[UNKNOWN]: So eventually they would have an entire notebook on you that they could then use to further their illegal activities.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, it's still in mail so we get the postal inspectors involved.
[UNKNOWN]: We encountered people counterfitting money when now the secret service is involved.
[UNKNOWN]: So it wasn't just Donnie Brasco type stuff where, you know, I'm this, look like a dirt bag living out there doing that stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, it was some,
[UNKNOWN]: different more involved financial investigations a lot of times.
[UNKNOWN]: But at the same time, Lake Wood standing up wanted to have its own SWAT team.
[UNKNOWN]: So in that area, the city of Tacoma, they had a 12-man SWAT team.
[UNKNOWN]: You had Pierce County Sheriff's Department, they had a 12-man SWAT team.
[UNKNOWN]: Lake Wood had a 12-man SWAT team.
[UNKNOWN]: But the smaller cities couldn't field a full SWAT team so they had the cooperative the Metro County SWAT team.
[UNKNOWN]: And so the smaller cities would contribute one or two people or maybe it was just equipment or whatever they could afford.
[UNKNOWN]: And we actually, I was a part of that as well, and we had three entry teams.
[UNKNOWN]: So we had probably 40, 45 SWAT operators on that team.
[UNKNOWN]: And pretty quickly, I became an assistant team leader, and then I became a team leader.
[UNKNOWN]: And the naming convention was not cosmic.
[UNKNOWN]: One of the team leaders is a former green beret, so his team was green team.
[UNKNOWN]: another guy was a ranger for a ranger so he was red team and then I'm air force so I'm blue team, you know, yeah, I didn't stay up late thinking that one.
[UNKNOWN]: But we were in the as a detective, we were serving warrants all the time, but there's a threat matrix, you know, you got to fill out, you got to do, you know, hey, does this meet the threshold to hand it over to SWAT?
[UNKNOWN]: And a lot of
[UNKNOWN]: Like I said, it's some big city crime, I mean, there's gangs, there's just elements that would heighten a simple stuff in the door to where, okay, we're going to back out, Swats can handle it.
[UNKNOWN]: And on the Swats team, we were doing them up three, three a week, I think we, you know, about 150 a year, and that's on top of my day job, if you will, as a detective.
[UNKNOWN]: So, I was busy.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: It was a lot of
[UNKNOWN]: a lot of interaction, but man, it sounds like it, that's a pretty quick escalation into the meat and potatoes of law enforcement work, no doubt about it.
[UNKNOWN]: Is there a harriest operation both on the swath side and on the undercover side that you can share?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, there is one that stands out because it was just, it was a little bit complex.
[UNKNOWN]: They were dealing dope out of the houses and they were working together.
[UNKNOWN]: This is a group.
[UNKNOWN]: They had these two little bungalows.
[UNKNOWN]: Most people don't know this even if they know about telecom.
[UNKNOWN]: But telecom once upon a long time ago was a little resort community.
[UNKNOWN]: It was outside of Tacoma.
[UNKNOWN]: It's on American Lake.
[UNKNOWN]: People would get out of the city for the summer.
[UNKNOWN]: and drive the 15 miles or whatever it was, 10 miles, and they would just have their weekend or summer cottage there.
[UNKNOWN]: So these houses aren't really houses.
[UNKNOWN]: They're these little bungalow type things.
[UNKNOWN]: But they've also been modified.
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of them.
[UNKNOWN]: Walls have been knocked down.
[UNKNOWN]: They've been added.
[UNKNOWN]: They've, you know, over the years, different owners, and the property lines are very odd, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So you look at a nice development now, everything's neat and orderly, and you can kind of plan for,
[UNKNOWN]: where your dead spots are, in telecom, it's just wild.
[UNKNOWN]: So we went into this place and as we think we've cleared it, and then somebody in the house opened a door and this massive pit bull comes charging out and takes a swipe at one guy and he kind of dives back.
[UNKNOWN]: and then comes running, and he's running right at me.
[UNKNOWN]: And he sees the door, and he decides not to go out the door.
[UNKNOWN]: His front door's open.
[UNKNOWN]: He could have been free.
[UNKNOWN]: But he does, and he looks at me, and he's coming at me.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I engaged the dog, and he quickly realized he didn't like that, and he turns, and, you know, kind of textbook, I'm firing until I'm off the shoulder
[UNKNOWN]: counterpart over here, I stop.
[UNKNOWN]: He picks up when he's off my shoulder and the dog dies in the hallway.
[UNKNOWN]: But those rounds go somewhere, they go right through the dog, they go right through the floor, we still have people in the basement.
[UNKNOWN]: Everybody walked away, fine, except for the dog, sadly.
[UNKNOWN]: But
[UNKNOWN]: That's just, you know, couldn't plan for it.
[UNKNOWN]: And I don't know.
[UNKNOWN]: I thought about it.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, should I let the dog bite me?
[UNKNOWN]: He'll know.
[UNKNOWN]: You know?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, that's a massive, that's a big dog.
[UNKNOWN]: And just little things like that.
[UNKNOWN]: So it wasn't that it was,
[UNKNOWN]: Scary or harrowing, but it was one of those, in that moment, what are you going to do?
[UNKNOWN]: And I made a decision and, you know, did you guys run into guard dogs so to speak often?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, all the time.
[UNKNOWN]: It was there a particular breed that you ran into the most.
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of pits.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: From a, I guess, level of heinous circumstances that you ever uncovered doing that as a profession, what stands out.
[UNKNOWN]: In terms of the dogs, no, no, just generally speaking, whether it's, you know, deplorable conditions that kids are in or sex trafficking ring, I mean, was there a thing or an operation a sting that stood out as being kind of the most shaking for you?
[UNKNOWN]: So, it wasn't a sting, it was, the nice thing about Lakewood was it was a big enough department that we had specialization within the detective corps, but it was small enough that sometimes it was all hands on deck or you might be a homicide detective, but I'm the second person there or the first person, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I'm on scene because they need a detective and then I might hand it off depending.
[UNKNOWN]: But,
[UNKNOWN]: There was, you know, I show up one morning, I'm getting a cup of coffee at the office, and our senior homicide detective looks at me.
[UNKNOWN]: He says, hey, man, you got time right now?
[UNKNOWN]: That's the time for what?
[UNKNOWN]: He says, I gotta run out to Fort Lewis to talk to them about homicide as I'll go.
[UNKNOWN]: And what it happened is this kid came back from, for my rack and just kind of lost his marbles and killed his wife and tried to saw her head off and she's dead and he's lined up all the kitchen knives like a halo around her head, music's blaring.
[UNKNOWN]: That's how the neighbors called a noise complaint because the music was blaring and he's gone.
[UNKNOWN]: I wasn't prepared for that walking in, you know, like, oh, okay, that's not something you see every day.
[UNKNOWN]: But
[UNKNOWN]: My most memorable case was December 2nd, 2005.
[UNKNOWN]: It was a Friday.
[UNKNOWN]: I was trying to have a sham day, so I'd signed up for some Excel spreadsheet class at City Hall, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I didn't do a lot of spreadsheets, but, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: But a full day of sitting there doing that, and then I leave, and I meet my wife and kids, and we go to the Christmas tree lot, and we're picking out a Christmas tree, and my pageer goes off, and so I'm like, hey, I gotta go, and I, you know, run home.
[UNKNOWN]: Switch out and head back to work.
[UNKNOWN]: I've been off duty for like an hour and a half and I'm the first detective on scene and what happened was it doesn't snow very often in Lakewood and Tacoma because of the budget sound because of the you know it snows in the mountains snows west of us but not right there but it did snowed and this little girl nine years old Adriana Jackson had according to her parents she'd left for school and she didn't come home.
[UNKNOWN]: And parents called the school saying, hey, our daughter's not home.
[UNKNOWN]: They said, well, school was canceled today, and they didn't know.
[UNKNOWN]: And when we were looking through the house, not a nice house, there was some clear indicators that the kid had been
[UNKNOWN]: sexually abused, soil underwear hidden in the closet, things that would indicate that there's something going on, nine-year-old is soil underwear, that's not common, that's not standard.
[UNKNOWN]: But in the course of looking through this kid's room, there was this little construction paper scrapbook that
[UNKNOWN]: when she'd been in kindergarten, her teacher had made, we found out, you know, for every kid in this school, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And it was their art projects from kindergarten, like all year.
[UNKNOWN]: She'd made this thing and given it to him, like, an end of the year present, and that was there.
[UNKNOWN]: And so it kind of drives at home, and it's a real kid, and it's a real sad story.
[UNKNOWN]: And I had my oldest daughter was about seven years old, seven and a half at the time.
[UNKNOWN]: So it was close enough in age
[UNKNOWN]: I was taking it kind of personally, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And I wanted to figure this out.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I actually stayed.
[UNKNOWN]: I was on the clock for 24 hours after my shift, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So I came back and got there.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, six o'clock at night, and was there until about 530 the next day.
[UNKNOWN]: And during the course of that, as we were looking and doing the next day, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So this has, I've been there for 12, 16 hours, something like that.
[UNKNOWN]: And there's a construction dumpster at a house, just a couple of down.
[UNKNOWN]: And we just have to look in it.
[UNKNOWN]: And the parents had already started cleaning a room out.
[UNKNOWN]: And there was the scrapbook.
[UNKNOWN]: And grieving parents don't throw their kids stuff away.
[UNKNOWN]: unless they know the kids not coming back.
[UNKNOWN]: So it was a pretty galvanizing moment.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm not still think about it.
[UNKNOWN]: This kid was nine years old, and I would seem to care about her and her family.
[UNKNOWN]: And we try to, you know, the hours turned in days, weeks, months.
[UNKNOWN]: We got so in our boys, we were, you know, dredging the American lake, thinking maybe she's in there.
[UNKNOWN]: We were, I mean, we were chasing every lead.
[UNKNOWN]: We had one guy, I try to kill himself in the holding cell at the county jail, which kind of, that's an indicator, maybe had something to do with it.
[UNKNOWN]: And he may have, he may have been what we think we know, right,
[UNKNOWN]: She was sold for drugs, and so maybe this guy was part of that, who knows.
[UNKNOWN]: He, the investigation went a different direction, but then I went back, I got called up to go back to Afghanistan and it kind of ended, that was in March of 06 that I started back into the train up to deploy.
[UNKNOWN]: I left being a cop in December of 07, and so it was probably springtime of 08.
[UNKNOWN]: And I got a call from one of my old buddies at the department.
[UNKNOWN]: He said, hey man, are you in town?
[UNKNOWN]: I said, yeah, he says, can you swing out this way?
[UNKNOWN]: not even half a mile from her house.
[UNKNOWN]: They found her remains.
[UNKNOWN]: And well, what was left of them?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, you know, animals have been eaten on her.
[UNKNOWN]: And there's really just bones by that point.
[UNKNOWN]: But you know, I poor little kid.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you know what happened to her?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, tough to tell from the bones.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, the rest of her, in her rest, internally.
[UNKNOWN]: That's just, uh, God, that's this hardening.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that's stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: Throughout your, uh, law enforcement career, did you go hands on with guys often?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, did you ever have somebody to give you a run for your money?
[UNKNOWN]: I had a guy trying to take my gun on the side of the road.
[UNKNOWN]: So if you are familiar with King County, as it leaves heading north on the state Route 167, it's rural, it's dark.
[UNKNOWN]: I pulled a guy over for what I figured was just kind of drunk driving.
[UNKNOWN]: Turns out he was hopped up on at least math and booze.
[UNKNOWN]: And I had him on on the side of the road,
[UNKNOWN]: taking it to custody so I'm turning around and you know we don't pop the cuffs out until we have positive control of the guy right how many times in a movie if you've seen them they come up with the cuffs and then they end up getting cuffed themselves or you know stabbed in the eye or some goofiness so the minute I grabbed his hands to to control him the fight was on
[UNKNOWN]: And the Washington State Patrol is very regimented about how your gear is set up on your belt, so whichever side you carry your pistol on, your radio's on the opposite side.
[UNKNOWN]: Right?
[UNKNOWN]: And because I'm naturally right-handed,
[UNKNOWN]: that would put the assp, the OC, you know, the things that I would normally use my right hand on my right side if I could carry left-handed.
[UNKNOWN]: So because the patrol required you to shoot half of your qualification with either hand, you know, half with each hand, I just taught myself to shoot left-handed during trooper-basic and so I carried left-handed.
[UNKNOWN]: And he grabbed what he thought was
[UNKNOWN]: Ripped it, I mean, this is, you know, this is thick cow hide belts and, and, but shiny, of course, because they're the state patrol and we look pretty when we fight.
[UNKNOWN]: And he was, I have no doubt that if that had been my gun and he had ripped it off, he would have used it against me.
[UNKNOWN]: What, uh, how did that end?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, did you subdue him or what?
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Did, did you do much training outside of, what's taught in both the academy and any, uh, kind of subsequent sustainment training?
[UNKNOWN]: Did you do the jutsu or anything like that?
[UNKNOWN]: I did, and of course, combatives in the military, and so, you know, some of that is you just have to dial that back because you have to write the report, and in the report, as you describe, you know, taking the suspect in the custody, you have to, you can't say, you know, I put him in a rear-naked choke without some kind of justifiable, because that's deadly force.
[UNKNOWN]: All right.
[UNKNOWN]: Absolutely, you can kill somebody from that.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, they consider that and then we'll call it that.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a vascular lateral vascular restraint.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, if you keep it held on them long enough.
[UNKNOWN]: Absolutely.
[UNKNOWN]: But you also, you take your, you know, this is the lawyer part of me, you take your victim as you find them.
[UNKNOWN]: So if this person's hopped up on drugs and they're already, you know, probably elevated heart rate, whatever else is going on with them, usually the people we encounter aren't in the best physical shape, you know, health, that how many times have you heard in the news that somebody died in police custody, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean all the time, I guess I'm not a lawyer, but in thinking in that, I guess, train of logic, like, couldn't technically everything fall into that category.
[UNKNOWN]: Like, if you punch a guy, well, if you punch him hard enough, it could kill him.
[UNKNOWN]: Absolutely, if you take somebody down, and they hit their head, it could kill him absolutely.
[UNKNOWN]: So, but they do consider a rear naked choker, a vascular construction
[UNKNOWN]: well, that would be tough to navigate.
[UNKNOWN]: Anything else from your blonde forcent time that you'd like to share before we move into the redeployed afghanistan?
[UNKNOWN]: No.
[UNKNOWN]: You glad to be done with it?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Did you just not like doing it or?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, so I don't know if it's adult onset ADD, but I do tend to get bored.
[UNKNOWN]: And when I came back from this deployment we're about to talk about, I was moved to the robbery section, and that meant, you know, no more beards and long hair, it meant, you know, suit and tie.
[UNKNOWN]: I can't go interview a victim and look like the guy that, you know, I'm just beat them up at the gas station.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, right off the bat, that was distasteful to me.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: But also I kind of felt like I'd done it, it wasn't, it's not that it wasn't challenging.
[UNKNOWN]: I just, there's gotta be more, right?
[UNKNOWN]: What else is there?
[UNKNOWN]: Is this it?
[UNKNOWN]: Is this as far as I go?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, not make sense.
[UNKNOWN]: All right, so you get the word that you're going back on active basically, redeploying to Afghanistan, walk us through the buildup and then ultimately getting into that deployment because it was a long one.
[UNKNOWN]: So the buildup is standard, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You've got to make sure that all your boxes are checked, that you're current for controlling air, that you know, the standard pre-deployment stuff, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That are you physically healthy enough to go or did you get your medical and dental signed off?
[UNKNOWN]: You have good teeth to go to war, you know, the goofy stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: But,
[UNKNOWN]: You know, then really it was a bit different for me because this was my penance tour, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I was the lieutenant going back to be in charge of at the task force level.
[UNKNOWN]: And so there were some schools that I needed to go to just to have that, which was fine because I was down at Herbert Field and it was springtime and that's a great time to be down there.
[UNKNOWN]: But then we deployed, and this was the summer of 2006.
[UNKNOWN]: We got there as a third special forces group, and seventh special forces group, actually, seventh was leaving, third was ripping in.
[UNKNOWN]: And it was a big, I mean, it was massive.
[UNKNOWN]: There was Operation Medusa, it was a big one, the big one.
[UNKNOWN]: And that was, that was so big and so kinetic that they actually moved the AC-130s to Bagram, which is key, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Man, that's big, because now they're in country.
[UNKNOWN]: And then one of the engagements that some of the teams
[UNKNOWN]: They were so big, the gunships were winch-estering.
[UNKNOWN]: They were landing at Candahar, re-arming, and hitting them again.
[UNKNOWN]: And that was the only thing keeping these teams alive in the Panjo way, which was a kind of central Afghanistan.
[UNKNOWN]: And I was in charge of pushing air to these teams that are in contact, which, yes, it's a paper drill for me.
[UNKNOWN]: But we've got that pred feed.
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of times, there was overhead ISR assets that we had video of these guys.
[UNKNOWN]: And I remember one particular fight came in.
[UNKNOWN]: And I didn't hear what team it was.
[UNKNOWN]: And if I did, maybe I didn't register initially.
[UNKNOWN]: But I'm watching this screen.
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm seeing the two trucks come down through and the first one hits an IED.
[UNKNOWN]: And the second one stops to get the guys out of the burning truck.
[UNKNOWN]: And one of the guys on screen is visibly shorter than anybody else there.
[UNKNOWN]: But I start thinking, what team was this?
[UNKNOWN]: And that little dude is my buddy, Juan Valentin, who years before had been put out in the town on the jump into Iraq.
[UNKNOWN]: And I watch him go into the truck and drag and dudes out.
[UNKNOWN]: And you can see rounds impacting the truck all around him.
[UNKNOWN]: And let's give me that stuff because I can't do anything.
[UNKNOWN]: as you're basically in a talk or in a talk.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm, and, you know, I mean, of course the,
[UNKNOWN]: The three is yelling at me, Air Force, what do we got?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, can we send them?
[UNKNOWN]: And, you know, I've already scrambled it.
[UNKNOWN]: But, you know, the reality is, per 24 hours, there's only so many assets that can fly, right?
[UNKNOWN]: They're slotted against something and you have to now redirect them or they're on the ground waiting to go or they're up flying around and you redirect them.
[UNKNOWN]: Whatever it is, but when they're gone, they're gone.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's it.
[UNKNOWN]: And we had nothing to push them.
[UNKNOWN]: And that was pretty tough.
[UNKNOWN]: So in that environment, or I guess in that scenario, there's just literally nothing you can do at that point.
[UNKNOWN]: You watch the whole room stop breathing, you know, just staring and watching what how bad do it get.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't think they actually, I don't think anyone died, which is great.
[UNKNOWN]: There were some people badly injured, pretty messed up, some career-ending injuries.
[UNKNOWN]: I think, unfortunately, I've had a couple TBIs, so keeping the facts straight from one tick to the other 20 years ago is a little difficult, but I know that was pretty nasty because they're down to one truck.
[UNKNOWN]: They still have to fight their way out.
[UNKNOWN]: And now, you know, now that we've got to patch these, we're pushing to them, anything we have that we can to get them some kind of help.
[UNKNOWN]: That's tough and you watch the whole room and it's just collective impotence.
[UNKNOWN]: Everybody wants to just want to strap up and go, you know, stand next to them and help.
[UNKNOWN]: You can't, obviously, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So you got to do your job.
[UNKNOWN]: What's your job here?
[UNKNOWN]: My job is intel.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, keep getting the intel.
[UNKNOWN]: What's down the road?
[UNKNOWN]: Start seeing what we can look at, to get them a safe way out.
[UNKNOWN]: Whatever it is, but you can't be part of the fight.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, on the ground, so you're going to be part of the solution that gets them home.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: During that deployment, what different areas were you in or were you in the same area the whole time?
[UNKNOWN]: So I was originally supposed to be in the in the job for the first four months and then down range for the second and then go down to a cobble for the third four month stint.
[UNKNOWN]: And that changed because we had some, when the second four months was about to start
[UNKNOWN]: There were some brand new guys and sending them to the jock is like making this beautiful knife and then just snap in the tip off of it because you're not going to employ it, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That's unfair to the guy who's just qualified to be out there but also it doesn't help the guys who are down range because this guy's never done that job before and so
[UNKNOWN]: I pushed him out, he went, and he had a good rotation.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, he was down in skin, if he ever went there.
[UNKNOWN]: And he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
[UNKNOWN]: He was in the job every day, but what it did for me was one, I know in my heart, I let this guy go get in the fight that he trained hard to do.
[UNKNOWN]: He came home, so that's a win, but also then you still had some continuity and some experience back at the rear that could push the guys what they needed, that could fight for them, knowing what they needed versus, I don't know what they need, I don't know what I'm doing, this is going to be a fiasco.
[UNKNOWN]: So, yeah, it was all there in the rear.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: What were you say is the hardest part in that area, whether it's terrain or situation in terms of the enemy that you're fighting?
[UNKNOWN]: What's the biggest challenge for a controller in that environment?
[UNKNOWN]: There are, I mean, there are all kinds of things that change from your plan to reality and then when reality is actually happening.
[UNKNOWN]: There are women and children that are involved.
[UNKNOWN]: There are other things that the ground commanders not willing to engage around or with because of any kind of societal blowback.
[UNKNOWN]: We're not out out there bombing mosques, even though the dudes run into them.
[UNKNOWN]: We know they're in there.
[UNKNOWN]: We're just not going to do that, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So they're still shooting on us.
[UNKNOWN]: What we need to get away.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, there's a lot of things that they can pop up that you just.
[UNKNOWN]: You got to take it as you find it.
[UNKNOWN]: Were there any operations that you oversaw during that window of time that went horribly wrong?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I wasn't I mean over seeing I was pushing air to them But there's one that stands out because this guy's a good friend of mine now His name's Chef Ford.
[UNKNOWN]: He was a team leader for a for an 18.
[UNKNOWN]: This is right when I got in country, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So
[UNKNOWN]: But his team sergeant was killed in that engagement.
[UNKNOWN]: Tom Mahalik, they named, you know, Fawb Mahalik after him, it was, it was the situation where they would have, they would have all died if they had not had gas.
[UNKNOWN]: and they did lose the one they did and they had some other significant I wanted to.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, when you were there it was the following year after red wings, which is, you know, one of the bigger or more well known.
[UNKNOWN]: operations in the entire afghan war.
[UNKNOWN]: So in terms of red wings, four seals on a ridge, daylight, no gunship, no controller with them.
[UNKNOWN]: If there's a J-TAC on that team, how does that operation go in your mind?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I'm not a fortune teller, but I would say that they would have a better than average chance for more than one guy to come home.
[UNKNOWN]: Right?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, the...
[UNKNOWN]: air power has been a deciding factor, right?
[UNKNOWN]: We can go all the way back to the World War II.
[UNKNOWN]: You look at when Patton was going to relieve the battle of the bulge, and he kept the air core attacking everything on this side of the river while he went, you know, basically unchecked on this side.
[UNKNOWN]: The Germans didn't want to surrender to Patton.
[UNKNOWN]: They wanted to surrender to the guy who'd beaten him.
[UNKNOWN]: Who was that air commander?
[UNKNOWN]: Do you think if they had had a mid-J attack with them that we wouldn't even know the name of the operation?
[UNKNOWN]: I would love for that story to be true.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: All right, see, as you rotate back, now it's time to basically pull chalk, she decided to go a different route, correct?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so there's a couple things.
[UNKNOWN]: One, what really got to me, and you asked if I was tired of it, or if there was something, it was frustration, I think.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I'm going to use this word specifically.
[UNKNOWN]: Downrange, we prosecuted targets.
[UNKNOWN]: As a cop, I prosecuted, or helped prosecute people.
[UNKNOWN]: Downrange, they go away, they're gone.
[UNKNOWN]: Back home, I'm seeing these jimmoaks weeks, a couple months, maybe they get, you know, and they plead to a deal, and really this is,
[UNKNOWN]: You know, this is cold comfort that tells me I had good solid case work because they wouldn't fight it.
[UNKNOWN]: They would take the plea because they knew they were going to get a lesser sentence and they couldn't get out of it.
[UNKNOWN]: But I'm seeing these, I'm fighting the same people over and over and over and it got frustrating.
[UNKNOWN]: Something to remember that we didn't touch on here is that in 2004, I think, I think,
[UNKNOWN]: We were waiting to make entry on this house where this one guy is with SWAT.
[UNKNOWN]: With this one guy, he'd shot his girlfriend in the face while she's holding their 10-day old baby.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I think there's probably a less severe way to resolve that conflict.
[UNKNOWN]: But now a father of the year, yeah, you know, strong, strong candidate.
[UNKNOWN]: So we're waiting to make entry on this guy.
[UNKNOWN]: We're in last covering concealment.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, you're quiet.
[UNKNOWN]: You're not talking because you get the green light at any time.
[UNKNOWN]: And what that means is you get a lot of time in your head.
[UNKNOWN]: It's raining.
[UNKNOWN]: It's about 38 degrees.
[UNKNOWN]: We're standing there for about four hours.
[UNKNOWN]: Just soaked to the bone.
[UNKNOWN]: This is miserable.
[UNKNOWN]: And I thought to myself, one, I don't want to do this when I'm 40, too.
[UNKNOWN]: I had just had a phone call with my folks a couple weeks prior and I told my dad, I want to go back to school and get a master's.
[UNKNOWN]: And he said, for what?
[UNKNOWN]: And I said, ah, I'm thinking public administration.
[UNKNOWN]: And he kind of laughed at me, he said, why?
[UNKNOWN]: So you can go be a chief of police at some potent department?
[UNKNOWN]: No?
[UNKNOWN]: I guess that was the upper limit of my ambition.
[UNKNOWN]: And my mom pipes up in the background.
[UNKNOWN]: Y'all had to go to law school.
[UNKNOWN]: I said, Mom, I'll go in the law school.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't have time to go to law school.
[UNKNOWN]: And now I'm standing in the freezing rain.
[UNKNOWN]: And this is one of the few times in the negotiators, actually got them to give up.
[UNKNOWN]: So you don't even get the release of taking this guy into custody.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I get home, absolutely freezing to the bone.
[UNKNOWN]: poor myself, three fingers of Jamison, hottest shower, the hot water here you'll do.
[UNKNOWN]: Three more fingers of Jamison call my folks and said, all right, I'm going to law school.
[UNKNOWN]: So I started law school in 2005, the only person in the department who knew I was going was my partner because he asked to know, there's some things I just, you know, we're gonna have to switch this around, and
[UNKNOWN]: So, I finished that first year right before I deployed this 2006, and I took a year off to go to deploy, and now I've come back.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm trying to get back in the groove of law school, you know, as we touched on earlier, me re-entry is always a problem, it's it's always difficult.
[UNKNOWN]: and add one more.
[UNKNOWN]: Now I'm going back to school.
[UNKNOWN]: And so the idea was, I need to focus.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm either doing this or I'm not.
[UNKNOWN]: And so even though I went into contracting and I still would deploy to use that term, I did not stop going to school.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I would pack my books up, ship them to Afghanistan or I did a trip to the Philippines as part of that campaign down there, which not a lot of people know about.
[UNKNOWN]: And I brought my books, and I think I mentioned to you earlier when we were talking that I, there is a picture.
[UNKNOWN]: I got to find it of me studying federal tax law under a poncho with a red lens flashlight in the corn go.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, two bad things about that, right?
[UNKNOWN]: One, it's federal tax law.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's about as boring a subject is I can think of.
[UNKNOWN]: And two, there's got to be a better way, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Like this is, but it worked.
[UNKNOWN]: And I finished and, you know, here I am, all these years later, as an attorney.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, Matt's quite the dedication to the craft, no doubt about it.
[UNKNOWN]: When you got back from that deployment,
[UNKNOWN]: hang up the body armor law enforcement lies in those following years of excuse me contract work.
[UNKNOWN]: What all did that in tail?
[UNKNOWN]: I know some of those special activities are supposed to project type stuff that maybe you can't get into but can you kind of go over that window of time as a as a contractor and what it entailed?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I could tell you that the company I worked for was a company called Blackbird Technologies and they had been awarded a sole source contract, IDIQ, right, and definite delivery and definite quantity with a ceiling of $450 million.
[UNKNOWN]: That doesn't mean they get 450 million.
[UNKNOWN]: That means they have to find a way to take that off the table.
[UNKNOWN]: And the program was essentially me showing up in country, getting a two or three day hand off with the guy I was replacing, and then, you know,
[UNKNOWN]: I'm there for three months.
[UNKNOWN]: I extended, I would stay there for six months.
[UNKNOWN]: They would let me stay there the whole year if they wanted because they just billing me or billing for me.
[UNKNOWN]: But what I quickly figured out is what we were doing is important.
[UNKNOWN]: The army wants it, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That was the customer.
[UNKNOWN]: And they don't know about it.
[UNKNOWN]: We got it.
[UNKNOWN]: We get to sell this.
[UNKNOWN]: So it was almost like traveling vacuum salesmen.
[UNKNOWN]: I was going around to the different commands in country and selling this program.
[UNKNOWN]: and it worked.
[UNKNOWN]: And without going too far, it helped them to identify where and how the enemy was doing their business and who and then be able to better prosecute it.
[UNKNOWN]: And so when I wrapped that up,
[UNKNOWN]: at one time, so it's total three months.
[UNKNOWN]: So 24 guys throughout the year, unless they wanted to stay and then they could.
[UNKNOWN]: And whatever, but I had grown it enough that Blackbird said, hey, that's cool.
[UNKNOWN]: And I said, great, could you give me an internship?
[UNKNOWN]: And I hadn't done anything with what the finished law school hadn't done anything in terms of actually trying to get a job.
[UNKNOWN]: And so they created an internship for me.
[UNKNOWN]: And then when they,
[UNKNOWN]: had a spin-off of that program that was focused strictly on the Afghan commandos, they put me in charge of being the program manager for it.
[UNKNOWN]: So, you know, no good deed goes unpunished, I guess.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: The window of time-wise, that was 07 till when.
[UNKNOWN]: So I actually started with Blackbird in 08.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: There was a little lag in there where I went to work for a company out of Chicago.
[UNKNOWN]: doing business management consulting.
[UNKNOWN]: I was essentially selling the team that would come in and do that.
[UNKNOWN]: That was a very aggressive one-call close.
[UNKNOWN]: I might have five minutes with you because you didn't want to talk to me at all.
[UNKNOWN]: As a business owner you have stuff to do but you know I did well enough that but an hour later would be on the phone with HQ and they'd be flying a team out the next day to actually help you sit down go through your books and figure out how you could
[UNKNOWN]: You know, what was your goal?
[UNKNOWN]: Is it to grow and sell?
[UNKNOWN]: Is it to, you know, hand it down to your kids?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, what are you going to do for this business?
[UNKNOWN]: And the key thing there is that, like I said, it's a one-call close.
[UNKNOWN]: If I don't get this deal today, I can't come back.
[UNKNOWN]: That's not happening.
[UNKNOWN]: And I had about a 40% close rate.
[UNKNOWN]: So that's pretty good.
[UNKNOWN]: That's close.
[UNKNOWN]: I was closing on average two of those a day.
[UNKNOWN]: And within three months, they made me a corporate trainer and an assistant regional manager.
[UNKNOWN]: The region was, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: Western Canada, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California down to San Luis Obispo, and the northern half of Nevada.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, wow.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: All right, so, oh wait, you're back in Afghanistan, selling this special activities program after that you're in the Philippines, correct?
[UNKNOWN]: So, I went, I had to go help out.
[UNKNOWN]: They just had a manpower shortage down the Philippines, and so I went to help out.
[UNKNOWN]: It's the same program, different theater, and totally different ROE.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, in Afghanistan, something happens.
[UNKNOWN]: Who did it?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know.
[UNKNOWN]: Who are they when who are they connected?
[UNKNOWN]: I know no idea.
[UNKNOWN]: But in the Philippines I'm they ever the part of the commander's brief every day They would talk about the top 10 most wanted.
[UNKNOWN]: They knew who they were where they were everything, but there it was more Like being a cop you got to build a case against them before you knew actually prosecute is very very surreal in that sense Yeah In both of those places were there Any big targets that the program that you were implementing got that you can mention?
[UNKNOWN]: I can say in Afghanistan that we rolled up an entire wing of the Taliban's finance.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you get any kickback, do you get to be involved in any of the actual going and doing it or that's more of a program that you're helping implement is making it capable?
[UNKNOWN]: The latter, the latter, moving into the Philippines, you went there and hope run that where it's essentially kind of like lawyers are running the war, so to speak, and that's one of the things, you know, one of my platoons we spent a fair bit of time in the Philippines and the North cross-training Filipino seals to go down into the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south and in the south
[UNKNOWN]: more of Islamic liberation front and all those guys, the milk, the al-Qaeda affiliates, what a name, by the way, the pick.
[UNKNOWN]: But I think it's an area of the world that I think most people don't realize is as heavily connected to Islamic terrorism as it is, specifically in the south, but for what you can share down in the south, what same kind of question did you have any
[UNKNOWN]: we didn't really.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, not while I was there.
[UNKNOWN]: I would say that they had some as a result of work that we were doing.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I played a small part.
[UNKNOWN]: I'd like to say I played a big part, but overall it's just because of the nature of building the case and you can't just say, all right, that's the guy and go grab him.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, prosecuting, if you're going to prosecute this guy, you've got to be able to prosecute him kinetically as well as legally and marrying those two wasn't always the best.
[UNKNOWN]: I will say, too, that your seal boy is up at the embassy.
[UNKNOWN]: I was there during Typhoon, on the way.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, really?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and Manella was basically open sewer, the streets were flooded, it was disgusting, and we got pulled up to help out with body recovery.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, wow.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that was pretty gross.
[UNKNOWN]: I can't even imagine.
[UNKNOWN]: Is there a way to summarize that program in very broad or vague terms where it's like is it cigarette and it's purely electric or electrical type of mechanism is it a hands-on human kind of thing or is it a mix of the two or it's a combination it's a combination of
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I don't know exactly where I had the line in it, so I don't want to say too much, no one across over it.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Was the Philippines the last chapter in that part of your life story book, where you're running that kind of program?
[UNKNOWN]: It was because I came back from that in November of 09, and then when I went back to Afghanistan, it was just with this other,
[UNKNOWN]: Essentially, I'll tell you this, the program that I was made the program manager for was trying to create essentially a blue-force tracker program for the for the commandos was called the Afghan National Tracking program or ant and and so I was involved with that and that
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know where, I mean these guys would take the batteries out of their nods so they could listen to their little radios maybe.
[UNKNOWN]: So, yeah, like, you're not getting anywhere with that, but yeah, it was a nice try.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Someone wrote that there was, in 2009 that they ran an app on, I probably will butcher this name, Ed Alfit Fittiver, Fitter, does that ring a bell?
[UNKNOWN]: Two weeks later, an IED killed two Americans in a village where they'd spent months building
[UNKNOWN]: And no locals warned them, does that, no, no, no, that rings a belly at all.
[UNKNOWN]: No.
[UNKNOWN]: What about Marlon?
[UNKNOWN]: Does that, you know, that name ring a bell?
[UNKNOWN]: Because there was some confusion where it was reported that he was killed in 2012, except that he wasn't.
[UNKNOWN]: And he was killed for real in 2015 in a raid that got 44 Filipino cops killed.
[UNKNOWN]: Does any of that line up with the program that you were working in terms of that being able to combat that do you know what happened I don't you know Marwan is definitely I mean that's a name out of the past right but I know that
[UNKNOWN]: They were very clear about engaging Americans.
[UNKNOWN]: They did not want to bring the boot down on top of them because that's not, you know, they can't go on a toe to toe fight.
[UNKNOWN]: We lost some guys from first group down in holo because they changed up the order of the convoy and those guys went in front and ran into the IED.
[UNKNOWN]: I think that for the most part, they like to fly out of the radar, keep doing what they're doing.
[UNKNOWN]: They didn't want to fight America, they wanted to fight Filipinos.
[UNKNOWN]: So, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: As that chapter closed, did you continue to do any type of contracting work in that operational space or from that on?
[UNKNOWN]: Did you move into kind of what you're doing now?
[UNKNOWN]: So my last trip to Afghanistan was in 2010 until February of 11 and it was towards the end of that that I got a message from the General Counsel Blackbird Technologies asking me if I wanted to come and be a lawyer there.
[UNKNOWN]: I'd finished law school by then and I said yes absolutely right that's why I went to law school and so I got home.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, sometimes beginning of middle of February of 2011 and by the beginning of March, I was in, I'd moved from Washington State to Virginia to do that.
[UNKNOWN]: It's interesting to note that I stayed a year and a day due to the leap year.
[UNKNOWN]: It was the exact same date from when I started and I resigned to go off and do my own thing, and I'm just not built for the cubicle.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Before we get into kind of what you've been doing since then with kind of the all the different mechanisms of entrepreneurship that you've gotten into, I've just kind of a list of questions that are kind of broad spectrum as it relates to tech pee and Air Force combat controlling, if you will, if you can hear humorous for a minute, try.
[UNKNOWN]: Can an F-35 do your job straight answer?
[UNKNOWN]: what separates that platform from all the traditional is it Jen Ford that the ones that you work with prior to that?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I don't want to talk about generations because that's not really important.
[UNKNOWN]: What's important is what is the platform designed for, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So if you look at the A10 and it's an easy obstacle, or I guess trap to fall into because it was designed for close air sport.
[UNKNOWN]: It is a tank killer, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And it kills other vehicles just as easily, if not more so.
[UNKNOWN]: The F-35 is not a replacement for the A-10.
[UNKNOWN]: When they had the tests to basically verify that it could do everything, it wasn't a fair test.
[UNKNOWN]: And I wish I'd brought my notes on that.
[UNKNOWN]: I just was at the test.
[UNKNOWN]: air university at Maxwell Air Force Base earlier this year, giving a talk to the air command and staff college about this very thing.
[UNKNOWN]: We don't, well, currently they're looking at getting rid of the ATN, the reason they don't is because we don't really have anything that can replace it.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's why we saw it in the straight-in-four moves being used against boats.
[UNKNOWN]: Boats not a tank, but you know, ATN does so killing, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, but it actually does worse with holes in it.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: The F-35 is one of those, I mean, I guess if you and I are going to need a knife fight, would you rather have a big Bowie knife or a Leatherman a big Bowie knife?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, okay, but F-35's a, that's only one of a jobs, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It also does these other things.
[UNKNOWN]: And so when you have anything that's required to do or is tasked to do multiple roles,
[UNKNOWN]: how good is it really going to be at any of them.
[UNKNOWN]: By the way, it's more than that.
[UNKNOWN]: The current training plan for the F-35 pilots does not require them to train on cast.
[UNKNOWN]: Really?
[UNKNOWN]: No.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you have any idea why?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, how many other jobs do they have?
[UNKNOWN]: there's only so many hours in the day.
[UNKNOWN]: I guess with the current platforms that are in use is there are one that stands out as being for fixed wing.
[UNKNOWN]: Being, I guess you were, if you were on the ground today, what would be your go-to platform with all of them available?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, it gets, you know, it really does depend on the situation, but, you know, the A10's obviously capable, the Strike Eagle, very capable.
[UNKNOWN]: That's why they brought them into Afghanistan, they had a faster response time, they carry a lot of ordinance.
[UNKNOWN]: But let's look at some of the alternatives that they've tried to introduce, right?
[UNKNOWN]: The kind of light fighter, the Texan and other things where the super teccanos, whatever, I don't know what their military designation is, right?
[UNKNOWN]: But they're looking at something that can act more as a spot or like we used to have the sky Raiders and the sandies back in Vietnam.
[UNKNOWN]: later armed, I mean you're trading something, but they have a longer lawyer time, they have a tighter turn radius, you know the F-16 is very good at some things, it's not great at all of them.
[UNKNOWN]: The F-35 is just a cooler, more capable platform in terms of ability, but you're only as good as the pilots, and if the pilots aren't training on cast all the time, how good are they?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: And with that, I saw a stat that said the DOD cut, tack P by 44%, you can reach from anywhere there.
[UNKNOWN]: What year is that?
[UNKNOWN]: That it's in the process of being cut.
[UNKNOWN]: Significantly.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know if that's because of AI platforms and drones and I don't know what the the thought process is, but You know, let's say a platoon gets pinned down in 2030 Who's calling the air if there's that big of a loss and and tats great question.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I don't know.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean you you've seen this when not
[UNKNOWN]: G-Wat was great for the TACP world.
[UNKNOWN]: G-Wat was great for the CAS world because it got used every day.
[UNKNOWN]: now we are not in that day-to-day fight, they look to they being the Air Force and they've done this and after every conflict, again, going back to what I said about World War II.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, in Korea, they were taking P-51 Mustangs out of hangers because they could perform a close-air mission.
[UNKNOWN]: Right?
[UNKNOWN]: We get into Vietnam.
[UNKNOWN]: They've turned everything off and they turn it back on.
[UNKNOWN]: They tried to maintain some consistency and continuity after Vietnam.
[UNKNOWN]: And as a matter of fact, TACP was a sunset mission in the late 90s.
[UNKNOWN]: We were going away.
[UNKNOWN]: And then poof.
[UNKNOWN]: Global War on Terrorism and I would say that there are there are there are some things that that are are helping The in terms of war fighting ability that that they've streamlined where everybody Whether it's PJs come out controllers tack pee or special reconnaissance, you know They're all coming together at the beginning and getting at least some modicum of of of
[UNKNOWN]: familiarity with each other.
[UNKNOWN]: It's not really cross-training per se, but if they're going to cut down the throughput.
[UNKNOWN]: the pipeline is still there because that's the thing that really matters if the pipeline's there you can plus it up right you to some extent you get mass produced or quickly replace those guys but if you get rid of it completely then you have to start from zero and that's always a fight it's always a problem yeah it's a reminds me of dog programs in that way because kind of similarly
[UNKNOWN]: Yep, they've only really emboldened or plused them up to a degree with which they're firing on all cylinders at the height of, you know, Vietnam and then post 9-11 and like now you're seeing that again where they're disbanding and closing down a lot of dog programs and
[UNKNOWN]: Especially that, you know, that's not like a sniper platform or a weapon system or and to me, TACP is similar to dog programs and that there's so much more to it that if you do get rid of it, you can't just turn that light switch back on and bring that experience back from nowhere.
[UNKNOWN]: I think that's such a huge mistake.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, unfortunately, you know, the dogs aren't training the new dogs, right?
[UNKNOWN]: If you get rid of the program, you're getting rid of the institutional knowledge, you're getting rid of the experience, or at best, you keep some guys on how current is what they know.
[UNKNOWN]: For sure.
[UNKNOWN]: And right after 9-11, they're like really the only military dog programs and existence were gate guard centredogs, for the most part, they were MP-style
[UNKNOWN]: kind of right out of law enforcement, and so now when they wanted to use whether it was explosive detection dogs embedded in the conventional or infantry units, or especially multi-purpose canine or combat assault dogs in special operations groups, they were having to bring in law enforcement swat guys to at least give them some kind of starting point, but then it took years of deploying them and you know kind of learning in blood sweat and tears,
[UNKNOWN]: and really learning the hard way how to implement these dogs and by 2012, 2015 you had every special operations group had pretty well-oiled canine programs and now they're fizzling them out again, which is as heartbreaking to me.
[UNKNOWN]: Good idea.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: One thing, if you paid much attention to the stuff going on in Ukraine with a lot of the drone and kind of AI based,
[UNKNOWN]: kind of cat and mouse game in the air that would be related to close air support.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you see as we move forward in the AI boom of warfare that that's going to change the tech P and J.
[UNKNOWN]: Tech profession significantly and if so, how?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I mean, the lawyer and me says, what do you mean by significantly?
[UNKNOWN]: I think it will change.
[UNKNOWN]: I think it will have to.
[UNKNOWN]: It's an evolution.
[UNKNOWN]: If the other side is using it, we need to be able to counter it.
[UNKNOWN]: Similarly, if we can use it, we have to be proficient at it.
[UNKNOWN]: There are a lot of subsets of what the any J-TAC would do.
[UNKNOWN]: you can only do so much, but it's still employing indirect fires, it's still employing air to ground.
[UNKNOWN]: So in that sense, it's just a different platform.
[UNKNOWN]: I think Ukraine shows that
[UNKNOWN]: You know, special forces, special operations, and I don't mean necessarily the people.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean the mindset, thinking outside the box, and that's such a cliche.
[UNKNOWN]: But employing different tactics, techniques, procedures.
[UNKNOWN]: Ukraine shows it works, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Afghanistan showed what happens when it's kind of tethered and handcuffed.
[UNKNOWN]: So I think, you know, Ukraine is absolutely approving ground.
[UNKNOWN]: You have an idea, let's go try it.
[UNKNOWN]: Hey, it didn't work.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's fix it and do it again.
[UNKNOWN]: And right, wrong or indifferent.
[UNKNOWN]: And that's kind of a cold observation of it.
[UNKNOWN]: But I mean, they are refining tactics in real time.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, that is the reality.
[UNKNOWN]: Whether it's humanoid, drone, you know, you name it.
[UNKNOWN]: I know, you know, the United States has taken a very,
[UNKNOWN]: Vested and significant interest in what's working and helping figure that thing out and using it as a test bed.
[UNKNOWN]: I think where my curiosity lies as it relates to the J-TAC mission.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you ever see a point at which AI replaces the J-TAC from a targeting standpoint?
[UNKNOWN]: some jobs that you can use AI to remove the danger to a person.
[UNKNOWN]: I think that if you have AI operating to develop targets, that may be quicker, it may be better.
[UNKNOWN]: But as we know, AI is not infallible.
[UNKNOWN]: And the human in the loop, I think, is always going to have to be there.
[UNKNOWN]: Are there any concerns that you have for even in that scenario where let's say still have a physical human J-TAC that's using AI to faster fine targets, give coordinates, even communicate to a pilot, maybe the pilot system is an AI and it's two AI is talking with humans on the on the bookings of that.
[UNKNOWN]: To me, my kind of initial or first instinctive concern is that what if, you know, there's a targeting thing and the human doesn't give them permission and they do it anyway kind of thing and I know that that's I think most people's fear, but do you see that being part of the evolution in trying to embed AI into the targeting chain of custody?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I mean, a couple of thoughts, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So, you know, when Skynet became aware, it wiped out the human race, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And the terrorized of the terminators.
[UNKNOWN]: But on a serious note, if there aren't controls, and we've seen in the news, right, that somebody just had one, I had a private AI that bought a dog.
[UNKNOWN]: Did you see that?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it wasn't authorized, too, but it communicated to another through crypto or something bought a dog.
[UNKNOWN]: Like it was an assistant or something.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, it just went off and did its own thing.
[UNKNOWN]: And you know, why wouldn't that happen?
[UNKNOWN]: Is that possible to become kind of system-wide?
[UNKNOWN]: Maybe.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, that's certainly frightening.
[UNKNOWN]: The idea that...
[UNKNOWN]: So I came in the military long ago enough that we had to train for being triangulated against right keep our communications short watch our RF signature because a near-peer could find us.
[UNKNOWN]: So that's when they started talking about, well
[UNKNOWN]: sending messages versus talking, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Cause you, you've data burst and it's done and it's hard to triangulate that.
[UNKNOWN]: If AI is talking to AI and it's just a quick burst of information that would take you and I an hour to discuss, but they send it in a second, you know, that could reduce the signature and make it harder to find the person.
[UNKNOWN]: That'd be a great thing.
[UNKNOWN]: unless there's AI on the other end that 100% who's listening and who are they really talking to?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, but you bring up a good point in that, you know, back in the days of being more concerned with near-peer adversaries and then, you know, 20 plus years of sustained combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, Horn of Africa and North Africa where they're not near-peer and so that begs the question for a
[UNKNOWN]: Ajay Tak trained in say 2010, who's only ever worked and can uncontested airspace, unlimited ISR, and essentially an enemy with no air defense.
[UNKNOWN]: What does that guy have to unlearn to be able to fight a China, Russia, a more capable near-peer?
[UNKNOWN]: Easy way.
[UNKNOWN]: I can answer that is, when we're calling for air, we fill out a nine line, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, in GWAT, first three were NA.
[UNKNOWN]: Why?
[UNKNOWN]: Because they're going to show up, they're just going to wheel up overhead.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm not telling them, I'm not, I'm not designating in an initial point.
[UNKNOWN]: And because I haven't had to think about keeping that plane far enough away so that they are safe, right?
[UNKNOWN]: helping them to figure out a run-in, what direction does that come from?
[UNKNOWN]: How am I employing my laser designator, things like that, it's a different, it's completely different fighting.
[UNKNOWN]: They're going to come in and they're going to be shot at on the way in.
[UNKNOWN]: And, oh, by the way, we've got to employ suppression of enemy ear defenses to get them in and out safely.
[UNKNOWN]: How much are we really practicing that when that isn't a concern?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know.
[UNKNOWN]: That's going to be something that they're going to have to learn.
[UNKNOWN]: You can't discount three significant lines of the nine line, which is how the planes even get to you.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, to me, it's a terrifying prospect, because there's a part of me that feels like, and this isn't just relegated to a J-Tak that you know, learned in 2010, it's any special operations force that
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, frankly, any department of defense unit that, you know, for the last 20 years has fought in a very specific environment, terrain, very, you know, specific type of enemy, and it's very different going against, you know, the capabilities that other countries have, I think you see.
[UNKNOWN]: glimpses of that into Iran, even though I wouldn't put them anywhere near the same category as a near-peer, they're definitely not on the same playing field as a Rakan Afghanistan.
[UNKNOWN]: One of the things that we spent 20 years teaching Afghans to call in air strikes, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Fast forward to August of 21, where did it all go?
[UNKNOWN]: Do you know why they had no
[UNKNOWN]: No capacity to do what we spent 20 years in this, obviously you could apply that question to ground forces to special operations to every unit that, you know, was unable or incapable of, of staving off the hour with draw and in the Taliban taking back over, but do you have a thought on that?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, 48 years earlier, when the last Americans left Vietnam, it seemed like we've been training them.
[UNKNOWN]: Haven't we been equipping them?
[UNKNOWN]: What happened there?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you know what happened in another place?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I do have a thought on it.
[UNKNOWN]: I do, and I think that it wasn't their fight.
[UNKNOWN]: If they had truly wanted to fight that, they would have.
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, I guess, I mean, it's easy to sit here as an armchair, quarterback, at least from my perspective, and I know it's not quite that simple, but it is both puzzling and frustrating in both of those instances to see the withdrawal happen the way that it did.
[UNKNOWN]: as someone who spent quite a bit of time there in a number of capacities, what was going through your mind during the withdrawal when you saw it happen the way it did.
[UNKNOWN]: It's disheartening.
[UNKNOWN]: It's frustrating.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think about the friends that I lost there.
[UNKNOWN]: I think about the friends that came back and took their own lives because they couldn't reinsert.
[UNKNOWN]: And I even think about some of the discussions I had, the first couple times I came home, right?
[UNKNOWN]: People ask me, you know, how was it?
[UNKNOWN]: I'm like, well, look, you know, I'd rather it be there than here.
[UNKNOWN]: And going back 24 years ago, I'd rather it be me than my kids.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, you know, guess what?
[UNKNOWN]: we didn't solve anything, and that's clearly evidenced by the way we left, right?
[UNKNOWN]: We just, hey, I'm done, you know, that's never going to be a good way to wrap things up, right?
[UNKNOWN]: You know, so my personal opinion is that we could have and should have done it differently how, and that's a longer discussion, right?
[UNKNOWN]: But, you know, if you're in a fight, and it's time to go,
[UNKNOWN]: but not everybody can go because they live there and you just walk away and fight probably still going to go on without you.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, you know, yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: If we fight China in five years, what's the first thing that we find out we can't do anymore?
[UNKNOWN]: Ooh.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, we as it relates to your experience.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, I would just think that, so I'll answer that by telling you a poor story about a book I read many years ago was a anthology of short science fiction stories.
[UNKNOWN]: And one of them was told from the standpoint of this commander of this technologically advanced race somewhere some galaxy.
[UNKNOWN]: And they were fighting these barbaric other aliens, whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: And they should have won.
[UNKNOWN]: They should be winning because they have this advanced technology, the other side, which is not as advanced, has thousands more ships, thousands more whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: OK, so if we put up an F22, which can conceivably kill anything on its radar before the other side even knows it's there, we haven't figured out how to rearm them in flight.
[UNKNOWN]: So at some point, they're going to have to come in land and refit refuel rearm, right?
[UNKNOWN]: While they're on the ground, they're vulnerable.
[UNKNOWN]: But oh, by the way, how many missiles bombs, et cetera, can a plane carry?
[UNKNOWN]: So if they go up and they can take out
[UNKNOWN]: 10.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's make a crazy day out, 50 enemy planes, right, not realistic, but just for public math.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, how many does China have to put up?
[UNKNOWN]: 51?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, they don't have to be gent-five, because they can just have to be fast and be able to come and get it while it's on the ground or returning without any weapons without it's completely winch-chestered.
[UNKNOWN]: Now it's defenseless.
[UNKNOWN]: It's an expensive plane that they can't fight back.
[UNKNOWN]: We will eventually, I mean, just even if it was, okay, listen, we're going to do this with Pugel sticks, you know, get your American citizenry up online and get all the Chinese online.
[UNKNOWN]: We're going to lose that one, right?
[UNKNOWN]: How badly are we outnumbered there?
[UNKNOWN]: It's just a simple numbers thing.
[UNKNOWN]: So in five years, is that going to be better?
[UNKNOWN]: Are we going to have that figured out?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, I don't think so.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: That's a daunting thought for sure.
[UNKNOWN]: Fast forward or currently in Iran, I guess, from a tack pee perspective, let's say, physically you were capable and you had the desire to, and you got the call to, you know, there's boots on the ground in Iran and you're going in as a tack pee for a soft unit.
[UNKNOWN]: What's different about being there in that position than Iraq and Afghanistan?
[UNKNOWN]: If anything.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, from a high level, stay in point, nothing's different.
[UNKNOWN]: Still, people against people, it's technology.
[UNKNOWN]: It's what you can bring to the fight.
[UNKNOWN]: But there are, well, any time there's rules of engagement that limit your ability to actually engage, that's going to be a problem.
[UNKNOWN]: If we don't want to hit certain targets because we want to keep them for after the fight, where are they going to go hide?
[UNKNOWN]: And that's a no-brainer.
[UNKNOWN]: What's different about Iran?
[UNKNOWN]: Iran is a huge country.
[UNKNOWN]: It's massive.
[UNKNOWN]: What's also different about Iran?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, Iran has people that look no different than you and I. I mean, very Caucasian looking.
[UNKNOWN]: They have janissaries that are blonde, blue eyed.
[UNKNOWN]: They have people that would walk down the street and you wouldn't know that they were Iranian.
[UNKNOWN]: That's an issue, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, well, I mean, who are we fighting?
[UNKNOWN]: Knowing the enemy is a big one.
[UNKNOWN]: So far, there hasn't been boots on the ground.
[UNKNOWN]: We haven't looked at somebody.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, by the way, how are we gonna really address, if we're boots on the ground, what's the point?
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's look at Afghanistan.
[UNKNOWN]: We weren't there to conquer territory.
[UNKNOWN]: We didn't start at one end and double our mineral just walk across and clean up.
[UNKNOWN]: It was peace meal.
[UNKNOWN]: It was here and there.
[UNKNOWN]: It was trying to, you know, resume build, resume change, nation building, I don't think that works.
[UNKNOWN]: It hasn't worked in our history.
[UNKNOWN]: So if that's the case, that's what we're doing, I think that's going to be a similar problem.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, let's look at the beginning of Afghanistan, a handful of troops, special operations, went in and beat the Taliban, sent them running, and what would things be like if we had just left?
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, we came in, we got you, you guys do it again, we're coming back, but we'd left.
[UNKNOWN]: What would things be like?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, probably much different.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: It's hard to even imagine how different things would be.
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: Had we done that.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think most guys that I've had on the show with, I don't know that there is an exception.
[UNKNOWN]: Actually, tend to all agree that that's what we should have done, which is even more frustrating.
[UNKNOWN]: But,
[UNKNOWN]: From a, I guess, a lawyer stand point.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, you've spent the last many number of years in a kind of consultant and legal and DC war machine, you know, type of capacity to a certain extent, not as a slight, but from that kind of perspective,
[UNKNOWN]: obviously influenced by the many years, you know, in combat, etc.
[UNKNOWN]: What is your opinion of what's going on in Iran right now and what we're doing and what we may do?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I'll say this.
[UNKNOWN]: I think that something needed to be done.
[UNKNOWN]: I definitely don't think that...
[UNKNOWN]: we could sit back and let them continue to run terror operations and terrorist proxies in the region.
[UNKNOWN]: It's been destabilizing the area.
[UNKNOWN]: They've been killing Americans every day, every year, for 47 years.
[UNKNOWN]: Is that a problem?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that's a problem.
[UNKNOWN]: Do they kill anyone you knew?
[UNKNOWN]: Maybe not.
[UNKNOWN]: Didn't kill anyone I know.
[UNKNOWN]: It doesn't matter, right?
[UNKNOWN]: The point is they were operating on check.
[UNKNOWN]: They were killing their own citizens pretty handily.
[UNKNOWN]: does that need to stop?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I think so.
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.
[UNKNOWN]: But how?
[UNKNOWN]: And when we went in there last summer and smoke their nuclear facilities, that was great.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't think we should have stopped.
[UNKNOWN]: But now you're asking me my opinion, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Nope.
[UNKNOWN]: Nobody from the government's calling and saying hey, Conan, what do you think?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: But I think if...
[UNKNOWN]: I think it's life's little instruction book, page 32, when in a fight, hit hard, fast, and first, right, and often.
[UNKNOWN]: And I do think that there's a plan that we just, you know, I don't think it's all being told to us.
[UNKNOWN]: I think that that's purposeful.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't think that the media really does us any help.
[UNKNOWN]: I think that they give away our plans and our intent.
[UNKNOWN]: So there's no element of surprise or we don't achieve the results that we want because assets have been moved or hardened or But I think that it needs to be, you know, more Concerted effort.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's figure out what exactly we're doing.
[UNKNOWN]: I personally don't believe that the straightest closed by Iran.
[UNKNOWN]: What are they closing it with?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, to me, I agree in that I wouldn't say that it's closed.
[UNKNOWN]: What is it?
[UNKNOWN]: The media is reported.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I mean, I'll caveat that with, I think there's a difference between being closed, but also being jacked up enough to where it's not running the way it needs to for it to be.
[UNKNOWN]: I agree with that.
[UNKNOWN]: It's like these idiots that would block traffic on the freeway.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's like maybe they didn't shut the entire city down, but they screwed everything up enough for it to become a major problem and have enough unintended consequences to where now we're having to rethink both what we're doing and how we're doing it.
[UNKNOWN]: So I guess the million dollar question is let's say the White House does call you tomorrow and says, what do you think we should do, what advice would you give them?
[UNKNOWN]: uh... i would say that uh... you need to fly me in mike out there dynamic duo that's it we're gonna figure it out i you know look at it you know i i won't speak for you i've been in a lot of fights and uh... they usually go better for me if i fight right if we if we say okay but we're only doing body shots because we still want to be picture perfect
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, well, we just took out some targets that I might hit to end the fight sooner, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Similarly, you can't use your hands, you can only use your shoulder.
[UNKNOWN]: Well...
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, I mean, that just seems odd, right?
[UNKNOWN]: How are we going to have a fight with just the shoulder?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, probably we'll figure it out.
[UNKNOWN]: But is it going to take longer?
[UNKNOWN]: Is it going to be as effective?
[UNKNOWN]: Is it going to be as decisive?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It just seems a little odd.
[UNKNOWN]: And so I think that initially there was enough to hit that we could just smoke them.
[UNKNOWN]: And we did, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Air Force has gone, Navy's at the bottom of the sea.
[UNKNOWN]: We hit a lot of the factories where they were producing this stuff, and yet they're still producing it, right?
[UNKNOWN]: are we going to hit those or not?
[UNKNOWN]: Because if we are, let's go do that.
[UNKNOWN]: If we're not, why not?
[UNKNOWN]: Just I guess the shitter get off the pot moment.
[UNKNOWN]: Do you think that we should continue in any capacity or would this be your afghanistan moment of saying okay we've we've done enough let's leave and say hey if you keep doing this stuff we're going to come back and make it worse.
[UNKNOWN]: Well it's usually not appropriate to answer a question with a question but what happens if we just leave?
[UNKNOWN]: The same people who've been doing this for 47 years are still there.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not the ones that are dead, obviously, but the mentality is still there.
[UNKNOWN]: The structure is still there to have this regime that wants to impose its will on its surrounding neighbors.
[UNKNOWN]: Is that something we want?
[UNKNOWN]: If we're okay with that, then begs a question why do we start in the first place?
[UNKNOWN]: So in the devil's advocate realm, or to be fair, you know, couldn't you say that same thing about three months after we went into Afghanistan, though?
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, because to me, it was, we would have asked the same question, and probably, they difference is the Taliban was not as sophisticated.
[UNKNOWN]: as I ran, in terms of technology, in terms of scope, in terms of reach.
[UNKNOWN]: So I think there's some similarities in that, but then there's not, right?
[UNKNOWN]: What international proxies did Taliban have, they didn't have a hummus, they didn't have a Hezbollah, they didn't have the hoothees.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and I'm not necessarily making the argument.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm parroting what we were told, because that same question was posed back then, which was, well, they harbored Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda had reach in, you know, they bombed the coal, they, you know, 9-11, they've got, you know, Kenyan and I wrote, you know, the embassy in Nairobi, Kenyan and other parts of eastern Africa, and so they, they're responsible for harboring the tentacles that are, you know, reaching all over the world,
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not saying I have the answer that's more just asking your opinion on it of, you know, at what point have we mission accomplished, you know, one enough in Iran to say, okay, we're going to leave now and if you keep it up, we'll come back, I don't know what that answer is.
[UNKNOWN]: And I don't either, but I do know that anything that I've ever done in my life, if I'm not clear about what the end state needs to be, it's hard to reach it.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think that's the problem both in Afghanistan, Iraq, not both all three, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran is there.
[UNKNOWN]: There hasn't really been a clear cut.
[UNKNOWN]: This is what winning looks like.
[UNKNOWN]: Here is why we're going and this is what needs to happen for us to leave.
[UNKNOWN]: That's not been done in any of those places and I would have hoped that we would have learned that from Afghanistan and Iraq and it doesn't seem like we have.
[UNKNOWN]: What was the goal of the civil war?
[UNKNOWN]: It was to bring the union back together, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It was to cause the Confederacy to capitulate, okay?
[UNKNOWN]: Mission accomplished, yes.
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: World War II.
[UNKNOWN]: Japan, Germany, stop fighting.
[UNKNOWN]: You're done, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I don't know how we're going to get there necessarily, but that's what we need is you to stop fighting.
[UNKNOWN]: Like, done, lay it down where, you know, unconditional surrender.
[UNKNOWN]: you could look at, you know, what was Korea?
[UNKNOWN]: What was Vietnam?
[UNKNOWN]: What was anything since then?
[UNKNOWN]: It seems like it's been just a slug fest.
[UNKNOWN]: And then, still me.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and I think that's the difficult part where Iran in particular is, you know, because I don't disagree with, we've got to do something because, and to me, this is,
[UNKNOWN]: setting the whole nuke thing to the side because I do my personal opinion is that's a completely different conversation And the reason I say that is that there are other nuclear powers.
[UNKNOWN]: Yep, we'll take North Korea as an example It is as the most analogous one I think to Iran and that
[UNKNOWN]: you know, China and Russia already have robust programs so that that's kind of a different conversation, but we didn't do anything like what we've done in Iran and North Korea, you know, why not, you know, if that's the main precursor in justification for why we're doing what we're doing, well those two things don't really add up to me.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, the international arms of terror do make sense because that is very legitimate.
[UNKNOWN]: I do think that a big part of that is from us going into Iraq and getting rid of the one check-in balance that Iran had at the time in Saddam Hussein that opened the floodgates for them to expand, and I don't think it's an accident.
[UNKNOWN]: right around that same time, and since then they've catapulted themselves into international terror that has swept through the entire region and further destabilized it far past where I think anybody would have even predicted.
[UNKNOWN]: But to me, that same thing hasn't really been done, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I'm not saying we should have done nothing.
[UNKNOWN]: But what is enough, you know, because if we're using the Civil War and World War II as kind of the benchmark From my perspective the only way that you solve the problem that is Iran and in that they pose is going full World War II style and You know, you send everybody over there boots on the ground.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, it's a full-blown campaign and until their entire Society and culture is completely changed the way it did in Germany in Japan
[UNKNOWN]: I don't think Americans have the stomach for us to do that.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not even saying that that's necessarily what should be done.
[UNKNOWN]: But I do think deductive reasoning lies if we're saying Iran is a big enough problem to where we need to do something and the goal is to get them to stop doing what they're doing.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know how you accomplish that other than going full world or two on them.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, it's going back to being a cop, right?
[UNKNOWN]: How much force do you need to use enough to neutralize the threat?
[UNKNOWN]: What does that mean?
[UNKNOWN]: What does that look like to pendulum the threat?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: And so if we're not completely identifying and quantifying what that threat is and when it's done, when is it neutralized?
[UNKNOWN]: Then how do you know you've reached it?
[UNKNOWN]: So I think that's more to what you're saying there.
[UNKNOWN]: And I mean, you know, I use Civil War as kind of a clear one, right?
[UNKNOWN]: because it stands out, it wasn't necessarily to end slavery.
[UNKNOWN]: That's not, it was to bring the union back together.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, slavery ended.
[UNKNOWN]: But that wasn't the original intent.
[UNKNOWN]: It was to bring the union back together.
[UNKNOWN]: And then it happened.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know what's going to happen in Iran.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know what's going to happen in that entire region.
[UNKNOWN]: It's volatile.
[UNKNOWN]: It's, uh,
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I just saw a thing where a hundred Israeli soldiers just deserted.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, really?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, did you see that?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: So the article I read was that a commander tore down these, they put up posters, you know, like, I don't know, MWR posters, whatever, and a commander torn down.
[UNKNOWN]: So a hundred of them walked off, just left their weapons and walked away.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh wow.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, this was just in the last few days or yeah, within the last week.
[UNKNOWN]: All right, so that chapter closes, you decide to take the lawyer position for Blackbird.
[UNKNOWN]: What have you been doing since then?
[UNKNOWN]: So I mentioned that I left there after a year and a day and I wanted to go out on my own.
[UNKNOWN]: So I wanted to...
[UNKNOWN]: work overseas.
[UNKNOWN]: I wanted to work in international business law.
[UNKNOWN]: I went back to school a year after I finished law school.
[UNKNOWN]: I went to the University of Liverpool in England to get an advanced legal degree in international business law because I had this great dream of living in Europe and being an attorney.
[UNKNOWN]: The reality is that there are a lot of attorneys in Europe that know how to be European attorneys.
[UNKNOWN]: So what there aren't a lot of are people who are willing to go into
[UNKNOWN]: semi-promissive environments, and you can read that anyway you want, but especially places where the rule of law is not well-established.
[UNKNOWN]: A perfect example is the entire continent of Africa, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And so I got asked to come help with a project in Liberia that was over budget behind schedule had nothing to do with legal and it was really it was program management.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, okay, so I do that.
[UNKNOWN]: Then it became a referral award amount.
[UNKNOWN]: People, well, didn't you work on this project?
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, can you help me with this one?
[UNKNOWN]: Sure.
[UNKNOWN]: Building a warehouse in Kenya to house coffee, a simple thing that we might think of or take it for granted is, you know, where who's selling you the land?
[UNKNOWN]: Where are you getting the land?
[UNKNOWN]: because in Africa a lot of it's tribal, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So if you're not in with the right tribe, do you actually own the land?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, who actually sold you that?
[UNKNOWN]: And one thing that's important to at least back in the day, and of course it's been the better part of 15 years, is in Africa sitting across the table from somebody, if they didn't feel in their heart and in their stomach that you were capable of coming
[UNKNOWN]: So, you know, problems solved, right?
[UNKNOWN]: But why is that?
[UNKNOWN]: Because violence is an acceptable form of conflict resolution in parts of the world, right?
[UNKNOWN]: I'll try it your way.
[UNKNOWN]: We'll talk.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm done talking, it's time to go.
[UNKNOWN]: And so, working in an environment like that requires a certain mindset and most people don't have it.
[UNKNOWN]: Did I have to do that?
[UNKNOWN]: Am I glad?
[UNKNOWN]: Sure.
[UNKNOWN]: Where there's some people I would love to have, how do I go that way at 100%, but really, this got me back to what I originally liked about being a detective, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It's human chess, my smarter than this guy.
[UNKNOWN]: Can I solve this problem for my client?
[UNKNOWN]: Can we figure this out?
[UNKNOWN]: What am I going to do?
[UNKNOWN]: And I think that business schools, and I say this quite often, they want to teach you
[UNKNOWN]: business solutions, as though you drive up into your shiny fire truck, you get out, hook up the hose, put the wet on the red to use the firefighter vernacular, and when the fires out, you get back in your truck, you go home and eat supper.
[UNKNOWN]: But the reality is that, and I found it, you know, you're in this position because whoever you're replacing got fired, quit, died, something, whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: year on the second floor of that building it's fully engulfed and they're storing propane downstairs.
[UNKNOWN]: Good luck, right?
[UNKNOWN]: How are you solving that?
[UNKNOWN]: That's what I've been doing for the last really well more than 15.
[UNKNOWN]: For about 25 years whether it was with SWAT, whether it was with the military, whether it's been as an attorney and working internationally.
[UNKNOWN]: It's been solving those crisis incidents that people just aren't built for.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't have the framework for it.
[UNKNOWN]: And a lot of people want to talk
[UNKNOWN]: I know you won't, could I just walk in off the street and join a seal team?
[UNKNOWN]: No, but I'm going to rise to the occasion.
[UNKNOWN]: No, I can't do that.
[UNKNOWN]: You're going to fall to the level of preparation.
[UNKNOWN]: So what I've been doing for the last really the last 15 years specifically is helping people through that.
[UNKNOWN]: some of it is legal, some of it is mind numbingly boring.
[UNKNOWN]: Did you ever see that movie Wardogs?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, okay, so those idiots got in trouble because they weren't handling the paperwork.
[UNKNOWN]: I handled the paperwork.
[UNKNOWN]: They don't make a movie out of a guy like me, filling out forms and actually filing the license applications.
[UNKNOWN]: But those are the things that keep you, the business owner out of trouble, out of jail.
[UNKNOWN]: The foreign corrupt practices act.
[UNKNOWN]: I would put you to sleep if I talked about it, but let me boil it down.
[UNKNOWN]: I can't take a government official to lunch in Juba, South Sudan, but the Chinese can come in and give them a BMW.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, by the way, the Chinese will self-fund the project.
[UNKNOWN]: In return, they'll take some extractive rights for that held over there.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, they've already done the homework.
[UNKNOWN]: That's the box site and that hill, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So the people that they're taking it from don't really understand the natural resources that they have, they have a nice car.
[UNKNOWN]: and maybe a bag full of cash, because the Chinese aren't constrained the way we are as American businessmen.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's hard to do business in environment like that, where they are expecting the vanilla envelope under the table, we can't do that.
[UNKNOWN]: And so helping my clients to navigate that and to find ways to do business above board, that's a thing that I've been doing for the last,
[UNKNOWN]: couple decades.
[UNKNOWN]: In any of those transactions or clients that you've worked with have you ever run into not necessarily the exact word dog scenario but something that does like that where it's a bit shady or gray or where you've found yourself in some pretty murky, murky water or squirrely situations.
[UNKNOWN]: Yes.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, care to share any of those.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I will share this with you.
[UNKNOWN]: I was in
[UNKNOWN]: This is about seven years ago, and I had a business partner who has a, let's say, open a relationship with the truth, you know, Seth, Seth paint the picture.
[UNKNOWN]: Good lawyers.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, you know, it's pretty harsh to call somebody a liar about the shoe fit.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: But it was more embellishment.
[UNKNOWN]: We were there to see about getting an old munitions plant back online, right?
[UNKNOWN]: We were going to, that was the project.
[UNKNOWN]: And he announces that he's going on vacation, he's taking a cruise with some family and he's taking off and he leaves.
[UNKNOWN]: And I get a call from our local guy.
[UNKNOWN]: And he says, hey, are you at the apartment?
[UNKNOWN]: We had a corporate apartment in Bucharest.
[UNKNOWN]: And I said, yeah, I am.
[UNKNOWN]: He says, great.
[UNKNOWN]: I'll be by to pick you up in a minute.
[UNKNOWN]: Because he was outside, he knew I was there, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So he comes picks me up and said, where are we going?
[UNKNOWN]: He says to the government building, they had some questions for you about the project.
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm already, despite his sense of stangling, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And we get to not, so there is in Bucharest, there is a building that was built to be bigger than the Pentagon.
[UNKNOWN]: And it's ridiculously big, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And it's their government building.
[UNKNOWN]: we're not at that.
[UNKNOWN]: We're at this other government building, which looks like right out of central casting, old gray, concrete, Soviet, nothing good is coming in or out of that place.
[UNKNOWN]: And we're, and we're, I'm brought into this room with one window, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And it's, I mean, it's gray, and kind of, you know, ground looks a little CP wet, just damp, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm interrogated for about four hours.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, pretty quickly, they realized I'm not a liar.
[UNKNOWN]: And the nature and the tone of the interrogation went from
[UNKNOWN]: you know, you're in trouble to, okay, this is this guy's everything saying checks out.
[UNKNOWN]: We need to talk about your business partner.
[UNKNOWN]: And, you know, I think a lot of times people would say, well, I want to, you know, I want to, you know, I want to represent from the embassy and they'd say, fine, and you'd stay in that room until somebody from the embassy knew you were there.
[UNKNOWN]: When's that going to be, you know, not anytime soon, probably, if ever?
[UNKNOWN]: And that's a case where me just being straightforward and honest, well, no, I don't know what you're talking about.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, this is what our plan is.
[UNKNOWN]: I can share that with you.
[UNKNOWN]: Here it is.
[UNKNOWN]: They realize they confirmed two things.
[UNKNOWN]: One, I was not the bad actor.
[UNKNOWN]: The guy they thought was and his tape only extended as far as he was.
[UNKNOWN]: Had he done anything criminal?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, unlawful, we'll say he'd done some unlawful things, not outright breaking laws, but definitely some misrepresentations.
[UNKNOWN]: And the end result was, after four hours, I was allowed to leave, that's when number one.
[UNKNOWN]: When number two to show there was no hard feelings, they were going to take me out drinking that night.
[UNKNOWN]: And when number three is that further evidence of no hard feelings, they were going to let me pay for it.
[UNKNOWN]: and they drink and eat a lot but but the the end result of that was the partner was PNG from Romania wasn't allowed back I think was put on a interpole watch list you know in terms of entry into the into the country but then now we had a
[UNKNOWN]: we'd cleared a path.
[UNKNOWN]: So when we were filing for permitting or we were filing for an environmental study or getting some, we had a direct channel into the government where again, no brown envelopes under the table, none of those expediting fees, if you will, there's none of that.
[UNKNOWN]: But they understood that look, we're here, we're going to make money, you know, it's going to be a good deal.
[UNKNOWN]: And ultimately the financing didn't come through for the project, so it didn't happen.
[UNKNOWN]: But
[UNKNOWN]: That was one of those where this guy didn't care and I think you knew that they were on to him And that's why he suddenly went on a cruise.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That caused any problems between you and him.
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I don't talk to him anymore I mean I didn't know if like he tried to come after you or anything after after that or oh Come after me for what right?
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, yeah, no, he'd be no, no, no Listen this guy is I mean he couldn't come after me because
[UNKNOWN]: I hadn't done anything, number one.
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't know if he would take that interview as you selling him out or anything like that.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, look, when you tell the truth, the another guy doesn't like it, why is that?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say there's bad blood.
[UNKNOWN]: If I saw him here today, I'd probably give my hug and then I'd punch him in the throat.
[UNKNOWN]: So that's the or vice versa.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, little spectrum.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know.
[UNKNOWN]: What are all the kind of things that you do now services that you offer, because you have quite a few hands in the cookie jar, so it's a do.
[UNKNOWN]: So a lot of what I do is I assist with government contracting and procurement from if you're a company and you're going to go after a contract and you have your proposal, I'll help you through that process by reviewing for compliance.
[UNKNOWN]: help to set pricing, I don't give you the bid, no bid, that's all you, but there are ways to write a proposal.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, inadvertently you've misrepresented something or you haven't considered the international trafficking in arms regulations.
[UNKNOWN]: I do a lot of work with that.
[UNKNOWN]: I do a lot of work with, as I mentioned earlier, the foreign corrupt practices act, both teaching that and also counseling clients on how to avoid that.
[UNKNOWN]: I also, you know, a lot of it is just crisis mitigation, crisis leadership.
[UNKNOWN]: So there are businesses that don't know what they're doing.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know if you know that.
[UNKNOWN]: Strangely, I have come across that before.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and it's more prevalent than you'd think.
[UNKNOWN]: Again, it goes to, you know,
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of times, it's resource constraints.
[UNKNOWN]: People only have so much time, effort, and energy, and put money into any one of those buckets, right?
[UNKNOWN]: If you have the money, do you have the time?
[UNKNOWN]: Do you have the personnel?
[UNKNOWN]: If you have the personnel, do you have the time or the money?
[UNKNOWN]: Any one of those, like you get to pick one or two, but you don't get all three normally, and so people find themselves upside down pretty quickly, and trying to help them, and I do tell my clients right off the bat, if they're babies ugly.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, this project is a downer and we've got to close it down and this is what we can do to save you as much.
[UNKNOWN]: of the asset is possible, and that's not always easy for people to hear, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So between that, and then consulting on just getting businesses back on track, helping them to grow, you've heard of Black Rifle Coffee?
[UNKNOWN]: Oh yeah, yeah, so those were all buddies of mine.
[UNKNOWN]: when they were starting out, they didn't really know how to run the business.
[UNKNOWN]: And so they brought a few of us on to help them actually structure it, right?
[UNKNOWN]: So they could sell the coffee.
[UNKNOWN]: They could sell the content.
[UNKNOWN]: They could do the stuff that they were really good at.
[UNKNOWN]: And all the back office, nerdy admin, wardogs, filing nonsense.
[UNKNOWN]: People don't want to do or don't know how to do.
[UNKNOWN]: That could be taken care of.
[UNKNOWN]: And so instead of a people-driven business,
[UNKNOWN]: I help those to become processed driven and put in policies and procedures that if you get taken by aliens, your business will still run and hopefully grow or whatever the end goal is that you've identified.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that's awesome.
[UNKNOWN]: Working people find you for all of your services and stuff.
[UNKNOWN]: And so on my website, TSI LegalEnterprises.com, you can book a consultation with me.
[UNKNOWN]: You can see the different services that I offer and kind of read up on some of the things I've done.
[UNKNOWN]: I did write a book for people, that was published last October, it's called The Mavericks Blueprint.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh cool.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: and I have a copy for you and over your lovely staff.
[UNKNOWN]: I appreciate that.
[UNKNOWN]: But this was written because I haven't come across a book that boils it down as though we're talking like this and tells you things that I've learned different frameworks, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That help people either identify the problem as it's going on or before it happens, right?
[UNKNOWN]: And find fix and forget about it because it's done.
[UNKNOWN]: I call that the detect framework, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Sometimes we find ourselves in crises through no fault of our own, right?
[UNKNOWN]: We inherit it because, like I said, you come in, you're brought on because the old person quit that fire died, whatever the problem was.
[UNKNOWN]: And now you've inherited this mess.
[UNKNOWN]: What are you gonna do now?
[UNKNOWN]: And that's how this book was written as more of a practitioner's field guide so that,
[UNKNOWN]: I think most people who read it, they feel some of it at least.
[UNKNOWN]: They're like, I knew that.
[UNKNOWN]: And the great do it, right?
[UNKNOWN]: If it reminds you of who you used to be and how you used to solve problems, excellent.
[UNKNOWN]: If it jogs something loose that you didn't know is there, excellent.
[UNKNOWN]: If it's all completely new, that's fine too, right?
[UNKNOWN]: But what it's designed to do is to help people who don't necessarily value their experience.
[UNKNOWN]: Let's take somebody in the military who wants to get into business and doesn't think that there's a translation or transition that fits.
[UNKNOWN]: That's not true.
[UNKNOWN]: This will help you to understand that.
[UNKNOWN]: And you can go to the website and read more about it and find out more about me.
[UNKNOWN]: who is the Maverick's blueprint for primarily.
[UNKNOWN]: Anybody who's working on a project, so I'm not talking about building your kid's tree house, but you can apply it to that, right?
[UNKNOWN]: It's the practitioner, it's the person in the trench, it's CEOs running a business.
[UNKNOWN]: We look at it this way, right?
[UNKNOWN]: Your software company, and you spend all this time and money to develop the next big thing and you ship it.
[UNKNOWN]: that's too late.
[UNKNOWN]: We get a fix it.
[UNKNOWN]: How are you going to do that?
[UNKNOWN]: Well, you can pick this up, you can read it, and maybe some of it you already knew, maybe some of it you didn't.
[UNKNOWN]: But it's for people running businesses, it's people running projects, it's definitely people working cross-border transactions and people who are working kind of out of their depth.
[UNKNOWN]: a little bit.
[UNKNOWN]: With the cross border transaction thing, do you get into crypto at all with that being implemented or to implement it to stay away from it?
[UNKNOWN]: Do you have kind of a position on it?
[UNKNOWN]: I don't.
[UNKNOWN]: It's not something you mess with I guess.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not a math lead.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, well, I mean, I've seen from a use case justification standpoint.
[UNKNOWN]: Now, this is very specific tokens within crypto.
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously, the crypto space is far more encompassing than just crossborder payments, but you know, some of the max RP coming to mind.
[UNKNOWN]: being that that that seems to be kind of the biggest selling point is getting rid of swift and You know the international Monetary transaction is that it reduces the time increases security significantly and and makes the whole process Better and pretty much every way and way cheaper and then whatever I didn't know if that was something that you'd gotten into at all or not I don't I admittedly don't know a ton about it.
[UNKNOWN]: I just have seen blips here in there and was curious
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, no.
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, I understand it conceptually.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't dabble in it.
[UNKNOWN]: But, you know, there are reasons that are compelling.
[UNKNOWN]: As you just mentioned, why people want to use it.
[UNKNOWN]: I think it also avoids a lot of oversight, which is why some people want to use it.
[UNKNOWN]: Right.
[UNKNOWN]: So, you think of that whole silk road, dark web, you know, that's, that's obviously that's a whole different discussion right there.
[UNKNOWN]: blue blue.
[UNKNOWN]: It's my favorite color.
[UNKNOWN]: All right.
[UNKNOWN]: A specific shade of blue or no actually.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, and I say that, but I think actually if we're being honest, I think all of drab is with some tiger stripes.
[UNKNOWN]: You may be buffered in there.
[UNKNOWN]: And I do still think that the B to you, the woodland camo is the best go to work uniform.
[UNKNOWN]: Hey, man, on that.
[UNKNOWN]: Good, good project outfit, right?
[UNKNOWN]: That's right.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a,
[UNKNOWN]: What's going on, I gotta tell you, it's been great to meet you, to sit down and hear your story and pick your brain on both your experiences and so much of what you think about what's going on and what's in the future.
[UNKNOWN]: Man, I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your busy schedule to come and sit down and and share it.
[UNKNOWN]: No, I appreciate it.
[UNKNOWN]: This has been wonderful.
[UNKNOWN]: It's been good.
[UNKNOWN]: You've caused me to think about a lot of stuff that has been rattling around in there.
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I mentioned the TBIs and I think of my memories as books in a library that were put back in the wrong shelf.
[UNKNOWN]: So I don't necessarily independently recall them, but you've walked down the aisle and pulled this one off said, hey, what's this?
[UNKNOWN]: And so I've had a good trip running down memory lane.
[UNKNOWN]: Have you looked into any of the TBI treatments, whether it's any of the Iowa sky, beginning, or any of the magnetic brain clinic stuff, or anything?
[UNKNOWN]: I have.
[UNKNOWN]: I just, uh...
[UNKNOWN]: We do things, we make things happen when they're a priority for us.
[UNKNOWN]: And it hasn't become a priority enough for me.
[UNKNOWN]: So it's like a knee replacement.
[UNKNOWN]: You'll wait until you can't walk before you go.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so I'll wait till I'm a vegetable.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know about that, but no, I have.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think it's important.
[UNKNOWN]: And I think anything we do for just taking care of ourselves and Uncle Sugar got his pound of flesh out of us.
[UNKNOWN]: And we are this beat up and worn out.
[UNKNOWN]: partially because we had fun doing it, partially because it's just a hard job.
[UNKNOWN]: It's a hard life.
[UNKNOWN]: So it wouldn't take it back for anything.
[UNKNOWN]: That's for sure.
[UNKNOWN]: Not at all.
[UNKNOWN]: Before we leave though, I need to hear about these belt buckles.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so basically it started with a great guy, John Johnston, and California is a big fan of the show, and it was a recommendation from him in saying, you know, hey, you're in Texas.
[UNKNOWN]: There's, you know, a correlation with belt buckles, that he had worked with this company called Champions Choice Silver, which is here in Texas that makes them
[UNKNOWN]: And wanted to kind of put together a project of making buckles for the show and giving them the way as kind of parting gifts for the guests.
[UNKNOWN]: So, I've been doing it for a couple years.
[UNKNOWN]: Kind of done it often on the availability of them.
[UNKNOWN]: isn't always there, so let's say most of the time we have them and sometimes we don't, but that's really the just of it.
[UNKNOWN]: There's not like some crazy story behind it or anything like that.
[UNKNOWN]: I don't wear a belt buckle, so.
[UNKNOWN]: you won't even see me sporting them, but it's been really neat, you know, over the last couple years of doing it, you know, I've given some to some guests where they'll snap a picture doing something or meeting somebody that it's a big deal or whatever, wearing it and they kind of flash it and it's closer or whatever.
[UNKNOWN]: So, yeah, it's neat.
[UNKNOWN]: We'll check them out here after we're using the picker on out if you want to.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: And seriously, thank you very much.
[UNKNOWN]: As I said earlier, some people were incredulous that I had been asked to come on this show and others, you know, I think they're just waiting to see it.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, no, I mean, you have an amazing story and you're great at telling it and it's been been a pleasure getting to know you.
[UNKNOWN]: So I appreciate it.
[UNKNOWN]: And now it's cocktail hour.
[UNKNOWN]: Amen.
[UNKNOWN]: Thanks, Mike.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: For the viewer slash listener, I hope you enjoyed it.
[UNKNOWN]: If you didn't, you can