The Pete Blaber Hot Question: If tomorrow you were tasked with eradicating the cartels, but you could only bring 5 movie actors or fictional characters, who's on your team and why? And in the most general terms, what's your weapon of choice and what air support would you want overhead?
Wow. Well, I don't, you know, I wouldn't go down that. I wouldn't use that approach. I wouldn't. I'd use— and you know, you've been down there, you've been— and we're going to talk about Colombia. We've both been to Colombia, you know, through, with, and by clandestine, especially in, you know, south of the Rio Grande. If you're a gringo and you're seen in some of these places, especially now after Venezuela, they're going to see you. They're going to ID you. You're going to have a really hard time collecting the on-the-ground intel you need. I don't want to throw a damper on that. So if I had the 5, I don't— as soon as you said that, I was going, well, I'd take Larry. I think you just interviewed Larry. I'd take a really good shot. Larry would be one of my shooters. And, you know, I probably wouldn't take any Hollywood actors because I wouldn't either, because, you know, they're just not— again, the— you, when you go into a contentious, very sensitive area like that, like counter-narcotics, where it's sensitive because, as you know, the, the narcotraffickers are embedded in the local society. And not all of them are the rich cartel kingpins.
Some of them are the fruit stands.
Yeah, exactly.
Side of the road.
Exactly. So you start, you know, if some of them are included, collateral damage or whatever, you've just lost the hearts and minds for further ops. You might get one cartel kingpin, but you're not going to clean up the cartels. So again, my advice would be go low-vis, make it clandestine. We should never say we have— we're even, you know, uh, that mission is ongoing, but the infiltration should be starting right now. Um, obviously Spanish speakers are a lot of 7th Group guys, a lot of guys who, you know, can blend in down there, um, would be needed. And I think, you know, it would not be that hard to do some serious damage to them.
You don't think it would be?
I don't. I think if we had the intel—
How do you— I just go to drones, marking a target, drone it.
Yeah.
Is that what you would do?
Well, but the drone, you'd have to know who the guy you're going for and where he's at. And if you got that, yeah, the drone would work. But again, Soon as you start that, they're going to start looking for the drones. And, you know, we had drones, we had Predators for bin Laden, and we couldn't find him. We couldn't find Zarqawi. We couldn't, you know, find Mullah Omar and most of their lieutenants we couldn't find. And we had those drones flying all the time. And, you know, Predator is better than most of the drones that are flying today.
Is it really?
Yeah, resolution level, flight time, the whole thing. The little ones—
I mean, have you seen these new Shield AI drones?
Yeah, yep.
It's like 1,200 nautical miles. Yeah, with payload. I can't remember altitude, but it's up there.
Yeah, and then remember the thing, uh, end of '24, the supposed drone invasion in New Jersey and all that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, That was— they were—
everybody remembers that.
Well, I'm in— I told you I got a cabin in the Atacama Mountains. And so when you look south from my— where I'm at on the mountain, Edwards Air Force Base is right over to the east, uh, in the Mojave Desert there. And Edwards is where, you know, Skunk Works is and everything else— Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin. And they were doing the same tests. I could, from my cabin, I was watching and, uh, you could see what it was.
It—
they were testing the mothership concept. So the mothership is the big drone. It's got the legs, it's got the antennas, and it's got the power to power that antenna so, you know, it can go farther send signals back from farther away, but it gets to vicinity of the target, opens up its payload, and out come the mini drones. And the mini drones swarm the target or targets, and that they can go in complete silent mode because the only thing they're communicating with is directly back up to the mothership. Then the mothership aggregates it and sends it back. But I was watching that. I was watching them test that in our mountains because they're completely— there's nobody in these mountains. They're, you know, replete with people. That's why it's so— I jumped at the opportunity to buy land up there. There's only 80 private parcels. So good for you. Yeah, well, you got the same thing here, man. This place looks fantastic.
Yeah, but, you know, it's not surrounded by protected land.
So that was one of my prerequisites.
It's surrounded by a bunch of land that's probably going to turn into a neighborhood here pretty soon.
Yeah, you know, but then you move again. Yep. You got a great— this is really, really nice. And, uh, thank you. Yeah, thank you.
So, weapon of choice, what would your weapon of choice be?
Uh, it's still just, uh, you know, Glock 19 with the Glock 19. Yeah, just A simple gun, you know, I've dropped it in the mud many a times. I slept with it. I had it in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was my sidearm. Uh, you know, it always functions. Uh, I got a Trijicon sight on mine, uh, red dot sight. I can hit anything with that, you know, out to 100 meters. And, uh, again, I've got—
I got you a little something.
What's that?
Got you a little something. Let me grab it.
Okay.
It's not a Glock, but it is, uh, whoa, it's Sig's newest, uh, but wow, that's your squad rifle.
Yeah, nice.
That's the, uh, MCX Spear 5.56. So I got a friend over at Sig, his name's Jason. I told him you were coming on, he got all excited. He's at SHOT Show right now. They're on talking about this exact thing. But, um, and then also, is this the new silencer on here? Yep. So I got a friend at Silencer Shop and they heard you were coming on, so they wanted to throw a can on there.
Who makes this?
I believe that's a Sig suppressor as well. Okay, so the suppressor's from Silencer Shop, the rifle's from Sig, and that's going to be the new, uh, squad rifle for supposedly all the US military. But wow, they're going to do it in this new round 6.82.
Wow. But, uh, that's awesome.
Yeah, maybe we could break that in a little bit later. Yeah. So yeah, they're going to send you one.
Are you kidding me?
No, I'm not kidding you.
Wow.
They're going to send you the exact same thing. So, so maybe that could be your weapon of choice.
Yeah, it will be now.
But Look good up there on the mountains.
Yeah, but clear.
So yeah, they'll send that to you.
Oh my God. Well, tell them thank you. I'm ecstatic. It'll have a place in my hidden safe up in the cabin.
Right on. And there was one— there was one follow-up question here. So if Delta Force was unleashed on cartel leadership in real life, what's your honest timeline to dismantle them?
Again, I don't want to sound like a contrarian, but I wouldn't put a timeline on it. You know, one of the things I think Putin did for Russia was he never told his generals there's any time limit on, you know, take this sector. There's no time limit on you taking it. And a lot of people don't understand that. It's, you know, the Russians are have incredible strategic acumen. They always have. If you go back, read about the Eastern Front, you're amazed at what they did, how they crushed the Germans, you know, the corps of Germans at a time. And all through their strategic acumen, they, they, they think deeply about strategy and then they implement it over time. So on the cartels, if If the unit was doing it, I'd go back to what our other, you know, the answer to the other question. I would have them lead with plenty of other guys because you need all fluent Spanish speakers. So you're going to need to pick from a bunch of special ops units. And I would just give them the mission would be develop the situation, you know, get them a base. Somewhere they can operate.
And then, you know, I haven't looked at the— at, you know, whether that should be— where that should be. I'm sure someone with current Mexico expertise would be able to tell us that. So have kind of a base of operation, have these guys, uh, you know, out working with— the, the tough part about it in Mexico, I think, is it's really hard to trust anyone in the Mexican military or Mexican government. And I'm— that's not a derogatory thing, it just— it's the reality.
It is.
Yeah. And what we said before, same thing, you know, you go in guns blazing and you're going to kill that guy at the fruit stand, uh, you know, and who's supporting a family of 6, you know, making, uh $100 a month or something, which is what they pay down there. And, uh, you know, it would, it would backfire on us. So I, I just think it'd be incredible. It's an incredibly sensitive thing, and it requires an incredibly sensitive approach, uh, and it, you know, clandestine, uh, as much as possible, uh, you know, through, with, and by if possible. And again, I'm not a my expertise in Mexico is not current operational. So there may be some people we can trust there that have been vetted. I don't know that. Do you feel like—
I feel just from my limited experience, I mean, when we're talking, when we're comparing cartel to terrorists, I think those are kind of apples and oranges. And here's why. You know, I think that terrorists, the ones that you and I are accustomed to fighting to— man, I hate to say this, but it is, for lack of a better term, more respectable than a cartel member because terrorists are fighting for what they believe in. What they believe to be true, their values. Cartel is a fucking transaction for money.
Yeah.
And so if you were to— it's harder to infiltrate somebody whose motivations are not financial. You know, it is, it is a religion to them. It is their values. It is their fucking core as a human being. But a cartel member is a prostitute. And all you have to do to win a prostitute over is paying more money than the next guy.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. But that's the kind of thing. So, you know, if the mission comes up, you know, guys, tell— we want you to do this. Tell us, come back and tell us what you can do. That's the kind of input, you know, that's needed. Brainstorming, uh, you know, multiple thought processes on the best way to do it, and then neck it down and figure it out. And, you know, a little bit I'm speaking from experience because, you know, I, I had the privilege of, uh, you know, being part of both going after Pablo, and then, you know, we're the guys who, uh, captured the intel that captured the Cali Cartel. So, you know, and we did that. Both of those were through with and by, you know, despite what some people have said in a few books, the Colombians killed Pablo. You know, there was no— the DEA guys came out and took pictures. As soon as they heard he was dead, they flew out of Bogotá into Medellín, drove right to the target, and took those you know, happy to glad pics, which I think was a massive mistake because they're smiling over his body.
And then again, you know, part of any, you know, operational space that we enter, as you know, you've been, you know, you got a picture of Yemen up there, Afghanistan. You've got to respect the culture, and the history of that country. And, you know, one of the things I would just remind everyone, even at further ops in Venezuela, is everybody south of the Rio Grande, you know, grew up with Grenada, Panama, and now Venezuela. And so it was explained to me by the chief of staff of the Guyana military. We were down there doing jungle training in Guyana, And I said, he said, well, where will the helicopters fly after that? And I was like, well, they fly out, they can go around the capital city and then come back. And he goes, Peter, sit down, let me tell you something. And then he explained that to me. He said, everyone down here goes to sleep at night. And when they hear a bump, they don't necessarily think it's a criminal. They think, is this the Americans invading our country? Wow. Yeah. And it was. It. It, you know, he was, he was very sincere about it, and I could tell by his seriousness, and I never forgot that.
Um, and, you know, part of that's, that's a big part of what we did in Colombia, and, uh, I think it's a big part of what we'd have to do in Mexico. I've been to Mexico. I tried to open a business there. Um, so I went to Guadalajara 15 times. Uh, we almost signed a contract. The last minute, COVID happened.
And, uh, what kind of business were you going to open there?
Uh, an armor car business, armor and cars. So I had a company, I'm just in the middle of selling it. I'm closing the deal right now, uh, selling all my shares, uh, which, you know, it's just time to do it. Um, and I'm selling it to my partner, so But until that closes, I can't—
I'm not sure—
can't talk about it. But it's— we make— we armor civilian vehicles. So we've been doing that since 2018. Do a lot of undercover cops, do a ton of, you know, exec VIPs, and then a lot of people who just have had threats against them. You know, for about $35,000, you can put what we call the anti-intrusion package. We'll put B4 level. So, um, 9mm shotgun, uh, it'll take 5.56 as long as it's not shot point-blank 6, uh, 6 feet away from your vehicle. So, you know, when you calculate armor protection, you, you have to, uh, calculate the angle that a bullet's going to hit it at. It's all rated for 6-foot point-blank— I get, I think it's called zero-degree obliquity, you know, perfectly flat. You're— the weapon's perfectly flat at the same tangent level as the, as the side of the vehicle. But as soon as you move off that angle, every caliber round loses its penetration ability on armor. So B4 is really all you need in America.
You can do that for $35,000?
$35,000 to $40,000, depending on the vehicle. Yep.
Is it—
we do. So we do the doors. So here's— so if you had, say you had an Escalade, we do all your doors, we do all your windows, and we do your back hatch with armored panels. So interior armor panels and armored glass on all the windows. We would not do the top. Uh, some people go, why, I want my roof done. And I'm so— well, what I always ask, what's the threat? And so if, if a trained sniper is after you, you might want to do the roof. But same thing on the roof, if you explain to people that unless the guy is on a highway overpass, uh, shooting at your roof is really hard to hit someone in the car, to hit the roof. And when you, you know, everything, there's a cost-benefit to armoring every part of your vehicle. So you armor the top part of your vehicle. Now you are going to affect the drivability, the physics of that vehicle. You're going to make it a little more top-heavy, a lot more if you go B6, which is 7.62. That's what, you know, we had in Afghanistan. Any embassy has B6 armor.
What vehicle would you recommend?
All American SUVs are the best vehicles to armor. They have the most room in the doors, the least amount of superfluous crap, electric stuff. Like, German vehicles are much harder to armor.
What about a Toyota LC?
They're fantastic to armor too.
They probably last the longest.
Yep. So we, you know, we actually do a lot of Tacomas. You know, the Tacoma Pros, because people want a less conspicuous vehicle. But also, and when people ask me, I tell them always, if it's an armored vehicle, you might as well go four-wheel drive because, you know, the number one protection is not your armor. It's that accelerator, that brake, that steering wheel. You know, you drive into an ambush, your first reaction, your first course of action is drive out of the ambush.
So what's the name of this company? Can I ask?
At Armor. Yep, it's, uh, there's a website. You could still— the website's still up. I'm still on the top of it as CEO, um, but that's getting switched over to— and yeah, my partner will still— if you want a vehicle armored, I can still get your vehicle armored. And this guy's a craftsman. He's been in the, um, in the coach business, you know, it's That's what these companies used to be called. He was Quality Coach Works for 30 years. He's, you know, he's our age. He's in his 50s. He's in— well, he's a little— he's late 50s, but he's a great guy, total craftsman. And, you know, when we started the company, we, we started it saying, okay, what's our— what, what What part of this company is going to make us— is going to be our competitive advantage? And my input was, let's make it trust. Let's make it you can trust us to put, you know, real armor and attach it the right way and then stand by it. If something happens, a panel comes loose, or you think something's wrong, we'll fix it for free. And we do that. Our shop is in Ontario, California, right outside the Ontario airport, but we do vehicles from all over the world, all over the country.
That's why I wanted to move to Mexico. It's way cheaper. We were also going to move to Nevada, but again, COVID.
$35,000 for an armored vehicle is pretty damn affordable, in my opinion.
Yep.
Or to armor a vehicle, not for the whole thing.
Right.
But, um, wow, wow, that's— you should have come on here before you negotiated that deal. Yeah, but, uh, you ready to get into the interview?
Sure, sure. Perfect.
Let me give you an introduction here.
Okay.
Pete Blaber, Colonel Pete Blaber, retired. You commanded at every level of First Special Forces Operation, Operational Detachment Delta, including interim commander during the Iraq invasion. A combat veteran with operational experience across major U.S. conflicts, including operations in Panama, Colombia, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Pretty much everything. The author of the bestselling books The Mission: The Men in Me, The Common Sense Way, and Common Sense Leadership Matters. And most importantly, You're a Christian. Welcome to the show.
Touche. Thank you. Great to be here, Sean.
It's an honor to have you.
Thank you.
And so a couple of things just to knock out before we get to get in the weeds here. So I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account that we've turned into one hell of a community. I think it's 100-something thousand strong now. And they're honestly, they're the reason that I was even able to start this show. and they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. So I offer them the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from escrow140. Given the levels of fraud, deceit, and complete betrayal by the US federal government over the last 30 to 40 years, how can you best convince our next generation to want to step into your shoes?
Hmm, it's a great question. Um, you know, I think you gotta believe. I think, uh, you gotta believe in what this country stands for. Uh, certainly right now, um, I would, I would tell anyone that the country is in as good a shape as it's been in a long, long time. I mean, even, uh, in Trump's first term, unfortunately You know, they put cement shoes on him. '16 to '20, they were right. The accusations started, the Russia hoax started in '17. He was completely sidetracked by that. He didn't have the right, you know, individuals, I think, in the key positions. Probably a little bit of naivete by the president, which I don't find it fault. You know, one of the reasons he makes a great president is because he's not a politician. But as you know, having the key people in the right— in charge of the right agencies is absolutely essential to, you know, reestablishing that trust, real trust. And, you know, I think we said it earlier, What is that? It's people who understand that they serve the people of this country, and everything they do is about the greater good. Every decision they make is about the greater good of this country and the people in this country.
We've had a great military this whole time. We've had incredible economic power, but none of that does any good if we don't have the right leader in charge. And that right leader has to be someone who's guided by logic and common sense and faith and patriotism. And if they're not, we got the wrong person leading the country. But like I said earlier, I think we have the right person. You don't even have to agree with everything President Trump does. But certainly, if you look at what he's doing and listen to what he's saying, he's all about the people. You know, he just announced this thing. He's for— and I didn't even fathom this until he announced it the other day, that he's going to end the requirement for seniors, anyone who owns their own house outright, that they should not have to pay property taxes anymore on it. So, you know, we have all these retirees now who own their homes and like If you live where I live in California, you know, I'll just pick a number. If your house is worth $1 million, you're paying around $13,000 a year for that house. And for a retiree, that's an incredible amount of money.
And, you know, that's one of those things that's not going to help the government coffers, but he understands the things that need to happen and they need to be for the people. And his income tax the tariffs, you know, historians will look back on this and just look at the body of work, look at the logic of why he's stated he does what he does. And I think the historical record will be shocked that, you know, there's actually politicians who were against all these things. Gavin Newsom has said that he, you know, will not allow the no tax on tips in California.
Yeah, he just told me that.
He did?
You just told me.
Oh yeah, so it's like, yeah, no, you told me he was here. But I mean, how stupid is that? It's not going to save the, you know, it's not going to even be a drop in the California coffers. But it just shows you he has no, there's no principle in his head that says do what's in the best interest of the people of California. He's wired to do what's in the best interest of himself. And that's, you know, that's one of the definitions of a toxic leader. And that's, you know, that's what happened to Pat Tillman and his platoon in Afghanistan. That's toxic leadership. Common sense leadership matters. Toxic leadership destroys. And if you just look at the last 5 years that, you know, the toxic leadership we lived under for 4 years, being lectured, you know, being told, don't go protesting, we have the F-16s, we have all the guns. I mean, when he first said that, uh, you know, I was just like, no one, no one, no value-based person, no patriot in this country has ever once walked around and gone man, we really need a civil war. That whole thing has come up from the left, uh, out of their desperation.
And I, you know, one of your other— I answered some Patreon questions out there, and that was one of the questions.
Uh, it's on everybody's mind.
It is, it is. But, you know, my thing is it won't be a civil war. It— I'd call it a civil Grenada. It'll be about 10 hours long and it'll be over with. There's no, no civil war that the left can win in America. There's too many freedom-loving, God-fearing patriots in this country. And although we haven't had a voice for many years, we have one now. And I think people would do the right thing. And anyone who would try to start a, a civil war would regret it very quickly.
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Yeah, I don't argue with you on that. I think that there are three sides to that war. I think there's the left, the right, and the government.
But that's the way the shadow government—
or what, I don't know what do you call it anymore. But I can tell you this, I don't think that very many people up there have our best interest, and, uh, I think that's becoming more and more apparent every single day. But, um, but anyways, I got something else for you too.
All right, love it.
It's a, uh, Vigilance League gummy bears, made in the USA. Okay, legal in all 50 states. Not that it matters in California, but, uh, just candy. Just candy.
Yep, you gotta, you gotta be careful of the gummies you take in California. Find yourself— that's what I hear— out in the backyard looking at the stars.
Well, Pete, I want to do a life story on you, and I know you have a lot of stuff you want to talk about outside of your story too that I'm interested in, in particular Venezuela, the Ukraine wars, your thoughts on that stuff. But starting off, where'd you grow up?
I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. It's a suburb outside Chicago, idyllic place to grow up. I was one of 9 kids, Irish Catholic family. Went to Catholic school, got my ass kicked by nuns. You know, I grew up on—
Good old days.
Yeah, and hose water, drinking hose water, not wearing helmets, and, you know, with one mission, just to have fun. And that was not the best mission when it came to going to school. And scholastically, I was a horrible student. I used to tell people, The purpose of school is to learn how to be a stand-up comedian. I just wanted to laugh, and I was not suited for being cooped up in a classroom. But it was an amazing time to grow up. Even though school was hard, when I wasn't at school, I pretty much had the same pattern of activity every day. I'd wake up. Get a bowl of oatmeal, put my shoes on, and head outside. And, you know, my amazing mom would always say some version of the same thing, you know, stay out of trouble and be home before the streetlights come on. And, you know, back then there was no cellular phone/beacon on you. There were no text check-ins. You know, just freedom and independence. And, you know, there's some amazing studies, psychological studies have been done on people who grew up in the pre-digital era. So I don't put a lot of credence to the alphabetical generations, you know, because I think more or less generations are in like 30-year bands.
And within those 30-year bands, the 10-year bands all overlap, and then even the 30-year ones overlap. And the reason they overlap is because, you know, the way you and me grew up is the way we try to raise our own kids. So if you grew up pre-digital, you should be taking some of those great things that, you know, we were able to— the conditions we had, because what this study showed is that growing up that way was incredibly beneficial. And they covered 3 things. The first was unstructured problem solving. The second was something they call adaptive risk calculations. And the third thing was the ability to believe in and trust your senses. And you can see all 3 of those. It was an aha moment when I read this thing. So let's just go back to the daily itinerary of kids pre-digital. So after your mom tells you that, she kicks you outside and you're out in the backyard and you're like, okay, what am I going to do now? So this is unstructured problem solving. So most of the time, first thing you think is I'm going to go get some buddies. I want to hang out with some of my buddies.
So whatever the type neighborhood you're in, proximity is everything. For me, Walked across the alley, knocked on the door, the back door. You talk to, you know, the mom always answers, you know, can Billy come out and play? And, you know, every mom is like, yes. Hey, get down here, Billy. Pete's here. Get outside. Pretty soon you got, you know, 4 or 5 kids. And, you know, you're in the unstructured problem-solving mode. First thing is you're realizing, wow, 5 heads is better than 1. More ideas, we can do more things, we can have more fun. But you figured it out. You realize, I figured something out. It takes action to make action. And you just did it. You just took action and found yourself some friends. And then off you go, no itinerary for For young boys, you don't know a lot, so everything is a potential challenge. Every tree, every rock wall, every construction site, especially, which is like an obstacle course to a little boy. And every one of those is full of hazards. This is what the school of hard knocks is, and it's why I think pre-digital All of us, you know, there was never a moment we didn't have scabs on both elbows and scabs on both knees.
And, you know, that's learning the laws of physics. I was— I ran too fast. I should not have tried to grab that limb on that tree. And at some point along the way, you know, you're going to get one buddy, "Let's stick with the tree." You climb up the tree. "Come on, let's climb this thing." And I had a friend who was an amazing climber, incredible strength to body weight and grip strength. He could climb anything. And one day he was on a tree limb yelling like Tarzan. I was like, hey, Danny, that's dangerous. You better stop that. Sure enough, the branch broke. He fell, broke his arm. And I never forgot that. And this is part of this adaptive risk calculation, you're building your memory, you're building, you know, a Rolodex of experience. Yeah. And so, and it's experience for you, your body, your mind. You know what you can do physically. You know what makes sense to you. And so when that guy says, come on, what are you afraid? You know, on that one day you say, no, I'm not afraid. I just don't want to. It's not worth it climbing up that thing and breaking my arm.
So let's go play baseball. And you walk away. And the real benefit of that happens afterwards. You realize you made the right decision and you've now etched that pattern in your brain that, hey, you don't have to do stupid shit. If it doesn't make sense, veto it. Take care of yourself. And I've been asked many, many times about survival in combat. And I tell people, One reason that I never got shot or seriously injured, you know, beyond luck, was that adaptive risk calculation. I was always thinking, is this worth it? Number one, what's, you know, what am I risking? How risky is this? How much do I know about what we're doing? And if you don't know a lot and there's a lot of risk to it, then it might not make sense. But you don't have that unless you've got the experience and you, not just the experience of, of, you know, the, the conditions, but the experience of saying, I don't think that, I don't think that's smart. I don't think we should do it. So that's the adaptive risk calculation. The final thing is believing in and trusting your senses. And, you know, that obviously applies to both the same things, but it, where it really comes in handy is interpersonal relationships.
You know, when kids are out, it's the law of the jungle. And, you know, you're going to run into some older kids, you're going to run into some strange kids, and you learn right away that, you know, you have to understand who you're dealing with and that you can't trust strangers. You've got to— you got to get some data on this person first. And, you know, I mentioned the School of Hard Knocks, you know, Mistakes have consequences. You get your face washed out with snow if you say the wrong thing, or kicked in the stomach. And, you know, I remember both incidents like that happening to me and my friends. And it was, you know, one time we were just hanging out with these older kids, and one of my buddies— we, you know, when you're 10, 11, 12, you say the word fuck as a comma. It's like it separates the sentences you use. And when someone says something funny—
this is still how I speak.
Yeah, me too. You know, I will probably— to the viewers, they'll probably see us regress to that during this conversation. I'm the same way. My son, when he hears me on the phone with my buddies, like, Dad, I've never heard you swear so much. I'm like, but I'm just back in military mode. But you learn to read people. You learn to pay attention to tone of voice, to the nuances of body language. And that's emotional intelligence. You're looking at a person, you're listening. And as we know, both those things kind of signal what a person's about to do. So again, the real benefit is when you avoid problems, when you spot, hey, this guy's crazy. Let's get out of here. Let's not hang out here anymore. And same thing, you've now etched a pattern in your brain and you realize that the only thing you got in the real world is your senses. And that's a biologic fact. You know, Ernst Mach, the guy who came up with the Mach 1, Mach 2, the Mach principle, was a German scientist. And in 1869, he came up with the Mach principle, which is just— there's no other way to prove scientific fact than with your senses.
And so still to this day in science, if you have a new hypothesis or new theory, you have to be able to validate that hypothesis or theory with sensory information. Like, you can't say when someone says, well, where is it? And you say, well, it's invisible. Say, well, there's no such thing as invisible. Then the hypothesis or the theory falls apart. So believe in and trust your senses. It's all you got. It's the ironic thing is that's even more important today than it was pre-digital because there's so much fake out there. There's so many AI-generated video clips. There's so much propaganda. If you haven't learned to take every news report with a grain of salt, every government report with a grain of salt, then you're missing a big lesson of our time. So again, rock foundation is believe in and trust your senses. And then the final thing from that study that I thought was interesting is that pre-digital, 70% of teenage boys had jobs either after school, on the weekends, or, you know, and including all summer. And the majority of those 70% were not working to save for college. They were working to buy a car.
And, you know, again, I'm reading this thing going, that's me. That's what I did. I bought my first car was a '72 Impala for $250. It had 170,000 miles on it. It had a hole in the passenger side floor that I had to cover with plywood in the winter because slush would fly up. My mom wouldn't even get in it, but that thing ran like a champ. And I kept it and used it all through college, drove down to my college and back.
Right on, man.
Yeah. So again, to sum up, the point of all that is not to sit around and wax poetic and say, oh, those were the good old days. There's no such thing as good good old days. The world's always changing— society, culture, technology. But we could take those foundational aspects of human nature— unstructured problem solving, adaptive risk calculation, and believing in and trusting your senses— and we can understand how important those are to the development of the brain. And we can apply them and make every effort for our own kids and the society around us to allow that back, to have that as part of the way kids grow up today. You know, big kudos to our parents today. You know, they call parents helicopter parents. They're hovering over their kids all the time, ready to swoop down as soon as they run into an obstacle or get hurt or have a problem. Our parents are called Home Depot parents. And Home Depot parents are parents where when you think you need something, you can't find anybody to help you. So you look around for a while, you still can't find anyone. You say, shit, okay, I'm going to figure this out.
And so you use deductive logic to figure out what aisle this part is you're searching for. And then you go down, find the part, you know, whether it's a toilet or electricity thing, and you start flipping them over, reading the specs on it, comparing them to the specs you brought, and you end up making a decision. You said, I'll take this one, and you go buy it. And again, the real benefit of it comes at home when you find out that's the right part. You're like, I did that. I did it on my own. Yeah. And so, you know, we can also try to be more Home Depot parents than helicopter parents. Yeah. So that's my—
certainly agree with you on that.
Yeah. Yeah. So that's my childhood. At high school, I ran cross-country, played hockey. I went off to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. It's at the southern tip of Illinois, about 350 miles from Chicago. The farther away, the better. And it's an amazing place. It's where the Ohio and Mississippi come together in the bottom of the state. The glaciers of 10,000 years ago did not reach southern Illinois, so it's still full of massive hills, ridges, rock outcroppings, cliffs, lakes, and 275,000-acre Shawnee National Forest. And when I went down there and saw that, I was like, I'm going to— this is the school I'm going to. Wow. I didn't even tour the campus. I went there for the, you know, the wilderness. And, you know, pretty much every weekend I was in college, I was out hiking in places like Panther's Den and Devil's Kitchen. It was the first time I used my own money to buy a book, which was Be an Expert with a Map and Compass by Bjorn Kjellstrom. Yeah, I learned how to navigate, what terrain features were. Little did I know I was, you know, inching my way toward, uh, joining the military.
I didn't know that at the time.
No kidding, it wasn't even on your radar?
No, it, uh, my, my first year I think was when the Iran hostage rescue mission went awry, Desert One.
Okay.
And that had an incredible effect on me, uh, because, you know, 8 guys died in Desert One trying to save the American hostages in Tehran. I think there was like 400 of them. It was a lot. And it had a huge effect on me because it was the first time I ever stopped to think about how good I had it and what an amazing life I had in America specifically.
How old were you at that time?
I was just a freshman in college. So, you know, 18, 19, something like that.
Wow, you thought that? Yeah, I feel like nobody feels like that anymore. Nobody takes the time, you know, to appreciate it.
Yeah, well, you might be pointing out— I agree with you. And maybe it's because, look, we— can you imagine anyone kneeling for the national anthem when we were growing up or disparaging, you know, people who served? You know, I grew up— I remember as a kid, hearing about the way they treated Vietnam veterans and, you know, being completely disgusted by that. But I think, you know, it was a more patriotic time. We hadn't had a full portion of the country who, you know, did nothing but criticize our freedom and criticize our forefathers, you know, tearing down statues.
Yeah.
So, you know, I was a marathon runner and triathlete at the time, and I'd go on long runs in the hills of Southern Illinois. And on one of those runs, I decided, you know, I need to pay something back to the country. I'm going to— and the way I'm going to do it is join the military. And I want to be in the units that do the toughest missions. I want to, you know, make sure that Desert One never happens again, that we don't have a a tragedy like that on the world stage on an important mission. And, you know, I was super naive at the time. I went to a recruiter and I said, you know, I want to join the military and I'd like to be part of Delta Force.
And the first—
you said that right off the bat? Yeah, because they were, they were at Desert One. And, uh, you know, I didn't know they were secret or anything. And, uh, and this is the first—
how did you So you heard about Delta Force from Tehran?
Yeah, yeah, that was in the, that was in the media. Yep.
Wow.
And, um, he said, look, let me tell you something. The only thing going into Special Forces is going to do for you is when you get out is either make you a criminal or a hitman. And I got up from my chair and walked out and, uh, found another recruiter in the next town over. And this guy was great. I still remember his name, Terry Story. And he was like, what do you want to do? What do you want to do? And I told him, and he goes, okay, You can't do that, but here you can get in, become a Ranger, and then become that. I said, okay, well, how do I do that? And he goes, well, you can join, uh, to go in the infantry and then Rangers, or because you have a college degree, you can volunteer for OCS. The only catch is if you don't make it through OCS, you know, you're going to be a PFC and they're going to put you wherever they want to put you. So I signed up an OCS contract, and, you know, again, I freeze that moment in time because it's happened literally millions of times since 1776.
It's, you know, our grandfathers did it after Pearl Harbor, and, you know, all these great soldiers who joined after 9/11, same thing. Pat Tillman joined, you know, The day after 9/11, he decided to join the military, to leave the Arizona Cardinals and join the military. So this process has been happening, and, you know, it's important for us as veterans to say it out loud and be consciously aware of it because, you know, these patriots are our country's greatest natural resource, and we have to treat them that way, and we have to treat their lives that way. This is a fixed amount of individuals like this. They're not a never-ending flow. So these are a special part of this country. And these young men join with a lot of naivete, but they're joining. They're agreeing to sacrifice their lives and their livelihoods to serve and protect our great nation and the freedoms that our nation involves. And in so doing, they enter a contract with the government, and that contract is sacrosanct. All those patriots ask for is that the government uses common sense on when and where they're going to employ them and provide them with common sense leaders who will make good decisions and solve complex problems so they can succeed when they're employed.
And, you know, I say it's important because when you find out, like, how the Ukraine war started, a bunch of Ivy League, State Department, CIA people concocted that thing, made bad decision, senseless decision after senseless decision after senseless decision. And You know, can you elaborate?
I mean, we have this entire portion towards the end of the interview, but yeah, yeah, crank it out.
Right. So, so the Ukraine war was started by—
you say this is the biggest propaganda war of all time.
Yes, it should be called the propaganda war. The fighting's real. Everything we've been told about it is basically a lie. And every piece of history that shows it's a lie has been either tucked, kicked under the rug, or lied about too. So how the war started, the war started when the Obama administration, I don't say US because the Ukraine war could not have started with any other administration because it couldn't have started without the press as part of the group that was going to provide cover for starting it. And they were all in on the start of the Ukraine war. But the US Obama administration, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, John Brennan, and Joe Biden. Joe Biden had one job. You can look in his archives as vice president. It was his one job was Ukraine. And Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan, his deputy, were the architects of the start of the war. And the way it started was the State Department and CIA, non-elected officials along with their counterparts in the EU, Ukrainian politicians, and George Soros's Open Society Foundation, along with the neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists, created the fake Maidan protests. You can still go online.
I checked before I came. Videos are still there, 2014-15. Look at Maidan protests, you'll see brand new GP mediums in the background, you'll see them serving soup, you'll notice that everyone has the same orange hard hats on distributed to them. The weapons, you'll see weapons, the same common weapons being held by the ultranationalist neo-Nazis. And then there are interviews. There's BBC and German TV interviews with Ukrainian protesters. And one, in one of them, all the guy does is ask, why are you protesting? Every single individual that they question says the same thing. I'm here because they told me to be here and I'm getting paid. And so Victoria Nuland admitted afterwards that the US spent $5 billion in USAID funds to bribe all these people and to make it happen. And in February of 2014, the culmination of the Maidan protests was the violent overthrow of the Viktor Yanukovych government, the duly elected government of Ukraine. He was elected not just by Eastern Ukrainians, but by Western Ukrainians. And his election was validated by the UN. But some, for some reason, they decided we got to overthrow him. And the plan, and this is where you, this senseless decision-making comes from, and this is all in cables, it's in State Department, CIA cables, and in—
for the audience, cables are Basically secure emails.
Yes, good description. It's all in those. They believed that by overthrowing Yanukovych, installing their Ukrainian puppet politicians, and then starting an ethnic war in eastern Ukraine, which is populated by almost 100% ethnic Russians, that by doing that, this would cause so much unrest in Russia that the Russian people would rise up and overthrow Putin. That was the plan. And, you know, when you read that, when you read the cables, when you see that, it's like these, you know, Ivy League, never been in a war, never been in anything real in their life It's like they were like kids playing with matches, completely unaware of the potential unintended consequences of throwing those matches into a pile of leaves or into, you know, something soaked in gas. And what happened afterwards is a classic law of unintended consequences. They had no plan for after they overthrew the government. And in the power vacuum, because they had no plan, the neo-Nazis took over the Ukrainian government.
They had no contingency plans?
No contingencies. And that's why Crimea caught them so by surprise. So also online, you can go on any of your favorite search engines and just look up Victoria Nuland, Gregory Pyatt. He was the ambassador. She was the head of State Department. For the overthrow. Their phone call was intercepted by the Russians and then published on YouTube initially. It's on all search engines now. Their phone call is them talking about who, which Ukrainian politicians that they controlled would be the next prime minister. And this is before the violent overthrow. It's like 2 weeks before. So they're on record talking about who to install in the new government. So there's no— there's like no— this is— there's— it's not a theory. Everything— there's a massive trail of evidence that shows exactly what happened, to include open source intelligence, the videotapes that show what's about to happen. So when the neo-Nazis controlled the 5 key ministries of the Ukrainian government, to include the Ministry of Defense, John O'Brien was the head of CIA then. He flew in the day after they overthrew the Yanukovych government, met with the head of the Ukrainian intelligence and the head of MI6.
And the very next day, they began the ethnic war on eastern Ukraine, which was really one of the great, one of the most horrific humanitarian violations in modern history, they just began shelling the civilian areas with artillery and mortars. And again, it's all on video. You can see grandmothers crying in the streets with dead, you know, spouses and dead children and saying, why? Why is our own country doing this to us? Why is our own government doing this to us? The Eastern Ukrainian oblasts that have since voted for independence and autonomy, then independence and reunification with Russia. So Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, all three of them would've stayed in Ukraine, but they had no choice. Ethnic cleansing began, and between 2014 and 2021, 14,000 ethnic Russian civilians were killed in Eastern Ukraine. Most of them by artillery, mortar, and, you know, drone attacks. And all the hospitals. Yeah. Horrific. The East, the ethnic Russians petitioned the UN to come in and investigate, begged for the UN to investigate. They wouldn't do it. We should have as the US. If, you know, Trump always says, if I had been president, this wouldn't have happened. But any objective president, this was grounds for, for sending forces in.
This was like, this was worse than Bosnia, worse than Rwanda, any of those places. We should have sent people in to stop it, but no one would do that. And the killing just continued, as well as the cover-up. You know, most Western Ukrainians still to this day believe what the propaganda said happened, that Maidan protest was an organic protest, that Yanukovych fled because of his corruption. He knew he was going to get busted, he fled the country. And then they say that, uh, Putin invaded, uh, Ukraine, and he did not. Um, so I told you, 14,000 dead. Crimea was the first in May of 2014. They knew what was happening. They instantly voted for independence. And in the vote, I think 89% of people voted and of the population voted and something like 85% voted to secede from Ukraine. Yeah. And Russia, the part of Crimea that's so important is the Sevastopol naval base. It's Russia's only warm water naval base. They had a contract with Ukraine to keep that till 2045. They just left the base and helped the Crimeans secure Crimea. But Donetsk and Luhansk begged for Russian help. Putin demurred. He was incredibly conscientious about not pissing off NATO, if you can believe that, because NATO is, you know, actively working to undermine him and he's not helping these ethnic Russians because he doesn't want it to look like, you know, he's invading or that he's provoking NATO.
So they set their own elections up in the summer of 2014, and the same results, you know, 80-plus percent voted and 80% voted for independence. So why is that important? Because today when you hear people say We— why would we give, uh, the Donbas Basin back to Russia? They invaded. Well, you're not giving Donbas back to Russia. Don stands for coal, bas stands for basin. So Donbas is the coal basin, and within it is Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, or provinces, and both of those voted for independence. They had no other choice. After all the killing in 2015, the president, the newly installed president of Ukraine, outlawed the Russian language, outlawed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is like the sister to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church was founded in Kyiv. Russia considers Kyiv the holiest of holy cities. It's like Jerusalem to them. That's why they've been so circumspect on the bombing of Kyiv, because it's a holy city. But the Ukrainians forfeited any right to those to eastern Ukraine when they started killing them, when they took away all their basic human rights— life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. You can't practice religion, you can't speak your language.
Yeah, he stopped the pensions of all— uh, the hell are you supposed to speak? Yeah, exactly, sign language. I mean, if you read the UN Charter on human rights, all those things are like the staples. And if you violate those, you know, the UN Charter more or less says the country has a right to, you know, for self-governance, to break away from whoever is doing that to it. So it's again, clear-cut case. It's not theory. And then on the invasion, you know, I like, I liken what Russia did to, you know, think of it this way. You sure you can technically call it an invasion, just like if you're walking down the street and you come up to a vestibule and see your buddy getting mugged inside the vestibule, but on the door to the vestibule of the building, it says no trespassing. Well, you fucking kick that door in, smack that mugger on the head, toss him out, and save your buddy. Did you just trespass? Well, I guess technically you did, but, you know, no judge, jury, or common sense human being is going to say you shouldn't have trespassed. It's the same thing Russia did.
14,000 ethnic Russians slaughtered begging him for help, begging for humanitarian assistance. And finally, he just broke into that vestibule to save his, you know, his people, ethnic Russians. And so calling him the invader, calling him the instigator, or Russia just doesn't hold any water. It doesn't make sense as long as you cut through the propaganda. And that's You know, that's kind of why I got involved. I, I've been to Kyiv, I've been to Ukraine. I love Ukraine. I love the Ukrainian people. I've never been to Russia, would love to go there. And I have buddies, my buddy in State Department, two buddies in the agency, and a buddy who's over there as a long-term contractor. And they one night said, hey, let's call Pete and tell him this stuff. And find out what he thinks we should do. And so they didn't call me. They just called and set up a meeting. We met at LAX, outside LAX, and they told me everything. And I was like, holy shit. Now, every one of these guys is still active. And, you know, one reason they came to me was, you know, can you get the word out?
And I was like, yeah, I've got a duty to get the word out, you know. Right now we're at about 1.25 million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. So back to that many.
Yeah, 1.25 million.
Yep. The Ukrainian MODS database was hacked about 4 months ago, and the number they had then was 1.2. I'm giving them benefit of doubt. They've been losing about 1,000 men a day every day of 2025. Wow. So it's incredible numbers. You can, you know, I'm on about 5 or 6 different Telegram channels that I subscribe to. And there's some great independent reporters. I think you might have had one of them on, Patrick Lancaster. Did you have him on? Okay, maybe he was on Tucker or something. I probably shouldn't have brought that up, but—
All good.
Yeah. So we should look into him. Yeah, he's an independent reporter. He's been over there from the beginning. And the first thing that strikes you when you watch one of his reports is, where the fuck is the press? Why is there no mainstream global media press coverage of the Ukraine war? Why have we not seen a single member? You know, they forced the US military to embed them in Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, and demanded it because not, not because they want to cover it, because that's the quickest formula for getting a Pulitzer Prize and getting, you know, looked on favorably as a journalist. But from the beginning, the question has to be, why is there no coverage of the Ukraine war? And I'll tell you why there's none. Because if they cover it, they'll expose the propaganda stories that are happening. And the first way is The entire war has been fought in eastern Ukraine. So every city that you get that gets taken by the Russians in eastern Ukraine, they're the liberators. And the people come out celebrating when the Russians come in and telling them about the hell they've been living through with the Ukrainian army occupying their town.
These are ethnic Russians. The whole battlefield, all these flattened towns, all the infrastructure. That's eastern Ukraine. That's where these people live. That's Donetsk, Luhansk. And of course, Crimea has Odessa right next to it. So it's been hit too.
But, you know, when was this meeting?
When was what? The meeting between— that I went to was right before 2022, right before the war started.
So this was a while ago.
Yeah. And then we've stayed. They feed me stuff all along. I get new stuff. They'll call me up and go, this is total bullshit. There's been fake massacres that were blamed on Russia. They're so fake, they're a joke. And this is again why you see there's no Western press coverage. You know, people who were supposedly shot by Russians laying in the mud. With their hands tied behind their back, but their hands are tied with pristine white ties. And then when they— when this French, brave French reporter, who was actually one of the only ones who went and visited the massacre site, he saw the Ukrainian intelligence people pulling cadavers off out of frozen trucks, laying them on the ground, tying their hands together, And he's testified on that numerous times. Same thing. His life's been threatened. He's been censored in France. But he's another— there's two of them, actually, two French reporters independent of each other reported the same thing. And then the war itself, massive lies about the progress of the war, about the casualties. You know, even President Trump was duped because his initial advisors to Ukraine were were, you know, the, the one guy he had was an ex-general.
His daughter ran an NGO in Ukraine. And so when he was in Ukraine, he was paying his daughter's NGO to take him around and provide security for him. How can a guy whose family is making money from the war be taken seriously in trying to stop the war. And he was feeding President Trump, you know, propaganda information. So initially, you know, President Trump was saying, hey, Russia's lost all these men, you know, really bad, million men. Well, they haven't. They've lost probably about a tenth of what Ukraine has lost. Yep. And Russia, remember I talked about their strategic acumen from the beginning? They saw this This is a war of attrition. And all these ex-generals who are now paid influencers, of course, they can't understand that. And so one of the things you heard year after, you know, '22, '23, '24, you know, look at Russia, they're so weak, they've only moved, you know, 50 kilometers in the last 3 years. Well, they finish that sentence and then they say, and the reason we got to keep fighting is because they're getting ready to take over all of Europe. So, I mean, they contradict themselves with their propaganda.
They're not— you're saying they're not strong enough and formidable enough to even take terrain in Ukraine, yet they're going to take all of Europe, which they're not. There's not a single statement from Putin or anyone else, intercepted or not, that says they have any designs on Europe. And of course, thank goodness for Tulsi Gabbard. She just released, she did a press conference just about a month ago and released, said, hey, we've already provided this to Congress. There is zero evidence nor zero indications that Russia has any intention to invade Europe or that it would ever make sense for Ukraine to invade Europe. So that's been put to rest, but the propaganda continues. The influencers continue to repeat it on, you know, the global mainstream media. And, you know, people without the truth continue to buy into it, man.
Which means everybody's repeating it.
Yeah. So all these guys are dying, you know, and they're just being— and people are going, keep the war going, you can't let it stop. And they're taking their time on these peace negotiations. Again, historians will look at this and it'll really shine a positive light on Trump because he's the only guy who has said from the beginning, we have to stop the war, we have to stop the killing. And he used to say that every time he talked. He just talks about it so much now he doesn't anymore. But he used to start, and that is the start point. And back to that, you know, as veterans, we understand that. We understand that sacrosanct contract that a veteran, that a patriot makes with his government. And so even though these are, you know, Russian and Ukrainian military, I think as, you know, veterans, we share, you know, a responsibility for each other worldwide. And this is just senseless killing. And the really sad thing is that Ukraine, without knowing it, is being absolutely decimated because these people are telling them to keep fighting. You can win. We're going to be behind you. And they're not.
And they can't win. And, you know, they're in a position now where not just manpower, but military-industrial complex, and then their command and control and leadership is so contaminated and so dysfunctional, they just have no chance against the Russians.
I wasn't expecting to hear all that.
Wow, wow. Yeah, and again, most of it is still open source available, so anyone can do it. Uh, if people want, I've got a long-form article on my Substack page, peteblaber.substack.com. It's the chronology of the Ukraine war. I expose it all. Uh, I provide the facts. I, I have hyperlinks to videos, hyperlinks to pictures. And, you know, it's horrific. Mike Benz coined this, and he was right. He said the overthrow of the Yanukovych government started the censorship industrial complex around the world. So when they figured out they could lie about something that big and they could collude to create a propaganda version of reality, they were emboldened. And, you know, part of that is their control over tech because, you know, Facebook had a big part in that Maidan protest. Everyone got their directions via Facebook. So, you know, during that period, both during the Obama and the Biden administration, those tech companies were controlled by the government. You know, the FBI was controlling Twitter and the content on Twitter at the time. So, you know, they were emboldened by it. And again, Mike Benz, you know, did a great report on this. That's what made them go, hey, in 2017, we can do the same thing in the US.
Instead of Maidan protests, they did the BLM protests. Create chaos, burn infrastructure, sow dissent. And let that happen so that you— it leads to the, the eventual overthrow of the government. And that's what they were trying to do with those riots and everything else. It's called the Color Revolution. Damn, it's bad.
Yeah, no kidding. Let's take a quick break.
Okay.
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Where do you think they're coming up with that? Do you think there's any legitimacy?
I think, well, what would tell me that it's far more likely than not is just the momentum behind what Trump's doing and then the logic of why it makes sense to ceasefire. And I don't think there will be a ceasefire, you know, unless it's part of— it's over, you know, they've agreed on something. But Russia is not going to agree to just a plain ceasefire. They'll agree to the terms that they put forward, you know, the 5 oblasts, the size of the Ukrainian army, the, uh, you know, the—
I mean, how are they even getting anybody to fight?
1.25 million? I could pull out my, my, uh, I show these every Tuesday on the podcast I do on CDM Media, and it's also on my Substack. Uh, we show every week, uh, the forced conscription. They're beating their they're tackling people, men in the streets, beating them, forcing them into vehicles, and the fights are unbelievable. And what—
that's their recruitment. That's their recruitment. Forced conscription for their country.
Yep. And so I've said this numerous times, never, I believe, never in the history of warfare has a country won a war where they had to force their soldiers to join.
That's fucking unbelievable.
Yeah, no one wants to join. You know, Ukraine took a— Zelensky and Ukraine took a lot of criticism from Biden, Jake Sullivan, and Austin that they did not immediately draft 18 to 23-year-olds. They drafted— they started, I think, at 25. They went down to 23. They still haven't drafted, but they've said had done the Selective Service thing. But when Zelensky established martial law, he closed the borders, so 18 to 23-year-olds were not allowed to leave the country. He just changed that about 6 to 8 weeks ago. The day after he did it, every border crossing was swamped. All the 18 to 23-year-olds pretty much have either fled. Yeah. And What does that tell you? It tells you that the messaging, you know, 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for, doesn't make sense to the actual people who are supposed to do the fighting. So when you have these actual citizens of Ukraine fleeing, fighting for their lives, bystanders join in and help the recruits against these forced conscriptors. You'll see the massive fights And women too come over, they start beating on these guys. Let them alone, let them alone. This happens every day all across Ukraine because the logical why doesn't make sense.
They see people disappear. They realize the truth is, you know, whispered among the people of Ukraine, what's really going on, who's really trying to win this war, whose war it really is. And it's not Ukraine, it's the EU, it's the globalists, um, and they're the ones telling Ukraine keep fighting to the last Ukrainian. But the Ukrainian people, the ones that are, you know, the, the go-to-war age, are having nothing of it.
So they, they basically don't have a country.
No, they don't. It's not a real country, uh, and that's not a— I'm nothing against Ukraine. I love Ukraine. I love the Ukrainian people. But if you just take what Zelensky did— so first off, on Zelensky, uh, you know, in, in 2018, he— 2017, he became the lead in a, in a comedy show, Servant of the People, which the producers of which, which, like, you know, famous producers in Hollywood, were two of the biggest oligarchs in Ukraine, multimillionaire, billionaire oligarchs. The, the head, the one, the billionaire decided, hey, and probably in cahoots with, uh, the Biden State Department and CIA, because they needed a candidate, they needed someone for the '19 election, and it had to be a stooge. So they decided, let's make Zelensky a candidate. So up to that point, Zelensky had never even tweeted any position on any political statement, any political event. He had never spoken about any political proclivities. He had never written anything. He had never spoke. When he announced his presidency, his run for the president and his new party, which was called the same thing as the sitcom, the Servant of the People Party. He refused to debate the other candidates.
He did no campaigning. Does this sound familiar? He put out no, you know, no campaign promises, no platform. And I think 4 months after he announced Even though he was behind in the polls, the election happened. He won 73%, mysteriously, of the vote. The first thing he did was outlaw all political parties in Ukraine except his own party, the Servant of the People. And by outlawing them, making them against the law, this is— if you read the definition of a totalitarian regime, that's what they do. There's no— they outlaw competition political competition. So what that did was allow him to take over a supermajority of the Rada, because all these other people in the Rada, that's their Congress, were not allowed to run. So they just stacked it with new servant of the people. And now the Rada has a supermajority for his party. He also outlawed press. All All independent press, newspapers, television stations were shut down. Only stations that run in Ukraine still to this day are either Ukrainian government or NGO George Soros-sponsored stations. So you outlaw political competition, you end any ability, freedom of information, and then he ended freedom of speech too.
There's no You can't criticize the government. You can't— no right to protest. Those are all the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime. That corruption scandal that just broke, $100 million— it was a small one, $100 million off the energy sector, where his sidekick was indicted. He fled the country. He's now back working for him. He just not in the same role he was before. So corrupt to the bone. This is not a government of the people. It's a government installed. Zelensky's out of the country more than he's in country. And again, that's a pattern too that should make everyone question what leader in contentious times leaves the country even once. None. He's gone In the last 2 years, he's been out of Ukraine more than he's been in. Usually he's in Europe, gallivanting around Europe under the guise of collecting funds. But you have to ask, how can he do that? Well, he can do it because there's no competition. He's the stooge, and he's earned his right to maintain that from his EU handlers, from his globalist handlers, and from is he's got American handlers too. The neocons, the left, the people who put him in power from the Obama and Biden administrations still want him to stay in power.
They still keep the propaganda going. But the reality is men are dying by the thousands every day for no reason. A fake war. They don't even know what they're fighting for. They're definitely not fighting for Ukraine right now. And their leadership is also just a canard, something other than what it seems to be.
Well, I can see why there's only a 12% chance of a ceasefire by March 31st.
Yeah, he's not having any of it. He's— Trump just said it a few days ago that Zelensky's the main barrier. He said Putin's already said, hey, I want to end the war. And finally, Trump's got good information. He's saying it now. He's talking about the Ukraine, over a million casualties. He's talking about they can't win. They have no military-industrial complex. So if you can't make bullets and, you know, beans along with ammunition, weapons, how can you fight an ongoing war against a superpower?
And let me answer that for you, because we send them all of our shit.
Yeah, very true. Billions of dollars. I think $300 billion we sent them with no strings attached.
Do you have any insight on when they would— when they will run out of manpower?
They're pretty— they're there. I think they're there right now. So Russia, Russia brought in 443,000 recruits last year. Just to give you an idea of the standard. It's— no one knows what Ukraine brought in, but it's believed to be somewhere in the double-digit thousands, so 50,000 to 99,000. So that right there just tells you, you know, they can't keep up. And on this battlefield, you know, Ukraine doesn't rotate their forces. If you joined in 2022 and you're still alive, you're still out there. There's no ETS date, you know, which every soldier, you know, is counting off the days till they get to go home. Uh, you know, we talk about you fight for the guy next to you. Yeah, you do. But, you know, your foundational— what you're really fighting for is to go home to your family and, you know, where you live. And, uh, And they don't even have that. So they're dispirited. The command and control, the leadership of Ukraine is dysfunctional as can be. And we, again, the Obama and Biden administrations, who were the architects along with the rest of NATO, the Brits have been hand in hand on everything, the French and Germans to a slightly lesser extent.
Train this army. And it was the same mistake we've made everywhere, you know, from Vietnam forward. They decided, we're going to build an army and it's going to be a NATO-compatible army. So everything they built was to make it by the standards of NATO. And you can't— you know, the lesson of Vietnam was don't try to build an American army in another country, a second world country, who's got its own tradition of military customs, courtesies, protocols, and just ways of fighting. And it's the same thing in Ukraine. Most of the generals were Soviet trained. In fact, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine right now speaks Russian, was trained in Russia, Sirsky. But, you know, they don't care. Zelensky's in on the decision-making for combat. Um, you know, they're letting their guys die in these cities. I, I did an episode on this when Puckrov fell. We had a captain, a Ukrainian captain, talk to my guys on the ground and tell us how the thing unfolded. And he said, you know, he, he gave this example. He said, you know, when you're you're laying in a position for a long time, you know that position like the back of your hand, and you know everything around you.
You've calculated time, distance from every, uh, you know, terrain feature, every tree, every rock outcropping. And with Pakhros, we knew where the Russians were, and my front line guys knew if they get get to that copse of trees over there, this massive, you know, forest belt that protects the farmlands, then we're dead in the water. We cannot— we've got to fall back. And fall back is not retreating. It's just fall back that's called a supplementary position, which you always have in the defense. And so once the Russians made it to that point, to that copse of trees, They called in and said, hey, we've got this all set up. We've got alternate positions. Time to fall back. Roger, standby. We've got to get permission from higher. That went all the way back to Kyiv and Zelensky and Syrskyi. And the answer was no, not one inch. Stay and fight. And about 3 weeks later, they were surrounded. Most of them killed, many of them captured. And the same thing happened, just happened in Uye-Puye. It's a city down south Ukraine. Same thing. The guys knew if they make it to that position, we're surrounded, we're in a cauldron, and then you're dead.
Because, you know, the cauldrons in this war, because of the terrain and the technology, the drone technology, whenever you see a position, that means that a 10 by 10 kill zone sits in front of that drone kill zone. So if you move up to here, now that 10K kill zone goes 10K from that point. So that's why when that captain, that Ukrainian captain, said, when they make it to there, we got to get out of here, you listen to the guys on the ground, you know, you listen to the guys who are assessing the reality of the situation on the ground. And they, they did not. And they continue that pattern. And it's because they're trying to keep this propaganda thing going that, hey, we can win, we just need more time, more money. And to me, it seems like the EU decided we got to get them at least through 2026. And I believe the reason for that is that then they could get all the orders with the European military industrial complex, which is what's happened now. When Trump said, I'm not giving you stuff anymore, you can buy it from us, they saw that as an opportunity to reinvigorate the European military-industrial complex, which they had shut down.
And though all those stocks skyrocketed before Trump got in power, and then in those first few months, but now they're all tanking because, you know, most honest, objective people see that, you know, the end is a fait accompli. It's, it's going to happen.
I mean, if these, if these guys are forced to fight for their country, some of them, I mean, why would— why do you think they're not— or maybe they are— why are they not surrendering?
A lot of them, yeah, a lot of them are. Uh, so, uh, you— I've got tons of videotapes of guys coming out of holes, and, you know, you Ukrainians are hard people too. They're all Slavs. So the Ukrainians are not pushovers if, you know, armed properly, led properly, and motivated properly. But think about that— they're not armed properly. They don't— back to the military-industrial complex— they've got huge supply problems, which is totally exacerbated by corruption. They're skimming money off the top. A couple of cities have fallen because The $50 to $100 million tranches to dig these, you know, NATS-ass trench systems never happened. The money just was laundered and went into the pockets of the oligarchs. So the corruption has also, you know, greatly handcuffed the Ukrainian military. But, you know, there's their command and control. You tell guys on the ground, no, don't leave. Stay and die. And you do that once, you're in big trouble. You do it twice, they're never going to forgive you. And I believe that the majority of Ukrainian military have lost faith in their higher headquarters and that they don't accept anything that's coming out of them as being credible.
And then, you know, the final thing is just motivation on not knowing when you're going to go home, seeing all these dead bodies. They leave, they're ordered to leave dead bodies where they lay. There's dead bodies all over the battlefield, and Russia polices them up. Since those Istanbul talks, there's one of the things they agreed to is body exchanges to repatriate the dead bodies. That's happened, I think, something like 15 times, and the ratio— we just had one, and Russia turned over 1,600 bodies. Ukraine turned over 29. So, whoa, it was a ratio of 39 to 1. I don't know what it is now on bodies being exchanged, but, you know, part of it is just the number of KIAs, but the other part is they're not even allowing these guys to, you know, pick up their dead colleagues and bring them back to repatriate them for their family. Uh, there's monetary incentives behind that. If the body's not recovered, Ukraine doesn't have to pay the family, and they don't, even if the guy's off the ledger. Yeah. Holy shit, it's bad. It's bad. And this is all these globalists, you know, they're globalists doing like, again, little kids playing with matches, uh, you know, in a gas station.
No clue of the laws of physics, no clues of the laws of unintended consequences. And, uh, what they've done is, you know, one of the most horrific, uh, humanitarian crimes, I think, against humanity that we've ever seen. A million— over a million guys dead just on one side. We lost 58,000 in Vietnam. 15 years, I think.
Man, wow. Well, that paints a very different picture than, than what everybody's told.
Yeah, thanks for asking. It's, uh, it's important that people— and again, do the research. All this stuff is available online. There's plenty of people that were there early who have come out and they talk about it. Uh, the war, it should be called the propaganda war, not the Ukraine war. The fighting's real, everything we've been told about it is a lie.
Wow. Well, let's get back to you.
We were— you're going to Rangers. Yeah, I think I joined OCS, got a Ranger contract. Yep. So I went to Korea, my first tour, DMZ in Korea. It's a great tour. Uh, and I did that, like I said, because you could apply for the regiment. It's a 1-year tour. I applied, I got fortunate to get in. Even more fortunate to go to 2nd Ranger Battalion, Fort Lewis, Washington. Loved it there. It was— it would turn out to be— I was there 4 years. I ended up as a captain, junior captain, when I— my last year. But it was a foundational experience because of the amazing leadership climate that was in place for all 4 of those years. And, you know, I was taught then what a leadership climate is. And my battalion commander and my company commander said this to me. It was, you know, think of a leadership climate the same way you think of a real climate. You can feel the effects of a leadership climate. You can see the effects of a leadership climate. And when people find a healthy leadership climate, they put down stakes. They work together as teams. Think of neighborhoods to make their place of duty, their place they're living, better.
And the positive climate makes everyone who lives under it grow, progress, and succeed. Now, when you think of an unhealthy leadership climate, it stymies growth. People are miserable. And the only thing they think about is, how do I get the F out of here? And get to a place where the sun shines occasionally and I can grow, I can progress, and I can succeed, which is what everyone joins the military for. So, you know, the other thing they taught me, which was foundational, was that, you know, that a leadership climate is not— is not— does not emerge from just the most senior leader in whatever the organization. Instead, a leadership climate emerges from the sum total of choices made by all the leaders in the climate system. So leadership is a collective thing in an organization. It's not just the guy at the top, right? Because he can be cool and you can have tyrants right underneath them. And if they're allowed to operate, then you're living in a unhealthy leadership climate, even though the guy at the top's okay. But what it also emphasizes is the responsibility of leaders. And my battalion commander again said this to me.
He said, you know, Pete, you can be the smartest, funniest, most handsome, most tactically astute commander a unit's ever had, but if you turn a blind eye to a tyrant who's making their lives miserable, they'll treat you with the same derision they treat that Siren. That's your job. Your job is to remove these friction barriers that prevent your guys from growing, uh, succeeding in what they do. And when you don't do that, it's, you know, you're not doing your duty as a leader. So, you know, from that day forward, I, I passed that on, but I also lived it. You know, leadership climate takes, you know, constant pruning, constant maintenance. It doesn't mean you're looking for guys doing things, but you're always keeping an eye open for it because it's hard.
How would you, how would you take the temperature of the climate throughout your entire career, not just at Ranger Battalion?
Yeah, just talking to guys and, uh, you know, uh, and having and listening to other people who talk to the guys. You know, your sergeant major should be a huge part of that. Um, but you take that temperature and, you know, remember, a climate, just like a just like how would you tell if you're living in a good climate? The sun's shining, everything's growing, everyone's happy, everyone takes pride in their neighborhood and gets along with their neighbors, makes an effort to get along with their neighbors. And I think those are things that are hallmarks of a positive leadership climate. I mean, one in particular is just freedom of speech. The ability to speak up, out, or with anyone in the battalion. And so one of the things about, you know, common-sense leaders is they talk the same way to a private as they do to a general. And that's the way we all should be. And when you become consciously aware of it, you know, you might even catch yourself at times, you know, why am I suborning myself to this general? It's not how I talk to a private. And then vice versa. Why am I treating this guy, hey, no, I don't have time for you right now?
You wouldn't have done that if the general stuck his head in the door. So freedom of speech, to speak up out in width, is hugely important in any organization, corporate or military. Your people got to feel like they can come up to you and go, hey, sir, I don't mean to, I don't know who else to talk to, so I'm just at wit's end, but we have a real problem in B Company, and I know you're busy, but if you could send someone down to take a look, I would totally appreciate it. You'll get that when you make yourself approachable, when people know that they can talk to you without repercussions. And so freedom of speech, I think, is one of the hallmarks of a healthy leadership climate.
Good to know. Thank you. So let's, let's move on. Let's move on in your career.
Yeah, so, you know, from the Rangers I went— I commanded a company, a light infantry company, 7th ID. We participated in the invasion of Panama. Uh, amazing experience. I had an amazing company, 111 guys. We deployed to Panama. I had 28 fluent Spanish speakers.
Were you with Bob Porras?
No, no. You know Bob? Yeah, I know. Okay. I think he was in the unit then. I was in the 7th ID. I was about to be in the unit, so I don't think he was in the unit. Oh, okay.
He got, uh, actually I think he jumped in a van with some unit guys.
Was he in the 7th ID? Was he—
I can't remember what he was in.
I gotta ask him. Yeah, I know him. He's a great guy.
I did see some action down there, and then he got picked up and I wound up in a van, and I believe that in the van was a bunch of unit guys, a bunch of D-Boys.
Yeah, I saw them too. So, but, you know, what it taught me was we had better intelligence than the agency or, you know, our, our division intel. Because same thing, always listen to the guy on the ground doesn't just apply to your— the guy who's fighting on the ground. It applies to civilians and to some extent people who are against you too. Listen to what they're saying. But you can't listen if you don't understand the language. And it sounds incredibly elementary, but for all of us who were in Afghanistan, Iraq, you realize one of the biggest barriers to not winning the hearts and minds, not losing the hearts and minds, and understanding where the enemy was, was the language barrier. You know, there, of course, we had interpreters, but, you know, that was usually one per whatever type unit you were in. So the inability to communicate should be, you know, a red flag in any type of expeditionary warfare we're considering. And it's just simple. If you can't communicate, you can't understand what that person's needs are. You cannot even understand how to, you know, get the— get what you need to get out of that person.
Intelligence, operational intelligence, or just, you know, like we were talking about with talking to your soldiers, finding out, taking the temperature of, you know, the society at the time. So from there, you know, I was very fortunate because I came right into the 7th ID, took command, Also very fortunate, I had a great battalion commander who understood. I told him I want to go to unit tryouts after this, and he said, yeah, by all means. So I finished command, uh, 2 months later I went to selection. Again, fortunate, made it through selection. And, uh, you know, that experience— I saw your episode with Larry, and, uh, I can't come close to describing selection as well as he did, so I won't. But there were some great moments in it, again, that, you know, that taught me a lot about human nature. And, uh, you know, it started with the initial psych interview, uh, and a lot of people don't remember this, you probably do, but, you know, it used to be the biggest barrier to getting into the CIA or the special mission units was the lie detector test, the potential lie detector test. And of course, the biggest barrier of the lie detector test was one question: Did you ever do drugs in high school or college?
And so, you know, there were tons of people who, you know, came back, said, no, they didn't take me, you know, I— because I, you know, I told them I tried whatever. In high school, and to include marijuana. And so there was a lot of angst about that. And I went, as I told you, I went to Southern Illinois University Carbondale. I think way, way before I was there in the '70s, Playboy magazine called it the number one party school in the country. It was kind of a party school, but, you know, not egregiously, just in a very fun.
Uh, now I know it wasn't the wilderness down there.
Exactly. So, but I was a marathon runner, triathlete. I had rehearsed all this in my mind. What am I going to do when he starts asking the lie detector test questions? And, you know, just to be honest, I— it was impossible not to have tried marijuana where I went, grew up, in high school and college. Uh, and again, the only thing that kept me, that allowed me to you know, stiff arm it was. I was a hardcore runner, and I, I believed if I took a puff off anything, I'd be knocking like 2 minutes off my time. So, you know, I, I did not, uh, I stopped everything, uh, when I started competing in college. So I walk into the psych interview, and Larry's the head psych guy, and he's sitting there and he's got a manila folder up And he just motions me to sit down. I sit down. I'm like, what the fuck's he doing? And his first words out of his mouth are, Southern Illinois University, huh? That's quite the party school, isn't it? And someone had told me, you know, whatever you do, don't give more information than the question. So don't answer him and then go into some long litany about how you tried it and it was not that great.
You never tried it and you're, you know, all jittery. You can tell you're lying. So just answer the question. I said, yeah, it got some rating in Playboy, but it was really, you know, a great college. And I loved it because it was a great place to run and train for triathlons. I could swim in lakes, you know, run to the lake, run back and do my training there. And he asked me one more question. I can't remember what it was. It was something about Did you ever see cocaine or something? And I just answered him honestly. No, I never saw cocaine without context. And then he said, okay. And he put the manila folder down. And then at the end of the interview, his phone rang, his phone beeper. And it was like, yeah, I'll be right there, sir. And he goes, hey, I got to leave. You know, we got one more person. You got to fill out some stuff. And so I go, okay. Yeah, I'll wait. He goes out. I pick that manila folder up. It's empty.
This is Larry Vickers?
No.
Okay.
Wow.
That's an interesting choice to give a psych patient.
Yeah, he probably could have pulled that off too. But it was part of learning about human nature and about effects-based activity that you can, if you know a desired outcome, then you can plan backwards and use little props to get that effect. And I probably did in my 13 years there, you know, there's 2 selections a year. I probably did 10 boards, sat on 10 boards, and probably 5 or 6 times, me and my sergeant major, when there was a guy with— it was like, hey, he's got some serious— gotten some police trouble. We don't know. It might be nothing, you know. And so we pull out the manila folder. The thing about the manila folder is it's not to try to catch the guy. It's just to see how they react. Because if the guy goes, "Yeah, I, you know, I smoked some weed and, you know, I smoked it for a while, but I stopped, you know, and I haven't smoked in 2 years," whatever, that's fine. You know, same thing. I got drunk one night, I got in a fight. You know, there are a lot of those, and guys would— yeah, guys would think I'm gonna get thrown out.
It'd be hard to find one that didn't, I'll bet.
Yeah, yeah. But you— so you're not trying to trick them to say something, you just want to see how they react. And I carried that forward into the corporate world, and I probably—
what is the reaction you're wanting?
You want to see, uh, cool, calm, collective. You want usually a smile, like, okay, you know. And then instead of getting all uptight and talking fast and stuttering, they just tell the truth. You know, they're resigned to tell the truth. They're resigned to, hey, I'm going to throw myself at mercy of the court. And they handle it. It's a little bit of pressure. You know, it doesn't seem like much, but ownership. Yeah. Yeah. And if you think about that, But it also comes with when you're on an interview board, military or corporate, respect for the person. They're there. They've done everything to get there. This is their dream. This is their life. So callous decisions going, no, I don't like the guy because he smoked weed once or he got drunk that's not what you're looking for. But guys who then turn that into stuttering, long-winded, making up stuff, and you can already see that he was arrested, he got in it, he did battery, all this other stuff, and they're not talking about that. Those guys, you want to scrutinize a little bit closer. It's the same thing in the corporate world. Like I said, I hired about 500 people, or I did about 500 interviews.
I don't know how many we hired. You know, what you're trying to figure out is how that person thinks. You're trying to get inside their head for whatever context you're hiring them. And I was hiring people for sales and marketing, you know, senior sales and marketing people. So you want to see how they react under pressure. If you're a salesperson, You got to be able to take pressure. You know, in the biopharma industry, you're in front of doctors, you're in front of payers, you know, guys who make $1 million a year who are going to price your drug and whatnot. You've got to be able to stay cool, you know, under stress. And so part of that is what we talked about before, the unstructured problem solving, your ability to just work through something. And I had read this thing in Harvard Business Review right before I got out. And it was about what companies like Google were moving to, which was just intellectual questions that you ask someone. And you're not necessarily looking for the right answer. You're looking at how they come up with the answer, how they approach problem solving, and how they communicate that approach.
So, you know, one question was, how much water does the average family of 4 use over a 48-hour period in their house? And, you know, you'd be surprised. Some people immediately, well, I don't know, I've never worked for the water company. And, you know, someone else—
Dissects it.
Well, yeah. Smiles because, okay, 4 people, let's see.
Dishwasher.
Yeah, I drink a gallon a day. Right. And goes through exactly— that's what you want to hear. They're unstructured problem solving. They're saying it out loud. They're using logic, you know, deductive logic to come to an answer. Another question was, why are all sewer caps round? And, you know, there's no right answer to that, it turns out. But there's a lot of reasons they're round. They can't fall into the sewer, you know, around a square will break the street, the structure of a square. To put that into an asphalt street will cause, you know, the physics of the street to fail much quicker than a circle, which is, you know, I guess the strongest self-supporting structure or self-sustaining structure. So there's no real answer, but you want to see how they handle it, if they can think on their feet. They can use logic and common sense. And if you ask pointed questions, tell me about a time, the famous question is, tell me about a time you had a difficult customer. Most of that stuff they've got already prepared. There's a pat answer. You're not going to learn how that person thinks with those type of questions, but ask them something that makes them think, that makes them problem solve, see how they react, see how they communicate, and that, that tells you a lot about that person.
Makes a lot of sense. What— I mean, how is it— do officers go through with the enlisted at OTC?
Yeah, they do. Mm-hmm. Any—
anything extracurricular?
What do you mean?
That you'd go through, for example, in, in— I mean, Through the SEAL pipeline, the officers have— they have an extra, an extra section.
Yeah, there's a— there's— there is an extra.
Is there?
Yeah.
How many officers are going through at once?
It depends. Sometimes, you know, there's none. Uh, sometimes there's, there's a good number of them. I'm not sure on the current, but, you know, there were always— it always seemed like there were 4 or 5 at least. Per class.
I heard you had an incident with a bear.
Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a bear. It was a pig. I thought it was a bear. Oh, this is going to be good. I was navigating on one of the famous legs of the Long Walk. And I was— I believe no one knows the actual— so very few people know the standard. I don't. I believe I was way ahead of schedule, kicking ass. Uh, and I also believe I was close to the end. So, uh, I had to get up this mountain. I took this route that I thought would be the best route, and I ended up in a— what every class, like 10 guys end up in it. It's a manzanilla forest. Oh, so it's like swimming through a sea of 1,000 pitchforks. You're caught in this thing. And there's really— once you're in it, you know, you make the dumb decision initially to keep going. This thing's got to end. And then you're in the middle, and there's really no way out except picking your ruck, throwing it, knocking a couple of the manzanilla vines down, stepping on those, picking your ruck up again. And so, you know, it could take you 100 throws to get out.
So I tried to get up a little bit higher to see if I could spot you know, which direction I should go to, to the— would take me quickest to the edge of the Manzanilla Forest. And so I got up a couple of, uh, branches high, you know, right as I'm reaching for this next one, I'm going, I probably should have taken my rucksack off before I started climbing. And snap, that thing snapped. I fell from the tree, fell down, uh, instantly thought, okay, I'm either paralyzed or broke my back, something, because I fell right on my back. So it was probably a good thing— well, it caused me to fall, probably, so I don't know if it was a good thing, but it cushioned the blow. And, you know, as soon as I checked all my limbs and I was okay, I was like, all right, man. And then I heard, you know, this noise behind me. And, uh, because I've been walking for 30-some miles I tried to croon my neck like, you know, an arthritic old man. You know how when you're rucksacking, you can't move your neck anymore? And I just turned halfway and I saw this thing coming at me, small.
And I, you know, it was squeaking and screaming. And I instantly thought, you know, that's a baby bear. And then I heard, you know, so I was like, baby bear. And of course, any outdoorsman knows if there's a baby, there's a mom. Then I heard the massive crushing of the manzanilla vines behind it, and like the snorting, and bears snort. Um, and so, you know, adrenaline rush. I picked up my rucksack, used it as a shield, and just started sprinting like a madman and mowing down manzanilla as best I could. And sure enough, I came to the edge of the forest. The bears, what I thought were bears, were closing in on me. I could hear them getting closer. So my adrenaline was, you know, all I had left. And once I broke free, you know, the exaltation of breaking free was quickly dampened by the fact that the only thing in front of me was a cliff. Oh, shit. And so I was, you know, I'm like, I'm not getting eaten by a freaking bear while trying to go through selection. So I got up to the edge of that cliff, and I, you know, it wasn't a sheer cliff, it was, you know, like the West Virginia hills, pretty steep.
And I just hurled my body off the edge. Holy shit. Yeah. And hit on my feet. I thought I was going to grab this tree. It was a bad plan. They went right by that tree, cartwheeled down. And I ended up about 300 meters down, and I lost my map. So, uh, it— one of the things is if you lose your map, your weapon— your map and your weapon— you're disqualified. So my map, you know, the end of it was a sheer cliff. My map was gone. It was like, that thing's history. But I had my weapon, my rubber weapon, and I'm like, fuck. Now what I'm going to do— at least I didn't get eaten by the freaking bear. And then I look up and there up top is, you know, uh, is a boar, a pig, a baby pig and a mama. You know, the, the was a massive pig. And of course I'm from Illinois, so I never knew there were wild pigs, you know, in anywhere, much less West Virginia. Uh, and I was I'm like, fuck. And, you know, I had the momentary feel sorry for myself, and then I'm like, dude, you got to get back in it.
And I just brushed myself off, you know, made my way to the top. The pigs were gone. It was just starting to get dark, uh, so, you know, I had no map, but I've been to Panama JOTC 3 times, and in Panama you learn to navigate with your feet, to read terrain with your feet. So if your feet are, are at this angle, you know you're walking off the ridgeline. Uh, you know, when they're flat, you're on the top of the ridgeline. Same thing, you're going left downward. Uh, so you literally are— your brain is totally in touch with your feet because you can't see the terrain features in Panama. They're, they're covered so thickly with jungle canopy. So you navigate with your feet, and that's what I did up there. It got dark, I just said, I know I looked at this route. What's left is about 4 or 5 kilometers on the ridgeline. The ridge, you know, meandered too, so I got to stay on this ridge, uh, you know, with no map. And so I stayed on it. I remember, you know, because probably of the, the, uh, adrenaline rush, uh, I was completely depleted.
I was droning my ass off. I I remember looking ahead of me and going, why is there a washing machine on the trail up there? And, you know, I keep going, keep going. And I, yeah, I thought it was a washing machine because there was a little red light. And I got up to it, and it— to the washing machine, and it was, you know, one of the Delta, uh, cadre. And he was like, you know, color and number. And I gave my color and number. And he goes, go sit over there. And I went and sat over there, and, uh, I was like, uh, I fucked up. I don't have a map, nothing. And, uh, about 5 minutes later, Sergeant Major came over and said, you know, welcome to the unit, you made it.
No shit.
Yeah. So, so, you know, it's just, uh, never give up. Oh, I felt amazing. I was, you know, my dream It was my, my singular goal in the military. It's why I joined. So I was ecstatic. And, you know, they didn't ask for the map. No, I can't remember. I don't— somehow they knew I lost it somehow. Because later, later, a guy who became my, my sergeant major was one of the cadre. And he goes, yeah, we laughed pretty hard at you. And he goes, You know, that happens about 2 or 3 times every single— and I said no. And he said, yeah. I said, have anyone ever been chased by a pig before? And he said, not that I know of, but bears, yes. And, you know, I don't know what else is up there, coyotes or something.
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Yeah, just, uh, I don't know. It's, uh, you're the—
what squadron?
B. B. I started in A, I commanded in, uh, B.
Okay. Well, I mean, how is it— talk to a lot of enlisted guys that have been over there but never an officer, so I mean, what is it like for an officer to check into the squadron as a new guy?
Yeah, it's, you know, to me it's as it should be. You're, you know, you got to earn— if you're going to get any respect, you got to earn it. That's not going to come quickly. You got to earn it over time. So, you know, you going in and talking to people and telling them, you know, how great you are and what you're— how you think is not going to do it. You know, you've got to like earn their trust. And, uh, part of that is, you know, is your competency with tactics, techniques, and procedures. And the other part's just your, you know, ability to use common sense, to communicate, to talk to people. And, you know, for me, like, when my first job, the first troop I got as a brand new, you know, I was a major, so I'm brand new in the troop. That troop, Larry was one of the team leaders. So Larry and I, right from the beginning, you know, kind of connected. He was one of the 3 best shots in the unit. You know, stories of his, you know, amazing shots have circulated the unit. It had been known to me and a lot of other people.
But more than that, he was always a very astute tactician and, uh, never minced words, would always tell you like it is. Uh, and so we just, you know, he, he was like a sounding board for me, uh, operationally. You know, when I would think of something, hey, what do you think about this? And, you know, one of the things we talked about was dogs. And he was one of the first guys who said to me, yeah, a lot of people have talked about it a long time. There's a lot of people don't want them. But somebody tell me they're going— they got to go down and clear a deeply buried underground bunker and tell me that they don't want a dog with them to go in first. And I was like, I agree. Same thing. How about perimeter security? How about clearing just a building, a house, where you got known enemy? So, you know, Larry was a big source of common sense to me. He's also very funny. You know, he and I used to sit through briefings and, you know, go back and forth cracking each other up. And the most famous one was when, for 9/11, after 9/11 happened, we were up at JSOC, and the JSOC intel officer was briefing the plan they had come up with, which was an empty target raid.
And it wasn't even the empty target raid they ended up doing, it was another empty target raid. And me and him were sitting there going, okay. So he opened the, the presentation up, said, you know, we have to do something meaningful. And then he said, we've been We've got the whole staff. We've been working for 96 hours, and this is what we came up with. And Larry and I, in that conversation, created this concept. We called it the operational cul-de-sac. You know, you're— you see the sign that says dead end, but you decide to go down the street anyway just to get turned around in the cul-de-sac and ended up back where you started from in the beginning. And that's what we're going to do here. We'll do an empty target raid, and then we'll be like, okay, let's find a target. Why not find a real target? Why not, you know, instead of just looking for targets, why not make the mission get some guys on the ground and start figuring things out? And, you know, so to back to your question, if you don't have someone like that who you can speak freely with, who, you know, you respect their opinion, they tell it like it is, I think it's a lot harder for an officer, but it should be because it's an incredible position.
You have to be, in my opinion, they don't need an officer, but they need someone to be looking over the next terrain feature. Someone's got to be talking on the radio to hire. Someone's got to be able to call a medevac. Someone's got to be marking off buildings if you're clearing, you know, a small town or whatever. So, you know, focus on what— how you can contribute. Make sure you stay in your lane and the guys, you know, see the value of having you around. But if you do nothing but, you know, act as a barrier, negative, squasher of ideas, overbearing, you know, and tactical operations and planning, you know, you're going to fall right into the, you know, the famous, I don't like officers. And again, to be fair, when I got there, you know, there were some individuals where I just scratched my head and said, you know, what the heck, how did they ever get in here? Wow. No shit.
Even at that command.
Yep. So I think it's good. It's part of the process. You learn, you know, you've got to adapt, you've got to blend in, you got to figure out your role, and you got to respect the amazing combat and intellectual power of a bunch of operators.
Well, I do believe Larry did say you are the only officer that he ever liked working with. He wanted to make that clear.
Wow. Wow. Well, I think that is a high compliment. I did not pay him for that. So, oh man.
So you went to Columbia with—
Yeah, that was my first deployment.
So that was the first one.
Yeah. So getting into the unit, you know, I just give you my impressions like it was like nirvana because when I got there, everyone I talked to at some point talked about Common Sense. And, you know, back then, that's what— if you had to do an elevator speech on what the unit was, it was just an organization that uses common sense. And there were symptoms of that. There were— I don't remember any SOPs. There were no binders that said, this is how we clear a building, this is how we you know, the formation we use when we're doing, uh, desert mobility or whatever, uh, you know, there were, there were historical records, there were things that showed here, here's the formation we use for this or that. But, you know, back to that adaptive risk assessment, it was kind of this adaptive approach to any mission. Don't take set-piece approaches to things. Don't You know, every mission does not take one troop, one squadron, or one platoon, one company, one, you know, battalion. Think about what you need and then, you know, array, allocate, and group your forces that way.
I really like how— I've never heard none of the— but none of the guys that have come in here have talked about that and described the unit as a place of common sense. And that really Fucking resonates with me. Yeah, because, man, I'm trying to put it into words, but I mean, it's just other units are not able to operate with common sense because of the fucking red tape and the guardrails that are put all around them.
So true.
Flying at night, daytime operations only. All these kind of fucking things. And that's just— I mean, those are just the two that pop in my head immediately. But you didn't have those guidelines over there. Why don't you think that more military units use fucking common sense? Because I've— even in the SEAL teams, a lot of common sense fucking completely gone.
Yeah, no, I, uh, that's what I do now. I consult. I teach companies how to use common— the common sense way to make decisions and solve complex problems. And it's, it's not, again, it's not theoretical, it's biologic. You just gotta, you know, follow your instincts, what the brain tells you to do. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. Uh, but that's, that's the way the unit was described to me. When, you know, the unit had the, the closest thing to like a charter was 3 guiding principles. And, you know, I used them on every mission I went on. The first one was understand what's going on around you. The second one was blend in anywhere. And the third one is the only failure is a failure to try. And later, I would minimize those to learn, adapt, and interact in any situation. Learn about the situation going on around you, adapt to it, adapt to what you learn, and interact. It's the only way you're going to learn. You've got to get out on the frontier and interact with the Indians in the terrain. You've got to understand that. So, you know, when that was first told to me, I was, you know, I took it like you take any guiding principles.
It was like, wow, those are cool. But when I got down to Colombia— so Colombia, just to give you some background, it started '91 when Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxury prison. The president of Colombia said, "No more deal-making, no more being nice. He's going to jail and he's going to jail for life." So the manhunt began. Of course, the manhunt in a foreign country or any operation is run by the embassy country team. You know that a lot of people don't understand that. But the embassy country team, which is an ambassador, usually the key instruments of national power. There's a MilGroup commander for the military, there's a CIA station chief, there's a DEA station chief everywhere down south, and there's usually an FBI guy, smaller group. They do criminal, international criminal stuff. But the MilGroup commander, the CIA, and the DEA were the, you know, key honchos down there. The ambassador, the guy, incredibly astute ambassador, his name was Ambassador Busby. He was very unhappy with his country team because of one of the most common symptoms of all country teams. Instead of working together and collaborating as a team, they work at cross-purposes.
And a big reason for that is because they're incentivized to. Whoever gets credit for taking out Pablo is going to get the big budget. They're going to all get rewarded. A lot of people don't do it in DOD, but, you know, in the agency, if you do well on a mission, even back then, you got like a $30K stipend for, you know, not an ARCOM, not a little ribbon with a piece of, you know, that we were like, did you see this ARCOM I got? Wow. And, you know, all proud of it. They got like $30 grand. So they were, you know, the system like incentivized them to work at cross purposes. And then same problem, you know, you've seen it in the agency. The majority of people that end up in those stations are people with no life experience. They're never going to leave the embassy. All the reports, you know, big eye-opener down there. I'm like, you're the guy who writes the reports. Never left his office in Bogotá. He's writing about Cali, writing about Medellín. Wow. Yeah. But they're working at cross purposes. And so he said he had been to a demo and he, he called back and I'm not sure who he called to, but he said, I want some unit guys down here to help me figure this thing out.
And so the unit sent a first team down. I wasn't with the first team. But that team, he told the same thing he told me later, which is, I need you guys to help me bring this team together. They don't work together. I might as well have 4 country teams because there's no communication, there's no sharing of information. And if you guys get in on this, then maybe you can do that. And, you know, one of our missions was, "We are what you need us to be." So, you know, we took that on as a challenge. And when I got down there, it was the last of Pablo. It was when Pablo got killed in Medellín. And my job was liaison in the embassy in Bogotá. So I was part of the country team. And right off the bat, you know, I was like, when I came in and the ambassador told me, gave me my charter, he goes, look, I'm dependent on you. And if we're going to get him and get the other guys, we're going to need you guys to do it. And so I went back to my office and I was like, okay, what in the F do I do now?
And then I just thought about it, you know, the 3 guiding principles: understand what's going on around you, blend in anywhere, the only failure is a failure to try. So understand what's going on around you. Immerse yourself in the history of the country. Immersed myself specifically not just in the cartel traffic, but, you know, all the way back to the Panama Canal times where basically Panama used to be part of Colombia. And why is that important? Because a lot of Colombians still carry a chip on their shoulder about Panama and the canal. That's one thing, getting up to speed on the Spanish language, making sure you're fluent. I had a good— you know, I took it in college. I had a good understanding, but I had to, you know, up my game on the language. That's understand what's going on. And the other part that was key was understanding the two guerrilla armies that were actually a huge part of the cocaine processing network, and that was the FARC and the ELN. And, you know, they're both, I think, back around again because Maduro refinanced them and, you know, rebuilt them. The ELN's in the north, Ejército de Liberación Nacional, and the FARC is down south in Amazonia.
So, you know, and then blend in anywhere, you know, now you're working on a country team. So besides you know, my khaki jungle stuff. Uh, I gotta wear a suit every day. I gotta comport myself so that, you know, I— the people in the State Department, CIA aren't calling you a knuckle-dragger. You got to be able to communicate. Uh, and, you know, only failure is a failure to try. My, my main thing was we got to get people out of Bogotá. They need to be down where the narcotrafficking is going on. We have to be interacting with the the environment and the people. And that eventually— I mentioned Pablo got killed. The Colombian HRT deserved 100% credit for that, and they did it. The Agrupación is what they're called down there. But immediately, the day after he died, the ambassador called me in and he goes, okay, I want to go after the Cali Cartel now, and I want you to lead the effort to go after the Cali Cartel.
This is after Pablo was killed?
The day after.
Can you talk about the day he was killed?
Yeah, it's pretty much, uh, he, you know, one thing about him was he loved his family, and, uh, they had identified this weakness. He had to get on, you know, a mobile phone and talk to his son. And his son, at the time, his son and his mom were staying in like the Hilton in Bogotá. They were you know, house— under house arrest or whatever, because they tried to flee, I believe, and a number of countries said they would not allow them. So Pablo was in Medellín. I can't remember the relationship of the house. I think his mom was— either his mom's house or his mom's friend. He was hiding out there, and he got on his cell phone to call his son. His voice, he instantly was voice matched. We had trained up the agrupación on how to use the direction-finding SIGINT package, which was literally a package you put it in the back seat and then you had like the equivalent of an antenna that you would point out. It looked like a bullhorn you'd point out, and that thing could triangulate a cell signal. And they literally— the— because the, the initial hit on it just put it in, I think, a 400 by 400 meter area.
So they went out driving, uh, two guys with the direction-finding equipment, and they just did, you know, a comprehensive search in the neighborhood, up, down, up, down. And on like their third up, down, bing, a hit. And The guy who got the hit, you know, looked up and there in the bathroom window of this house was fat old Pablo on the phone. And they immediately slammed on the brakes, ran up there, got in a gunfight and shot him dead.
Wow.
Yep.
Shit.
And yeah.
In Bogotá?
Medellín.
You were in Medellín?
No, no, I was in Bogotá when it happened. Yeah, but there were guys down there in Medellín when it happened. And they were in a safe house. But it was 100%, you know, Colombian. When you hear people say the US did it, that's— we had nothing to do with it. And we— that was not by accident. We knew how sensitive it was, and we knew that, you know, to kill Pablo, it's got to be by the Colombians, or capture him, because, you know, a bunch of gringos grab him, it just makes him a martyr, a hero. You know, and a lot of people liked him down there. They did, especially around Medellín. He sponsored soccer teams, built parks, you know, employed a lot of people. Yeah. So, but anyway, I mean, how does that feel?
First deployment, killed probably the number one most wanted guy in the world.
Well, you know, I didn't do it, but I mean, it felt good to see it happen, to see success. That the efforts, you know, which had been going on, I think, 6 or 9 months, were, you know, were successful. And then, you know, I didn't have time to reflect because that next day he said, we're going after the Cali Cartel. And, you know, I did the same thing. I was like, what do we need? How are we going to do this? And, you know, to our conversation earlier, the first thing was no no embassy employee had stepped foot in Cali up to that point. So you had this place that was supposedly 100% controlled by the cartel, you know, totally inhospitable to any outsider. And we were like, well, there's only one way to find out. Let's get some guys down there. And there was— there's a military airfield down there. So we, you know, flew down there, unloaded our guys. The Colombian our partners, the HRT, was, you know, very sensitive about down there. They're like, you guys have to, you know, maintain low vis, uh, out here, or, you know, it can get really bad.
But what they found— first off, Cali's beautiful. If they ever turn it into a resort, uh, it'll take off like almost nowhere else in the world. Gorgeous terrain. Yeah, it's, it's beautiful. People, you know, all across Colombia are great. They're super nice, super friendly. And, you know, so we had the beginning of an op, and, you know, I returned. I would go down there, check on them. The guys, you know, the guys were living in squalor. I went back to the embassy, and, you know, I had instantly an amazing breakthrough. And this is probably 3 weeks to 4 weeks in from when he gave us the mission. So I'm back at the embassy. It's Christmas time in Bogotá. And I can't remember, I think it was like the 23rd. And I was in my little office next to the ambassador's office. It was 7 o'clock at night. And I just, I just got off the SATCOM with the guys down there. They were— and what they told me gave me pause. They were like, Pete, we barely get any food. The Colombian supply system's hard broke. It's not their fault. They're not getting much food either.
But the real problem is water. We've been out of bottled water. We're trying to boil it. A lot of the— we're not sure if some of the food the Colombians are feeding us is cooked. In water that was boiled at the right temperature. And sure enough, we're all sick as dogs, shitting our brains out. We've lost like 15 pounds. We're living in squalor. And the safe house, what's supposed to be a safe house, it's definitely safe, but it's not a house. It's a shit shack. So it's a safe shit shack that we're staying in. And I said, well, shit, man. Do you guys want to come home? I'll send an aircraft down tomorrow and bring you home. And they're like, no, no, no, no. We're fine. We can hang another couple weeks. Just don't forget about us, Panther, and get some good intel. And I'm like, roger that. So I literally, you know, put the SATCOM receiver down. I was standing there, and then another SATCOM radio that printed out digital messages beeped to life. And this one was, was an intel net, and it was sending me a SIGINT hit from the massive— you've seen them— the massive radar dishes that dot South America.
It was a SIGINT hit. And I, you know, tore the thing off and read it, and it was like, SIGINT hit: Miguel Rodriguez Orihuela, one of the Orihuela brothers, head of the Cali Cartel, positive ID at this lat-long. And I'm like, holy shit. So I go over, we had a wall map, you know, about half the size of this. Cut this wall in half, it would cover the half the wall. And I went on and, you know, it took me a couple minutes to do the lat long. And I remember looking up at it and going, wow, these fucking guys know what they're doing. He was in, he was in a 100-meter square around the most pricey condominium real estate up by the Zona Rosa. In Bogotá. And then because it was a 1:25,000 topographic map, I followed the terrain down from the Sigon hit, and right below him was the 10-acre U.S. ambassador's residence. And, you know, my first thought was like simple genius: what better place to hide than right next door to the guy who's leading the search against you? So my next thing was, I, I gotta, you know, we got to take action on this.
So I left my office, like I said, I think it was around 7 at night. I left my office, went down to the agency's office, locked tight, no one there, lights off. DEA, locked tight, no one there, lights off. Uh, Mill Group, locked tight, no one off. And I was, I was really looking for DEA or CIA. And specifically CIA, but nothing. So I got on the phone, the landline. I called their emergency numbers, got voicemail on all of them. So this was— this is another, you know, as I'm doing this, I'm going, this is why the ambassador brought us down here.
Probably out drinking.
Yeah. Well, you know, it's— we're like military guys. When they're on a mission, they're on a mission. There's no time limits. You know, you're going to pull an all-nighter if the mission, you know, requires it. But that's not the same. And for good reason. They all had their families there. But you could see most embassy company country teams have this corporate mentality.
You know, you just cannot match the work ethic.
No.
Of military guys, probably especially SOF. I've not worked in a conventional unit, but you cannot You cannot fucking match that work ethic anywhere you go.
You're right.
Unless you're working here at Sean Ryan Show.
I've talked to some of your employees.
They told me they work their fucking asses off. They invested what they got.
A heck of a team out there.
But that is one of the things I noticed immediately.
Yeah.
When I started contracting for CIA, these people's work ethic fucking sucks.
Yeah. Yep.
All they give a fuck about is getting drunk.
Yeah.
Tally bar.
Yeah. And it's, it's not good. And then for the wrong reasons, and you're trying to do something, it gets frustrating if you let it. But anyway, you know, so, so I'm trying to figure out what to do, and there's a knock on the door, and I'm like, come in. And it's the ambassador's secretary. Her name was— I'll call her Maria. And she was like, this could go one of two ways here. Oh, Sean. So maybe both ways. I don't know. So, um, I heard you're a Delta. She— I already had a good relationship with her because, as funny as it sounds, she was a career State Department employee and she was just an administrative assistant. But if you needed an answer in that embassy, like if you needed to know, hey, I got this. Who do I talk to? And then what do I do after I talk to them? She'd tell you, okay, don't talk to this guy. Talk to this guy. Don't tell him what you want. Just tell him what you found. She'd give you advice like that. Very highly contextual, very valuable. She helped us. I can't put adjectives on it, but she stuck her head in the door.
She goes, hey, I just wanted to check on you. It's pretty late. You're the only one here. And I'm like, yeah. Yep, I got a really— we got something kind of hot right now, Maria. I, you know, I'm super busy. And she goes, oh, well, I wanted to just, uh, tell you we're having, uh, dinner at my place tonight. A bunch of people from the country team are coming over. We've got, you know, the steaks in Colombia are like all-world steaks. We've got fresh steaks. The chef's gonna put them on in, uh, like 20 minutes. They should be ready. In an hour. And I'm like, you know, Maria, I can't. I'm here. I'll probably be here all night. And, uh, you know, this is really hot. I'm sorry. And she goes, okay, well, um, you know, if you change your mind, here's my address, and, uh, I don't bite. And I took the address, and then she said, I don't bite. And this is part of not working with women. The door shut. And I awkwardly said, well then, how will you swallow your meat? And I was like, fuck, I cannot believe I just said that.
It's the fucking stupidest thing I ever said. Oh shit. And I go back to plot the thing, and all of a sudden the door opens up again and she goes, what did you just say? And I go, I asked how will you chew your food? And she goes, oh, okay, I thought you said something different, but, uh Okay, the offer still stands. Uh, we're going to be there. You work really hard, so if you finish this up, uh, please just come over. Steaks will be ready. It'll be a good time. And I'm like, yep, I, I, you know, no change. So I went back, I called my guys down, um, uh, down, you know, in Cali, and I told— bounced it off them. I said, hey guys, here's what I got. And they're Panther, you got to figure something out, man. You got to act on this. This could lead to a lot of intel. And this could be it. This is the opportunity we can't pass up. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I'll get back to you guys. I'm going to keep trying to call these other country team members. I tried again, no answer.
So I went over to the map board and something about this yellow sticky she gave me, I was like, I wonder where this is. So, you know, it was like 122 Callaway, something like that. Calle, you know, C-A-L-L-E. So I went up the map, I go inside the circle, like in— she's— her condo is, uh, which makes sense, is also above the ambassador's residence, the best real estate in town, inside this at the time it was a 100-meter circle, the SIGINT circle is her apartment. So I'm like, holy shit, damn. So I called the guys back up and I go, guys, Horn's with a dilemma here. You know, uh, no one's answering their phone. This, this SIGINT hit is getting colder by the minute. Right now it's 26 minutes old. Uh, so what I found out is The SIGINT hit comes either the same apartment or the apartment next door to one of the embassy employees who asked me to come over for dinner, but I told her I can't. You know, I'm not going over to anyone's house for dinner while you guys are shitting your brains out. They're like, Panther, come to your senses.
Get your ass in the car and drive to that party and check it out. It's the only thing we got. And I'm like, Okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be gone. I gave him a 5-point contingency. I said, it takes— it should take me about a half hour to drive there. I'm going to drive. So give me a half hour there, half hour back. I may need to hang out in the party just as part of my cover for action. So give me 2 hours max. If I'm not back in 3 hours, call SOUTHCOM and tell them, you know, what happened and where I went. They're like, roger that.
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So, you know, again, this is my first deployment. I get my car, it's nighttime. There was not a restriction against driving at night, in Bogotá, but it was highly discouraged by the State Department security. But I knew the route. I'd driven all over Bogotá, and the route to get there took me through Parque Nacional, which is a pretty hairy part of Bogotá. And I remember all my, you know, all my training had come into place. I took my.45 out. It had a piece of Velcro stuck to the handgrip. Grip. I also had a piece of hook pile tape, which is what Velcro sticks to, on the dashboard. So I stuck my.45 on the— because I got to drive, you know. So I stuck my.45 on the dashboard, put my hat over it, uh, so that if I ran into an ambush in Parque Nacional, I could just blast away through the front windshield and drive out of the ambush. So I drove you know, made it there. I got within, uh, you know, about 500 meters, slowed down. It was like, okay, you know, am I doing the right thing here? You know, and I know I don't want to go to the apartment, but I got to check it out to see if— I got to check the Sigint hit out.
So I drive up, and, you know, I'm— my cover for action is I'm going to this dinner. So, you know, I'm I shift my mindset. Don't act like a guy checking out a sig-in hit. Act like a guy, a dumbass embassy employee, going to an embassy party. So I pull up, beautiful glass-faced, you know, high-rise condominium, 20 stories maybe. Beautiful, you know, you can tell these are massive condos. Full glass vestibule. And I get out of my car, I park in front, and the car next to me was a Lexus, a black Lexus with tinted windows. And as soon as I got out of my car, I was like, there's someone in that car and they're looking at me. And, you know, the same thing had happened to me. My house had gotten robbed in Washington a couple of years earlier, and I came home from a bar and the guys who robbed it were in the car next to me. And I had the same thing. I was like, my spider senses set off that someone was looking at me. So, you know, I dismissed it. I'm like, stick with your cover, stick with your cover, keep walking.
So I walked up, you know, uh, act like you've been here before. I opened the door, act like you know where you're going. I walked over to the, you know, the doorbell call box thing, saw her name, hit the thing. You know, walked over to the elevator. It was a private elevator. And, you know, turned. And as I turned, 4 guys were getting out of that Lexus. 3 of them were gigantic. One was, you know, your typical, like, CEO-looking guy in the back seat, which, you know, fit the whole profile. And, you know, I'm like, come on, elevator, come on, because they're coming into the lobby. And as soon as their door opened into the lobby, the elevator door opened for me. And I took one glance before I walked in and I saw the lead guy, you know, $1,000 suit at the time. And I saw a sidearm that he was armed. You know, there's no guns. You're not allowed to have guns in Colombia unless you're a narcotrafficker or pistols in Bogotá. So about, you know, up elevator, I'm going up, I'm like, what the fuck? I think that's them and they're in this building.
So up the elevator goes, it comes to her condo, bing, the door's open. The whole condo is like dark. There's, you know, like 5 people in there drinking champagne, soft music, there's like candlelit. Oh table in the background, and all 5 of them turned at the same time. And they're all dressed— they somehow changed, dressed to the nines. All of them turned, Pete, welcome, so glad you're here. And, you know, I looked at them, and again, you know, can't hide my geekiness. Bam, I hit the closed door button and the down button at the same time. They're like— the last thing I heard was one of the guys say, what the fuck? All right, all right, man. All right. Breathe, breathe. You know, I'm going down, I'm going down. What if they're still in the lobby? Uh, first thing I did was touch my, my.45, uh, you know, and then touch my spare mag. I had 8 rounds in the.45, 7 in the mag, so I had 15 shots. Should be more than enough if I get in a shootout, but I don't want to get in a shootout. What I want to do is walk right by them, get their license plate, and then drive away.
And so Bing! The doors open up. There they are again. Same thing. This time, they're standing inside the lobby. Just one of them's on, like, you know, the old-school brick cell phones. So I take a deep breath. I walk, you know, right by them. I walk out. I look at the Lexus. It does have license plates. In a split second, I was able to memorize the license plate number. I got in my vehicle and I drove away. And I, you know, I drove about a block away and then just watched. And sure enough, they— right after I walked out, they loaded their vehicle. And I was like, I might have spooked them. You know, I got to, like, think worst-case scenario. So I got back to the embassy. I immediately got on the SATCOM to my guys. I go, guys, Here's what happened. They're like, what the fuck? Did you go back there? I'm like, no, you know, I can't go back again. I don't want to blow the COVID and I don't want them to, you know, know that there's embassy people living there or whatever. But we got to process this thing. And so can you guys somehow, without, uh, you know, letting the agrupación intel guys know what we're doing, just see— you know, I know they run plates all the time.
They have a massive database of Colombian plates. See if you can run it and see what happens. And he goes, no problem, Panther, we know the guy who does it, we'll do that. So they ran the plates, and sure enough, they were registered to this office in Cali, uh, which, you know, they called up on a, uh, satellite photo that they had on their laptop. Like, it's an office, it's a one-story office, can we go now? And I'm like, Guys, it's got to be HRT, you know. And they're like, yep, yep, roger. Okay, we'll get them ready for an op tomorrow morning. And so I stayed in my— in— slept in the, uh, my office that night. The next morning—
HRT?
What's that?
FBI's HRT?
No, these are the Colombian HRT, is their equivalent of SEAL Team Six and Delta Force. They're the Agrupación is what they're called. They're their CT force. And so, you know, the next morning I wake up because I hear voices out and it's the ambassador. He was an early riser and the CIA station chief out there. And CIA station— I walk out and CIA station chief's going, Ambassador, we got this SIGINT hit last night. We processed it. We know where it's at. And we're ready to go. And Ambassador goes, "Okay, make sure you brief Pete and then let me know what you guys decide to do." And he turns to me and he goes, "Okay." And I go, "Hey, man, check out this license plate number and tell me what you find out." And he goes, "Okay. You mean you know what happened?" And I told him, "Yeah, I was here last night. Didn't you get my answering machine message?" He goes, "Oh, that was you? Yeah, I never listened to those." So that next day, all this worked together to get approval for the Agrupación guys to hit this small office, one-story office, with my guys.
So they get to the facility, and this is '92, I think. '93. Yeah, '92. So, I mean, think about even in 1000, most people don't know what, you know, a computer hard drive is. In 2000, even in 2000, people were still learning the internet and stuff. So it was full of computers and hard drives and printers. And, uh, my guys called me and they're like, Panther, we got to go inside. They don't know anything about computers. They don't know what to grab. what could be sensitive. They don't know how to interrogate the devices. And we had our SIGINT guy down there. He had all this high-speed shit you could just plug in. So I go, okay, I got to talk to SOUTHCOM because our ROE is we're not allowed to go step foot on any target that the HRT is in. So I call SOUTHCOM and I'm going, this probably isn't the smartest thing to do, but I got to do it. So I call them. Guy gets on the phone, he goes, "Okay, okay, let me run it by the boss." Calls me back 10 minutes later, "Permission denied. You shouldn't even be out there.
It's their op. Should be letting them run the op themselves. But permission denied. They're not allowed to go in." So I call them back up, I go, "Guys, here's the guidance. You're not allowed to go inside." They're like, "Roger that." So So, you know, they had all the— had the agrupación open all the windows. They went to each window around the building. They got on top of the roof. There was a massive skylight. They opened the skylight. They started pointing, "That's a hard drive. Get that, get that." And the result was all that info turned up. Somewhere in there were two things: 8 key congressmen that they were bribing. In the Colombian government and also an address of one of their main residences. And that resident was, uh, was taken by DEA and agency guys, and they ended up going in there with the Colombian HRT and arresting the Uribe brothers. Found one of them, he was hidden in— he was in a hidden room, uh, in there. So So to me, I reflected long on that, and my lesson was how sensitive decision-making is to context and that you can never pre-decide anything, or you can never tell what you would do in a given situation without context.
Was I going to the party as an excuse to check out the Sigint hit? Or was I going to the Sigint hit as an excuse to go to the party? I don't know. Would I have gone if it had been somewhere else? I can't say that. But I know in the context of the moment why I did what I did. And, you know, I was happy with every bit of it. To include, you know, leaving, hitting the down button on that elevator and going down. And, you know, they found out what happened. And all that did was get me invited to about 10 more of those.
Nice.
Yeah. But, you know, we had very clear lines, demarcation lines of never mixing business and pleasure. So right on. So, yeah, that was my— and so, you know, you started this asking about going after the cartels in Mexico, and that's what I mean, something similar to that. But the added challenge, it's so difficult to know who to trust in Mexico and specifically in the government.
Yeah.
That, you know, it's going to be tricky, but I'm sure there are some, you know, Mexico experts who can come up with a counter solution, and then just incrementally work, develop the situation, work the intel, have people in place where you can take advantage of opportunities. And then, you know, the courage of your convictions to act. If it makes sense, do it. Even if it seems like you're bending the rules a little bit, fucking bend them, man. And, you know, ask for, ask for, uh, ask for permission later or ask for forgiveness later.
I've got a question for you. Since we're talking about cartels and I'll just wrap it up into everything. I mean, if we are taking out a cartel, a terrorist organization, some type of a machine, through everything that you've been through, because you've been through just about every damn conflict that's happened in what, since Panama, would you rather go start with the bottom up or the top down?
I think if you got the intel on the top down, go top down. It's just usually it's the inverse. You got the intel on the you know, the subalterns, the lieutenants, and it's much sketchier on the big guy. But if you got good intel, you know, you got to take it while you got it, because finding a guy who doesn't want to be found is, even with all the technology today, is super difficult. Um, you know, the Maduro thing is an incredible op, and someday I'm sure we'll find out you know, where the intel came from, but it had to be pretty good. I wouldn't have passed that up either. So yeah, I'd always go top. I think, you know, that's why human hunting, you know, if we had taken out Hitler, if we had had the balls in '98 to take out bin Laden— and we— he wasn't that hidden. He was in caves. He was living in Kandahar, driving to Khost. You know, every week, which is like 400 miles on, you know, elephant-sized potholed roads surrounded by landmines. So, it takes like 10 hours to drive there, and he was doing that every week.
We could have gotten him en route. We could have gotten him in Khost, could have gotten him in Kandahar. We stayed in his house. We used it as a safe house after the invasion. We could have taken that thing out, No audacity, no, uh, you know, no listening to the guys on the ground. Uh, you know, I, I doubt President Clinton at the time had someone telling him, you know, we can do this, it's not this complicated thing. But at the time, uh, he had a four-star, the head of the military, was telling him, you know, whatever we do, we can't— it can't involve boots on the ground in Afghanistan. It's like, dude, why? You know, no one even know. You could land in Afghanistan, could have landed anytime before 9/11 on a, on a dry lake bed, a dirt road, anywhere, and no one would have known you were there. Yeah. So, you know, uh, those are the components, and, you know, we have those now. So it's just a matter of, you know, the interagency unity of effort again, and that's critical. And I'm hoping that that's working. You know, I know that the CIA still needs a lot of course correction from the tidal wave of woke hires they made from 2020 to 2024.
And I'm not being derogatory. I'm just— that's the truth. And I would say that if they were all right-wing fanatics, you can't have political people in the CIA. You just can't. You can't have them in DOD either, but you can't have them in CIA because it's much more prone with the money and everything else to nefarious activities. And as we saw, you know, we now have seen And again, Tulsi Gabbard released that memo where, you know, the head of the CIA had already approved that the memo, the famous, you know, Hunter Biden laptop memo 51, had already endorsed sending that thing around. Gina Haspel, right, was the— so you just can't be that way. And it's so foreign to most of us. Like, if anyone had ever said to me during the Obama administration, hey, we got some guys, there's guys on the inside and they're working to overthrow Obama, I'd fucking rat them out, man. He's the president of the United States. And, you know, they wouldn't have said that because it's so far out of the, you know, out of the just any concept of righteousness or logic. But, you know, that was the case.
They were doing everything they could to, you know, get rid of Trump. And who knows how many opportunities were missed, you know, with real criminals, real narcoterrorists, real terrorists during that time. They were all focused on Trump.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So where do we go from here? Somalia?
Yeah, we go there next.
What was your involvement there?
I was, uh, backup. So I'm in, uh, so C did the mission. So before the mission happened, uh, it actually, uh, coursed through all three squadrons. So B had— if you were on alert, you had the mission and you rehearsed the Somalia mission, how to get Adid. You know, it was more or less a single snatch type thing we were working on. And, uh, so B had it first, then A, which was me and Larry, and then C. We passed it like the day of that they deployed was the turnover, and the commander decided to give it to them, which, you know, it's fine. They, and they did amazing there. But, you know, the rehearsals were, I think, you know, have some key learning points in them too, because the rehearsals, this was, this was the, the like onset of the MH-60 dominating every mission that special ops went on. They were, they were new. The fleet was just updated. All the 160 Blackhawks were new. They were big, you know, they were— they held the most people. And they want— every mission was, you know, default to an air assault raid. And so we were out there rehearsing.
There's no competition between squadrons. And like all missions, you're not really believing this one's going to happen because you know, we've been through 1,000 dry holes or 1,000— nope, don't need your plan anymore, you know, knock it off. So it was just, you know, the way I described Larry before, like, just common sense, looking at shit, what works, what not. And so after the first night, uh, we were like, these Blackhawks are not assault platforms. Um, it takes 45 seconds for a Black Hawk to brake, flare, hover, and get his rope down. And then it takes another 45 seconds just to get one aircraft load of unit operators all the way to the ground. So you're talking a minute and a half. A Little Bird with 4 guys on it can pull up to a balcony, the top of the building, the side of the building, If it's a balcony, you can do one skid, turn around, do the other skid. But basically, a Little Bird, it's brake flare, hover, dislodge, 15 seconds. So a Little Bird was 15 seconds in and out, and a Black Hawk was a minute and a half. And we were like, they're gonna blow that fucking Black Hawks out of the sky.
Common sense.
Common sense. And Larry, Larry, it was me and Larry. It was like 2 in the morning. And unfortunately, in the AAR was led by all Black Hawk pilots and stuff, and they were great guys who I know and I would be honored to fly with. But they took it like, you know, personally, or like we were making an emotional thing. And it's like, guys, I like your Black Hawk too, but I just don't want to ride that thing into combat. We have enough Little Birds. Why don't we put the whole squadron on Little Birds? So we needed 12 Little Birds to do that, the whole assault force, I should say. And, uh, and, you know, that went all the way up to the commanding general. Well, the commanding general was a helicopter pilot, a Black Hawk pilot. And so the answer came back very swiftly: keep the Blackhawks. Um, and so the next thing we were doing is, you know, you're rehearsing the shit out of them. We're like, can we at least try some other techniques? And, you know, one idea someone in the troop came up with was, you know, they have these shit-sucking trucks.
That is the only way they— they don't have sewer lines. They just have shit-sucking trucks that suck the shit out of their little vats below the houses. And they drive all over. Why not get a shit-sucking truck? Hollow that thing out, clean it out, and we ride inside the shit-sucking truck right to the target, jump out, grab them. You know, we can even wait inside of it until the target presents itself. And that idea got kind of quashed too, and not by, you know, any— not by other squadrons or anything, by the higher headquarters. So it just, you know, it was just formidable to me because, you know, I already— it was already apparent that everyone expected the US to come in helicopters, you know, and, and, and we knew how easy it was to knock a helicopter out of the sky just with an AK-47, much less an RPG. So, you know, it just did not seem to make sense. And from then on, I was dogmatic about no helicopters allowed. And the main reason is not even the tactical operational that I was just talking about. It's because when you default to the helicopter solution, you immediately divorce yourself from the real deep thinking that's required for any successful op.
You know, what time does the guard shift change? What time do they eat dinner at? What's the pattern these guards do each night? You know, at the specific time we're looking at H-hour, you know, can we, can we use something like the shit-sucking truck to get in there? All these things that if you don't have a helicopter, you're going to think about. So I guess going back again to unstructured problem solving, it's not unstructured problem solving if someone says, I need you to do a raid on these Blackhawks. The only option is either fast rope or land where a Black Hawk can land. So already you're fencing your options in, and then that means you've completely lost surprise. And so squirters, unless you're surrounding the target, you're going to have squirters, and squirters almost always get away. So, you know, defaulting to the, the helo mindset, it's nothing against— we still need helos there, you know, we need to have them. But I think even most Black Hawk guys would agree it's not an assault platform. It was never built to be an assault platform. That flies to a target with known enemy and somehow lands or disgorges its guys.
The Little Bird is— it's like a flying dirt bike. It can get anywhere it wants to go. It's got that small bubble signature. It even crashes well. It bounces when it crashes. Very survivable. And they're in and out, you know, like that. 15 seconds versus a minute and a half. So You know, I, I just became a big advocate of don't use helos unless you have to, and if you do have to, always try to use the Little Bird first.
Who shot that down?
Uh, well, multiple were shot down. It was just the Somalis with the RPGs.
No, no, no, no, no, that's who shot the, the ideas down.
Oh, uh, JSOC.
JSOC shot it down.
Yep. Yeah, at the time, you know, probably take some hits for this, but you had like the helicopter mafia was in place. And by God, we've got these multi-million dollar machines and we got to use them. We got to show results for spending all that money on these helos. It's human nature But so, so it was a—
it was a— it was a TF-160 Mafia. It's a JSOC.
Yeah, no, I wouldn't even call them— they were old TF guys. But, you know, I think maybe that is a mistake. Maybe what?
I mean, that, that in itself is a mistake, isn't it?
Yeah, I think so. I'm— again, I don't want to sound controversial, but But, you know, in, in those first years, I was commanded by my JSOC commander for the Battle of Shaiyekot was an Air Force one-star general who flew transport planes. And he flew C-141s his whole career. And so, and he was a nice guy, but my uncle's a nice guy too. But I'd never put him in charge of a bunch of commandos in a war zone. And, uh, you know, where— show me where in the military guys like you and me are taking command of F-16 wings or F-15 fighter squadrons. It's not— they don't put ground guys in charge of air, so why are you putting air guys in charge of ground?
Zero fucking sense.
Yeah, but there's been a bunch of them, and, uh, You know, nothing against those guys, they're just taking what they can get. But I, I just agree with your premise. It's— it doesn't make any sense. You know, you— all you can contribute at that level is wisdom and knowledge, uh, and hopefully learn through experience. But you've got to be able to relate the nuances.
You only get that from a well-rounded team.
Yep, yep.
What was the sentiment at the unit after that happened?
Happened after Mogadishu? Uh, it was, you know, great, uh, like, concern. I mean, first empathy for the guys, you know, and see— and the families. Um, I, you know, I, I can't speak for everybody, but for us, it was my circle of guys, it was just, you know, uh, we need to learn, like, hard lessons and be very honest. And the unit was always very good at that. Uh, you know, you, you pull off what you think is the most successful op in the world, and you get your ass ripped apart in the AAR afterwards. And usually good stuff brought up, you know, they were, they were productive, they weren't, uh, character assassination events. But we never really were able to hot wash it You know, a number of key commanders got hurt. General Harrell, he became a general, he was injured by that mortar round. So, you know, was in a little bit of turmoil. I don't think we ever, you know, did justice to all the lessons. And quite frankly, you know, more, more than that, I wanted to hear like each of these team leaders the— who were in C. I wanted to hear their stories, you know, what happened to them, because they were all in slightly different battles, you know, all throughout Mogadishu.
And one guy pretty much became a personal hero of mine, Paul Howe, because he was taking it to the enemy, you know. Uh, the Rangers and a bunch of other people had to, you know, ordered, hey, stay static, stay in position. We got to figure out where everyone is. Well, Paul Howell was like, I'm not staying static. Let them surround me. And he just started moving and clearing buildings and clearing up a huge portion of the sector to ensure they wouldn't get surrounded on the 1 or 2 square block area where everyone was located. So, you know, I wanted to hear more of that. Um, but other than that, I mean, it was no— there was no negativity. It was just empathy and, you know, compassion for the families and, uh, the guys who got injured, some of them, you know, very seriously. So it took a, you know, it took a big toll. And, uh, you know, same thing I said to you earlier, No one was walking around cursing Bill Clinton. No one was walking around— that didn't exist, you know. We didn't take it out politically. We take out on ourselves. What could we have done better?
You know, should we have agreed to this? Uh, you know, I know one of the things, uh, C brought up was this template mentality they were forced to follow. It was the same because you had this helicopter package. The same package was used The Little Birds went in immediately around whatever the target building was or on top of. The Blackhawks went to the four corners, dropped fast ropes, Ranger isolation force, security forces. And so that package, you know, it was even called a template at the time, became, you know, the default. And, uh, you know, though, I definitely— a lot of us learned formidable lessons from it. And I know I did because it affected every op I was on from there on out, man.
Yeah, I've interviewed, um, Tom about that. I've never heard anything like it.
Yeah, and he was in the real shit. He's an amazing guy too. I would love to avert his, you know, classified AAR Every bit of it, because so much of the stuff those guys did, you know, changed, course-corrected the unit on things like CQB, our tactics, techniques, and procedures. As Tom probably told you, you know, we all went to Mogadishu with skateboard helmets on, and we only wore helmets to hold our NODs and, you know, our Peltors to our ear. But But after that, the unit's the one that invented what's now, I think, called the MOLLE, the partial helmet. The unit invented that, started cutting just like they always do, started turning operators loose with saws and helmets and cutting them into the right shape and then turning back to vendors and going, can you do this? Can you make one like this and change the padding? And they changed it and they built the current helmet, you know, of the version that produced the current helmet that everybody wears in the military. So that's just one thing. But tons of tactics, techniques, and procedures changed after that. Moving along walls, stuff like that, because the walls were getting hit by RPGs and bullets.
And you can— you don't really have to aim if someone's running along a wall. If you just hit the wall in front of them, them. With an RPG, it's gonna splash all over them. With the, you know, 7.62 round, if it's a good wall, it's just gonna, you know, ricochet and go through however many guys are in a line along that wall. So that's another one I remember, but I'm sure Tom and the rest of those guys have a ton more that would be fascinating to hear.
Well, Pete, let's take a quick break.
Yeah, sounds good.
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Claude.ai/srs. All right, Pete, we're back from the break. I think we're moving to Bosnia and the Balkans next.
Yeah, so Bosnia, I did 7 rotations in Bosnia.
What was— what were we doing over there?
It was, uh, I came in on the tail end of this. Yeah, it was to capture war criminals. S4 was the security force for Bosnia. So, uh, the international Criminal Tribunal— icty, I can't remember what the last part is— indicted these Serbian war criminals for— there were, for good reason, there were massacres, you know, massive massacres, hundreds of people. And they, you know, once they were indicted, there was the NATO and the UN charged the US with, and the multinational force over there, with capturing them. And then we, well, JSOC was selected to run the op, which was continuous. I think it started in, I want to say '95, went to '99. And I think the war ended in '95. So you saw the end of the war, you saw what happened. And it's crazy. I mean, like, the ethnic hatred, you know, on all sides was pretty, pretty heavy. And, uh, you know, you remember what I said about understand what's going on around you. The first thing you do before you go to Bosnia is again understand the history. And you understand, you know, Bosnia— Bosnia is Muslims, and they were the the object of most of the ethnic killings.
But, you know, the history of that area goes back to 1389 when the Turks came in and slaughtered Serbs and Croatians, and they kind of never forgave them. Islam for that. And, you know, the Turks brought Islam to the Balkans. So, you know, you'd hear Serbian guys and Croatian guys talk about that, and it was like, wow, 1389, that's a long time ago. But, you know, you understood. And, uh, and to me, you know, I sum up Bosnia as it was a living laboratory. It was like this, you know, you can do whatever you want to figure out how to capture these guys. And, and we did, you know, back to that unstructured problem solving, you know, first thing, blend in anywhere. You know, usually when you're over there, you wore what most males wear in Bosnia, and that's like blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and a leather jacket. Some cigarettes, some cigarettes. Yeah, a lot of cigarettes. The, uh, you know, I always remember, uh, one of the girls came down and, uh, on the first day of her tour, and the— for some reason, the most common color of hair in Bosnia at the time was a color that knows no, uh, equal in nature.
We just called it red not found in nature. And she somehow went out, bought a box of this red not found in nature, and dyed her hair. And it was like, whoa. But it was all about blending in and, you know, the ability to go into a town, do a close target recce, walk down the street, see if you could spot the war criminal. A lot of cool innovations at the time, like, you know, to track someone. You need the— I forget what the triangulation thing is the cops have. Is it LoJack?
I don't know.
Yeah, I think it's called LoJack, but it's the 3 antennas. When you're tracking a beacon, optimal is to have 3 antennas. So you have 3 little antennas on top of your car. But it's like, how do you keep that from sticking out? Well, same thing. You understand what's going on around you. And people in Bosnia, used their cars for everything. A Yugo is 5 cars in 1. It's a pickup truck. It's a dump truck. It's a bus. And so you'd constantly see cars with everything strapped to them. And we just decided, hey, let's put a box on top of the car to cover the antennas. And we'd switch the box out every few days, make it look like a washing machine or something. Strap it on and drive around like that. Uh, you know, there was no— it was the '90s, so there was no Google Maps or anything. So you had to have also a SATCOM antenna to downlink, you know, your digital SATCOM, your maps, uh, because you might want one, you know, that you don't have, a satellite photo or something. So a lot of little innovations, uh, just again in the— in this you know, art of human hunting, tracking, you know, surveillance, and then the setup, you know, setting these guys up.
There were some incredible ops that were pulled off over there, you know, really, really valuable long term. One device that was invented was— we called it the Kevlar tennis net, and it's a good example of how stuff you know, how the unit, you know, does research and development. It's just, hey guys, we got to find out another way to stop vehicles. We already had the spikes, which are good, but, you know, we wanted to stop a vehicle and then with the intention of pulling people out and capturing them. So one of the guys did some research and he found this German scientist who had sewed together a Kevlar tennis net And he did it to stop, to put on the side of the Autobahn for cars that lose their brakes to be able to drive through, you know. And he's— so he came to me one day and he said, hey, have you seen this thing? And I'm like, no. And he's like, this guy in Germany— I'm pretty sure he was German— has it. And it's made of Kevlar and it'll stop a car up to 60 miles an hour. That's Incredible, man. You got to check that out.
And sure enough, uh, you know, he flew over, checked it out. We bought it and, uh, we employed it. And one of the biggest war criminals— he was a Serb general, uh, I won't name him— uh, was captured that way. And it was cool. We spray-painted it gray so it would blend into the asphalt on the road. We— first, you got to find the right terrain. So, you know, anytime you're doing ambush, you want it around a curve so there you can get the vehicle as slow as possible when you do the hit. So we found a good curve in the road, and then as luck would have it, there was a bridge abutment. So we were able to anchor the net on both sides to, you know, and I'm not talking about a, uh, I'm not talking a bridge over the road, I'm talking a— it was a bridge, the creek went under the road, and it had like the guardrails and stuff, but the cement abutments. And we anchored the net that way. Then, uh, the guys dressed up as road workers, road worker vests, shovels. About 6 of them were out there, and, uh, then, uh, 2 people followed, uh, the target.
He got in his car and then passed it off to an aircraft that was tracking the vehicle. The aircraft tracked it, downloaded it to the assault force. The assault force was waiting in the woods off to the side. Not— it was the capture. The guys were going to do it. The workers were all armed. They were going to be the initial, but, you know, we had like 25 guys out there. And, uh, sure enough, here he comes down the road, 50 miles an hour. Uh, you know, you just— you sometimes you can't believe shit while it's happening. And, you know, they pulled that net and it stopped that vehicle. And, you know, everyone was pretty serious, but it was like little kids in a, you know, some kind of, I don't know, Christmas store. It was like, yeah, you know, running out there and this thing snagged this vehicle, uh, and captured him without, you know, hurting him. He had an amputated leg, so his leg, his, uh, fake leg came off. But, uh, you know, captured him without hurting him, uh, you know, which is what the intention was. And in the process, invented this new, you know, vehicle stopping device, uh, that I think is still relevant today.
Damn, if you need to do it. So that's what I mean by living laboratory. A lot of things were invented, a lot of things were perfected, um, and, you know, they set us up really well for, uh, Afghanistan because, you know, the last tours I think were '99 in, uh, Bosnia. So only about a year and a half till, damn, 9/11 happened.
Anything else notable? How many, how many war criminals do you think you guys took?
Uh, I think captured 7 or 8. There was, you know, there were a couple things. Uh, so Bosnia was the first time VTCs ever showed up, video teleconferences. So the Bosnian Command and Control Cell was called S4, uh, Security Forces Bosnia, I guess. And, uh, and it was the most bureaucratic structure you've ever seen. A 4-star general, American 4-star at the top, like a 2-star Brit below him, a 1-star German below him. They all, they all needed to approve everything, uh, so on your guys's— on our guys's. Yeah, so it was crazy. Uh, I remember one op, and this actually— op, when it actually came to fruition, we had passed it. This, uh, you know, the SEALs eventually came over. We were rotating, doing, uh— I can't remember if they did autonomous, but they were definitely over there, and they did a couple of the capture ops. And on this one, it was a guy we had been following for a long time. He's an old man. You know, just living quietly. We knew where he lived, lived in an apartment. Every day, you know, got up, walked to the fruit market, bought some fruit, walked back.
So, you know, the SEALs' plan was we're just going to pull a van up there. When he walks by, we're going to open the van doors, grab him, throw him in, and drive off. I'm like, fucking, hey, great plan. And, uh, it's so But it had to be approved by S4. And like, I—
yeah, no shit, how else are you gonna do it?
Yeah, and I can't remember why I had to go to, to brief it with them, but you know, I was up there and the— you had all these generals and they listen to the plan, they go, once he gets inside the apartment, how many steps to his apartment? See, old guys like 20, 23. It's okay, we need to know exactly how many steps. It's like, all right, uh, what else? What kind of anti-intrusion devices do you think he's got in the apartment? I was like, I don't— probably not many. He seems pretty casual, you know, he's just walking up and down the street. I, I don't see him taking a lot of measures. And this is a re— an exact comment. He's like, you know, Well, I read somewhere that one of the best devices to tell if someone's breaking into your house is to just put a soup can on the door with some change in it. Do you think maybe he's got a soup can on his door? Oh man, what the fuck, man? And we were just like, holy shit.
That's when you know it's not even—
yeah, and that's when I— we started— this is— it's going to come into play later, but you You realize this hierarchical decision-making, these disconnected chains of command. And this is even though they're on the other side of the city, they're completely disconnected. They're running the construction and all this admin shit, and they want to play infantry commando when the missions come up.
I hate these fucking people.
Yeah, it really tries you, and it tried everyone's patience. There were guys pulling their hair out. And this is the shit why I only have 6 years of the military.
Yeah, because I just looked— as a 24-year-old, I was able to go, you're a fucking idiot, I'm out.
Yeah, I think, uh, common sense again winning the day.
Makes the fucking hair on the back of my head stand up. It makes me so angry. Yeah, it should be so fucking angry.
It should, because you care about soldiers, you care about doing the right thing, and, and that's what it messes up. So that guy, I mean, if he ruined my fucking dreams—
I'm not fucking around. All I wanted to be was a SEAL, and then I got there and that's what I witnessed, and I was like, this is not what the fuck it was cracked up to be.
Yeah.
And a lot of, a lot of guys had a great experience, you know, but— and I had some really good experiences, but I just ran into that too many times, and I was like like, this is not the fucking place for me, man.
Yeah, but no, I'm with you. Um, and you know, just to give you like the, the final story, I was again '99, I believe. So it was in the middle of that, we— NATO bombed, uh, Belgrade, uh, for like 78 days. I don't know if you remember that, the capital of Sarajevo. Oh, or capital, excuse me, of Serbia. Bombed them for 78 days. It's NATO doing offensive operations, uh, in order to bring the country to its knees. Another stupid-ass decision. But during that, the Kosovo thing was also going on. So what happened was the Serbs finally decided to pull back out of Kosovo, and this was all being run from now EUCOM headquarters, because Kosovo wasn't part of the Bosnia thing. It was up to EUCOM. So, uh, one day, uh, the— I get this intel tipper and it said, hey, the Serbs are pulling out of, of, uh, the Pristina airfield. Pristina airfield's the only airfield in Kosovo that can land transport aircraft. It is absolutely critical to U.S. interests that we secure that airfield. So I was like, I know exactly where it is. I had 20 guys. We were doing some either prepping for something or we were going to do some training thing.
So I had 20 guys and I'm like, we have vehicles. I can get in my car right now. We'll drive there with the 20 guys and we'll hold the gate and hold us by force, a perimeter, by covering it, you know, with weapons. But we can easily secure that base because no one's going to fight us for it. It's just whoever arrives there first owns it. So I briefed this right to the S4 commander, and the S4 commander was like, okay, well, we don't have approval authority. It's got to come from EUCOM. So he gets on the phone to the 4-star in EUCOM. 4-star in EUCOM goes, negative, negative, negative. We need to, we need put this into the planning cell, figure out how to do this. So EUCOM goes into this 96-hour planning cycle. That same day, a lot of people don't know this, the Russians were part of the multinational security force in Bosnia. And the day before that intel trip, Tipperon, Pristina came in, we had driven out and bumped into these guys. They had like 10 BTRs parked on the side of a road near where their base was, and it was their sector and everything.
We stopped. It was kind of cool, you know. We was like, this has got to be the only time U.S. and Russian military guys have sat, you know, sat down, talked to each other. And we shot the shit, gave memories, they gave us our food, we talked for a while. You know, they were, they were like normal guys. Well, Russia obviously wanted that airfield too. You know, Serbia was a huge ally of Russia, and they were red-hot pissed off we were bombing it anyway. So they were looking for ways to, you know, get their moxie back and do something, poke, you know, the eagle instead of always having the bear poked. Smoked. And so, uh, 18 of those BTRs loaded up with guys, followed by 20 civilian vehicles. They drove 400 miles to Pristina, got in the gate, shut the gate behind them, and still to this day Russia controls that airfield in Pristina. And the Russian general just put this out— he's a civilian now— he put it out a couple years ago. Someone interviewed him And he said, well, the first thing is we knew that NATO was a paper tiger, they wouldn't do anything if we went there.
So we were convinced to go there. And then we knew all we got to do is start out, because the multinational bureaucracy that they have in Bosnia can never make a decision. It's— they'll still be talking to each other between Germany, the US, Britain, and the other commands. And I mean, he called it. It like laughingly fucking embarrassing. It is, but, and, but, you know, again, it, it's only, you know, experience only matters. What's that?
I said those fucking generals probably got awarded for it.
Yeah, yeah. But again, experience only matters if you learn from it. And the lesson was, if you want to be nimble, you got to be quick, and you got to be audacious, and you can't go through this hierarchical decision-making process in the real world. It doesn't work. And remember, there was no real world. Bosnia is kind of a, you know, it's not a war, definitely. And, you know, Colombia wasn't a war. So we were not at war. We weren't— these generals were the same way. They don't have a concept of operations of how things unfold. For me and my guys, we could see instantly, just drive there, you know, 400 miles, we'll be there in 6 hours or 8 hours, 7 hours. And it's a simple thing. No one's going to do anything. We'll take it. But, you know, this demurring and this, you know, get the JAG in here, we want to see if this is legal. It's never going to work. And again, I add that in because we're about to go to Afghanistan and see all of these you know, negative, destructive C2 protocols just, you know, impede any potential for success on some of the biggest ops in Afghanistan.
Man, that shit just, it just enrages me.
Yeah, it's going to get worse when we talk Afghanistan. And that's what Ukraine is, just to keep going back to Ukraine. 'cause we only talked 2021. So the New York Times just did an exposé, and it's a funny thing. You know, it was meant to be a propaganda piece to prop up the DOD and CIA guys who've been fighting the war. Well, it turns out the Ukraine war was commanded and controlled by US generals from EUCOM in Wiesbaden, along with Brit generals. and I'm talking 4-star, 3-star generals, they're micromanaging. They're coming up with these attacks. They're coming up with these counterattacks, applying this, the number one negative lesson of all the way back to Bosnia, but for sure of GWAT, which is what I'm describing and I'll describe again. And that's that decision-making and problem-solving by A disconnected chain of command never has and never will be capable of making sense of the reality of the situation on the ground, nor will it be capable of making sensible choices for what the guys on the ground should do next. And the reason for that is not theoretical, it's biologic. The very nature of a disconnected hierarchy means its senses are disconnected from the environment.
And as I mentioned earlier with, you know, mock, the only way to prove scientific facts is with your senses. The only way to make sense of any situation is with your senses. A video, anything else does not work. It has to be sensory information. That's how the brain works. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. So these disconnected hierarchies that are, you know, have— are on steroids now. They're $10 million. Every one of these jock talks is a massive space-age, you know, conglomeration.
And where did this stem from? When did this start to happen?
I think it was part of technology. They figured out they could do it. And I think what entices these generals is when you're running, when you're telling people what to do off of VTC, it's like being a captain again, like being they can be a company commander again and tell tactical shit. But they never understand that they're looking at a one-dimensional view of reality, that they can't smell, they can't feel the cold, they can't feel the fear that a guy has because he heard some guys coming up behind him. None of that is relative— relevant to guys who are sitting in TOCs, tactical operations centers, with with a wall of big screen TVs, uh, in, you know, air-conditioned, heated in the winter, you know, eating their 3, 4 meals a day, working out. Um, and so I think it just became intoxicating to these generals to—
did it stem from entitlement? Do they think they don't need to be on the battlefield anymore because they have a fucking star? I mean, what it— where did this shit stem from?
No one ever self-corrected it. And, you know, that's—
it's fucking crazy. I mean, yeah, there's this man, Jamie Sands. Have you ever heard of this guy?
Who is he?
Oh, he was— he was— he was, uh, what the hell? I can't— I'm having a brain— he was in charge of all of the SEAL teams and has like same battlefield experience. He was, he was my CO at 2.
Oh man.
Yeah, just all just got fucking shitcanned finally. But it's, it's, I mean, just, I just don't fucking get it. Yeah, I don't know. I would love to know when this started happening. Was it World War II?
Well, I think the VTC, I think the SATCOM and VTC, yeah, have allowed these. I mean, I think it's always been, you know, you see in the old movies of World War II, the generals in a chalet moving, you know, little icons across a board. So it was probably to some extent then, but the chaos of World War II and the inability to send messages quickly precluded a lot of that micromanagement. But now you've got a Predator, so you're seeing eye-in-the-sky stuff. You think you got better SA than the guy on the ground. You don't have any idea what he can see. You've got SATCOM radio, so you're hearing sound bites of people talking and sitreps of what's going on on the ground. And I think they just get caught up that they feel like they've got this tactical omnipotence. They can understand everything. And then, you know, the very nature of the fact, you know, they're generals makes them realize, well, no one can come up, you know, with a better decision than me. I'm going to use my wise general officer, you know, wisdom to to inflect this operation, and they just can't resist it.
And I've seen it. I remember coming in from Shahikot back to Bagram and sitting in one of the TOCs, and an op was going on. They were all watching the Predator, and they called in fast movers. The fast mover dropped a bomb, and it nailed these people, and, you know, I was not even convinced they were enemy. Definitely some of them were civilians. And the whole place started cheering, yeah! And me and my agency buddy were standing in the back, and, you know, we, we didn't even— we never even gave a peep. We didn't cheer, we didn't say anything, because we were still looking, going, how the fuck do they know who that is that just got hit? And it's this— you're— you're— it's just this enticement that, hey, I can't resist injecting myself into this battle and potentially, you know, hitting the— hitting the motherlode and capturing bin Laden or whatever. And I remember a general at that same VTC said, Pete, come over, sit down next to me, and and put a headset on, and guys started asking questions, and I knew the answer to the question. And then somebody asked me something like, well, you know, what should we do?
And, you know, I, because of Shaheen Coat, I, I knew what the response is to that. The response is, what's your recommendation? And get that guy talking, get him unloading the tacit knowledge that he's accumulated on the target, because most of it is tacit. In other words, he hasn't made it physical yet. It's just inside their head. But no one has given them a chance. No one said, hey, blank slab, tell me what you'd do if you were in charge. What do I need to know right now? And they just start talking. And within that conversation, these pearls of wisdom, these nuggets come out. And you're like, of course, that's what we need to do. And it's back to that principle, always listen to the guy on the ground. But the best question any commander can ever make when he's trying to figure something out to a subordinate is to ask, what's your recommendation? And get them talking so you have some kind of accuracy to pivot off of. And again, I think that comes with experience. Most of these generals, they don't care. We've been doing it now 25 years. So if you just take, if we take the end of Bosnia till today, I guess it's '26, because we spotten, it's one reason that I believe Ukraine's been so unsuccessful.
Not only we build an army that was supposed to match NATO, which doesn't match Ukrainians and Ukrainian military training, we commanded and controlled it with the same disconnected hierarchies that cannot makes sense. And they, in their zest to keep self-correcting, they just micromanage more.
What a shame.
Yeah, we're never going to learn. Well, shows like this, so you got to get the word out and you get the, the truth out and educate people. And I think at least we can chip away, um, and, you know, the right guy is in the right place at the right time and who's heard, you know, the lessons. And that's, that's the other part, you know. Uh, I said it earlier, experience only matters if you learn from it. And I don't give a shit about proving I was right or someone else was right or someone was wrong. That doesn't matter. And that's why I try not to say names, you know. But people are like, why don't you name the guy? I'm like, because then you'll be thinking about that guy instead of thinking about It's one of the perils of human nature. And that guy's out, but there's 10 of him back in right now. So it could happen to you again, but it might surprise you because you only think that guy does that shit. And so don't personalize it. Just talk about the foundational lessons. And we have a responsibility to do that so they don't happen again.
And that's an example of one right there. Prevent these tragedies from happening again.
When did you show up in Afghanistan?
Uh, we were the, you know, November of, uh, 2001.
Holy shit.
So we, you know, did the initial raid on Mullah Omar's house, was kind of the opening, uh, combat boots on the ground. Uh, I was flying, I was the LNO in the AC-130 during that, so flew above it. And then from there, you know, again, a piece of history. Our command wanted to go home after that empty target raid, said, you know, there's no more missions for us. And I had had this PowerPoint presentation that we built in 1998 when we were told by the Clinton administration, come up with you know, a way to get bin Laden. And I described to you, he drove from Kandahar to Khost, 400 miles. So I showed him this template, which was get guys in, move to a safe house, sequester them in the safe house, and then, you know, wait for the right moment, move out, set up an ambush, grab them, and get out. But what we found out while we were doing that was that southern Afghanistan is full of these dry lake beds that are like pool tables. So you can land C-130s on them. You can, you know, land the C-130, disgorge vehicles, disgorge Little Birds.
And that became our plan. Let's fly into these dry lake beds, unload vehicles, unload Little Birds, let the Little Birds go hunting. AH-6s have a couple MHs, but mostly AHs. And the vehicles go out. We can take key roads. Block those roads, interdict the roads. And, uh, they were going to still blow it off, but it turned out, uh, Franks— General Franks was so pissed off, he's like, you know, why do we pay you guys all this money? You're not even— you don't do anything. You raid two empty targets, you know, you didn't capture anybody. Uh, I need you to do something. So they sent that plan up to Franks. He's like, approved. And the next day we started the process, haloing guys into the dry lake beds, doing penetrometer checks to check the soil and the, you know, the surface hardness. And C-130s were landing like a night later, unloading Gowers and Little Birds. And that's when the hunting began. That's when the, you know, almost all the enemy fled Kandahar after that and ended up up, you know, in eastern Afghanistan in the Shaikot Valley where they hid.
Oh shit. Yeah, you were in on Anaconda.
Yeah, yep, I was the AFO commander.
A lot of history there.
Yeah, it was, uh, I mean, it was the biggest battle at the time and it ended up being the biggest ongoing battle of the war. But, you know, it started same way, you know, we described earlier. General Franks— I was on the ground. It was— the Taliban had fled. It was early January now, and we had 45— I had 45 AFO guys under me, and they were mostly unit guys. I had some SEALs some SEAL Team 6 guys, Air Force CCT, and some special mission SIGINT guys along with us. And then the agency had, you know, a small group of ground branch on the ground, but that was it. And, uh, you know, I had given the mission, guys, we're going to move out the frontier and start developing the situation. And Frank's heard— he had read one of our sitreps, and he's like, now this is what we should be doing. So he flew into Bagram and he said, tell Blaber to come see me. So I, you know, went to Bagram and it was a, it was a shithole at the time. There wasn't even a fence around it. And I met him in, uh, in a room but off of a hangar.
And he said, look, it's real simple. I want you to get AFO, go find the enemy, and then kill or capture them. And I was like I think, Roger, that's the best mission statement I think I've ever gotten in my life. And it was, it was a blank canvas. And, you know, immediately got together with the guys. I, you know, shared that, guys, here's our mission. Okay. You know, how do we, how do we accomplish this? Afghanistan's massive, 645,000 acres. And so you'd you know, uh, 45 AFO guys wouldn't be able to do anything. But, you know, that's where, like, logic and the process of elimination comes in, uh, you know. But bin Laden's only allies in Afghanistan were Pashtuns, so, uh, there's almost no way— everyone else hated him, uh, all the other tribes. So he's not going to be hiding amongst tribes that hate him. He's going to be hiding among tribes that like him, the tribe, which is Pashtuns. And that's really just the southern part of the country and then up to the east side of the country. So you've now necked the country down by about a third. And then if you start looking at, you know, what you have in that third, there's vast tracts of desert, flat as can be, same place as we landed on.
He ain't going to be out there, too vulnerable. There's, you know, all throughout massive mountains, 20,000-footers. He ain't going to be up at altitude. He's, you know, old. The rumor at the time was that he had diabetes or kidney failure. But, you know, we just kind of necked it down. And then we, you know, one of the big breaks that happened for us is I had been there for the initial invasions, and then, uh, like I told you, the— our higher headquarters swapped us out. They wanted to start rotating people. We'd only been there like 3 or 4 weeks, and so everyone was like, why, why do it now? But, you know, we did it, so roger that. So we all went home, the SEALs came over, and then the AFO concept— I, you know, was selected to lead AFO, so I flew back and I came back a different route this time, under alias and everything.
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So, you know, in that initial portion, while I was home, this intel guy I had worked with for many years had called me up and he's like, hey Pete, there's a, there's a guy who used to be one of bin Laden's lead trained but non-security detail, worked on his detail, and he's in prison right now in the US, and he's written a, um, like a, you know, his own personal, uh, like little pamphlet on how to find al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. So it was like 20 pages long, legal paper. He goes, you got any interest in reading that? And I go, hell yeah, man, can you get that to me right away? And he goes, I should tell you one thing. And I go, what? And he goes, he's been in prison since 1998. And I said, well, you know, if Warren Buffett wanted to give you a stock tip 2 years after he retired, would you take his stock tip? Yeah, you'd fucking take his stock tip. So why would I turn down the guy who trained bin Laden's security detail, you know, 2 and a half years earlier? He still knows how they're trained, their habits.
It's got to be something in there. So he sent it to me and and this thing read like, you know, a best-selling novel. Every bullet— I highlighted the entire document, ended up being highlighted, tabbed. It was just full of solid, logical, operational information. And the part that stood out most was his recommendations for once we go over there. So before I tell you what those are, I called the guy back and I go, hey man, can I talk to this guy? He goes, yeah, sure. Uh, he's in the, you know, he's in a prison up in a large city on the East Coast. It's a prison that sits right in the middle of a large city, and I'm not going to say what that city is. Uh, and I'm like, okay, uh, what do I need to do? He goes, you just need to, uh, I'll take care of it on the Army side, but you need to call this number at the Bureau of Prisons and get permission. And I always point this out. This period right after 9/11 happened was a unique period in American history because it's for a brief, short period.
This is how you saw how the government should work. Bureaucracy was not the watchword. We're all Americans. We're all pulling together. And I saw it right off the bat. I called the guy in Bureau of Prisons, say, I'm Pete Blaber. I explained who I was, what I'm doing. You got any problem me seeing that? He goes, ready to see you tomorrow. Just give me a time. We'll be ready. Same thing. DOD was like, yeah, tell him to go. We don't think he's going to produce anything, but let him go. So, you know, we had this— we had broke down these bureaucratic barriers and you could actually get things done. So that next day I showed up at the Bureau of Prisons, at the prison itself. Show my ID. They took me up into a room. You know, all the tables and chairs are connected to the floor, can't be used as weapons. Sat down and a couple minutes later, door slid to the side and in, you know, in chains and an orange jumpsuit came this terrorist, Ali Mohammed. And he was in prison for the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy bombings. But he had also trained bin Laden's security detail.
So I had his thing and I told him, hey, I just want to talk to you. And when I asked him point blank, hey, how do we find al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? He said, ask the shepherds because they have to have lamb meat to survive. Ask the shopkeepers because Arabs eat different spices than the Afghans and the shopkeeper will tell you, be able to tell you who bought them. 'Ask the money exchangers because all the Arabs, al-Qaeda, who come into country come through Pakistan. So they have Pakistani rupees instead of the currency of Afghan choice, which was the American dollar. And ask the taxi drivers because the Arabs don't have driver's licenses. They don't know how to drive.' And so, you know, we took that. We were like, 'Wow, this is really good.' And, you know, I finished my meeting with them. like a couple days later, flew back to Afghanistan. And, and then we just started— we necked everything down. We had a warlord tell us— we asked a warlord, hey, do you know where al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan? And he told us somewhere in the mountains around Gardez. So we occupied a safe house outside Gardez.
And we started, you know, a methodical searching. And, uh, you know, one day we were out, it was a long day, about 8 hours driving around. And, uh, the— I think the driver's the guy who saw him, you know, just all of a sudden looked over to the right. And I, I was looking at the same time, and he yelled, "A fucking shepherd!" You know, because we've been talking about these shepherds. Everyone knew the Ask the shepherd, ask the shopkeeper. Everyone was saying it, but it wasn't real yet, you know. We hadn't had a shopkeeper, a shepherd, or a taxi driver, or a money exchanger. So we see the shepherd, and like, yeah, I think there were 5 of us in the vehicle, like little kids, you know. We got out laughing our asses off. Motherfucking shepherd! I can't wait to talk to this guy, you know. Shit, it's like that picture you had up there at the sniper hide site, you know, what guys do during the time. They laugh. Most of the time you're laughing. So we got up to him through our interpreter. We asked him respectfully if we could talk to him.
He said, of course. And we just said to him, you know, do you know where Al-Qaeda is hiding in Afghanistan? And he just beckoned us with his fingers, turned around, headed for this probably about 1,500-foot hill. Then just power strode up that thing like an Olympic gold medalist speed skater. And behind him was us, the warrior athletes who know no fear. And I always remember I got to the top and I'm like, hands on the knees. Next guy's up. We're all sucking air. And I look up and there he is at the edge of the ridge. And I follow his arm down to his gnarly finger. And at the end of it was these daunting palisades. And he just said, you know, two words, Shahikot. And, you know, they never used maps. They always pointed to stuff or drew you a little sketch in the ground. And so we could see the mountain range. We still didn't know where the Shahikot Valley was, but we saw this mountain range. And, you know, to give you an analogy, it was kind of like like looking at the Grand Tetons from, you know, Jackson Hole. Still a big-ass thing, but at least, you know, we had it neck down.
And we use the same process, same way our brain makes sense, this process of elimination. It just starts chopping shit down to get to the relevant part that has a chance for whatever success you're trying to achieve. And so we looked at these mountains, and you could see You know, he's not up at alpine level in the snow. That would be too difficult. We already knew that the Afghans weren't creatures of habit, so they needed an urban umbilical cord. They needed quick access to a small town or somewhere where there was water, wells, and food to buy, you know, to feed them. So they weren't like the Viet Cong who could survive on grubs and stuff. They needed that urban umbilical cord. So by the time we necked the whole mountain range down, it was not a big chunk. It was pretty much the area they ended up being in and probably a small area off to the right of it. And, uh, we decided, okay, we need to do environmental recons, which is just go out, walk through the hills, check the route Is there a route up to the area we think we want to go?
Like, is there a route? And then, you know, understand the environment. Is there any source of water up there? You know, what's the terrain like? Can you hide up there? Are these barren mountains? Are they too exposed? Is there any sign of life, civilian activity, enemy activity up in these mountains? Then all the operational stuff. How does the cold and altitude affect our batteries, our nickel-cadmium batteries? How about our weapons? You know, we learned we needed the desert, you know, silicone spray for our weapons to keep them from clogging up and getting frozen up. So a lot of little things the environmental recons proved. but, uh, mostly they proved we can, we can do it, we can get in there. Um, then we came back and started planning to go in with 3 teams. Uh, I first had to request those 3 teams, which was incredibly contentious. I got on a VTC with the higher-level commander. I was proud of what we'd done. I thought this is a no-brainer, so I went in you know, like a naive kid. And when I finished my briefing, you know, all the intel we found, it was like very clear that this was not going to go that way.
The general said, what makes you think that your theory that there's Al-Qaeda hiding in a pocket is correct when we've combed that area with satellite imagery and there is nothing in there? And I'm like, well, we've talked to people We've had a warlord tell us they're there. We've had a shepherd. There's activity. We've talked to a couple of Afghan who lived in the villages, and they confirmed they had seen these guys, Arabs, going in and out. So we had a lot of circumstantial evidence, enough certainly where this was not like us just guessing, you know, they're in that mountain over there. So finally, again, same thing, pressure from Franks. He approved 2 teams. So 2 teams, uh, I got 2 teams from the unit. I needed 3. And at the time, my, my acting Sergeant Major— I, we didn't call him that, but he was, you know, like my sidekick— was a guy named Homer, a SEAL Team guy. Uh, he was my Sergeant Major, and he goes, you know, The SEALs are all sitting back at Bagram cooped up, dying to get the fuck out of there. And I know for a fact that if you request a couple teams from the commander, he's almost assuredly going to give them to you.
And I go, well, can you— can we work it from both ends? And he goes, I already started. They're already waiting for your request. So I went back, requested 2 teams. They gave me one, and that team was a team led by a guy named Mike Goodenbowe. Fantastic guy, uh, you know, sniper recce mentality to the nth degree. Funny, common sense guy, warrior.
I knew him.
Yeah, great guy. He was killed in action, uh, as a contractor after he retired. But I worked with him over there. Did you?
Fucking amazing guy.
Yeah, really, uh, and you know, just to bring him up, it takes up— you got to personalize it. Now go to back to what that thing on Ukraine, you know, 1.25 million of those guys dead. And, you know, Goody's dead. And, uh, you know, there's a number of other guys. So when, you know, we had the debacle of the pullout from Afghanistan, you know, it like, to me, it dishonored all those guys who made all those sacrifices. But anyway, Goody was out there, so we were set. Uh, we moved in. One team used ATVs, uh, two teams we did vehicle drop-off. They walked in, uh, and within a couple days they were set in position, um, and the battle, uh, began. I'm going to try to give you a short version of it. So the battle began 2 days after the teams had surrounded it, and it, it opened with a thud because the 10th Mountain's plan was to land in the valley floor. We told them you can't land on the valley floor and you shouldn't fly those helicopters because there's dishkas. And if, if you look at my book, there's a picture of it that Goody took with a Coolpix camera of an enemy standing right next to a dishka, and he's standing right where the brigade commanders of the 101st, uh, who was participating in this with 10th Mountain, was going to land, uh, and right on the OP we picked.
So, you know, another lesson is when you, when you pick out something because it's good terrain, don't be surprised to find that the enemy made the same choice. Expect every OP that you're going to to be occupied because it's good terrain. And it was. And so, you know, that fight started off, it was going well for us. Uh, they— the guys remained uncompromised. First time in modern history I think I've ever— that's happened. Uh, the three, uh, OPs, they were just calling fire in non-stop. you know, liquidating targets. 5 here, 5 there, 10 here, 10 there. It was shooting fish in a barrel. But again, things were not going well for the 10th Mountain. They were pinned down. They knew they couldn't get the second chock in with the second wave of Chinooks because the first ones had taken so much fire. So the brigade commander, who didn't have a radio, his SATCOM broke, came up to Goody's position. He was like, can I use your radio to call back? So it was our AFO satnet, and he called back and he said, hey, to the 10th Mountain Commander, great guy, General Hagenbach, said, hey sir, I recommend we call off the op, bring everyone back.
We reset and come back in another day. And General Hagenbach said, roger that. You know, he listened to the guy on the ground. Now, it was our net, so I couldn't, you know, hold back from adding some context. So I got on the radio and I said, look, um, I just want— before you make a decision, I want you to know what we're seeing, because it's a totally different battle than what, what your guys are seeing. We've prosecuted at the time, I can't remember, 37 targets or something. We've bombed damage assessment between 50 and 100 guys killed so far. We've cut off all the ingress/egress routes by fire. Our guys have enough supplies to stay in position for another 48 hours, before they need resupply. And quite frankly, this is the battlefield opportunity of a lifetime. And if you guys leave, I totally understand, but we're staying. And then Hagenbach did something that, you know, I think is a model for all future generals. He changed his mind. He consulted with his two one-stars who were there. One of them was General Harrell, ex-unit commander, great guy. And they said, yeah, I don't think you should pull out.
And he got back on the radio and he said, okay, we're not pulling out, we're staying. We'll get the next chalk in tomorrow. Here's what I want you to do. And, you know, he did the right thing for the mission, he did the right thing for the men, and he did the right thing for himself by changing his mind. And so, you know, I point that out because, you know, the future battle commanders never feel— don't allow ego to stop you from changing your mind. Changing your mind is what you do when you got more information, and the only reason you change your mind is because you have relevant information that makes you change it. Never hesitate to do that. Whatever you do, don't talk yourself out of it because you might embarrass yourself by saying, you know, I was wrong, or I shouldn't have said that, uh, when I did. So, you know, they, uh, we stayed in, we kept the fight going, um, and that night, uh, you know, the battle was like on everyone's computer. Everyone was being briefed on it. The Predator feeds were on in the White House Situation Room.
CENTCOM was monitoring our SATCOM 24/7, having meetings about, you know, what was happening. And that night the phone rang. And so all that adulation was coming to JSOC. So CENTCOM was calling JSOC, great job. This is unbelievable what you guys have done. you know, who knows if the president called, but they knew that they were getting a lot of positive attention for this. And so that night, the guy who was the JSOC commander at the time, a one-star Air Force general, calls me up on the red phone and he said, hey Pete, uh, great job on everything. You guys have really, uh, you know, really done super. 'But look, uh, you know, we can't have you do this anymore. It's too much. Uh, I need to get you out looking for the next battlefield. I need to get you out looking for where the other places the enemy are. And what I want to do is pass this mission off to the SEALs.' And, you know, sometimes when someone says something so outlandish, you have no response. And that's the way I was. I was I guess it's called dumbstruck. And I had like 3 firefights going on at the time.
So I'm like, sir, can I get back to you? You know? And he's like, yeah, okay. And I hung up. And, uh, my intel guy was like, I fucking cannot believe this. Uh, because essentially what he's doing is trying to change the command and control in the middle of a battle. And it's an incredibly nuanced battle. The terrain, the enemy, what we'd done to prepare ourselves, just being acclimated. We were telling everyone, you need 4 days here minimum to acclimate. Gardez is 7,800 feet. The battlefield was between 8,500 and 11,000. So serious altitude. Yeah. So I got back on that night and I go, sir, 'You know, this makes no sense. We're fine. The teams are fine. They got another 48 hours. I'm fine. I'm not redlining it. We can keep commanding and controlling this thing.' And trying to pass it off to people who have not been immersed in all the things we've done and all the coordination is a formula for disaster. And he ended the conversation with, Pete, uh, I'm sending the SEALs down tonight. Put them in by tomorrow night, and that's an order.
Holy fucking shit.
Yep. And so he sent that. You know, I went, went to get a couple hours of sleep. Me and my intel guy were trading off. When I woke up, uh, You know, the sun was just coming up, and I noticed, you know, a couple cars, new cars in our, uh, our parking area. Um, and so I went into the TOC, and there were, you know, there were the SEALs. And, uh, um, I said, you know, what are you doing, man? And why didn't you tell us you were coming? Because they're really lucky they didn't get shot by the Afghan guards. They shot someone 2 days earlier, a civilian who just drove up without stopping at the sign? He said, uh, because General Trebon told us to come down, and, uh, you know, he said you were, you were all good with it. And I'm like, oh man. So one of the guys with them was a guy named Brits Lubinsky, and I knew him from Bosnia. He, he had done a tour same time I did. Um, I had ridden in a car with him for like 20 hours So, you know, and I had a lot of respect for him, and we had a good collegial relationship.
I said, Slap, can I talk to you outside? And he's like, yeah, sure. I said, Slap, you're a sniper recce guy. You know this makes no sense putting you in tonight. You haven't even acclimated yet. You guys haven't talked to the Afghans. You haven't talked to the guys who already went in and did the environmental recons. You haven't reconfigured your kit. You know, we've got all this, these spray paint cans so you can get the mottled look of the mountains, the lava rock and everything else. You know, your weapons, you guys need to test fire your weapons, your NODs, everything, frequencies. And he's like, I hear you, I hear you, Pete, but I already fought this back at Bagram and they wouldn't listen to me there and they're not listening to me now. I've been told it's an order and, you know, we have to obey orders. And then he said, I know you guys don't have to, but we do it. And that's a joke. He doesn't— we do have to obey orders. But like you said earlier, in a unit based on common sense, one of the hallmarks is freedom of speech in the unit.
You tell a guy to do something outlandish and he's going to go, Oh, tell me the logic of why. Why does that make sense? And you're going to debate it. And the irony of having that culture is leaders end up saving themselves more often than not from doing really stupid shit because they're saying it out loud. They're brainstorming with another human instead of just in their head. Bouncing off the walls of their head. So, you know, and I understood that, like, you know, the culture at the time was, you know, you obey your officers and you don't ask questions. And, you know, Slab had to do it. So, and I was given an order, so we let them plan They came up with a concept to go up to Takur Ghar, and the original LZ was called LZ1. It was to the east of Takur Ghar on the flatland. It was not on the mountain, and we chose it because one of our other teams, Juliet Team, could see that HLZ. So at least we'd be able to cover it by visual, visual overwatch and by fire if needed. So the, the mission was on for that night in helicopters.
And I also told, uh, the general that we had a no helicopter policy. So, but the only way that they were going to get in was by helicopters, because to get them in tonight, that's the only way. You can't drive them and have them walk and expect that they're going to make it tonight. So, you know, now we had an air assault to bring them in. And that night, we— me, my agency counterpart, my Special Forces counterpart— all moved forward with the convoy, the Afghans. We were going to reinsert the Afghans that night. The halos to pick up Mako 3-0 Slabs team flew in and landed at Gardez and immediately you know, called back and said, we have engine problems. So it was darkness, so probably 8 o'clock at night local. Engine problem's going to be an hour. They're at 9 now if things go right. And the problem was Slabs' backwards calculation of the time it would take to get up that mountain in nightfall was about 30 to 45 minutes away from being, you know, passed. So, you know, 45 minutes, they still couldn't get the aircraft right. But during that time, the SEAL troop commander, who was a major, went up to the pilot and he said, hey, what do you think about landing on top of the mountain?
And the pilot was like, I don't know if it's possible. And he said, it is. I've seen that imagery. I have the imagery. So I think he went in, got the imagery, showed the pilot. I think the pilot was Al Mack. I think you've had him on. Um, and, uh, and it was, yeah. And so Al's like, you know, he can land a freaking Chinook on a gnat's ass if he wanted to. So he's like, yeah, we can make it up there. Thinking, you know, this is all good. Well, Slab had already recommended we roll 24 hours because it's now at like an hour and a half, and he's passed his min amount of time to make it up to the top in darkness. And, uh, and so Slab said, no, my recommendation is roll 24. Well, the troop commander walked away from Slab Got on the blue sat, called back to his headquarters, said, hey, here's the deal, uh, we got engine problems, slab wants to roll, what do you want me to do? And they were like, Charlie Mike, you need to, you need to get on that mountain. Um, and so he went back.
He was completely, you know, and this is what I meant by a troop commander, uh, you don't know anything yet, but you're full of vim and vigor, you know, I want to get in combat, I want to be in the greatest firefight right? And I think a lot of that was operating with this guy. And, uh, he went back to Al Mack, said the mission's a go, let's do it. And, you know, Slab, same thing. He told Slab, you're going up on the mountain. And so now things are just getting worse. The delays keep coming. I'm forward, but I'm full suite of comms. So I had SATCOM, I had UHF, VHF, I'd have Predator downlink, but they never called me. They never— whether it was headquarters or anyone else, never called me and said, hey. And the troop commander should have called me. The last thing I said to him, anything happens, call me and we'll talk it out. And he should have told me because I would have immediately shitcanned it and said, we don't need to go up there. There's no we control the valley, not them. There's movement on that hilltop, but they're not shooting any weapons.
So when we have time, we'll go up there. And the 10th Mountain was halfway up the mountain anyway, so I kind of figured they'd end up doing the top of the mountain clearing. Um, but so Slab, you know, finally the helicopter goes, they hop in, they fly up to Takur Ghar. Uh, before they reach their Someone told an AC-130 to check it out. The AC-130 came, came back and said negative activity on the mountain. Turns out it was spiderwebbed with paths. There was a donkey tied to a tree, a fire up there. Somehow they didn't see any of that. And, uh, Slab goes flying in. And, uh, you know, the, the way this mountain is, is The only place to land, the peak's up here. The only place to land's right here. It's 50 feet or 5 stories below. So the place where the donkey was, there was also a bunker, you know, a hardened bunker. So here comes the Chinook, brake flare, flaring, its whole belly exposed. RPK machine gun fire, RPGs. They knocked the shit out of that somehow. Al Mack, incredible, you know, example of airmanship, steadies the thing. But while that was happening, uh, Neil Roberts fell off the back of the helicopter, tumbled down onto the— onto, uh, Takur Ghar, and, uh, the aircraft went over the side, did a controlled crash landing on the valley floor.
And, you know, Slab got out of that thing. He immediately called me on line-of-sight radio, gave me a sitrep, and said, you know, I said same thing to him, what's your recommendation? He said, I got to go back up there. I got to go up and either rescue him or recover his body. And I was like, roger that. And so we began planning to reinsert those guys up on top of the mall. Man, yeah, and we're not even to Takargarh yet, and that's the— that's what's coming next, and that's the real tragedy. But you know, it's the same thing, it's these you'll hear this disconnected chain of command trying to make decisions and solve problems, and then injecting those decisions and those solutions into the battlefield. And guys who can see everything, hear everything, know what the right thing to do are, you know, nothing more than like gnomes who have to obey obey these mindless orders from the starship. And that's why I say it's the main lesson of GWAT. And, you know, I just saw something that they're looking to spend a couple billion dollars on this new C2 thing that has AI and, you know, all the screens.
And I want to tell Hegseth, do not do that. Do not invest the money. You need to go back to the old way. You need to go back to the— the whole goal of the military should be reorganized so that command and control is always at the lowest level possible. Uh, we don't— you know, you can still have TOCs and JOCs because they're good for things like helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft deconfliction. They're good for beans and bullets stuff, logistics. But we should call TOCs the support TOC. You know, the TOC's job is to support the guys on the ground, whatever they need, not tell them what to do and only talk to them, you know, when they're not watching a VTC with another general officer in it.
Yeah, man. Let's take a break. I've got to tell you, this is one of those things I didn't realize how much I needed until I actually started using it. Every device I got needs a different cord— phone, headphones, watch. It's a mess, especially when you're traveling. But Ridge, they fixed it. Their 5-in-1 travel power bank has everything built in, so you're not carrying a bunch of cables around anymore. You've got Magsafe wireless charging, Apple Watch charger, Lightning, USB-C, all in one device. I've been using it and it just simplifies everything. I'm not digging through a bag or fighting for outlets anymore. It's got 20 watts of power, charges your phone fast, and with 10,000 milliamp hours, you're getting multiple full charges out of it. And like everything Ridge makes, it's solid, it's built to last, and it actually looks pretty good too. Not like those cheap airport chargers. One thing to pack, 5 ways to power. You can find Ridge's power bank at Best Buy, or our listeners can get 10% off at ridge.com by using code SRS at checkout. Just head to ridge.com and use code SRS, and that's it, you're all set. After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them.
Please be kind, support our show, and just tell them we sent you. All right, Pete, we're back from the break and, uh, it's about to get heavier.
Yeah, so, you know, we picked up, uh, Neil Roberts fell out of the helo. Al Mack crash-landed, controlled crash-landed the helo right in the middle of the Shaheeqat Valley. Slab gets out, immediately calls me, gives me a sitrep, what happened. And in that sitrep, it's, I'm going back up. So, you know, right off the bat, he never— no one was telling him to go up, and, you know, no one had to cajole or convince him he was going back up. Well, that helo is not airworthy, so another helo comes to pick them up. And remember what's happening here, back to context, you know, Slabs I'll go now to go back and pick him up, right? So the context of the moment matters. So the helo picks him up, takes him right to Gardez. It's only a minute and a half, 2-minute flight. We're— we're— the Gardez safe house is exactly 7 kilometers from the center of the valley. So touches down at Gardez to wait for another helo, an airworthy helo, to take them back up. so I'm, I'm at the base of Takur Ghar, so to speak, you know, the, the base and about a half mile away.
So I can see Takur Ghar, from where I'm standing. I have line of sight. I'm talking, you know, I can talk to the top of the mountain with line of sight. No one's up there right now, but the AC-130 is narrating what he sees. and unfortunately, you know, when we look at the tapes, uh, there were a lot of missed opportunities there. The enemy's just, you know, nonchalantly walking around, uh, in the open. At one point, uh, about 30 guys surrounded Neil's body, and we know why. They were taking his equipment. One of the guys, uh, who later gets killed a guy named Redbeard, we called Redbeard, is wearing Neil's Gore-Tex pants, uh, laying there dead with his pants on. So, you know, they're, they're tapping into this Bonanza material, but we're not— you know, there's no high-resolution feedback. And I, you know, I don't need— I don't have a Predator video. I'm walking around, um, you know, in the Shaheen Code Valley So Slab gets back to Gardez, the other aircraft picks him up. Now, all these TOCs, Bagram, which is 50 miles away, Masirah, which is 1,000 miles away in a time zone, are going beehive.
You know, this is, we got a crash, you know, we've got a man missing, we're going to launch a rescue operation. And you can hear they're trying to get, inject themselves. And remember, all the accolades had come the night before, you know, and everyone's watching. So I think, you know, and this was described to me by a staff officer, they were conscious that this thing they just got complimented for and then took over immediately went to shit. Now, little did I know they were taking it over because that was about to start. My deputy, whose name was Jimmy, another unit operator— I had put him in the 10th Mountain TOC right in the beginning so that we'd have an LNO there. All our radios, they could hear our radios, they knew everything we were reporting, and Jimmy did an amazing job at that. Now, in totality, he's probably got the best SA of anybody because there's a Predator downlink. He's got that He's got the AC, both AC-130s on radio. They're orbiting around. He's got AFO sat, he's got Purple sat. He knows where the 10th Mountain guys are. So Jimmy gets on a radio and, uh, he goes, Roger, sitrep follows.
Uh, the enemy is surrounding, uh, um, Roberts right now. Bunching up. If we hit them right now with the AC, we should, we should, uh, be able to either disperse them or kill some of them. He was making a recommendation. The Air Force One star I told you about gets on the radio, goes, stop getting all emotional on the radio, why don't you just get off the radio? Kicks him off the net.
Fucking kidding me?
Nope. And, uh, and little did we know at the time, this was you know, this was, this was like, you know, injecting cancer. What's that?
Do you know that fucker's name?
Yeah, General Chabon. It's, uh, it's out.
What a fucking piece of shit.
Yeah, I mean, it gets— it's gonna even get worse.
Fuck, do these guys live with themselves?
I don't know. Yeah, so Jimmy's off, and unbeknownst to me, uh, right after he did that, he gets on what's called the purple sat, JSOC sat. So I'm, I'm AFO sat. The blue sat is the SEAL sat. Everyone's got their own SEAL— I have their own SEAL, their own SATCOM, uh, freak for command purposes. But for this mission, it's AFO sat. AFO is running this battlefield. Them. But they get on the radio, and unbeknownst to me, they say, switch all stations to Purple Sat, without telling us. So now it's quiet, and I'm like, wow, well, at least they exercising some, you know, uh, radio discipline. And I'm not— we're not hearing anything. What's going on, what we now know, because, uh, we've got the tapes the tapes from the radio. So they switched the sat frequency, and this— they put— so he's the commander, and this is another point. The guy they put on is a major. He's a field artillery major. He's never commanded and controlled anything before, much less a complex multi-unit infantry battle, because that's what this is now. You call it special ops, but we're battling like infantrymen on a mountain and down in the valley and using fire support, uh, to reach out and touch the enemy.
Puts this guy on, and this guy is confused. He doesn't even know— he begins injecting himself into battle. He doesn't even know that Roberts fell off on top of Takur Ghar. He thinks he fell off in the middle of the valley where the Al Mack put the helo down. About 50 meters from that helo is a mortar platoon. So he immediately begins obsessing, telling the AC-130s, grid, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I want you— you're cleared hot. I want you to waste them. And the AC, luckily, the lead AC pilot, heroically, he's— he knows. He knows Roberts fell on the ridge. He knows that ridge That grid he's talking about is in the valley. It's not where Roberts is on top of Takur Ghar. And they're like, you know, 5 kilometers away from each other. They're not right next to each other. So he continues talking these guys in, trying to get them to open up. This is a 101st mortar platoon. And luckily, he gives the approval to fire in the AC-130. You hear the pilot say, Negative, negative, we're not, you know, we're not going to do that. Do not fire on them.
Then he straightens them out. At the same time, the guy is telling everybody, everything flying, okay, we're gonna assault this mountain, we're preparing for an assault. Uh, how many shooters you got on board? First thing he calls is an HH-60, which is a medevac helo. How many shooters you got on board? It's female pilot. She's a good pilot, squared away. Uh, none really. How many guys got guns? We all got guns. Okay, you're all shooters now. Holy shit. A medevac. He's fucking kidding me. And he's saying assault, and he ended up saying it— I counted 15 times on the 3 tapes. And major, major point here: In, in infantry and special ops, words matter, ever, especially words that describe offensive tasks. Assault is what you do when you have enough people, enough firepower against a position you can overwhelm. This is a bunker 5 stories above them through the snow. They've got nobody. Slab's team is not assaulters. They're sniper reconnaissance guys. They got SR-25s. I believe he had plastic helmets on there too. They have no Kevlar on. They're kitted light like snipers.
Like they should be. Yeah, fucking sniper.
But he's telling them assault, and he's telling everybody assault. Slabs' aircraft lifts off. So So their aircraft has Purple SAT. Chapman, who is a CCT, you know, no, I don't know exactly. And I've asked Slab if he knew what he was doing and he said, no, I don't. But I believe he was plugged into the intercom on the aircraft. And if you're on the intercom, you can hear the comms, especially the Purple SAT. So Chapman, who's a new guy and he's an Air Force CCT, is hearing this assault assault, assault, which is, you know, beyond belief. It's the last thing— the plan that we made, that Slab ran by me, was they fly us up, we're not going to land on the same spot. There's a defilade position up there. We're going to move to the defilade, contact the AC-130, and then do recon by fire and begin picking off targets from our defilade. And it was a beautiful spot surrounded by rock and that was the plan. But now I'm no longer talking. There's no one to talk to because I can't talk to Slabby. He's in the aircraft. I can— I could have talked to the 47s, but they had switched freaks.
So I'm thinking, wow, why, why is nobody talking anymore? You know, there must be something going on. Must be internal comms, and they must be stuck at Gardez. So I should mention, before they left, I got a radio check from Gardez. It was Mako 30 Charlie, which is John Chapman. Charlie is the suffix for RTO. He's a CCT, but he was their RTO and CCT. And so, you know, he told me, we're loading up Gardez, takeoff ETA 10 minutes or something. Roger that. So off they go. Instead of even going right from Gardez, we're now, we're now like an hour from when Slab initially said that. Instead of going back to the mountain and landing offset, the, the guy they put in charge, that major who's 1,000 miles away, realizes he made this mistake and he was telling the AC to waste a mortar, a friendly mortar platoon. He, he's a, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got to get things straight. Tell Razor 04, I think it was, to go into an air loiter. So instead of going and landing and getting on the mountain, they go only 1 nautical mile away, which is nothing. You, the thump, thump of rotor wings of a 47 are like they're in your backyard from a nautical mile in the mountains.
So the guys on top of the mountain, the enemies, like, they're over there, they're doing something over there. They sit in that air loiter for, I think, I think it was 40 minutes. And then he gives them the go-ahead. Okay, send them in. And does one final assault.
God, dude.
So if you look at the video, the video that's on the internet and And the more videos will be coming out, the actual videos unedited that show the full sequence of events. And when you see them, everything becomes clear about what happened. Uh, on the video, you watch the 47 lands in the exact same place it tried to land the first time. So all this gibberish on the radio he's doing, he never tells them, and oh yeah, Remember, do not land on the same spot, but they do. They land on the same spot. Luckily, the, the enemy decided to just wait and shoot once the aircraft took back off to try to knock it down again. So it disgorges Slab's team, Mako 3-0, and you can watch on the video, and it's on the internet right now. You'll watch 4 guys run as planned to the defilade position, and one guy alone beelines it for the bunker. When I first saw that, I didn't know what happened. So after everything happened— I'm jumping forward a little— the two days after it happened, I flew back to Bagram to watch. I wanted to see the tapes.
That's when I first watched the AC-130 and the Predator videos. When I see this guy get out of the helo and go right to the bunker, I'm like, I thought it was Slab. And if it wasn't Slab, I thought, you know, I didn't know, even know that, you know, I didn't even, wasn't even thinking he's got a CCT with him or anything. I'm like, fuck, what are you doing? Because one guy is going right for the bunker. Well, what I believe is that Chapman is a junior guy. He heard over and over, I told you 15 times, we're going to assault, this is an assault. So he gets off that helo, he's new. Remember, this is 2002, there hasn't been a war, so everybody is a new guy in actuality. We've been out there at least a little while, we've been sneaking around, so we're a little more attuned to things. But everybody else is new. So all the little things that became second nature, uh, like getting off a helo and making sure you never stray from the guy in front of you. And, you know, as an RTO, uh, you just follow your leader.
And if that's a team leader, you follow that team leader. That radio is your weapon, and it, it's the most effective weapon up there. But I believe he was confused. It's cold, it's cold, it's dark, snow's blowing. You've gotten off many helos and you know how easy it is to be just temporarily disoriented. But if you've also been listening to this cacophonic, you know, gibberish and this assault, assault, assault, he's fucking thinking the plan changed. We're assaulting the bunker and off he goes. And You know, I point this out and I mean it. He's a new guy, but this is kind of a heroic thing. He's charging a machine gun nest. You know, he believes his mission now has changed and he's charging a machine gun nest. Well, Slab obviously takes a head count, notices he's missing, sees they can see him up ahead. He's heading for the bunker. He yelled to Chappy, Chappy, what are you doing? And I can't remember exactly what Chappie said. It was something like, I don't know, or I'm not sure. And right when he said it, the bunker opened up on all of them, firing blindly. They don't have night vision.
They don't have sights. So, you know, the one thing these guys had going for them was they had night vision and the The Uzbeks who were up there did not. So, so Chappie heads up, Slab goes right after him, and you watch on the tape and it's, you know, the guy on the tape says the team leader never catches up with them. Well, duh, because he's going up 5 stories through a foot and a half of snow. You're not going to catch a guy who's ahead of you up going up 5 stories in a foot and a half of snow, and everyone's on adrenaline. Chappie makes it all the way up there to the top. In the video, they call it Bunker 2. It's not a bunker. It's a stove. It's just a cutout into the ground surrounded by rocks. In the video, they say he first clears Bunker 2. It's not a bunker. There's no one in it. There's no— you can see the heat signatures of everybody up there. You can see the donkey still alive up there. So Slab follows up. Chappie goes down right, you know, right when Slab gets there, uh, and they're under withering fire.
Slab brings the rest of his team around because they followed up too and starts trying to position them. They're on a rock, the big boulder. A couple guys, they're spread out like they should be, 4 guys, 2-2, and, uh Another guy gets hit. Another one of Slab's guys gets hit. He's on top of the boulder, rolls down, hitting the leg. So now Slab's got one dead, one non-ambulatory injured, and he said— and they're under crossfire from three directions: behind them, the side of them, and in front of them, the machine gun nest. So Slab makes the decision, okay, we got to go over. Let's go over the side. We need, we need to get out of kill zone. Right decision again, uh, second-guessed by a lot of people. He gets over, uh, as they're going over the side, uh, one more guy gets hit. So now he's got two guys injured, one guy dead, uh, he's actually got two guys dead because Roberts is dead too. And, you know, he's got him and one other guy, uh, who are ambulatory. They go over the side This is 20, 24 minutes after they landed. So from the minute they landed, the AC-130— I had briefed the AC-130.
I'm talking to him line of sight now. So he doesn't know I'm not on the purple sat. The ACs don't know that, but I'm talking on the line of sight fires net. And so I told the AC, okay, here's what you need to do. You need to cover these guys' movement when they get out of the helicopter. 'Any enemy you see up in the bunker area, you're cleared hot to fire on them. Any movement you see, you're cleared hot to fire on them.' He said, 'Roger that.' So when they got out of the aircraft, within 1 minute, the AC-130 is calling, 'Mako 3-0, Mako 3-0, this is Grim 3-3, Grim 3-2, over.' No answer, no answer. So I get on, they call back to me. You know, Ultra Zero One, this is Grim. No answer from Mako. Are we cleared hot to fire? And I go, I can't clear you hot now. I— only Slab can clear you hot. I can't see the top of the mountain, so I can't do that. I don't know where anyone was. Good thing, because, you know, if Chappie was even— he was non-ambulatory, he might have still been alive.
But those Slab's team hadn't made it all the way down. and the AC is usually very inaccurate on its first rounds. So, uh, I tried. I did what you're supposed to do. You don't want to clog the net by nonstop. Mako 30, Ultra 01, over. So I go to every 45 seconds to a minute. Mako 30, Ultra 01, over. It turned out, remember I told you they demanded they get put in that night? So Slab's team had less than 24 hours to prep, probably 18 hours for one of the most complex, deadly missions you could ever send guys on. My guys had 2 weeks and 10 days of immersion, and in during that immersion you do stuff like, okay, what freaks are we all on? You're all on your internal comms, which they were on, but unless you've been in combat, you don't— everybody doesn't have the fires freak loaded. Or unless a fires guy comes around and loads it, right? That's just even assaulters. The fire guys comes around before he goes, hey, you got the fire support freak? No, load me up. So none of them had that. Slab had it, but he's on his internal comms.
He's not— even though the MBIAR can monitor both, he's doing what he should do, talking to his team, trying to, you know, keep them alive. But for 24 minutes I called every 45 seconds to a minute, no answer. Finally, at 24, when Slab makes it over to the side, he switches freak. He knows, "I gotta get the AC." And then boom, now we're talking. To, you know, my initial assessment, the reason I never thought that Chappie lived was because of that right there. Not only did I watch the videos and never see a body move, But I called for 24 minutes and no one answered. He's the CCT. I know his radio worked because he called me from Gardez. That's his lifeline. Even if he was injured, he'd be on that radio fucking calling in hell on earth on top of himself. And from everything I know, he was that kind of guy. He would have done that. But he didn't have it. He wasn't on that freak either. So I don't know. You know, I believe he was killed right off the bat. Slab begins— I, you know, I tell Slab, Slab, you got to control the AC.
Just go ahead and have at it. You know where everyone's at. I don't. I can't see it. So they open up the AC. Like I said, it's 105 fire. It's incredibly inaccurate. They bomb the shit out of it. When you watch the full tape, you'll see this is hell on earth. They probably fired their basic load, which has got to be 25 to 50 rounds of 105 on top of that mountain. Why they're doing it— you look up at this tiny rock outcropping up on this finger that leads down to the bunkers, and there's two guys just fucking huddled up sitting there, you know, showing you what kind of warriors that are up there. These are mountain fighters, man. And, and, you know, we have pictures of them because from the sensitive site exploitation. These are fucking hardcore mountain fighters. And sure enough, they hang out. The AC-130 ceases fire. It's, you know, they're, they're about out of ammo, but then they fly off station. And, and this enemy somehow knew that And you watch— this is what I told you I asked when I saw the edited tape. Where's the enemy? Where's that enemy that comes IMT, an individual movement technique, across the snow plain?
And that's when, you know, he's like, ah, forget it, you don't want to watch it, and he shut it down. So I— it's not on there, but that's what kept me skeptical and wanting to find out more information. Sure enough, this is Redbeard, the first guy of the two, comes down, up, down, up, down, up, down. Well-trained fighter. They're confused. I believe he thinks Slab's team has taken over the bunker. And but here he comes. He's coming back to get the bunker again. So again, telling you what kind of guy this is. He's IMTing back to assault that bunker. But the first place he goes to, and he, the whole way he knows this mountain, he's got Robert's pants on, his Gore-Tex pants on. He knows this mountain because when you track where he went, he went into a perfect defilade position where the bunker could not shoot. You know, it's below that 5-story thing. You can't de-elevate your weapon to to shoot at that angle. The first thing he does is go up to that stove where Chappie was hit. IMT's right up to it, sits there for 30, 45 seconds, probably checked, saw that John was dead.
IMT's right back down his position that's out of defilade, goes down all the way around, flanks the bunker, gets You watch his AK, you watch the report on the Predator video. He begins firing at the bunker, then the fire comes out of the bunker, uh, both RPK machine gun and RPG. Redbeard goes down. Uh, and how do we know all that about Redbeard? Because where he goes down in that videotape is exactly where my guys found him when they came across him on the sensitive site exploitation. We took pictures, we marked the body. Mark the position. Never, never moved from that position. Now, the other enemy who was hiding up there starts IMTing down. He too comes down all the way to where Chappy ended up, but he doesn't leave. He stays there. And what's going on in the background, again, unbeknownst to me, I'm down there. It's starting to get a little bit light. Not light enough where you can see anything, but you can see the horizon. And behind Takur Ghar— Takur Ghar is 11,000. Behind it is another mountain to the east that's like 12,000, 12,500. So sunrise and BMNT are even later for the top of Takur Ghar.
You'd think mountaintop, it's going to get sun first, but it's not. It's occluded by this other mountain range to the east of it. And, uh, so the sun's rising. Also, the AC says, hey, we've been ordered off station. I said, negative, you cannot go off station. He says, yes, we're going off station. And so I got another radio to have Jimmy check it out, see if he could find out what the order was. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, uh, the general who took over the battle in Bagram launched the Ranger QRF. The Ranger QRF, who's— that's your job, QRF, so you wait around and then during firefights you get ready. They ran into them, they said, we need to get the QRF forward right now. The QRF, uh, commander or captain goes, what's the mission? Where are we going? There's no time, just get in the helicopter, we'll tell you when you get to Gardez. Well, the helicopter they get in has no SATCOM, so these Rangers from 1st Battalion getting this helicopter to come on a mission they know nothing about. They don't even know Roberts fell out of the helicopter. So they're flying forward to Gardez, they pause in Gardez, and then I hear this, this radio transmission on the line of sight say, uh, tell the AC they need to stay until the QRF gets here.
And I get on the radio and I go, QRF? What, what's going on with the QRF? The QRF is inbound. They're like 5 minutes out now. I hear the wop-wop of rotors. Here they come. They, they— so they're going in on short final. The AC is pulling off saying, I've been ordered off. I tell the AC-130, fuck, and this is a quote, I say, if you, you are, I am Alter Zero One, I'm the ground force commander. I am ordering you to stay on station. If you leave station right now, they're going to blow that helicopter out of the sky. When we watch the tapes later, that aircraft was already on its way back. When that, when that tape's playing, they're already on their way back. So they're gone. Now here comes, here comes the QRF. QRF. This is either 51 or an hour plus after Slab had landed. Slab was told in the beginning, remember I told you when he said, I'm going up, he was told on the radio in the helicopter, the QRF will be right behind you. So Slab's getting out of that heli. When he got out and, you know, Chapman headed up, Slab's thinking, well, we got QRF right behind us.
They're not. They're an hour out still, which again, he never would have executed this mission. Slab would have called the thing off with the helicopter before it ever landed, but he didn't know that either. He's not— no one's talking to him either. So here comes the QRF, and you know, I wish I had my pictures here. I'd show you the QRF lands in the exact same place.
Gosh.
So now we're on our third helicopter landing in the exact same place. 5 stories up from where it's going to land is an RPK machine gun. It's already sighted in on 2 other helicopters. This one comes in, nails it with RPG, nails it with RPK, shreds the helicopter. I believe 3 guys are killed before they ever get off that helicopter. No one on the QRF helicopter still knows Roberts fell out of a helicopter. There's SEALs up there, there's enemy, and they, of course, they don't know, don't land on the same spot. The second QRF helicopter somehow got word. It lands over on the other side of the mountain, down a bit. These guys go into Superman mode, power up that mountain, took them— I think it took them about an hour, but it was an incredible, uh, feat by those Rangers. But they tore up, uh, the rest of the Rangers, uh, and, you know, the guys continued to get hit. They were pinned down again, 3 directions. Um, Slabs now, you know, calling, trying to figure out what's going on. I'm trying to figure out— I'm trying to figure out who's up on top of that mountain.
Something else that happened, that same troop commander who overrode Slab for sliding it 24 hours and told him to go, hopped on the second QRF aircraft at Bagram, didn't tell anybody, didn't tell me he's leaving Gardez. He was, you know, like the acting OIC of Gardez. Gets off the Ranger helicopter, goes, you guys do your thing, I'm going off. Goes off on his own to find Mako and finds him. And he doesn't have radios, but he's got a cell phone, so he makes cell phone connectivity back to Dam Neck. Dam Neck is talking to the Blue TOC. I still don't even know this guy's on the mountain. So now things are compounding even worse. We can't figure out the headcount. We've got dead guys, we've got live guys, but there's extra guys up there and no one knows. It doesn't make sense. In these, in these, in this period after the Rangers arrived up the second half of the QRF, Jason Cummingham, who's this heroic JCU, he's a, he's an Air Force medic. Back. He's treating the pilots. Both pilots have been shot. Got IV bags going. A guy from behind them sneaks up, shoots him, gut shots him.
So now we're on golden hour. You know, we got a gut shot guy. We got to get him off in 1 hour. So, you know, I got to get this, this count correct so they can allow this medevac helicopter to fly in. I'm telling them, bring it in. Finally get the count correct because someone comes up, someone says, hey, the troop commander's up there, the blue troop commander. I'm like, fuck. So we added him, the count now works, and I'm talking to JSOC and I'm saying, I need that medevac now. We're 20 minutes into the golden hour. He's got 40 minutes to live. I need him now. Yeah, Pete, we've talked it over. We can't send another helicopter up there. We've already lost two, and, uh, it's— the risk is not worth it. And I'm like, fuck. I told him again, I need that helicopter. You need to send it. I'm— you— I'm giving you my word, the top of the mountain's secure. They got some other report that a mortar had been fired or whatnot, and there was still enemy, but it was worth bringing a Blackhawk in, you know, with the amount of guys we had up there.
To provide fire support. We could have built a wall of fire. I still would have brought him in. It was worth saving a guy's life at this point. But the, you know, the request was denied, and, uh, Jason bled out up on the mountain. Uh, so we, we weren't allowed to medevac him. Everything went quiet. Uh, the, the bunker, I should add, was still firing away. There were at least one, maybe two guys in there on that RPK. They had plenty of ammo. They held the Rangers. The Rangers could not assault and take it. They were pinned down there. And, you know, there's no superpowers when it comes to frontal assault on a machine gun nest. Nothing you can do. So they brought F-15s in. The F-15s were missing. And I'm one of my OPs said, hey Panther, do they know the Predator has a Hellfire on it? And I'm like, I thought they did, but great, you know, great point. And I called the CCT up there and I said, hey, use the Predator Hellfire. It's one shot, one kill. And sure enough, he used the Predator Hellfire. One Hellfire blew up the bunker, killed the guy.
The mount was secure. And that was midday, I think 12 or 1 o'clock, and they wouldn't allow a helo in there the rest of the day. We had to wait for night. Finally, helos were sent forward and evacuated all the guys off the mountain. So they all left. JSOC went back to not commanding and controlling. We stayed, finished the battle up, I think 4 more days. and then we headed out for the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan. But, you know, again, everything from the injection, the forced injection of a team that doesn't even want to go in, not giving them sufficient time because you don't understand how critical time is, that we don't pull shit out of our asses in combat. We prep ourselves to address every possible contingency. Especially on top of an 11,000-foot mountain, because all you got is what you got. So it's a, you know, PhD combat packing list. But they didn't have time to change their freaks. Then changing the radio net, taking command over without telling the ground force commander or even consulting, you know, telling me, hey, we got this. Nothing like that. Then putting the aircraft— telling the AC-130s the wrong target, putting the aircraft in an air loiter, delaying it beyond comprehension, sending it in, not telling it to land offset or in a different spot from where the other helicopters landed.
This is the prima facie. This is 2002. And I'll just say the lesson that would go on to haunt our military throughout GWAT and still haunts it today and has now been exported to Ukraine. And that is decision-making, problem-solving by disconnected chains of command never has and never will make sense. Because the only way to make sense is with your senses. And a disconnected chain of command by very definition cannot make sense. Because their senses are disconnected from the environment. So, you know, never again. We've got to shitcan this whole concept that a battle can be commanded remotely from a multi-million dollar talk. It does not work.
It's a fucking ego problem.
It is an ego problem.
How the fuck do they live with themselves?
I don't know.
And, uh, there's a documentary about to come out about this, I've heard.
Yeah. Yeah, there is. Well, there's a movie too. Uh, Ron Howard, I believe, is making a movie about the version that, you know, from the edited video, that Slab left the guy. And, you know, I've said to people, Slab's my friend. Not like we hang out. I haven't talked to him in a year or something. And, you know, a friend, like anyone you go to combat in, is your friend. And Slab is my friend. I knew him in Bosnia. I rode around in a car with him. He's— if you know Slab, you know he would never leave someone on a mountain who he had any doubt was not dead. And to character assassinate him like they did to get this other narrative forward just doesn't make any sense.
I don't know anything about that.
Yeah, well, you'll find it out. That's what the whole— that's what the whole documentary is. The documentary is proof that John Chapman was killed, uh, by that first volley, which even the autopsy backed up. It was terminal, uh, terminal, uh, injuries from the first rounds. But in order to get the— you know, he got up and cleaned out the bunkers himself you had to include that Slab left him up there, and that became the narrative. And, you know, I'll say this, Slab wouldn't mind, but he, he went through, you know, it caused physical harm to him, uh, to say that. There, it's hard enough balancing your, the whole PTSD thing when you get out, especially with all the shit he went through, but when you be you know, falsely accused to some, it makes it even worse. So yeah, there's a movie and then the documentary, uh, which is being made, which is in my opinion, a, you know, a very productive, uh, piece of history because they go into great detail. They interviewed all the Rangers, they interviewed all the helicopter pilots, they interviewed AFO, they interviewed General Hagenbach, the 10th Mountain Commander. They interviewed SEALs.
They interviewed other Air Force CCT. It's really a comprehensive, you know, piece. I haven't seen any of it. I know what they're doing, but a lot of that info is what needs to be put out.
They've reached out before.
Have they?
They've reached out before to come on here.
Yeah, they'd probably be a good guest. Bring some of the clips. He went back to Takur Ghar, got permission from the Taliban, and, uh, some unbelievable footage. They went back and filmed the battlefield geography again and the geometry, you know, what I was talking about, the 5 stories, the areas that are in defilade and, and those that aren't. So, you know, my thing, Sean, I'm not, I'm not not getting involved in the, the bickering. And a lot of it's inter-service because it started in 2015 when the secretaries of all the services put out a memo and it said all services are directed to re-review all Silver Stars and above to see if any of them qualify for Medal of Honor. So all the services did that. The Air Force had not had a Medal of Honor yet, in Afghanistan. And they— this is 2015. And so they put, you know, that's where the— that's where John got put in for the Medal of Honor. The Navy countered it and put Slab in for a Medal of Honor. And then it began this inter-service bickering. I know nothing about that. I would— no one called me.
I remember hearing about it. I'm like, they're changing their award? I wrote Slavs' initial reward. I think there's a reg that says you can't change it unless you consult with, you know, the prior commander. But, you know, the SEALs—
the SEALs have a history of this shit. Yeah, the SEALs have a history of this shit.
Well, the— it— both sides did it. Neither side, you know, called. So I would have just told them I don't have a parochial bone in my body.
Lies come out of the SEAL teams?
Yeah, well, in this case, you know, I think they were pretty accurate and they ended up being accurate. But, you know, the battle— so the battle still today online and everything is these narratives, and someone asked me to address you know, the Air Force guys' criticism that I was supporting this other narrative. And I'm like, it's— I'm not supporting anybody. I'm the ground force commander. John Chapman and Britt Slabinski were my guys. I still consider them my guys. And my only responsibility once that battle ended was to make sure that the lessons that were learned from that battle are shared and passed on to current and future warriors so the same thing never happens to them. And that's all I give a shit about. I give a shit about accuracy. I don't care about either side's parochialism. I don't have a dog in a fight. I don't have a favorite. And I'm not going to get involved in a debate with any of them about what they think. They got involved in this in 2015 off an edited video. I've been involved in it since 2002 off real-world experience. And I'm the only guy who's seen every video from start to finish.
So, uh, you know, to me it's about learning. And the fact it's turned into this narrative battle about, you know, what happened after John got shot is also letting off these people you very elegantly, uh, directed some, you know, emotional intelligence toward, uh, that, you know, they're the ones— the lesson is the disconnected chain of command caused this entire thing. This op was going, you know, as smooth as a massive battle op could ever go, especially when you're talking about 3 sniper recce teams infilling over 11,000-foot peaks amongst 1,000 enemy and never being compromised. But what happened on Takur Ghar happened, and we got to learn from it— good, bad, and indifferent. You know, uh, all the little things. Every— maybe some guy in the future will go, hey, do I got my fires freak on my radio? Another guy in RTO will go, okay, when I get off this helicopter, follow the team leader, follow the team leader, follow the team leader. Don't ever— even if you're by yourself, just take a knee and hold what you got. You're not an assaulter. You don't go assaulting something unless you're the assaulters and preferably behind them.
But the biggest lesson of all is that this C2 system is broke hard. And this was the first major incident. Uh, you know, if we talk about Pat Tillman, it's the same thing happened to Pat Tillman in his platoon. Uh, you know, I'll explain that one, but it's the exact same thing. They were— their deaths was the responsibility of this disconnected chain of command micromanaging and ignoring when they needed it, ignoring the guys on the ground. And again, same thing, we need to learn that. And if we don't change it, that's why I'm so big on Hegseth understanding this, we're going to get our asses kicked the next time we get into a real battle, something, a real war like the Ukraine war, we're going to get our asses kicked. Because, and it's also tragic because the real strength of the American military is bottom-up command and control. It's letting guys adapt and improvise on the battlefield, communicate themselves. They know what to do. But when you take all that away from them, you know, you've messed with nature. And you've messed with human nature, and the results continue to be to this day either catastrophic or massively unsuccessful.
Have there been any consequences? No leadership. They're probably still fucking in.
The one-star got promoted to two.
Of course he did.
The two-star got promoted to three.
Of course he did.
Uh, You know, no, no consequences at all. They, they covered it up.
They slapped some awards. Yeah, make everybody a fucking hero.
Yep.
Yeah, good job.
Yep.
That's what the fuck they did.
I know.
That's where those awards came.
And to me, the crime is you're denying those current warriors and future warriors their freedom to learn the lessons that could keep them alive in combat. And these are foundational lessons, but they're also, it's the beginning of, you know, a cancer that is now metastasized in our military. We've got to end this senseless C2 method and go back to dispersed C2, guy on the ground C2, flexible C2. but everybody works for the guys on the ground. You're in support when guys are on the ground, and that, that's like a philosophical shift that has to be taught and repeated over and over. Repetition breeds recognition. We need everyone to know that a TOC's job is to support the guys on the ground, and that's all they're there for. If there's a request they answer it. If it's intel that they need to update, they can send the intel, but they don't tell the guys on the ground what to do, uh, and they certainly don't tell them, uh, you know, key life-and-death decisions, uh, like they feel free to do right now.
I just, I just want to clarify something. I am, I am not commenting on Whether they— whether those awards should have been given or not, I don't fucking know. I wasn't there. But I will fucking comment on this: the United States Navy has a fucking history of turning people into heroes to cover up fucking shit that never should have happened.
Yeah.
And you know what the fuck I'm talking about.
Yeah, no doubt.
And, and fucking bunch— the Navy has a fucking integrity problem.
Problem.
Yeah, probably every other fucking branch does too, but they do just what I'm aware of because that was the fucking community that I was involved in, and I am fucking ashamed of it.
I think it's higher ranking people, the first recourse when an operation goes south, and it's very clear why it went south because the fucking orders that were delivered via micro messenger, uh, whether it's over the radio or in person are what caused it. So the first recourse to cover up a tragedy is what you said, drowned the participants in a tidal wave of awards. Then the awards eclipse the fuck-ups. Turns it into a positive. Right. And no one stops asking, well, yeah, but what do we learn from it?
And the generals get promoted. The admirals get promoted.
Because it's looked at as a job for fucking killing people.
You fucking pieces of shit. Sorry, man. No, let's take a break.
Pete Blaber is a retired Delta Force commander renowned for leading elite counter-terrorism and special operations teams across the globe, now applying his battle-tested leadership principles to corporate environments, authorship, and innovative security solutions.
Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, as one of nine children in an Irish-Catholic household. Pete attended Southern Illinois University. His military career saw him rise through the ranks of Delta Force to high-level command roles, directing critical operations in Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Retiring in 2006, he transitioned from commanding elite combat teams worldwide to leading executive teams.
A prominent voice on leadership, team dynamics, crisis decision-making, national security, and organizational effectiveness, he has been featured in profiles, interviews, and podcasts sharing practical insights drawn from his extraordinary career.
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