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AJ Pasciutti, welcome to the show, man.
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
It's an honor to have you. So, uh, you got your new book getting ready to come out. Actually, by the time this releases, it'll probably be out. Dark Horse. How long did it take you to write that?
So the process to write it was relatively quick. Um, Once we got going on it, we were actually trying to make November 10th, 2025 for the Marine Corps' 250th.
Oh man, that would've been awesome.
We tried super hard and it was a really fun process. You know, writing your first book is kind of like walking into like a dark forest. You really don't know what you don't know about it. You don't know if you're a good writer through the process. So I was able to link up with a really good writer, Neil McGuinness, and he is a writer who does a lot of work with James Patterson. And so through that process, the way that we really worked was I would kind of get a lot of stuff on paper and he would help me shape it. And so I wrote a lot of the book. Neal was the kind of like the sage wisdom over the top. Since he writes for James Patterson and works with James Patterson, they like to keep storylines moving, sentence structures, how they're able to keep people's attention. And so I can be sometimes long-winded or long-sentenced, you know, kind of when writing a, you know, writing long story. And so he was able to help kind of shape that narrative. But it took us around 4 and a half months. Typically what happens is an author is looking to like a professional author or professional writer.
They generally try to get 500 words a day. We were under such time constraints that I was going to 1800 to 2200 words a day. Whoa. Very much like going right on, dude. Fly. I mean, you know the personality type, right? You know where we like get in, we're like, okay, mission-focused, right? Here we go. So I shut everything else off in my life and went into this thing full, you know, full throttle because the writing portion is actually one of the shortest legs of the journey. So then you go to editing, then there's copy editing, and then specifically with military writers with clearances, we have to go through the DOD for pre-clearance. And we submitted it to the DOD for pre-clearance review and then had a series of government shutdowns that happened. Right. And that part of the Pentagon, you know, that wasn't, you know, one of the essential, you know, entities in the Pentagon. So they had to shut that down. So we had a couple of things in there. All that to say, the timing of this book releasing Memorial Day week of 2026 couldn't be more perfect for it. I've had a great publisher that's been fantastic to work with and very patient with me on this process itself.
Man, I'm excited for you.
Thank you.
Congratulations.
Thanks very much.
You know, I haven't heard much about this, about your service or for you, or actually even, uh, the sniper. And, uh, so researching you, uh, leading up to this interview, I mean, dude, you have had a hell of a career.
Like, thank you.
Wow. Uh, very impressive.
Very fortunate. Very fortunate.
So let me, uh, if you don't mind, I'm going to give you an intro, give the audience a little insight.
Of course. Do I have to sit here for it? I'm gonna be like super embarrassed.
Here we go. AJ Pashutti, you grew up in Sunnyvale, California, the son of immigrants. Enlisted in the Marine Corps after 9/11 and became a rifleman with one of the Corps' most storied infantry battalions, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Deployed to Iraq 3 times during Operation Iraqi Freedom, serving in OIF-1 and the Battle of Fallujah as a rifleman and a scout sniper. Later led a scout sniper team in Iraq tasked with hunting high-value targets, including the most lethal enemy sniper known as Juba. Juba killed over 100 Americans. You were— you went on to serve as a recon and force recon team leader deploying to Afghanistan and North Africa. You were selected for the highly competitive Marine Gunner Program, becoming an infantry weapons officer and deploying twice to the Indo-Pacific. Retired, retired retired from the Marine Corps in 2023 after 21 years of service. You currently host the Combat Story Podcast, helping preserve the stories of those who have served. You hold a Master's of Business for Veterans from the University of Southern California and a Master's of Public Leadership from the University of San Francisco and are currently pursuing a PhD in Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego.
You are the author of The Dark Horse: Harnessing, Harnessing Hidden Potential and More in Life, releasing May 19th, 2026. Dude, your podcast is awesome.
Oh, thank you.
So how long have you been doing that?
Not long, as a matter of fact. So the original host is a gentleman by the name of Ryan Fujit, and Ryan and I met when I interviewed on his show in 2024. So I had met him. I was doing a speaking event at a veterans gala up in San Jose area. And after, you know, I told some stories that we'll tell here, you know, kind of the idea of camaraderie and a little bit of loss and leadership. And he approached me at the end of the event and asked me to, you know, come on the show with him. Well, we really hit it off, you know, with some conversations through that. It was a really good, really long interview. And at the time I was running for city council in San Jose, California. So my hometown. So I had retired and then wanted to continue public service. And so after like running the campaign trail one night, night I was— I had a long conversation with him. It was really one of the first times that I had really talked about the story super publicly, specifically surrounding, you know, hunting a sniper and the teamwork that kind of came behind that.
Him and I became fast friends through that. And then he was the one— and I owe it all to Ryan— he was the one who had— he turned the microphones off when the interview was over and he said, listen, man, I've interviewed at this point 200 veterans. And he says, I've never asked one of them to write a book. And my first thing was, nope, I don't— I have no interest. I don't want to do that. I didn't want to be like— in the Marine culture, we, we don't— it's not, it's not part of the Marine culture generally. It's kind of frowned upon. Like, it always goes back to the team, right? And so it's very nerve-wracking to write a book about yourself, especially as a Marine. And so he really helped kind of make those things a little easier, you know, on me. He was able to work and get Neil McGinnis, the, you know, the co-author on the book, and started to bolt the pieces together. And then in April of 2025, he had sent me an email and he said, hey, I'm looking to either sundown the show or I'm looking to hand the show off to you.
He has 3 children, right? He has, you know, his normal day job. Prior to starting his podcast, he was an Apache pilot for, I think, 10 years and then was a CIA officer for another 10 years. And at the time, he was working in tech in Northern California. So he had a lot of other life obligations. And so we just had a really good bond through that. And his first question to me was like, hey, would you like taking the show? And I said, absolutely not. Right. And Ryan's a persistent man and was able to work through kind of what you're able to do here. You give people a space to feel seen, to feel heard, to make them feel that their sacrifices or their service is valued and it matters. And I think that as the wars— our war has transitioned over, I think a lot of people in our, in our, in our shoes may feel that their, their service or their stories may be forgotten. And so with that, we've really taken a really good liking or an inkling to wanting to be as open and honest with these young men and women that come on here and share some of the wildest things.
And it's just like you're doing is sit across from a person and just say, what happened out there? And it's been quite a journey. So about 6 months is what I've had. I've had the helm.
All right. Now, yeah, I've used it a couple of times to research some of the guests that I've had I was one. I was, I was like, I don't recognize you on that because I haven't listened to it in quite a while. And so I was, yeah, I was, I was like, I don't remember this guy being there, but, but it's, yeah, it's, yes, there's some awesome people, awesome stories, awesome, like just a great record of, you know, recent history on that podcast. So thank you.
We really tried. Ryan and I had a lot of conversations on it and what we wanted to do, what his value set was and what and why he started the show itself. And so when we had the conversations, it was just easy, you know, to say, okay, yeah, sounds good. I mean, and to your point, I still— every single episode that we released, there's still like, you know, a bunch of comments like, who's this guy? Right? You know, like, where's Ryan at? So we're working to be able to kind of, you know, shape that and change that. We also bring Ryan back from time to time because it's still his, you know, passion project. And so I don't want to remove him from it. We're actually doing an episode coming up in the next few weeks. We'll be flying to Kentucky, if I'm not mistaken, for the 101st Airborne's— it's called Week of the Eagles, and it's a reunion. And so he is obviously a pilot and I was a ground guy. So we like to attach when we go to these large organizations and he and other pilots can chase each other's watches and stuff, right?
And us ground guys can talk about, you know, the realities of what it's like being on the ground. And so we have a, you know, divide and conquer kind of thing.
Very cool. Very cool. Well, a couple of things to crank out here before we get going. One, everybody gets a gift. Gummy bears.
Thank you very much. I might need some sugar.
Yeah, there you go. And then, uh, I have a Patreon.
Yeah.
And, uh, are you familiar with Patreon?
Yeah.
So we've created quite the community on there, and they're the— honestly, they're the reason that I get to sit down with you here today. And so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from Stephen Casey: Where do you see our current modern views of masculine masculinity is limiting or ignoring the plight of the voiceless. What fundamental truths should we rediscover to present a comprehensive view of masculinity that is worth passing on?
Wow. And what was the gentleman's name?
Stephen Casey.
Stephen Casey. Fantastic question. I wrote Dark Horse to specifically tackle what I feel masculinity looks like. To me, masculinity is— yes, there's naturally going to be a toughness. You have to be tough, I think, in some aspects. One of the things that I've seen through my journey is that empathy and compassion and understanding are not weaknesses. They are truths. Dark Horse is really a love letter. It's a love letter to the people who have shaped my life. I don't believe that I would have been in— so I say that I don't believe in the idea of a self-made man or a self-made woman. Now, of course, there's going to be application of putting your nose down, putting your nose to the grindstone, and working through individual challenges. But there were people throughout my life that affected the trajectory of where I ended up. And so I wanted to write a thank you, and not only a thank you, but kind of a call to action to other people. To me, the, the example of being a man is being like I said, compassionate and understanding with certain people or certain scenarios, achieving your own success, and then turning around and then making sure that the person behind you has a better opportunity at success than you did.
Because that's what people did for me. And so I think of it as this positive feedback loop. Some people— and we'll talk about it today— that have gone through and, and completely been there when I needed it the most, and they wouldn't have done that if they weren't compassionate men and women that saw a young kid who needed a little bit of help and that a bit of guidance, someone to carry the weight when I couldn't carry it myself and showed me the path. And so to me, I think it's something called a social contract. When I work with team members or when I talk with people about leadership, what I say to them is, if you can focus on making the next generation or your team or whatever that individual unit is better than you, to me, that's what being a man looks like, is carrying them with you.
Wow. Great.
Thank you.
Great answer. I got to be honest, you have a very unique disposition, energy. I mean, for somebody that spent 20, 21, a 21-year career in the Marine Corps, sounds like the majority of it was in combat. I mean, you just, um, you, you, you have very unique energy.
Thank you.
Very positive.
I try.
It's Not like most of us that walk in there and it's just fucking dark, man. Yeah.
You know, I've, I've walked—
just a heaviness. I'm not, you know what I mean? Like, I, I, I have it sometimes. You just, uh, yeah, it's good to see.
So I appreciate that. Some people have called me the friendly sniper. Right on. So I think that, you know, to come back to the, to the manliness thing or the masculinity thing, I ask some of my guests the same question, and you don't hear the answers that you think you're going to hear is like, you know, be tough, rub dirt on it, right? Don't show weakness, right? Everything I've talked about is, is or seen with some of these, these men and women is—
That shit was a fad, dude. It was all fake.
100%. And, you know, I'm not the biggest guy in the world, right? And so I had to be adaptable, right, in certain scenarios. But I remember walking down, you know, the hallways of like 2nd Force Recon Company. And again, I'm not the biggest guy in the world. It was generally the people who chirped the loudest that had the most to hide or had, you know, whatever the things that they were insecure about.
So being the loudest motherfucker in the room is always the biggest shitbag.
I didn't say it, but yeah, no, you're totally right. You're totally right. And so I just didn't subscribe to that. It wasn't part of my upbringing. But also, I think it has to do with really where I'm from or how I was kind of raised. You know, you mentioned in the, you know, in the section earlier, I was raised by immigrants and people take it and they use it for whatever, you know, venue that they want to, you know, condition it for. But for me, my dad was an Italian immigrant, right? So from the old country, from Puglia. My mom met him when she was a fine arts student studying abroad in Florence. They met at a nightclub. And so I don't like to think about how, you know, how that, you know, transpired. But eventually, you know, little AJ came along. But what my dad did was when he came to the United States, he— I try to look at the United States in a lot of ways through an immigrant's eyes. So he came to the United States because it was this like land of opportunity and it was this place where he could become anything that he wanted.
And he just saw possibility inside of it. And that positivity, that like infection anxious love of this country was imprinted very, very early on me through my childhood. And then, you know, eventually they got— they separated when I was really young. And then my mother met another man and his family are all Argentinian immigrants. So I'm not Argentinian by blood, but I'm Argentinian by upbringing. They left, they fled their country, that his family fled their country. And Evita Perón helped them leave their country during a lot of their civil unrest. They didn't speak a lick of English when they came to the United States. They were field workers and house cleaners when they first came in. They didn't know the difference. Again, they didn't speak English when they were refugees to the United States. They didn't know the difference for canned foods. And they told me stories about how they ate canned dog food because they didn't know the difference when they first came in. So that's— yeah, they just, you know, it's part of these things when you are running from somewhere, right? And they live in a farming community in Northern California called Watsonville, which next to Gilroy, which makes a bunch of garlic.
And so had that right. And then I had, you know, my mom was the only college degree holder in my entire family. And so kind of had this like weird juxtaposition. So had some really good, you know, like a normal American upbringing. And then I had a very like immigrant-centric upbringing. But that love of what we are and who we are and the acceptance of who we are from wherever we are. Was imprinted very, very young.
Wow. Nice. Before we get too far into your story, I got one thing I want to just cover here. Have you—
have you been hearing about—
there's a lot of stuff going on about are we going to institute a draft in 2026? Have you heard about this?
I've heard rumblings. I'm trying to stay out of that as much as possible. But yeah, yeah, I've heard rumblings of that.
You want to stay out of it?
No, no, we can.
Oh, okay.
Like I said, airplane conversation. Yeah.
Well, Polly Market. Ah, you familiar with Polly Market?
I am.
So Polly Market says there is a 9% chance that we will institute a draft by the end of 2026, December 31st. I'm just— we got Ukraine war, we got the Iran war, we got a lot of conflict going on in the world. What do you think about that? Do you think there's a chance?
So I'll answer, I guess, two questions. No, I don't think a draft is going to happen personally. I don't have enough information on the entire, you know, aspect of it. But we have an extremely large military, an extremely capable military. I think it's— we have the first, second, third, and fourth largest militaries in the world, you know, and so the amount of money that we put behind it, the amount of training that we put behind it and education that we put behind it. I think that we're a very capable, capable military. With that, this is part of the aspect of being very different than I think what, you know, what we've talked about in the past is I'm not an advocate for war. I have seen it. I have lived it. I've experienced it. I think that the United States military should be as good as it is. But I think that it should be used as sparingly as possible because the wars that you and I were in— and I talk about it in the book and I'll talk about it here— we fought with a gun in our hand and a rulebook in our pocket.
And when you ask, it's like the Marine Corps is purpose-built for one thing: to break the enemy's will to ours. And when you send the Marines forward forward. They are there to do only that. But when politicians and policymakers get in the way of that one thing, they are endangering the lives of the service members they send forward themselves. The bond that we should— the love that we share for one another in those scenarios, you know, we talk about it. I think there's a, you know, an old quote from like Black Hawk Down, right? Once the first bullet passes your head, politics goes out the window. That's— I mean, couldn't be truer. No truer statement I've ever found. But that bond, that love that I have for my brothers, the love that I have for, you know, or that they have for me, that is something that I think should be sacred and should be wielded very, very carefully, because if they're going to send us to war, it better be for a damn good reason. And if it isn't, they're violating the social contract that we have with our country. You know, I—
what do you think about the draft just in general? I mean, would you be for it or against it? I'm just curious.
So I would— to answer your question directly, I'd be against a draft. I don't think that conscript service is something that is healthy for a fighting force. I think that there's a difference between being a volunteer, a volunteer, and there's something that comes with that. But also, I understand that less than 1% of the United States is physically and mentally capable of joining the delayed entry or excuse me, less than 1% of the United States is physically or physically or mentally capable of joining the military for whatever litany of reasons. I mean, there's a— we are naturally overweight as a country. There's a ton of mental health issues that our screeners be able to put, you know, before we can go inside of the service itself. But we still have a pretty large swath of people that are still serving. I think it's 2 million people in the armed services currently, whether that be active or reserve. We have a pretty good, you know, function of that. You know, but the challenge is, even as a retiree, you know, I've done my service, I've seen my war, you know, my war has passed. And I have a very good friend of mine who's on the precipice of retirement himself.
And we talk a lot. He's in. He's in right now. And he doesn't know whether or not he wants to retire because the bond that he has, the love that he has for the Marines that he serves is so strong. And I've talked to that man. He's a great man, better than me, but just a great man. But I talk with Sarah, my partner, and I talk with her a lot. And I say that if this thing turns up and we have to go, I would volunteer again to get back in, to do whatever I can to get back into the fight. Because you and I have a skill set that cannot be taught. You and I have experiences that cannot be taught. Those are learned and only learned by doing. And if I can save one person's life by putting mine in harm's way, I would gladly do that. You know, I think there's an old quote, right? My only regret is I have but one life to give, you know, to my country. I may not agree with our current stance or our current posture of how we're, you know, treating the world or how we're using the military.
Those are my personal opinions and not those of the Marine Corps or the Department of Defense. But I would still go.
I don't know, man. I got mixed feelings on this. I was totally against a draft. I mean, I have kids. I don't want my kids doing what me and you had to do by any means. I think involuntary service creates a— potentially creates a lesser— you're just not somebody that's not— they don't have— they don't— they're not bought in 100%. You know, they're there because they have to be there. But then I interviewed Joe Kent and he actually brought up a really good point and he was talking about the warrior class in, in the US. And I mean, a lot of our parents served, their parents served, their parents, you know, and you get these, these, these, these, these generational warriors, you know, and it winds up, it's coming from the same fucking class of people. And you know what Joe said, which I think makes sense, and you just said it, you know, at that— I can't remember exactly how you worded it, but that we should be— we should use our, our military very sparingly, uh, be very strategic. We're not doing that right now. And what Joe said, I have— I agree with him.
Is if we were to institute a draft, then everybody has skin in this game. Everybody has to do it. And the pressure in D.C. to send us to war— because right now it's 1% of the population, right? 1% of the U.S. serves in the fucking military. So 99% of the people aren't affected by it and they don't really give a shit.
Most of them are at the mall.
Now when we all have to fucking serve, now it becomes a different story. you know, in D.C., because everybody's going to have to go. Everybody's going to have a kid. Everybody, you know, everybody's going to have to register. They're all going to have to go with involuntary, you know, with the draft. And so I think that would almost, you know, according to Joe, and I agree with him, you know, that would, that would, that would be a totally different conversation in D.C. now that 100% of Americans are involved. I agree with that. I think I'm like, shit, that's a good fucking point because 1% of the population has been toeing the line for a long, long fucking time.
And we're tired, man. Yeah.
Now, on the other hand, you know, I don't know if you've seen this stuff. Have you seen— have you seen this Australian SAS guy that's getting persecuted for war crimes?
No, I haven't.
Supposedly is the most decorated SAS soldier in Australia. They're doing this. I actually did an episode with this guy Jay Cowley. He's an SAS guy in UK, you know, and he's getting, he's, he's, it's not getting prosecuted anymore, but they were going after him. And this is a huge thing going on in UK. And, you know, I actually saw when I was scrolling around looking for something to talk about other than your story, like we're doing right now. And I saw this. So I did a little post and I was like, you know, this is just fucking crazy, man. Like, I feel like this, you know, the, the, the, the, the warrior class in the world is just— it's disintegrating. I mean, I think it started with the defund the police movement here in the US. You know, nobody wants to be a cop anymore. Nobody wants to wear a badge. Nobody wants to protect the community. Look what happened to Daniel Penny. You know, that's the guy in New York City that had to choke that dude out. Tried to prosecute him, and now it's happening in Australian SAS, British SAS, you know, there's the Eddie Gallagher case here.
I mean, it just goes on and on. And so it's like, it's like, who is— what does that lead to? Well, that, that probably winds up leading to a draft because you see all that negativity online. Nobody's going to want to join, you know. And just what'd you just say, you know, you deploy with with a rifle and a rulebook. So I don't know. I got mixed feelings. Maybe a draft would be a good thing.
I think that what I would like to see personally— so I come back to service— is I think that service is a good thing. Service to the greater good, service to your country or your community is a good thing. I would like to see some sort of civil service being a leg up in society. So, you know, if I were, you know, in charge, right, I would rather than instituting a draft because I think that— so I'm a fan of science fiction. One of my favorite books is Starship Troopers. And inside of the book Starship Troopers, they talk about citizen versus civilian. And so if you are there, the difference between the two is a citizen who is somebody that has has served the government at some level or served the greater good at some level. And a civilian is someone who has not. And now, in this context, Robert Heinemann, I think it is, or Heinlein, forgive me on that, is citizens can vote and they can, they can make direction or they can vote on the direction of their government because they have served their government. Civilians cannot. Now, while I'm not advocating for that because the United States Constitution prevents that from happening, I look at more carrot versus stick.
What I would like to see is a society that rewards some sort of service. So what I would like to say is, if you serve from Peace Corps to Marine Corps, if you, if you said, I'm going to volunteer 2 to 4 years of my life, then what happens is at the end of that service, just like we have access to the, you know, the GI Bill, I think that if somebody serves in something like this, whether it be a nonprofit or a government vetted something or other in the United States, they, they then have that same opportunity, whether it be 2 years of vocational school or a 4-year college degree, because one, that helps change their trajectory. It helps give them a leg up into something. And then two, it gives them buy-in to the system. They have helped build something into the system. Counter to that, or I would say alternatively, I would also like to see our politicians or our public leaders or public servants, if I may, not be able to have their children avoid the wars that they send us to.
You do that by a draft.
Well, I mean, there's—
I'm not saying I'm 100% for a draft. But of course, all I'm saying is, I, you know, that's an interesting perspective that I had not thought about. And it just made me think, you know, of course, it said, I don't want my kids getting drafted.
So, right, you know, 58,000 service members, you know, lost their lives in Vietnam and the Marine Corps. Now, I can only speak to the Marine Corps because I know that better than the other services. The Marine Corps had to go through a lot after Vietnam and had to go through. So the reason you see the Marine Corps drill instructor the way that they are today was because of Vietnam. That drill instructor wasn't like that in World War II because they had to take a conscript military of people who literally had the choice between— excuse me, the choice between going to prison or joining the Marines, that put a certain demographic of people into, into the Marine Corps. So discipline became a huge function, which has now become part of the Marine Corps identity. When we institute a draft— well, let me backtrack. The 1970s and 1980s were a very tumultuous time for the Marine Corps because you had people who were now Vietnam, post-Vietnam, also draft ease inside of the service who had decided to stay. There's a ton of other issues of a culture that happens inside of this, inside of the service itself.
Personally, I think that we have enough people serving in the United States to be able to bring that. But I do get the idea of, man, I was, I was angry when I was a young guy, man. I would go to Fallujah and see every kind of carnage you could imagine, and America was at the mall, man. Nobody cared. But the way that I learned to be okay with it. There's a way that you want the world to be, and there's the way that the world is. And the way that I became okay with it to a certain level was that maybe it wasn't their job to know what it is, what happens in combat, where we go. Maybe it's our politicians' or our public leaders' job to have a better determining factor of where they send us and why. I have a lot of consternation over our war and whether it was justified or whether it was not justified. And that's a very deep and long conversation, and I'm very happy to go down that with you. But I have to look and say, 20 years later, so not counting Iran, right? But if we look at the fall of Kabul, right, 20 years later, were we better off than we were in 2001?
No, no. And so as much as the military and the service had affected and changed and made my life so fulfilled, so much fulfillment and so much joy and so much happiness, and changed who I am as a person, I would ask the mothers that lost sons or daughters, I would ask the husbands and wives, is it justified? Was it worth it? Was it worth the cost? And I don't And I don't know. And it's hard. I think that, that, you know, I'll tell you a story today that I haven't told anybody and I'll talk about it later on. But people ask me, I got asked the other day, someone said, do you have any regrets over times where you didn't pull the trigger? My biggest regrets come from times that I did, because what America wants or America thinks is that war is black and white. And clarity is the first casualty in combat. And so when we're out, we're asking young men and women, 19 years old, prefrontal cortex isn't developed. The word infantry literally means child soldier. We're taking our youngest people who don't have the ability to— now, I'm not saying that they're stupid or untrained or uneducated, but they don't have the higher reasoning of thought.
That doesn't happen until 25 in men, sometimes a little bit later on, probably later for me. Right. But you go into this thing And we make— we're put into these really tough situations and they have to make some judgment calls and judgment calls they have to live with for the rest of their life. And if we as, as, as leaders, if our leaders can't come to us and say there were tangible objectives that we were working towards to make our country better, safer, cleaner, whatever it is, if they can't have a tangible directive for that at the end of all the sacrifice, then I would be much more cautious to listen to them to send us to the next war.
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It's 2006. I was a, uh, I was a sniper. I was a school-trained sniper. I had graduated sniper school. I was the honor graduate. I was instructor's choice. Did everything right, did everything I was supposed to do. I was on my third tour. I was 21 years old.
Third tour at 21, sir? Holy shit.
So I was 21 years old and we had just gotten in the country and we were south of Fallujah in a town called Amariya. So there's Amariya. So the Zeidon is the big delineating factor. So you have the Euphrates River, you have Faluja, the Euphrates River comes south of Fallujah. You have Zaidan on the eastern side of the Euphrates, and then you have Amariya and Farris Town. So this is kind of where the rural areas of, of Iraq start to move into a little bit more of the developed areas. Excuse me. So that timeframe in Iraq, we were moving much more to the stability operations, much more asking Marines to be law enforcement officers and arming them to the teeth, but asking them at the same time to be combat troops and back and forth. So it was a confusing time for everybody. And when a unit gets into country, you know, the local forces, the, you know, the local nationals, they know when we're doing a unit changeover and they test us. And that's just been something that's happened, you know, since the dawn of time, where there's a changeover or new unit, they want to test them and see what they're about.
And so within the first 2 weeks of us being down in Almeria, you know, I write about it, but I don't go into the detail afterwards. We're in an intersection called Iron and Zinc, and it's this main supply route that goes north into Fallujah. And we hadn't gotten down to this specific position yet, but India Company, 2nd Platoon had taken this small patrol base and they had a satellite patrol base where a squad would be at this intersection. And this intersection was riddled with IEDs because we had a pattern. We had to go on these roads and we had to go and, you know, resupply our firm bases and all this kind of stuff. And on a local patrol on week number 2 or 1.5 of the deployment, a foot patrol goes out with, you know, a squad of 13 Marines and an IED goes off and instantly kills a man by the name of Javier Chavez, who was 19 years old from an immigrant farming community in Central California. It was his first deployment. We barely knew his name. and he was killed within the first week. Also with him was a person, a Marine named Corporal Ross Smith.
And Smitty and I, he's from, I think it was, I think it was Michigan. Smitty and I met in the School of Infantry in 2002, and then we deployed together in OIF-1 as, you know, you know, privates, right? And we deployed together in Fallujah. And he, when the IED happened and I wasn't there, a piece of shrapnel went above his, like, throat collar thing and embedded into his, into his, you know, esophagus. And he curled over on the street. And I remember listening to the squad leader and the team leaders recount the story to us and how he suffocated, drowned in the middle of the street because he couldn't, you know, couldn't breathe. They did everything they could. The problem that we had, because we had been put into this position where the infantry was effectively reactive, they couldn't be proactive based on the rules of engagement, based on the time frame, a lot of civilian casualties, so they couldn't be as aggressive as Marines are required to be. I mean, everybody knows the Marines are there to do one job.
Shouldn't be using the Marines then.
Absolutely not. But we had made some, some, some strategic errors to put Marines into stability operations. It's just not what we're built for. And the infantry can't really be proactive. And so what happens is sometimes in these scenarios, your snipers are your only proactive element. And the infantry is sometimes reactive. A bomb goes off and these Marines are frustrated and they're heartbroken. They've lost, you know, Smitty was like a white guy rapper, right? So he would always like spit rhymes and that was just his thing. We always made fun of him for it, but that was his kind of thing. And he was kind of the soul of India Company. When you lose the soul of a group of people, it's a natural human inclination to want retribution and that messes with your psyche. And so now I'm on my third deployment. I'm a sniper team leader— or excuse me, I'm a sniper in a team, and I'm sitting on a position. I can see the intersection where Smith died. His blood's still on the street. And I'm thinking about that. And I have to sit and watch and deal with this. And the infantry looks at snipers as their angels on their shoulders.
Do something for us. The subchapter that I write about is called Sandstorm. So what happens is this sandstorm starts to pick up, in Iraq or in, in this area. And I start losing visibility and I can't really see. My visibility is dropping from like 800 to 700. And then over this intersection, about 600 meters away from me, I see two men doing what we call a template match. They are digging with shovels by the side of the road. They check every single box that I need to, to be able to pull the trigger on them. And I watch them and I talk with Captain Len Coleman, the company commander. And I had a good relationship with Len. He was my company commander in Fallujah. And so we worked pretty well together and he trusted me. And that trust that a commander has of his sniper, if they trust them, cannot be violated. Ever. And I call in what I see. We go through the protocol, and he gives me the clearance to be able to shoot. And I explained to him that the sandstorm's coming in, I'm losing visibility, and my mind is telling me, it's wanting me, it's willing me, do something, avenge their deaths.
What happens if they're putting an IED? Can I— can a squad get there in time to go take care of this? Because as a sniper, my main goal isn't to use my bolt it's to use my radio, right, to get other people so I can remain concealed in my position. And I watch these two men and I make my choice and I decide that I'm going to kill these men because they're digging by the side of the road. What they're doing is they're taking a— what looks like a 24 by 12-inch, you know, object. Again, I can't see it very well. And they're digging furiously. They're looking over their shoulders. They're doing all the things that tells me that they're not supposed to be there, but they're digging furiously and they're putting this thing in the ground. I have my rules of engagement. I'm cleared. I'm legal to shoot and I'm legal to fire on this thing. And I decide to take my shot. And, you know, I use in the book 4 pounds of pressure. The interesting thing as a sniper, right, or as a— as a shooter, you know, with all of our weapon systems, I think an M4 is like 10 10 to 14 pounds of pressure to be able to break the trigger, depending, right?
You know, and then a sniper rifle is 4 to 6. And so what I write is, I said, 4 pounds of pressure to break, to break this trigger and to end this man's life. And so I go through my breathing exercise. I make sure my data is correct. The wind is relatively calm at this point, kind of blowing in my face. So it's real minimal wind call, about 600 meters fading. And I take my first shot. I hit the first man in the chest. He spins around. He falls to the ground before the second man can see what happens. I have now moved from left to right, so I'm taking the recoil from my first shot and I'm having it ride into my second shot. So as I'm racking my bolt, you know, it's kind of like, not a failure drill, but it's— what's the drill where you shoot multiple targets and then you come back to them? It's like I forget what it is, a box drill. It might be—
I think it's Presidente.
Yeah, Presidente. That's exactly right. So everybody's getting love before you come back, right? So I'm using that, but as a sniper. So I take my first shot, hit the first guy in the chest. He falls to the ground and I'm using that recoil to come to the second shot, hit him in the shoulder. He spins around and then falls to the ground. I bring my weapon system back. I look at the first man. He's now dead on the ground. And then I come over to the second man who's now reaching for something and I can't tell what he's reaching for. Is it a weapon system? Is he trying to detonate an IED? What is he doing? And he's crawling towards the first man. And I take my second shot and end his life. And then— and I was alone on this one. I didn't have my spotter. We, you know, just where we were at, we just didn't have anybody. It was just me up top. And the sun begins to set. And part of Sharia law is being able to bury their dead before the sun sets so that their bodies and their souls can have a chance at heaven.
So then what happens is a procession starts to happen inside of the small little, you know, village, and the civilian population comes out and they load these men up and they take them over to a field in my line of sight. They put a white sheet over these two men and they bury them. And I watched this as the sun setting, as the sun is fading. And I realize they weren't digging an IED. They were building a wall. They were building a wall for their family. The thing that they were putting into the ground were cinder blocks. Shit. And so when people ask me if I'm an advocate for whatever conflict, for whatever war, the answer is no. Because no matter what, if you're going to send Americans, you're going to send people like me and you into harm's way to make those kind of decisions. I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I was completely justified. I was completely clean with my ROEs, and I killed two men that didn't deserve it. So, no, I'm not okay with sending people to war unless it is absolutely justified, because my story is one of many.
And there are many Marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and, you know, and, and Coasties, right? And now Space Force, right? When we go to the next war, or are in the next war, many more people will have stories like that because clarity is the first casualty in combat. And so I tell that story not because I'm proud of what I did, because I want people to know the cost is every night when I go to bed, every day when I shave my face, not— and it comes in waves, right? I have to think about that. What would— I mean, and their children were in front of them.
Fuck, man.
And I didn't know that, right? You know, like, you do what you can, right? You do your best. But these young men below have just lost two of their closest friends and they can't fight back. There's— the IEDs killed us because there was nothing we could do. Nothing. It was just— it was a casualty that would happen. And the frustration that came from this from these Marines, and they were all looking to me to do something about it, to make it right, to make their deaths not in vain. But I wasn't the person that sent us there, right? I wasn't. And that's the challenge that I have. And I am— I have a friend of mine who said, you know, I was like, hey, I'm not trying to write like a political book. And he goes, no, AJ, this is a deeply political book. It's nonpartisan. I have a very strong relationship, very strong feelings with the politicians that sent us to war because we went with clear minds, clear hearts, you know, clear minds and full hearts to go and serve our country. Right. The red, white and blue, it's all over our bodies.
Right. You know, we've lived with it and we love this thing so much. And so that power has a responsibility that has to be wielded. Very carefully and very cautiously and only send snake eaters when it absolutely needs to happen.
Yeah, man, I'm sorry that happened. How did you— how long was it until you figured out that they were just building a wall? Then was it the next day they started?
So, yeah, that's when I confirmed it. You know, we didn't go and do a blast analysis or shot analysis on that because they had buried them. But it was interesting. So I thought it was, you know, they didn't treat— the first inclination was they don't treat foreign fighters that way. You know, the Mujahideen wasn't always— they weren't really well-liked by the local population, specifically in Amariya. We worked with them, you know, a lot down there. They really liked the coalition and they were afraid of the Mujahideen. And so they wouldn't have treated them with the— with that reverence had they been mujahideen. They may have left them or moved them. Right. But when they buried them was my first, oh no. And, and then the next morning I could see clearly and it was a half-built cinderblock wall protecting his family on the side of a road.
Shit.
And so you know, there's consternation, there's fear with sharing that, right? You know, I don't want people to think that I'm some, you know, heartless killer, right? You know, that I'm a, you know, warmonger or any of that stuff. So there's a ton of guilt in there. But I think that if people like you and I are able to be masculine by being vulnerable, by showing compassion, by showing those things, we can show the real strength of who we are. So I tell that story and all of this— there is no there is no one in the world that is— I've told all my secrets, right? Like, there's no one going to think that I like— I wasn't a hero waiting for his moment, right? I was a scrawny kid from Northern California who was cut from the high school baseball team, right? Who was, you know, I was a fucking thespian in high school, right? You know, I was the mascot, right? There's all the uncool boxes you could have checked, right? Like, I checked them all, right? I did all that. But I tell these stories because I want if I can have one young man or woman read this book, listen to this conversation and say, it's okay, you know, it's okay that I don't have it all figured out.
I suffered from like massive amounts of like low self-efficacy, you know, coming from that immigrant background we talked about, not a lot of money, poverty mindset, that kind of stuff that stays with you for a very, very long time. And as you and I think have walked similar paths, is that breeds into addiction, that breeds, you know, into substance abuse, that breeds into dangerous, you know, actions, personalities, whatever it may be when you're not able to, you know, reconcile that. So I tell these stories and I write these kind of things because I want some young man or woman, some kid who wants to join the military, whatever it is, to understand it, to do it, to feel it, to believe it. To know the cost at some level and what really happens. And I would like some deadbeat politicians to read this book and know what it actually means when you send people like you and me to war. Because the hardest part about going to combat is not just coming home, it's coming home whole. Yeah.
Damn. Well, that got heavy quick.
Yeah, man. That's the thing. I am—
I mean, It's weird because that was, I mean, 2006. Yep. Very early in your career. But at the same time, I think you said your third deployment.
Correct.
So maybe not so—
I mean, I was like salty, but not. Yeah.
Still young.
Yeah.
You know, still a long ways to go. So what, you're 5 years in at that point?
Yep. Yeah, just 4. 6.
17 years left.
Yep.
So we just talked about, you know, that we are engaging in more around the world. JSOC units have already been deployed. Special ops units have already been deployed. It's going to happen again. And so what advice do you have, you know, for somebody that's going to have to make a judgment call like that?
So this isn't—
and I don't know what to say. I can't say you made the wrong call.
Yeah, right. That's the wrong call.
But in retrospect, you wouldn't have done it again. And so when somebody finds himself in the same situation, which they will soon, what advice do you have for them? To keep driving on.
So I think that that what I did whenever I could after that was the lesson that I learned was any moment that I had the opportunity. So snipers just were not just, you know, cold-blooded killers, right? We have to— when time permits, you have to learn. You mean we've heard it before. You watch your prey, right? You watch your target. You get to know them. You get to learn them. The thing that we have to do between, you know, first focal or second focal plane, right? You know, two lenses of glass is try to figure out who that person is. I want them to tell me that they're a bad person or they have ill intent. And so I watch them as often as possible. So whenever given the chance again in the future, I didn't hesitate. I just made sure that they made the decision. At the end of the day, I became a hammer and they were the nail. They were the person that was, you know, they made the choice to pick up the gun, to, you know, implant the IED. I didn't hesitate. I just had to make sure that I was a little cleaner every single time.
And those are lessons that have to be learned as you go through that. For someone that's looking to join or people that are in the fight right now, my hat's off to you. You know, like, and again, I'm always one thing I'm never, ever, ever going to do is ever bash the service members that are forward, whether or not they go to whatever conflict around the world. They will keep their honor clean. They will fight with a just heart, right? Or with a, you know, a clear mind and a, and a good heart. And they will fight for the person to their left and the right. I would say never lose sight of that. That matters more than anything. And if you are making a decision, whether it turns out to be the right decision or the wrong decision, and the intention there is the preservation of American lives in a bad situation, you've made the right decision.
Is it— I mean, I've been in that situation more times than I can count. Fortunately, I never wound up in taking a shot that I regretted. But it could have happened very easily. I mean, it's— they just did on the side of the road for nothing. And like you said, our guys are getting killed around what, '05, I think, is when EFP started getting introduced on the scene, and that was fucking taking everybody out. What do you think that you could have done differently on that specific scenario?
You know, I've replayed it a million times in my head.
I don't hear anything you could have done differently.
I made the right decision, but the wrong outcome happened. And that happens a lot in life. You know, I, I've, I've taken that to my core. If this book sells 4 copies, that's okay. Because I didn't write it to sell books. I wrote it because I wanted to put I put everything into something and I bled on the pages and I tried to give everything I could into telling our story, not my story, our story. And so when I look at any endeavor I take on for the rest of my life, I put everything I can to ensure the best chance of success. But I also know that you can do everything right and still fail. And that gives me a little bit of grace, that gives me a little bit of understanding. I've failed more than I've succeeded in my career, and I continue to put myself out there and fight for something that I believe in and try to change something to, you know, for the better. And I generally fail the first time I do anything. As we get into the story a little bit more, you know, I failed at everything the first time, and then I've learned from it and I come back to it.
But anything— what I learned from that specific decision was you have to live with every decision that you make, every conscious decision you make. Part of my sobriety that we can talk about later on was that I was trying to hide from my own decisions and trying to be able to, you know, medicate from decisions that I didn't want to look in the mirror. I had to do some soul searching. I had to go through some steps. I had to go through some conversations with some people, make amends. And some of the hardest parts of making amends with yourself and saying you did everything you could with the information that you had and it turned out like shit. But you weren't looking, you weren't hungry, you weren't trying to kill people. You weren't trying to, you know, put everybody on your back that you could. I didn't think of these people as less than. I thought of them as my enemy. And my enemy was as cunning and as resourced as I was. And the funny thing is, Mujahideen, and, you know, I've told people and I've said in the past, I've never fought a terrorist.
I've only fought freedom fighters. And so when I put that perspective into mind, mujahideen means freedom fighter, right? Taliban is student of the Taliban or, you know, student of the Koran, right? They are fighting for their own just cause, just like I am. And so I respected them. Now, I didn't give them any quarter when I didn't need to, but I respected them. Them, you know, in that. And so that's kind of how I went through it. And I think that, you know, our young men and women that are going to be forward or are forward and, you know, currently doing their work, I think they're going to make some good decisions and they're going to have some tough decisions. And as long as they can do that and know that they did it with the best of intentions, I think that's the best they can hope for.
Thank you for sharing that.
Of course.
Let's get into your early story.
Yeah. Cool.
So you grew up in Northern California. Yeah. Son of immigrants. Yep. Any brothers and sisters?
No, no. Dog and a cat. My mom was an artist. So she is an artist. She was a plein air pastel and oil painter. And so, like, you know, like there's the stories of people who, like, join— they're all like growing up in Texas, you know, hunting with their dad or whatever. I didn't have any of that, right? I just had a very— again, it's like Northern— I'm like 30 minutes from Berkeley like that. We just didn't have a lot of military, you know, presence in the area. We didn't like look down on it or anything. It just wasn't at the forefront of of my thoughts growing up, but big G.I. Joe fan, you know, like that was kind of my, you know, I think we're around the same age. So like my formative years were built by that. But I talk about this idea of like low self-efficacy. And I think that part of it, I'll give you another nugget, is part of it comes from a little bit of a poverty mindset. So I'm not saying I'm not a victim. I do not believe I was a victim. I believe that I am the culmination of millions of tiny decisions that have brought me to this, to this position and this place in life.
But my mother, when she graduated, you know, college and moved back to, you know, my— like, had kind of come back to the United States and gone through that. One of her first jobs outside of college was working for a company called Singer Link. And Singer Link was a defense contractor out of Northern California. And what they did and what she did was they were designing the first flight simulators for the AH-64 Apache. And my mom as an artist, as a plein air pastel painter, was brought in to this company and worked for this company for— excuse me— for a number of years to help with rendering of landscapes. And so that's where it's like interesting where you bring this kind of landscape kind of piece in there. And life was good. I was, you know, 3 years old kind of at the time frame. And from what I remember, life was good. Single mom at the time. My parents were divorced. My dad was a long-haul truck driver. I mean, like the most, like, like quintessential, like immigrant cowboy, right? So like long-haul truck driver, flannel, square dancing points, right? You know, rolled cigarettes, rolled sleeves, Marlboro Reds here, right?
Cowboy hat, belt buckle, whole thing, you know, big rig truck driver kind of thing. But I didn't see him much because he was on the road. And like some fathers, right, they have to love their children from afar. And that was the role that he was in. So predominantly raised by a single mom in Northern California. Well, what happened was a person by the name of Paul Bilzerian came into Northern California, and he was what's called a corporate raider. And if you're familiar with the movie— I'm going to lose a lot of tough guy points here— but if you're familiar with the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Gere's character in Pretty Woman, he was a corporate raider. What he did was he bought companies and then broke them up into parts and then sold them. Well, that Paul Bilzerian was that person. And he came into Northern California and came into Singer Link and bought the company and sold it. And so overnight, my mom drove to work one day and got a pink slip and we were plunged into financial, you know, like basically destitute. And that kind of stuff like imprints on you young when you see a, you know, I don't understand, but you see your mom at a kitchen table crying, you know, over a stack of papers that kind of imprints on you.
But I'm not mad at Paul Bilzerian. I was mad at him for a very, very long time, but I'm not mad at him anymore because what happened was he gave my mom— I don't think this is— he was not altruistic in his, in his desire to do this. He sold the company I mean, the dickhead eventually went to prison, you know, for white-collar crimes later on. The name is something that you can probably Google. And there is a family lineage that is public at some level. But I look back and I— I want Paul Bilzerian at some point to see who I am and the man that I became, because he was responsible for that in a large part, because what he did was rip my entire world apart by making a quick buck and plunging us into financial chaos. But in that, what my mom taught me was she turned that loss. She did everything she could, did it the right way, and it just didn't work out the way that she had planned it. And so she pivoted and she ended up, you know, opening up a fine arts and framing studio and then, you know, got a second job to keep the lights on.
But she tried to follow her dream and her dream was being a professional artist. And so we rented this little house in Sunnyvale and the front 3 rooms of this like super old house. Was the art studio, a picture framing studio, and where she taught art classes at night. And we lived in the back two rooms. And that was kind of, you know, our little upbringing. Now, again, like, it's Silicon Valley. I, you know, it's not— I didn't— I mean, I'm not from the streets, you know. I didn't have— you know, people had it a lot worse than I did. But that imprinted on me pretty, pretty young. And so as I carried that kind of through, that helped kind of shape who I was because I got a chance to watch her and watch what she was doing. And kind of go, you know, from, from that point. And so not a lot of military, you know, upbringing kind of stuff. But I was a rambunctious kid and I saw in the fourth grade we had, you know, like, what is it like Scruff McGruff, you know, comes in and they do their little, you know, they do like the assemblies where they talk about whatever things, you know, don't do drugs.
And we had a Boy Scout master come in and this Boy Scout master came in in like some like ill-fitting, you know, uniform. And he talked about, you know, the Boy Scouts and he talked about camping in the woods and then fire and, you know, being able to make fire. And I was like hooked from there. And so from that point, I, you know, like ran home, was like, Mom, I want to join the Boy Scouts, right? And this was, you know, what I really wanted to do. I like the outdoors. And so a very long story short, she couldn't. So there was no— I was— I was too young to be a Boy Scout. I was in the 4th grade and I had to be be in the 6th grade to be a Boy Scout. So they have this in-between called Webelos, and the challenge was there was no fathers in the area to be Webelo den leaders. So what happened was my mom volunteered to be our Webelo den leader in the Cub Scouts, and she got other moms to be our little, like, our den leaders. So for the next 2 years, they ran us through this, like, Boy Scout curriculum, a bunch of young boys being taught how to be a man by their mothers, um, which I thought was kind of, you know, it's really cool.
It's like what a parent would do, right? You know, like they would do anything to make sure that their son or daughter didn't suffer or want for anything. And so she did that. And then eventually I joined the Boy Scouts and then continued through that pathway. And then eventually I became an Eagle Scout. And I never shot a gun before joining military. I mean, a black powder rifle, you know, like Boy Scout camp, you're like, stuff in the pew, you know, you do that kind of thing. That was the only gun I'd ever shot.
Not.
But I remember vividly I wanted to be two things. I saw we were camping one time and our scoutmaster brought this like, I think it was like Popular Mechanics or Popular Science magazine. I don't remember which one, but it was like this. They did this kind of overview of the United States military and they had all these pictures of what like a pilot looked like in all their garb and what an infantry person looked like. Right. And then eventually they had a picture of a sniper in a ghillie suit. And I was like, I want to do that. But the first thing that popped into my mind was— or the second thing that popped in my first thing was like, yeah, I want to do that. The second thing was I could never do that. I'm too small, I'm too little, whatever the thing is, that weird mindset that sets in. I never thought that I could achieve those dreams, but it was all I wanted to be, that or an F-18 pilot, because Top Gun got me too, right? You know, so, but then I was fascinated with the military and wanted to kind of do that.
But in high school, I was like a, you know, I thought I was like Ferris Bueller. You know, we would cut class and go surfing or go to San Francisco. And so I was a smart kid, but I didn't have the grades, you know. And then, and then in 2000, you know, my dad did everything he could, put all his money away into, you know, with an investment broker. And then the dot-com crash happened and my entire college fund disappeared overnight. And it was the second time that I saw my father cry, you know, because again, as a father, you know, you want to provide a better life for your child, a better opportunity than you had. It's the only thing that you want, right? And that's what he wanted for me. And that, you know, disappeared overnight. A funny side, the first time I saw my father cry was— and he's like super Italian. So like, again, he raised me to be an American boy. So I played baseball instead of soccer. I don't speak Italian. He didn't speak Italian at at home, like there's two different types of immigrants. There's people that really adapt to the culture that they're in and kind of force that.
And then there's some people that, you know, hold on. So he wanted me to be an American boy and was an avid history reader. Right. And like knew more about American history than really any American I've come across. And we were watching the World Cup in 1994 at a place called Vito's Pizza, where it's like this, you know, little pizza place in Santa Clara. In America, and all the Italian men from the area come and hang out. All the Guinni— or Guidos, excuse me. All the Guidos show up, right? And we're in the back room. We're watching on this big screen TV, and they're in the World Cup final, Italy versus Brazil. And, you know, the prodigal son of Italy, Roberto Baggio— we have to go to penalty kicks, right? And the prodigal son for Italy shows up. He's like their Pelé. He's like penalty kick to win the World Cup, to bring it home to Italy. And he fucking sails it. He sails it like over the crossbar. And like a scene out of The Godfather, like these Italian men are like throwing things in the air. They're like literally weeping, right? You know, for the, you know, their country's loss in the World Cup.
And I remember seeing that, you know, kind of laughing about that, you know, later on. But that was the first time I saw my dad cry. And the second was, you know, when I— when he had, you know, lost, you know, that savings, you know, for us. And then really, 9/11 was the precursor, was, was the thing that changed everything. Where were you? I was a senior in high school and I had kind of blossomed, you know, into kind of a popular kid, right? I ended up being like the homecoming king and it was— I kind of adapted. So being an only child, I learned how to make friends pretty, pretty quickly. Like sometimes only children get like a stigma of being like selfish or being kind of dicks. I wasn't that. I just learned how to make friends pretty quickly. And I remember, so I'm on the West Coast, so I wake up at like 6:30 in the morning as like a teenager, right, doing his thing. And then I remember on the way to school, I, I'm driving my grandmother's old car. You know, it's a 1986 Nissan Stanza. It's like a chicken McNugget with wheels.
It has like 4 cylinders. It doesn't work very well. and the only radio station that it actually can tune in is the AM radio station for the oldies channel, ironically enough. So it was called the Grandma Mobile. So I'm cruising to school in the Grandma Mobile, usually listen to some sort of oldies in the morning, and it's just a newscast. And they are, you know, the national broadcast has kind of taken over and they're kind of giving this play-by-play. Both towers had been hit at that point. And so we knew it wasn't an accident. and I'm listening to all of this kind of happen on the way to school. I get to school and they basically cancel school for the day, but some of us are there and we kind of just drone into this auditorium. And so we're in our school's theater and they live, you know, put a live feed in of whatever TV channel it was. And we sit there for the next, you know, few hours and we end up watching the towers fall as a group of high school students. I mean, people are crying, people like there's rage, right?
I'm 16 years old at the time, you know, and when I was a senior, but I was 16. And 3 weeks later, you know, I had this— so I talk about trajectory a lot. And as a sniper, I believe in trajectory. And part of the things— and I write about him in the book— was one of my high school teachers. My high school teacher was named Rafael Rojas, and he was a Marine reservist and like the super tough, you know, Marine-type teacher, right? You show up late to class, you paid in push-ups, which is like super illegal, but he had this, you know, kind of Dad, let's do it anyway. Right. But he had kind of seen this kind of growing in me over a period of months, kind of my indecision where I was at. But I was always kind of— I had this affinity towards the Marines and the discipline. I didn't really know much about the Marines themselves. I thought all Marines were infantry. I didn't know there were jobs in the Marine Corps. And 3 weeks, about 2 weeks after 9/11, he introduces me to my Marine recruiter, a gentleman by the name of— at the time, Staff Sergeant Walter Toney.
They called him Tiny. Tiny. He's this giant Hawaiian guy and ironically called him Tiny. And he handed me a business card and gave me, you know, like the— put his like giant, like, meat paw out there, right? You know, I'm like a 120-pound senior 16-year-old. And then I had to have him, you know, go through the thing of talking to my parents because I was not 18. And I had to wait 3— I had to wait another week until I turned 17 before I could even legally talk with a recruiter. And so then he went through the process of talking to my artist mother and my anti-war, you know, immigrant father about me joining the Marine Corps. And again, no real lineage of service. You know, my father's grandfather and great-grandfather fought in World War I and World War II, but not for the good guys, right? So there wasn't like a ton of affinity for service. And my dad was a huge history buff, right? In military history specifically. And so whether or not he, you know, he had conscripted service when he was in the Italian Army, but that was it. There was never any, like, positive association.
I wasn't, like, inculcated into joining the military.
You weren't part of the warrior class.
Yeah, no, not even remotely, dude. I mean, like, I was not very— the Eagle Scout was, like, the closest thing to that, right? You know, I did do really well in the Scouts because I liked the idea and I learned it very early on and I used it later in my career of iterative positive reinforcement, not being a cheerleader, right? But like saying, you know, every once in a while, you know, saying, hey, you did a good job here, or here's an incremental measure or metric of success, or keep climbing this ladder of success towards a common goal. That works for me or worked for me. And it also works a lot for the human psyche. Psyche and being able to bring people towards the idea of self-efficacy. So I had to learn that kind of going through there.
Wow.
Wow.
So you joined at 17?
Yeah. Yeah. I turned 18 in boot camp. So like right after I graduated high school, dude, I had like super— my hair was longer than it is now. I had— it was embarrassing. I have this photo. There's a couple of photos that I like don't want the internet to ever see because, you know, the internet's forever. There's this like like my mom, I love her to death, but God, I don't know, I have this like glamor shot almost of me, dude. I'm wearing my Boy Scout sash and I have my frosted tips and I'm like leaning against the wall. I gotta find that. Oh man. So yeah, and then eventually, yeah, joined the Marines, went 3 weeks after I graduated high school, ended up Dude, I— the Marine recruiters, you know, hardest job in the military. Hardest job in the military for sure is the recruiters. I tried to get one over on my recruiter. So they do this thing. I don't know if they do it in the Navy. And I read a little bit of your story as well. You know, I know that you had to do a lot of research before, you know, joining the SEALs.
I know that you went and like checked out a bunch of books to learn about it, right? So that you kind of get an understanding.
Nobody else would take me, right? And wasn't that big of a decision. Yeah.
Well, and there's only so much reading you can do to introduce yourself to what BUD/S actually is, right? You know, there's like reading it and experiencing it are two very different things. But the Marines do this thing where they have like these dog tags, like they're called, you know, identification tags. It's really ingenious is like you pick this thing out and they give you this like stack of things and it's like see the world or college or financial opportunities or adventure or whatever. And you like pick the top three. But basically what it is is you're picking the sales tactic they're going to use on you and they don't even have to figure it out. They just say like, what are the 3 things that you identify with? And you're like, I want to see the world. They're like, well, here's all these brochures on how you can see the world, right? So the other services were handing out bonuses and I was like, I was hip to it, right? Like, I understand, you know, I was a smarter kid. And so I remember I meet my recruiter Staff Sergeant Tanay at the office, and I meet this other guy at the time, Staff Sergeant Milburn, and he is a Force Recon scout sniper and like an old core Force Recon, screaming high, like a horseshoe haircut, right?
Super slender, like nearly emaciated. And they were like, oh yeah, he's a Force Recon sniper. And I was like, oh cool. Like I had any idea what that was, right? And I'm trying to like feign like nonchalance as like a teenager, Right. And I remember getting ready to leave the office. I was like, all right, I've got the upper hand. I'm in. I want to do all this stuff. And I was like, all right, so other services are talking about these bonuses, right? And I tried to get really hip with them and I said, hey, like, what can you guarantee me if I sign this contract? And my recruiter looks over my shoulder at Staff Sergeant Milburn and they kind of smirk and he puts his fucking big ass Hawaiian knuckles on the table, right? And he leans in and you can almost like hear like the leather, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like squishing, right? And he leans at me and he looks at me and he says, I'll tell you what, if you sign those papers, I can guarantee you 13 weeks of boot camp. And then he like hands me this fucking folder.
And I was like, and I was like, I am in. Like I was bought hook, hook, line and sinker. I was like ready to go. They just tough talked me into joining the Marines basically. And I was all about it, man. And then, yeah, shipped off to boot camp and started that, you know, that wild ride that was the service.
Right on, man.
Yeah.
Well, let's take a break because I know, uh, we got a long ways to go once we get into service. And when we come back, we'll just pick right back up.
I appreciate it.
Perfect.
You have a very easy demeanor as an interviewer. I do appreciate it. You have an uncanny ability to put people at ease, um, and I appreciate that. Thank you.
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Please support our show and tell them we sent you. All right, AJ, we're back from the break. Getting ready to— you just enlisted, 9/11 just happened, on your way to boot camp.
Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego. I have like frosted tip long hair, you know, kind of thing. And then they get the quintessential, you know, term when you go to boot camp is like any bumps, moles, or, uh, bumps, moles, or bruises, something like that. They don't even answer. They don't even care what your answer is. There's like some dude with a toothpick is sitting there in the middle of the night like, you know, just yanking the hair off. And yeah, my boot camp experience was like anybody else's, you know, going through it. I was— so there's a habitual thing and I get rid of all my cool points. Like, I just, I just, I like hemorrhage those things. I was not a good recruit in the beginning. I fail at everything that I do in the beginning. I was like a skinny, scrawny guy going through it. And then eventually I have like this kind of ramp up, right? And I kind of turned it on. But, you know, had a lot of leadership, I guess, skills or, you know, kind of, you know, bias or prowess for for it, but really, like, I've included in the book, like, series of letters that I've had for my entire career.
So when I tried to write this thing, I tried to write our story like a Marine story and then use me as the through line through this entire book. And so I could tell other people's stories along the way. But it's funny, my mom saved everything, right? So I have like boot camp letters where I'm like my third day in boot camp and I'm like, this place is terrible, right? Like, these men are truly— I hate it here, right? I made a huge mistake. Week, right? And then like week 6, you know, I'm like, we did a 3-mile hump today and people fell out, you know, hopefully more tomorrow, you know, kind of thing. Like, I, like, I just fall right into the Marine Corps and totally, you know, catch my stride and then find this organization that I really, really fell in love with. And yeah, had a great, you know, kind of experience through boot camp. A really weird one towards the end. We had this really weird scenario that happened at the end of boot camp. Camp. So like my entrance into the Marine Corps was tumultuous. So join up, super normal, tumultuous.
Yeah.
What the hell does that mean?
It was chaotic. And so a lot of ups and downs. And so I had a very interesting relationship with the service, and I'm sure that the Marine Corps is not going to be happy that I'm telling some of these stories, but whatever. They could shave my head and send me to boot camp again. But so I go through boot camp and the last few days of Marine Corps boot camp, the families are now visiting, right? Well, what happens is we are, you know, in hindsight, people ask me, they're like, well, why didn't you just not do this? Or why didn't you— like, when a drill instructor tells you to do something in boot camp, you're like, you do it like a million percent, right? So they— all the drill instructors at one point had us— we had to keep our pocket items. So we had to keep, you know, our ID card, our debit card, and like dog tags or whatever it was inside of our left breast pocket. It. And then at one point during the course, our scribe was directed to go down to all the recruits and ask for their PIN numbers to their debit card.
And literally none of us batted an eyelash because this is boot camp and I don't want to get killed. So what happens is on graduation morning, so what happens is like when you do the graduation ceremony, everyone's like, aye, sir, hurrah, right? And you're like, do your you reverse step, right? And then like you spin about or whatever the thing is. And like the families come like rushing down from the stage or from the stands. And so I'm crew, I'm standing there. And as, you know, our families are starting to come up to us, we have a drill instructor who like yells at our platoon. He goes, platoon 1101, right? Ah, ten hut, right? And so all of us have to snap to attention because like we're technically graduated, but some drill instructor is yelling at us right now that we don't recognize. And it's like this really Weird. So our families are like coming up to us and hugging us and we don't know what to do. Other drill instructors start ushering them out of the formation and they have us close ranks and then they march us back to our, uh, squad bay.
And inside the squad bay is now military police. And this is like, we've now officially graduated, right? That we don't know what's going on. People are screaming at us. And as you get towards the end of boot camp, your drill instructors start acting a little different, right? They start acting more like Marines and less like drill instructors. And so now this group of people is screaming their faces off at us. This is super new and we don't really know what's going on. So eventually what happens is a military police officer comes in and he talks about how he's some major somebody and we're all under official military investigation and none of us have any idea what's going on. And then what happens is they have us line up in front of our sea bags and our, you know, uniform bags. And we're standing at the position of attention. And then they start to go with a, a drill instructor flanked by two military police officers. Like a couple of teams of these guys start going down the line and they're having us open up our sea bags and dump all of our contents of everything that we own, which isn't much, but it's like two sea bags and a uniform bag onto the ground in front of us.
And no one's briefed us on any of this stuff. So they're going through, there's, there's like screaming, you know, like any Marine will understand. It's like the three hats are yelling at you from all three sides and you're freaking out. Out. You're trying to get your combination. Well, what happens is this, like, storm eventually blows over me, right? Like, I dump all the stuff out, nothing goes on. And then as soon as I'm done, I see across the squad bay a recruit— well, now a Marine technically— dumps his sea bag out, and out of the sea bag comes hundreds of stacks of $20. Just like thousands of dollars falls onto the ground. And then an MP spears this guy, like, like hits him against the wall locker, you know, or the, the, the, uh, the bunk beds or the racks, right? And then like throws handcuffs on them. And then another one down the other end of the squad bay, the same thing happens. Well, what had happened—
wait, two, two cops or two people dumped money out?
Two recruits, or now Marines, empty their sea bags and they're filled with cash, which is the oddest phenomenon for what this is because it's just supposed to be like your, you know, I don't know, shaving gear or whatever, Marine uniforms. And so there's hundreds of thousands of dollars, or I would say tens of thousands of dollars on the floor in front of us. These two Marines have now been speared by the MPs, are getting arrested. They like yank them out and they like take them into the showers and we like never see these people again. Well, what had happened, we think, because I'm like, I'm Private Pashutti, I'm PFC Pashutti at this point. So nobody's telling me anything, right? So what we get told later on kind of comes through the rumor mill is that we the visitors Thursday and or the night before graduation, we had our scribe or whoever it was in the platoon was going to the ATM on base near the barbershop and taking out $1,000 from every single recruit's account because all of our ID cards, all of our debit cards were in our left breast pocket. And then they had all of our PINs.
And so they created this list and then were stealing $1,000 or so from every single recruit in an 80-recruit, you know, You know, platoon.
Oh, shit.
And somehow this, you know, pings or whatever it is, there was a lot of questions in and around that, right? So we didn't know if the drill instructors had anything to do with it. We didn't know if the recruits acted alone. Nobody briefed me on it, but I was out like $1,000 and I have really no idea if I ever got it back. But the thing that that really hurt was that was my entrance into them. Like, we were— this is the proudest day of our lives at this point. We are now Marines. Marines, and then we get treated like absolute garbage. And then to find out that Marines of some level were stealing from us was like this really weird, like, gut punch. And then they're like, that's all, folks. And then we're released. And then we go to our families and then go on our 10 days of boot camp leave before we go to the School of Infantry. And so I say that to start this interesting trend in the Marine Corps at the time. I need to tell everybody in the world, I love the Marine Corps. I love my, you know, crimson and gold, or scarlet and gold, right?
My breath, my blood. But it doesn't mean that I can't criticize it, that I can't— that I don't have certain things that I don't enjoy about it. The entry-level pipeline for a young Marine is not good, and it wasn't good at this time frame. So what happens is we go to boot leave, right? And you're now— where I'm walking home, I'm, I'm back home in Northern California with a super high fight, talk about how I'm like 6 foot tall and bulletproof, you know, telling war stories already, right, kind of thing. And then I get back after my 10 days of boot leave to go to the School of Infantry, where now I'm— I am what's called an 0300. I am an infantry contract. That's what I signed up to be in the Marine Corps, was an infantry contract. Well, as you go through the School of Infantry, what happens is you get your MOS, your military occupational specialty. You get that designation as you go through, whether that be— at the time it was 0311, was a rifleman. 0311 3, uh, 31 was a machine gunner, 41 was a mortarman, 51 was an assaultman, and 52 was an anti-tank guided missileman at the time.
Um, so I'm going through this course and what the drill instructors, they personified professionalism and they were the guardians of the badge and they were really, really good at what they did to be able to create Marines. What we had at the School of Infantry at the time was the complete opposite of that. So the School of Infantry at the time wasn't a formal billet in the Marine Corps, like, at large. You had some people who had like a formal job there. Most of those— I don't know if the Navy has it, but we call them FAPS, um, or is when you're basically like farmed out, you're like a temp basically. Um, and a lot of these guys are like 6 months left in the Marine Corps, they don't have enough time on contract to make a deployment, and so you're like, go to SOI and become a School of Infantry instructor. And they were not— there's like, they're also seen as less than drill instructors. So we didn't— the Marine Corps didn't put a lot of emphasis into these young Marines who were going to be training younger Marines. So the quality of education— oh, excuse me, the quality of training that I got at the School of Infantry was very, very, very different than what it would become later on.
It was more like, you know, we were boots. I don't know if that's a term they use in the Navy much, but boots is like not a term of endearment. It's like you're a fucking new guy. And so they just treated us like absolute crap. And so this is an interesting concept back to the conscript or the draft conversation. A lot of our institutional hierarchy in the service was built on the back of a conscript— of training a conscript military or a non-volunteer force. The heavy-handed drill instructors, the institutional, like, assembly line production of putting people through. Very different than Navy SEALs because, you know, yes, you have— okay, not a SEAL, but I know that there's phases of BUD/S of where you're looking to weed people out, and then eventually you get to a point of where you have a smaller demographic of people or a smaller group of people, and you start to like train them and work on them. Ours at the time was just an assembly line. We would have 120 Marines in our company who would go to the machine gun range and they would have an M240, I think it was Golf at the time, machine gun.
And they would, you know, they would give us the class on it. We would sit in this auditorium of 300 people in this auditorium and the students would be in like various levels of consciousness, right? So 300 people, one, you know, instructor who didn't really want to do his job in the first place was droning on through a PowerPoint and the rest of us are like falling asleep, right? We're 18-year-old kids. Kids who are not paying attention. Thankfully, phones weren't a thing at the time, right? So we weren't super distracted, but the quality of education was super, super, super subpar. And I bring all that up to say is I had kind of found my niche, and I was doing well in the Marine Corps, and I graduated the School of Infantry as the honor graduate, meaning I had the highest, like, GPA in the class. So I had graduated boot camp as a squad leader. I was meritoriously promoted to Private First Class class. I was also an Eagle Scout, so that helped with the meritorious promotion. But then I go to my next 3 months of training in the School of Infantry, and I graduate as the honor graduate, which makes me a meritorious Lance Corporal, or E-3, which is not necessarily a good thing for young guys, right?
Because now you're showing up to the fleet with like a fleet rank and you're the boot, right? So they don't really enjoy that. So I go through all this training. We had to be what we called like the machine gun ride is almost what it was like. We would all go like throw a hand grenade made, we'd wait in line. 120 of us would wait in line all day for the one moment where we're shaking with an M67 and they're like, right? And that's it. And then you like throw it, you're like, check, move on, right? So imagine like a Ford Model T production line. That's what entry-level education was, or training at the time was. And we worked to be able to change that very much later on in the career. So then I get to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. And so I graduate School of Infantry, I'm promoted to E-3, I was one of the first classes in boot camp to get the new camouflage, the digital MARPAT uniforms. So I think it was like, like Mike Company and then Alpha Company to get their uniforms. I was the first or second, but that meant when I got to the fleet, all the old Marines were wearing tricolors, right?
And that's what the assaults looked like. But all the boots showed up wearing Digi. So there was like no hiding. And the worst place you can be in the Marine Corps is being a boot, right? Uh, especially showing up to an infantry unit, especially showing up to an infantry unit as a Lance Corporal, because I was like super hated right off the bat. Uh, but we check into 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, um, which is in Camp Pendleton, and a very storied unit, very good, um, you know, very good with like a long lineage and a long history. And then we started the preparation. I got there in late December, very early January of 2023. The dates are a little fuzzy. And then 3 weeks later, we deployed to Kuwait for OIF-1.
Holy shit.
Wow. Dude, nobody even knew my name. My name was just Boot. Hey, Boot, come here. Like, yeah, got it.
When did you find out you were deploying? So this would have been 2003.
Yep, 2003. We, I think I had gotten there either in December or very early January. And then right after we check in, we like the, you know, the gears of war are turning, right? We can see that there's deployments happening. So now during boot camp, we had already had, what is it? Task Force 51-5, well, it turned into 51-5, but it was former Secretary Mattis was like a one-star in charge of the Afghan, where the Marines landed in Kandahar while the Green Beret and CIA was up in Afghanistan. All this was happening while we were in boot camp. And so—
sorry, go ahead.
No, please. So yeah, all this was kind of happening when we were in boot camp. So we were already at war with the Taliban, but the Iraq shift was kind of happening while I was in boot camp.
Okay. Yeah. So I got a couple of questions because just about Marine Corps and your experience, isn't every Marine considered an infantryman? So am I wrong about that?
It's kind of a hot take. Um, mine, mine's kind of hot. We say every Marine's a rifleman.
Okay.
Um, and we, we do train to a marksmanship level that is superior to every other service. We train out to 500 meters with, at the time, with a non, uh, with iron sights. So every Marine can shoot or qualify up to 500 yards, then meters now. Now, you know, as an infantry guy, that has— I have consternation with that term. I have a little challenge with that term because the term every Marine, a rifleman, when the Marine Corps says it, my job was a rifleman, but I had to go through training and education and schooling for that. Not every Marine was infantry. But when you— when my actual job title was rifleman and then their moniker was like every Marine, a rifleman, was like, well, then What am I in this whole thing, right? Like, am I like every— so the administrator is as good as me at this job. It was almost— I would say it's almost akin to saying like, well, you know, every sailor is basically a SEAL, right? They all shoot a pistol in boot camp and you're like, you know, no, not this, not the same. And those are obviously very different.
But to, to, to actually go with what the Marine Corps wants with that, we train every single service member to be at the very baseline baseline rifleman to have a certain level of fight in them.
Reason I was asking is you went to boot camp and then infantry school, then showed up at the infantry unit, which I'm sure you have more training. Yeah. So I was just— I was curious. I didn't realize there was an infantry school. I thought every— Yeah. So second question, you know, those of us, me and you, that came in right after 9/11, it's just an interesting time, you know, because because there really has not been— I shouldn't say anything that's significant, but on a grand scale, you know, warfare, nothing since Vietnam. Iran, we had Mogadishu, Panama, Desert Storm, and, uh, some stuff in Colombia. I think that pretty much covers it, and those were all relatively, uh, very quick conflicts. So it left a vacuum of experience, you know, within the US military and guys that had actually— most of the Vietnam guys were gone.
Yep.
You know, had retired at that point. And so it was really a very— I would say the military was very inexperienced at that time. And so I'm just curious, you know, what, what are these guys saying that probably most of them have not been to war?
Yeah.
And they're training the next generation to go do something they've never done.
That was tough. So you have this—
was that apparent to you?
Yeah.
What are they telling you? Are they pretending they'd been there?
Yeah, they're kind of playing tough guy.
Okay.
Uh, I don't like bullies, right? And I've, and I've, you know, as a kid, that probably— what, you know, I was bullied as a kid, right? I don't like bullies, and I recognize that.
It was also a tough position for them to be in, you know.
They—
I mean, they with zero experience are trying to train, you know, a generation that is, they're not going to have that, you know what I mean? They're wildly different experience.
It's, it was tough for them. We are in that same position now as we are ramping up or are at next, you know, our next war. We have atrophied a ton of the experience from OIF and OEF.
I think a lot of it's still in there though. I mean, we just, you know, that was a 20-year war and that just ended what, 21?
Well, think of when the major kinetic things happened inside of that war outside of special operations. So conventional.
I see what you—
Yeah, that started to peter off in 2011. And so you have 10 years now. Again, like you have a point where we have at the end of my career, I was an infantry weapons officer and I had young instructors who had not seen combat. They handled it much differently than my instructors did.
Did.
There was a level of professionalism. Our service has really developed professionally on how they handle that. I think that again, there was an atrophy of service or of combat experience after the Vietnam era. And then the Marine Corps had to go through a total rebranding, like an ideological shift. General Gray was one of our commandants who was instrumental in changing the way that the Marine Corps functioned. Racism, sexual assault, sexual abuse. Like, the Marine Corps was like— was not a good place to be in the '70s and '80s. They had a lot of work to do, you know, uh, you know, post-Vietnam. And discipline was the tool to fix that. And so what happened was, when you were in a school of infantry as a student, you had an instructor who didn't have a ton of experience. I'm talking like maybe one deployment on a— on a Mew, right? So like it's kind of like first graders teaching kindergartners, right? And again, very young people with now a very large sense of authority, a lot of power. Again, I don't have— it's not a total negative experience. I just look at it as being, um, it wasn't— it will come to fruition as we come through the next story.
It will come to fruition of showing the failures of the system. Because when you have a, um, a, you know, stamp, rubber stamp model or an industrial line model of getting people through, the, the, the goal is production. And they literally talk about Marines as production, not as Marines, which is when you dehumanize the educational, it just gets— I mean, we've seen it, right? We've got BUD/S helmets, right? We have BRC, we have numbers. They do that for a purpose because you don't matter until a certain phase, right? When you— when there's a bandwidth that they— that you can matter. And so, yeah, check into 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines.
I mean, it is interesting. Well, you are right because another aspect, even though there is all this experience, like a guy like me, but I haven't been in, you know, my last deployment was 2015, 10, 11 years. And warfare is completely— I mean, it's completely changed. We didn't have FPV drones.
We didn't have sharks with lasers. Right.
You know, basically the battle, you know, the battle, the battlefield is completely changed since my day. I probably wouldn't even fucking recognize it barely at this point. That's other than the actual carnage, you know. And so you put a guy like me in there to teach and what, how fucking relevant am I anymore? Not very relevant. That's, you know, with all the new tech that's out and the— with it just look at what's going on in Ukraine, Russia. I mean, it's just totally, totally different.
It's like this total future fight. You're seeing a— you know, I'm not one of the guys there— it becomes kind of generational where they're like, oh, the next generation's a bunch of pussies, or whatever. Like, I'm actually really impressed with the generation that's taken the helm from us, um, and I think that they're going to do some incredible things because they are a generation that was raised with information at their fingertips. And so they are quintessentially different than we So I, you know, and I don't want to speak for you, but like when someone told me to do 100 push-ups as like a private or whatever, I just did 100 push-ups right now. And I'm being a little facetious here, but like a young Marine will want to know why he's doing 100 push-ups. Now, they won't question it. So it's still the Marine Corps, right? It's not like, you know, flowers and pancakes, right? Like still the Marine Corps. But you as a leader now, there is a heavier requirement to explain the reasons why they're doing something. Something because they're just curious and they want to know. And so that adaptability, that like their idea of curiosity is actually going to be very beneficial for us when we're fighting drones, when we're fighting like fucking sharks with lasers or whatever the next thing is, right?
Ours was very much training for a Russian Warsaw Pact, you know, T-72 coming over a hill. And that is what we trained Now, that happened to be very effective because that's who we fought in OIF-1. But you see how the war that you and I entered in in 2004 and '05 and '06 was not T-72s coming down, you know, a mountain pass. It was non-standard asymmetric, you know, fourth-generation warfare where the uniforms fall away. But our training and education system refused and didn't fail. It refused to adapt because that was the challenge. So you are already having a leg up. Now, if you were to go to, let's say, be an advisor in Ukraine, you've already answered the best question that you can of saying, I don't know if I'm relevant anymore because war has changed so much. The challenge that we face with a lot of older generation, you know, particularly— or particularly Marines that I come across cross with was assuming that their past victories would guarantee future successes. Well, in the world now, it's not a dude with a rifle, it's a dude with a computer or an autonomous drone or whatever.
And so you can't just like tough guy your way through that. That's going to end very poorly and very quickly for you. And so I think that, that you have that ability to say, hey man, I have some experience that can help in this thing, but I'm not sure I have all the answers. That's a very good sign. And I think that our younger generation actually has a lot of that because people our age generally, you know, I don't want to make generalizations, but may not always have that same mentality. And I think it's probably because of what you do now is you talk with people and you're willing to change your opinion based on what they say or your assessment or whatever it is and have a conversation. That's not necessarily the Marine Corps or maybe even the Navy that we were raised in. It was like, this is the fucking way to do it and that's the only way to do it. Doing.
For damn sure.
And you don't fucking ask questions or you're not here, right?
You know, so you show up at 3rd, 5th?
Yeah, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 3-5, and is a great unit. And we do, we go to OIF-1, or we go to Kuwait immediately. So like, we run, I run like 3 patrols with my squad in like the backyard. I mean, I know nothing, right? But I graduated honor graduate but the, the school, the skill sets just were not there. I was super green.
So hold on. What do they tell you? I mean, do they tell you you're deploying?
Yeah.
I've never— I've never done anything in a conventional unit, so I don't— do they, they tell you? Or is it like, hey, we're leaving tomorrow, get your shit?
Kind of. So it was like we knew that we were deploying. We knew that we were going to Kuwait, right, for the potential invasion of, of Iraq.
Iraq.
And so a lot of these things were happening on the geopolitical scale. I'm also 18 and the lowest man in the totem pole. So this may have happened at that time. A lot of stuff was pretty isolated and not like classified isolated. It just wasn't important to tell the younger guys what was happening. We knew we were going to Kuwait for a potential invasion of Iraq. And then we were told to be places at certain times and wait for that. That was kind kind of the, you know, the existence that we lived. And there wasn't, you know, ours is not to reason why, right? Ours is but to do and die. And so that was kind of how we lived. And we were just kind of okay with— we didn't know any better. We didn't know any different. This was just the Marine Corps. And I immediately meet and befriend a guy named Charlie Graham, who him and I became best friends and still remain extremely close today. And I've got some great stories of us and OIF-1 together because he is 19 years old from Tampa, Florida, who worked at Target. And then 9/11 happened.
He dropped out of college, right? And then joined the Marine Corps. And now from Tampa and San Francisco. And now we've become like we're in the same like fireteam together. And the fireteam is like 4-man fireteams and we become super, super close friends. But yeah, we deploy to Kuwait and there's just no there's no like information. We just go and we go to these large tents, these. And they're all— you have to think like they're all building it as we're getting there, you know, like the Iraq that we knew later on where there's like chow halls and firm bases and helipads. None of that stuff existed. It was just like flat desert and like moon dust. And then these circus tents that we would live in and we would go into the circus tents and we had It's kind of like Generation Kill. Generation Kill did a pretty— it's so fucking weird you just brought that up.
I was just gonna bring Generation Kill up.
Pretty accurate.
You know those guys?
Uh, actually, I know— so I know Jason Lilly, um, and then I know another guy named, uh, Taron, and I think— I won't say his last name because he's still in the space at some level, but, uh, he— I know Taron, the black guy, um, in the TV show. Uh, and then I know Rudy Reyes, um, but we're not like super close, but I do of them.
Do you know Tony Espero?
Maybe. I mean, he's so also a very different generation of Recon Marines. I didn't become a Recon Marine until like 8 years later. So there was generationally we're in the same club, but we don't really know each other, if that makes sense. Like, we would like shake each other's hand and that would be kind of, you know, kind of it. But generationally, no. Jason Lilly had a pretty good story as well. He's pretty, pretty solid dude. And then so ironic about the Generation Kill. So the gentleman, the black guy in Generation Kill is super not who the actual character is in real life. So Taron is his name. And him and I were in Japan together many, many years later on and is the one of the best operators I've ever— like the best Marine I've ever met in my entire life. Like we call it a triple threat, like jump, dive, sniper, seer, like like she's done it all, right? And he's like 6'3", super quiet, professional, super well-educated. And in the TV show, they like portray him as like this, like really hood kind of Black guy. And so we were terrible to him in Okinawa.
And again, very close friend of mine, but like we would like go to the PX and like buy durags and like leave durags on his rack and stuff. And he's like, you guys are fucking racist. And we're like, 'cause he just acted nothing like the TV show portrayed, you know, in that, But again, fantastic man. I love him to death and he's doing really, really good things. But yeah, so we get to Kuwait. It's a lot like Generation Kill is we live in these like plywood floor, fucking sandstormy kind of places and we have one boombox for our, our platoon has one boombox that somebody had brought and they have 3 CDs. They have Red Hot Chili Peppers self-titled album. Album, uh, or no, yeah, California, self-titled album, and then By the Way, and then the Blow soundtrack. I don't know why he brought those things. Uh, excuse me, the fourth one was Audioslave, self-titled, self-titled album, and that was it. So that is my, like, for all of OF1, that is my soundtrack that was always going through my head, is any of those, any of those specific songs. But we basically just waited, and we would do gas drills, and we would do, you know, what wasn't called TCCC at the time, it was just called first aid.
We would do like, you know, atropine and 2-pam chloride. And we had like fucking pigeons that they trained us on, these like pigeons that we were going to take with us because they're like the canary in the coal mines. We had like one pigeon that we had to have per squad that was going to detect gas for us. Uh, are you fucking serious? It was a stack of pigeons.
Is that real?
100% real. Ours was named— our second platoon's was named Private Petey Stenenko.
What do they do? What do they do if there's gas?
I've never heard this. They would just die first. We're like, uh, uh, Private Sonego's dead. I guess we should get our gas masks on, right? Like this is people like the war machine in the United States. We were not like, we, we had atrophied a lot of experience. It was again, a very different time. We did the best we could, but that was like wild. Um, and then we would go and we had to like march out to the desert to fall into the division's line. So the Marines are, I love Marines, man, but we do some Marine things sometimes. So we basically established a defensive perimeter. Into the desert facing the desert north, right? The berm, if you will. And it's like, you know, we've been combing the desert for hours, right? It's like that. So we go out to like nondescript piece of desert and like plop in and then we start digging fighting holes. And as a boot, my job is to dig fighting holes. That is what I am put on this earth to do, is dig fighting holes and burn shitters. That is my only job in life. Life. And so that's what I did for the first, like, 4 weeks of OIF-1 before we actually go into Iraq.
I dug fighting holes, and then we stood in the fighting holes and, like, shivered every single night and, like, stared into the desert for hours. And then we would do that for a week, and then we would pack up our stuff. Another group of Marines that I didn't know would, like, take our position at the front, and then we would come back to, you know, the base and then, like, lay around for a week and do classes and then we did that back and forth. And so I met a lot of Marines and we hung out by the shitters, and that's what my job was, was to, you know, play Jimi Hendrix, smoke cigarettes, and burn human feces for hours on end. Nice. It felt fitting. It was like very Vietnam-esque.
So were you fired up to be there at the beginning? Was the adrenaline pumping?
Yeah.
How long did that take to go away?
Well, funny you should ask. So So really fired up. Honestly, honestly, honestly, like, we believed that we were fighting a just cause. We were here. We were America. We were on the— America was attacked, right? Our Marines were fighting in Afghanistan. We had combat experience from that. We had people talk about that in boot camp and train us up. We were 100% excited to be there. Now, remember, though, there was a very small swath of people in that time period who had joined because of 9/11. There was a large— a larger demographic of people who did not join because of 9/11. They had joined for whatever other reason. Not saying they're bad or less than. There was just a very small— so 9/11 was like, I think, your catalyst, right? Of like why you joined the Navy and eventually went in, right? No. Oh, it wasn't. I'm sorry.
I joined before.
Oh, you did?
Yeah.
My mistake. I'm sorry.
That's all good.
Okay, so that— so that— my mistake. I'm such an asshole.
Now don't worry about it at all because you were in Haiti in 2004. Well, I joined in July of '01.
Oh shit.
And then as I left boot camp is when 9/11 hit. Holy—
okay. And then right when you started BUD/S?
Well, then I went to A school, then I went to BUD/S.
Okay. What was your original A school?
OS, Operations Specialist.
What is that?
Radar guy.
No shit. Yeah, that'll make you want to get through Yeah, right. It was my mistake on that. I'm sorry. And so you had guys that, again, not bad, but they had joined for whatever reason and then some of them were stop-lossed. So once we went to war, they were stop-lossed and couldn't get out. So you had a weird mix of people inside of there. And so, yeah, it was, it was a really weird kind of time for us. But I do remember like seeing— I got a chance to meet me at the time, it was 2-star General Mattis and then General Conway, who became the Commandant of the Marine Corps. I misspoke earlier on, on a different show. I was, I, I, you know, I didn't really know much. I was a fucking private, or I was a Lance Corporal, not really knowing anything. We had like the coolest experience before going into Iraq. It was General Conway who stood up on an M1A1 Abrams tank, and he had like the 5th Marine Regiment, and a regiment in the Marine Corps is each battalion is around 1,000 to 1,200. I don't math in public, but a regiment is like 4+ battalions depending on how large.
So you're talking like 7,000-ish people. And they get us in this like school circle is what we call it around this giant fucking tank. And then this guy hops up with like Marine Corps flag and like an American flag. And he's— I mean, because like, what does a badass do? He stands on a tank, right? So he stands on a tank and gives us this speech and it was the most fiery fucking ready to go, you know, speech ever because he's talking about what we're going to see over the berm and this, this is now all of this is happening when geopolitics is like President Bush had given a number of deadline ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to release his weapons of mass destruction or whatever, whatever his demands were at that time. And they were like crossing those things. The final one was, I think it was like March 19th or March 20th or something like that. Again, I was in the desert, nobody told me shit, but all of this stuff was happening. So we're ramping up, we're seeing that Saddam's not budging and we're about to go in. So this is like 3 or 4 days before the invasion actually starts.
So General Conway gets on this tank and he gives us this fiery speech and he goes, Marines, right? And he's like, over your left shoulder, you're going to have Marine aviation. And he checks his watch and then all of a sudden CH-46s, CH-53s, right? All of our transport helicopters like flying over and then Cobras and Hueys start, you know, like doing their thing. And then he like looks over his right shoulder and then he's like, and then you're going to have fixed wing. And these motherfuckers do like this, like sonic boom F-18s and Harriers like, and they like, and 7,000 Marines are like, Wah! You should do like—
It's about as motivating as it gets right there.
We would have taken France, you know, like, fuck it, let's invade France next, right? We would have done it. We would have gone 100% down that. And everyone was super fired up. We were really happy to be there. Now, again, people were scared and nervous. We all, we all thought we were going to get gassed to high heaven. We did a bajillion gas drills and wore those fucking mop suits, which—
Oh, man.
We wore the mop suits over our cammies. So we had cotton camis and then we had mop suits over them. And it was just a cesspool of sweat and grossness. And then we go to our final, you know, positions. Again, the 1st Marine Division, General Mattis gave every single person in the division a letter. And I actually spoke with him many, many years later. He said he took him— it took him only 45 minutes to write this letter. And it was a letter to the entire 1st Marine Division. Vision. And I have it verbatim in the book because it was profound to me, and it was telling us about who we were. No better friend, no worse enemy, right? This is what we're fighting for. We're fighting to be, you know, the might of the United States, but when they surrender, we will, you know, show them that we are a compassionate people, right? And all this like really, really good, you know, warrior poet type stuff. And I saved it, and I took it in my flak jacket, and I put it in my flak jacket inside my little— in between my sappies and my little Velcro thing and I kept it for the entire invasion and I still have it at home and it has a little, you know, the sappy plates have like a honeycomb pattern.
So the honeycomb pattern is like built into this little thing because it sat in my thing the entire time. But then we go out to our assembly area or our attack positions and we can sit and wait. And then we wait there for, I think, a day or two. And we have a little wind-up radio, a little survival radio that like one guy in the squad has. Has. And we're listening to the BBC, and then we hear Tony Blair from, uh, he was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the time, and he talks about that Saddam's missed all these things and we're going to war. And that's how we knew.
Why do you think he'd never released the, uh, weapons of mass destruction? What?
It feels like it's a loaded question. Well, I told you I'd answer any question you asked me on this I don't think he had them. And all of the evidence to show hindsight being what it is. Now, they did have Scuds, right? They did have these things. He did gas, you know. But what I had learned later in my career is that especially in the intelligence field is we do not normally act on single source reporting. And I think for OIF-1, we very heavily acted on single source reporting, and we committed an entire war to it. You know, I have my own consternation with things.
You know, they had another source, but they just decided not to.
Really?
Yeah.
Really?
You know who that source was?
No.
Pete Blaber and his guys.
What? That's really— because I remember he was I'm trying to remember. I read his book many, many years ago. It's like 2012 is when I read the book. He was in— was he in western Iraq?
I can't remember exactly where he was at, but they sent the imagery to his team at Delta to verify.
Really?
Yep.
Oh man.
And the missile was a water truck. The air purification system that was on top of the building that was producing weapons of mass destruction was an air conditioning unit. And the sentry guard that was outside the door wound up just being a guy taking a piss.
Just like smoking a cigarette, whatever it is. Jesus, man.
Sent it back to them. They fucking ignored it. We went in.
How does that make you feel? I don't want to like, you know, like I, in through this whole thing, you know, after everything that you've done and experienced and where you're at, you know, like, I, I can't help but feel pretty lied to, you know, about all this. Me neither.
It enrages me at the same— it's really, it's, it's kind of like a dichotomy in my head, you know. It's, it's— I wouldn't, uh, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything other than, you know, my family. But I sure as hell don't want my kid going through it. You know, as I mentioned at the beginning, and yeah, they fooled us.
Yeah, it's hard. I talk about this with, you know, the gentleman we were talking about off camera. I was talking about this with them. I think our generation of guys has an interesting kind of, at least the ones that I'm talking with, there's like this, we want young Marines, young soldiers, we want them to get it. We want them to go. We want them to do the thing, you know, but fuck the cost that comes with it. Like I said, that trust, that social contract You and I don't know each other from anybody, right? But if we have to go out and something goes down, like, we're going to fight for each other. That's who we are. You know, my best friend that I lost in Afghanistan, in the weird world that we're in right now, I couldn't tell you if he was a Republican or a Democrat. It just never came up. It didn't matter, right? It didn't fucking matter. We were there, right? And we were there for each other. That bond. That, that, that sacred bond between you and I, between the people who have worn the cloth of the United States and written a blank check to the United States payable with our lives.
I, I wish, I hope that any person who is calling for us to go to war or sending us into harm's way, they have to wield that relationship, that power carefully because it's something that is so— it is so pure for us, that love for one another, that love to protect your brother, right? It's written in sacred texts, right? Like it is all through our, you know, our lineage and our history. And it has to be protected and used by people who understand it. So to your idea of a warrior class, what's the saying? Any civilization that separates its warriors from scholars will have its fighting "Thinking done by fools and it's thinking done by cowards," I think is the quote. And so—
Good one.
You know, I'm not— I'll be open with this is our country has become much more militarized since the onset of the global war on terrorism. The military has become much more pop culture, much more center of everything that we do. And there's goods and there's bads with that. But I am appalled that— I don't know, not appalled. I would be— I just wish that some of our political leaders understood this cost, understood a little bit more, because again, if if I were to have to make a decision to send men and women into harm's way, I would know the cost. I'm not saying I wouldn't send them into harm's way if that— if it was a just cause, if it was a righteous thing to do. If the United States military is to be able to— well, unfortunately, if we look at our history, the United States Marines specifically have not always been used for the best, most altruistic means. A gentleman by the name of Smedley Butler is one of our most famous Marines, and he is the recipient of two Medals of Honor, which is— I think there's three people in our United States history have them.
The first Medal of Honor he has is from the Banana Wars, if I'm not mistaken, which was the Marine Corps was sent to— God, I'm going to mess this up, but I think it's— I think it's Honduras. Because there was a price-fixing kind of cartel, if you will, that was not wanting to be able to sell bananas to the United States at a specific price. And so they sent the Marines to break the back of this corporation. And that's where he won his first Medal of Honor or received his first Medal of Honor.
Wow.
He received a second Medal of Honor in World War I. And interestingly enough, he is one of our most famous Marines all over hallowed ground at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Corps. He was— he wrote a— he was— he ran for— he was a senator from Pennsylvania while he was on active duty, which is a weird thing. Was a 2-star general. He was actually approached, and I'm going to, you know, fact-check me on this a little bit. He was approached by— I think it was by the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts to like overthrow the United States government at one point. Because when he had gotten back from World War I, the United States government refused to pay their veterans salaries that they had guaranteed them during World War I. And he also wrote a book that nobody really talks about, and it's called War Is a Racket. And it's a very small pamphlet, and it's talking about how he was effectively a corporate— he was a thug for corporations. Um, interesting.
War Is a Racket.
War Is a Racket. I've heard this by Smedley Butler.
I got to get that.
It's inter— it's very— it's a, it's a small read, and it's, it's written by a man by who was very upset Now, interesting. So it's— history is always not, not always fair to people, right? When we look at War is a Racket, I actually disagree with Smedley Butler because he was an anti— he was an America First, that term America First, which meant he did not want to interfere in foreign wars, period. If it didn't have to do with the United States, don't get involved. So he was actually a very large anti-United States entering into World War II advocate. He did not want us in World War II and he advocated publicly against it. I think that there is a lot of justification for us entering into that war.
So I guess we are syncing up very nicely here because I was going to ask you, when is the last war that we were involved in that you think that we were fighting for ourselves?
Well, I mean, if we put our tinfoil hats on, what brought us into World War I? It was the sinking of the Lusitania, right? So a German U-boat hit an American liner. In, you know, in the Atlantic. And that brought us into the war. And we came into the war very late. I think we joined in 1917. The Marines specifically, right? The Battle of Belleau Wood, which is like sacred hallowed ground for us. We came into the war very, very late. And World War II, we were very, you know, very, very interested in staying out of the war. We had an embargo on Japan. We were we were suffocating or strangling Japan's economic and industrial ability to make war. We had brought them to the, you know, to the point of where then they attacked Pearl Harbor, of which they knew was a mistake at the time. But we were, you know, I'm sure that the internet's going to go crazy because I'm not a hit. I'm like, I'm surfing around the right kind of history, but I'm not a history major. Like, I'm like a PhD student in leadership, right? So I could talk on that, but I know my history to a certain level.
And so there was a cause that brought us into World War II. The Korean War was fighting communism through a, you know, through the expansion inside of the, you know, the Korean Peninsula. Vietnam was the same thing. We're doing a documentary about reconnaissance Marines right now with Combat Story, and we're finding out about the history of recon and where it came from. And our first interactions in Vietnam were actually in 1961. As advisors with SOG at the time. And it's interesting, the stuff that kind of happens of what we actually— what kind of percolates to the top and what we get taught and what really happened is very, very different. To answer your question, I think Desert Storm was— it was a just cause. I think it was a military victory that happened, you know, 96 hours. It was a strategic air campaign. We had a neighboring country invade, you know, so Kuwait had a lot of money. Saddam was broke and wanted to, you know, steal Kuwaiti oil or, you know, repurpose the land to make it, you know, Iraqi oil so that he could pay off his international debts. So he invaded Kuwait, which is not okay.
So we, you know, you know, did Desert Shield and Desert Storm. But World War II and Desert Storm are the two things. And in Afghanistan, I think for us, Afghanistan, what I tell people people is I think we— and for our generation— is we fought one war of necessity and one war of choice. And that's kind of my, like, political answer to kind of, you know, dance around that. But it's super tough. It's— it's— we look at our history with these kind of rose-colored glasses and we think, like, you know, raving the red, white, and blue, and we're only fighting for just causes and things like that. And that's not super true for our history. This kind of thing that we're seeing right now with, you know, Venezuela and with Iran and with Ukraine, this is kind of par for our— par for the course for us. Now, we have a decision of whether or not we want to continue down that pathway. But again, like you said, you know, a national draft puts people with skin in the game. Maybe more of our politicians need to have walked a mile in our boots.
Bad chance. Speaking of Iran, I got a hot question for you. You ready for this, AJ? Before you came on, we had Claude Anthropics AI scrape the entire internet and run a full background on you, and here's what came back. Oh God. 3 tours in Iraq, the invasion, Fallujah, the Ramadi corridor. The whole time, Iran's Quds Force was arming the Shia milit— excuse me, the Shia militias killing Marines. The EFPs that punched through armor and killed hundreds of Americans were Iranian-supplied. You fought Iran's proxies for 20 years without ever officially being at war with Iran. Now it's April of 2026. Operation Epic Fury is in its 8th week. 15 US service members have already been killed 5,000 Marines from the same pipeline you deployed with are sitting off Iran's coast. The ceasefire lapses today. Trump has not ruled out ground troops. Here's the question: you fought Iran through proxies for two decades. Now we're openly at war with them. What are you seeing that American people are not? And are we about to make the same mistakes all over again.
Yes. I would never argue that Iran was— I'll say this a little clearer. I am not an advocate for any war, knowing what it costs, knowing what it physically costs with budgetary requirements, with inflationary, you know, reason, you know, with inflationary very, I would say, causes and effects that happen from there, what that does to the American public, people, what it does to the people that actually deploy. I think that we have taken the playbook off of the shelf from 2003, blown the dust off of it, and are playing the same hits. However, I do believe that Iran has always been and will continue to remain at that time their regime a threat to the United States. I'm not arguing that they're not an— that they're not a threat. I'm not arguing that they are not— that they haven't fought us, that I have not literally fought with Shia militias throughout my entire career. But I think that with our dominance— and dominance is the right word here, right? In Iraq, we didn't have air superiority. We had air supremacy. Right? With the United States' military dominance, that is already enough of a deterrent to me.
We have a first option, which is always peace, debate, deliberation, maybe sanctions that come inside of there. The second option is breaking an enemy or a country to our will through superior firepower or willpower. But there's always a third option. And the third option, I believe, comes from an organization that you used to work for for a long time. What if we did not have to commit thousands of troops to something that we don't really know what the endgame is? What are the objectives inside of this? What were the objectives for Iraq? We saw this. And I love, I love my country and I love the Marine Corps with every fiber of my being. But we raced to Baghdad, toppled the regime, and then didn't have a plan once we caught the car. You ever seen a dog catch a car? Like, they don't know what to do next. And then we went into 20 years of nation building. If we want a free Iran and we want an Iran that pre the Ayatollah, pre the revolution of what, 1979, of—
they were considered the Shah, right?
They were the Paris of the Middle East. But a revolution cannot sustain and remain if it's not born and bred from within. We saw that in Iraq. We saw that in Afghanistan. How much blood did we have to spill to nation-build and build this for a country that couldn't or wouldn't do it for themselves? It's hard for me. I will never— I— my old unit, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, is deploying and I don't know where they're deploying to because I tend not to ask questions. I don't want to— I'm not going to implicate them or myself.
I'm sure they're just going to pay costs.
I talk with those young— I actually stay very close with that unit and their company gunnery sergeant, their E-7, keeps like an old guard of people to kind of mentor the new guys. Right. Because there is no real combat experience. And so they, they talk. These guys are good Americans and they want to fight and they want to serve their country. The challenge that these young men face, we bring them through an organization that tells them that their one source, their one moment to shine is to go to combat. Our entire organization's reason for existence is to go to combat. And so they want to go to combat just like I I wanted to go to combat just like you wanted to go to and eventually left the SEALs to continue down that, that pipeline because you want— that is natural for our type of person, for this warrior class, if you will. We don't want to be on the practice squad forever. We want to play in the game, right? So I will never, ever, ever fault the young Marines for wanting to do what they believe they were put on the face of the earth to do.
Again, I will go back to the politicians. Who will not— who will not commit their own sons and daughters to the same fight that we are willing to do so. It always comes from the same class of people, predominantly. You know, it's changed in recent years, but predominantly lower socioeconomic status people. The draft proves that. The draft in the 1960s proved that. Who got deferments to go to college, right? That became our, you know, our middle and upper middle class. Ass, while the people who couldn't get into college, afford college, they were the ones. That will still happen if we go to a draft today. Everyone will hire— every person with some sort of, um, influence or affluence will hire the right attorney to be able to doctor, fabricate, whatever the thing is, to get their kids out of that, out of the thing. But my broke ass and my friends whatever it is, don't have those resources. So at the end of the day, a draft to me has a specific band of people that it will send. The people who cannot advocate for themselves, cannot organize themselves, who then, if you disobey that draft, you go to prison, right?
You go to, you know, federal, you know, penitentiaries. So it puts us in this like catch-22. Our leaders should know that. They should know that. They should know the difference. They should know what they're asking these people to do. But again, you know, and I know that the Secretary of War is a veteran himself, and maybe they have access to information that I don't. My clearance has lapsed, right? You know, I don't go into the secret rooms anymore and have these conversations. Man, I don't know. I don't know. My direct answer to you is no, I don't think that we should be at war with Iran and an open war with Iran. And I'm— and it hurts to say that.
Yeah, I don't either. I don't either. I'm not buying the reasons that we're there either.
Yeah. Give me an objective. Give me a weapon of mass destruction. Give me the thing.
I mean, they said, you know, they've been our, what, 47 years? They've been our enemy for 47 years. Yeah, you're right. They have been our enemy for 47 years. Years. Why are we doing it now all of a sudden? Yeah. Second of all, I mean, that flag right there, do you know about that?
Yeah, they told me a little bit about that.
So he brought a guy, Legend, on, Afghan-American, served in U.S. Army as an intelligence guy, got out, went over there, works with the resistance. Taliban was burning that flag and Cowboy brought it back and he unveiled, uncovered the fact that we're sending $40 to $87 million in cash to the Taliban every single week. So we got introduced to Congress. They actually passed it. Now it's sitting at the fucking Senate floor. It's been over 2 years now, I think. How long have they been our enemy? Enemy and we're funding them.
Yep.
We're funding our fucking enemy.
Who we funded.
But then at the same time, the messaging about Iran is they've been our enemy for 47 years. At the same time, we're bringing in the, what, the new Syrian prime minister, president, whatever he is, who was chopping our fucking heads off and parading them around Congress and the White House. That guy's not our enemy anymore. It's interesting how fucking people will just buy right into this shit.
Yeah. You know, I joke with people. I think that, you know, people ask me about war and I joke and I say it flippantly. I'm like, well, I'm a pacifist now. I'm not really a pacifist. The pacifism doesn't work, right? Because as soon as you meet one person who's not a pacifist, they take what you want or they take what, you know, take your resources. Resources. It always comes down to resources at some level, right? Whether that be monetary, whether that be energy, and energy being the primary, you know, fuel behind this. I just, I just struggle with it, my friend. I struggle with it because these— and why I feel so hard about talking about not wanting to go to war with Iran is because any young American who's in the active armed services will think that I am a a traitor to them.
I don't think they think that.
Why? Because I don't know what— so what happened? Okay, here's a, here's a hot take, right? So like, now that we're in this, do you remember when John McCain, Senator McCain, was actively advocating against enhanced interrogation techniques? It was—
I don't remember.
Oh, he was a huge— so, and I won't go into too much, he was a— there was waterboarding basically, and he was No, fuck no. Like, not something the United States is going to use. That's not our technique. We're not— we are, you know, trying to be a more moral military, if you will. Right. And he was like, advocate fervently against that. Well, he was fervently against that because he had his fucking arms, you know, ripped out of his sockets inside of a pit in North Vietnam. Right. When he was, you know, a POW, he had seen that technique. He had seen the worst of the worst and didn't want us to become become our own, like, didn't want to degrade ourselves to become that type of enemy, that type of person. I was active duty at the time, and I was of that political party, and I fucking was so mad at John McCain because what I thought was John McCain doesn't want us getting information out of people to save American lives. Now I'm laughing because I'm sitting back after retiring from shooting people people all over the planet for the red, white, and blue and wondering the same thing.
Like, why the fuck do we continue to do this? How are we better off today than we were yesterday? And the answer is, I don't know. And I can't quantify that. I am heartbroken. I, you know, I'm sure we'll get into it eventually, but I have a mother that I stay in contact with from a friend of mine that I lost in Iraq. And I stay in contact with— I talked with her 2 days ago. So I actually haven't seen the real hardcover of this book. I've only seen the advanced reader copies. I have a copy at home that is sealed from the publisher. It's the very first copy. I called her up and I said, Jane, I want to be able to send you this book. I'm going to open this book up. This is the author's first copy. This is like a special thing. To them, you gave your son to this country. The least that I can do is give you a fucking— the first copy of my book. It's something so stupid. It's— but it's the only thing that I can give to this woman to tell her how fucking sorry I am that her son didn't make it home.
And I don't know why we did it. And I don't know why. And I wish this fucking guy survived Columbine. He was in Columbine, locked eyes with Dylan Klebold and the other dipshit that shot up the first fucking school in America and started this epidemic of killing people in our schools. And then he goes to Iraq and he fucking goes into a house knowing there's bad guys in there, but a Marine's inside and he makes a fucking decision to go inside this room when he knows he's probably going to die. And he gets shot, falls to the ground, continues to fight, and eventually succumbs to his wounds. Earns the Bronze Star. What the fuck was it for? How do I tell Jane what the fuck happened? Is Iraq better off now than it was before we went? Well, yes, in some ways, and in some ways, no. Is Afghanistan again, exactly the same as it was now before we went in. Sharia law, Taliban rule, right? You know, fucking stoning women in the streets for trying to get an education. What did we solve? So unless we get an idea— and I was told in no uncertain terms, try to stay neutral, AJ— but fuck, man, you got to have an opinion about something.
And I don't have an opinion because an opinion is the lowest form of human consciousness. I can have an opinion on anything, but I have an assessment. An assessment comes from being in the arena. You and I can look at each other and be like, what the fuck just happened? Why are we doing this? Give us objectives. Give us a reason. Give us a just cause, and I will sign up myself and I will fight on the front lines. But until you give me that, I cannot— I cannot in good conscience will another generation to suffer the same outcomes and the same consequences that you and I went through?
Yeah, I'm with you.
And I'm sure that there's like half the internet's like, yo, fuck this guy, right? And like half the internet's like, yeah, man. But like, there's no winning in this thing. But I say to anybody that's an advocate for war, hey man, the recruiting station's open to all of us.
Yeah, yeah, I fear we have, uh, overplayed our hand a little bit here, and, um, a lot has been exposed. Yeah, a lot has been exposed. Iran, China, Russia.
That's the issue, dude. We're over here chasing our tails.
Chinese probably don't fucking listening.
Sun Tzu, right? Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. They're just following their own doctrine. Now, again, even if we think of— I'm also of the mind, and again, I surf a lot more, I ride mountain bikes, right? Like, I get to chill out a little bit more, walks on the beach. My mindset's, you know, shifting since retiring from the military. I had a very good friend of mine, worked for some— he was a JTAC, saved my life in Afghanistan. Man, was a Marine artillery liaison, worked with recon, and then eventually was pulled up to National Mission Force. And then after he retired, he was a JTAC for them. He retired from them. He worked at their— one of their locations as a civilian running the same kind of thing. I call him up, we chat all the time. I fucking love this guy. Just Marines, Marine. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, I'm coaching high school wrestling. Teach wrestling. And it had been like 4 weeks since we had talked, like not a substantial amount of time. And I was like, what? I thought you were X place with X unit.
He goes, you know what? I just got tired of it all. Every day I would come to work and there was someone new to kill. I just got tired of it. I wanted to hang out with my kids and teach wrestling. I was like, fuck, dude. Like, are we always just looking for enemies? Now, again, we are the American superpower. We have chosen our own obligation to be able to be like America world police in some aspects. And I get it, right? There's democracy, the petrodollar. I understand a lot of those reasons why we do those kind of things. Never advocating against that. And having, you know, snake eaters around the world making sure that American influence is in the right way. I'm not, I'm not naive, but I understood his point when he was like, man, I just got tired of killing. There was always somebody else. So I'm not saying China is not our enemy, right? I'm not saying Iran's not our enemy. I'm not saying Venezuela wasn't our enemy. What I'm saying is, um, there's a lot of problems that we can fix at home, uh, that I'd be very interested in having some conversations with, especially with a $1 trillion annual budget, um, to a five-sided spending machine.
And that's not a good take for somebody who, um, you know, comes from this, but I'm sorry, it's just the way that I feel. I love what— I love who we are. I love what we to do. Um, but I think we've kind of lost the plot. Yeah, me too.
Me too. Let's take another break.
Yeah.
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Hard AJ, we went a whole new segment and didn't get, didn't get into the invasion, so Let's talk about the day the invasion happened.
So March 20th, 2003, I'm on Air Sentry. So Air Sentry is— we have the AAVs, the amphibious assault vehicles. The Marine Corps conducted the largest movement of an— like, technically amphibious landing, right? But like largest movement of amphibious vehicles inland in our nation's history, I think world history. So basically coming in from the ports of Kuwait and then driving these vehicles up to Baghdad. But we get word, you know, from the, you know, wind-up survival radio and we're like, we're going to war, right? So I need to preface all of this with I swear I got better, right? So all of these stories are going to be super self-deprecating, right? And, and I'm going to tell some funny ones along the way. But I think that there will be eventually, you know, a point to it. So I am Lance Corporal Pasciuti. I am 18 years old. I am on my first deployment. I've been in the unit for 6 or 7 weeks at this time. 4 of those weeks have been me in Kuwait. So we got into Kuwait on February 11th, 2003, and then March 20th, we're crossing into Iraq. Most people don't know my name at this point, but at least I have the tri— I went and bought the tricolor cammies, so I at least look the same as everybody else.
But so we're cruising up there now. I've got this fantastic team leader. So the way the Marine Corps works is we at the time, we had a 4-man fireteam with a fireteam leader. So it was a fireteam leader. You had a machine gunner or automatic rifleman, you had a grenadier, and you had, you know, like a point man, if you will. And then we had 3 fireteams per squad. Quad, and then you had a squad leader separate. So you had 12, you know, 12 Marines that were 3 independent elements and then 1 squad leader. Corporal Olson, Eric Olson, was my fireteam leader, and then Sergeant Pryor, Josh Pryor, was my squad leader. Now, they were actually really, really good to me, you know. Like, they didn't really hold it against me that I was a boot. They didn't give me, you know, they were— I was a human being to them, right, you know, and not like just the guy who dug things. Um, not everybody in the squad was that way, or the platoon was that way. And there were some people, especially at the time, is being a boot in the Marine Corps is not a good place to be, um, and especially in the infantry.
And so they just didn't treat us very, very well. In fact, they fucking hated us, right? And they treated us like such garbage, to the point of where— you ever heard of like— now I'm not gonna go down that path, but like, we, we would question our— all the young guys would question ourselves. I'm like, I'm not doing anything for that guy if he gets into it, whatever, you know, like, fuck that dude, he's terrible to me. Um, so we go and we're starting to like cross the berm. It's actually really, really cool. So I'll backtrack for just one second. When I was going to my first Boy Scout camp as a kid, uh, I was, I don't know, 10 years old, 12 years old, something like that. I had never spent a week away from home, and I was going to the woods woods for the first time for a long period of time. And I had to be— I had at the time what I considered a very reasonable fear of werewolves, right? And so as a, you know, I think I was 10, let's just say I was 10, right, for at least a little bit of fucking credibility.
Um, and my mom took me outside and she walked me into the front of our house, you know, in Sunnyvale, front of the studio, and she brought me outside and she had me look at the sky. And above us was a specific constellation, and the constellation was Orion. And you can tell Orion, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, it's really generally where it's at, is the, the Orion's Belt, the 3 stars in a row. And what she did is she walked me outside and she said, Angelo— you know, it's also one of my— I have 3 first names that are all the root of one name and no middle name. But she said, Angelo, um, you know, why don't you take a look at Orion? She says, that's where our family goes. When we move on from this earth. What I want you to do is anytime that you are afraid or you're alone and you miss home and you want to think of your family, look at Orion and we'll do the same. That'll be how we connect with one another. My mom's an artist, so it's a little, you know, a little spacey in that, but I get it.
Um, so we're in now Iraq, or technically Kuwait, and we hear the BBC going off. Now we're like loading up and we're starting and I'm on air sentry. So in our tracks, our air sentries are, we stand on a little bench that has a quarter-inch piece of foam on it. And we're on the left side of the track and our job is to look out the track to cover our flanks, basically. So one guy's facing right, we're facing left. And there's like, basically you'll see a track and you'll see like 3 little helmets sticking out of the back of it. Those are air sentries. And that's where the boots go, uh, in the, uh, in the infantry. Air Sentry, the younger guy, because you're just on Air Sentry for a million years. And all of a sudden I'm up. We're starting to move up. We got rooster tails of dirt. It's the middle of the night, right? And I'm looking for Orion and I see Orion. And then all of a sudden, off to my right, I see three arcs coming through the sky. And then I see like an igniter hit behind it. What those actually turned out to be was called RAP rounds, rocket-assisted projectiles from our artillery battalions or batteries.
Battalions. And so they were shooting wrap rounds into softened targets that probably Pete Blaber and First Force and Navy SEALs were all like, pick these targets for us. And so now they're softening targets for us as we're moving in. And then all of a sudden I start to see this own like night sky light up with like afterburners of the entire coalition air campaign kick off. So I'm in the desert.
Holy shit.
Yeah, just watching afterburners and, and, uh, artillery projectiles. Flying through the air as they're all going north towards the berm. And the berm is the separator between Kuwait and Iraq. And it's like a 15-foot berm, right? Nothing super crazy. And so what we have is— boy, I'm going to get some of the units a little wrong here. I'm not a historian, but you have 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance who are driving around in our LAV-25s. They're the wheeled reconnaissance vehicles. They have a 25mm Bushmaster beautiful, beautiful weapon system, great, you know, you know, team. And they call themselves a lot of times like wolf packs and they hunt like wolves. And so it's almost like how Apache's cavalry fights in a certain way. The LAVs are in that same. So they're very mobile and they oftentimes work with tanks or adjacent to M1A1s. So we've got 1st LAR, 1st Recon, and 1st Force. 1st Force is doing a helo insert into what's called Safwan Hill. And Safwan Hill is this hill overlooking the breach. So First Force flies over, we've got First LAR, and then I think it was Second Tanks, and they're working to blow the breach.
They have this like thing that blows through these things, it's called a MICLIC, Mine Clearing Lane Charge, and it's like this, basically a tank drives up and it like shoots this shape charge on a line and it flings this thing through the air and it lands on whatever it needs to and it's a mine clearing line charge. That's what it is, right? And it blows to clear off any mines in the area. So we have a clear way through. So engineers have helped with this whole thing. They're detonating all this stuff. And then 1st LAR and 1st Tanks and then portions of 1st Recon who are driving around in like Mercedes G-Wagons, like the tripped up or the tricked out G-Wagons are just hitting targets, just crushing the 51st Mechanized Brigade, I think was the Iraqi Mechanized Brigade South. And they're just getting work. So it's called like hammer and anvil. So you like set the anvil, right? And then you have the hammer swing around. And then it's also something what we call is a horns of dilemma. Basically what Marine Corps combined arms tries to do when we use aviation, artillery, tanks is the enemy gets to choose how they want to die.
Die. They're in the horns of equally bad options. And so the hammer and anvil is kind of that action. And so 1st Tanks and 1st LAR are just crushing T-55s, T-72s, and we're hearing this as we're coming forward. And then the rest of the division is in basically a ranger file in these tracks following these cleared mine routes that they've gone through. And we're just like a big dragon. Remember seeing, uh, The 13th Warriors or whatever, or 13th Warrior with like Antonio Banderas and they have the dragon coming down. It's kind of like that. So we're in this just big dragon, all of us with like PVS-7 Bravos, right? Dude, my M16A2 was older than I was, right? And I had an M203 on the bottom that rattled like I was afraid if I was gonna shoot it, it was like, you know, fly off, right? And so we're cruising through And I can't believe I'm about to tell you, there is no— I have no shame anymore. There's no— any cool guy points are going to get erased with this. So in the Marine Corps, actually in the Navy as well, Combat Action Ribbon, right?
So that is a big thing for Marines. And in the Army, they have the Combat Infantry Badge and then the Combat Non-Infantry Badge. It's like a dagger instead of a rifle, I think it is. So the Combat Action Ribbon is like a big deal for us. Here's how I got my first Combat Action Ribbon. And this is something that a lot of young Marines will, will weigh themselves if they have a Combat Action Ribbon, if they don't, and they see themselves as less than because remember, our service is about fighting. And if you haven't done the thing, then you are, you know, not openly talked about, but you classify yourself as technically less than. I believe that's all bullshit. And, and I tell this story to give people a little bit of to give themselves a little bit of credit. Here's how I got my first Combat Action Ribbon. We are— I know that you have a lot of non-military listeners, so I'm going to mansplain a couple of the things as well. Um, is we are Condition 3, uh, when we are driving in the track in Kuwait. So Condition 4 is no magazine inserted, no round in chamber, weapon on safe, bolt home, ejection port cover closed.
It's just a completely dry weapon. Condition 3 is magazine inserted, bolt forward, no weapon, no round in the chamber, weapon on safe. Condition 2 does not apply to this weapon system. Condition 1 is magazine inserted, round in the chamber, weapon on safe, ejection port cover closed. We are supposed to transition from Condition 3 to Condition 1 when we cross the berm and technically enter into Iraq. So we start that. So when we're like, I'm on air sentry and we like drive through this berm and it's like nondescript, just like a fucking wall of dirt. And I'm like crossing the berm and I'm like yelling into the track while we're like whipping around this kind of desert thing. And so everybody starts going through their process, right? And they're like racking their bolts, they're loading their 203s. You know, some guys have 9mms, they're just getting their weapon systems from condition 3-ish to condition 1. Charlie Graham is a private first class from Tampa, Florida, right? He is another boot. And one of the things that we used to do in the service, of which I advocated fervently against later on in my career, is we give the automatic rifle or the squad automatic weapon, the M249 SAW.
We would always give that to the junior Marine in the fireteam. But the problem was we gave it to him because like it was the— it was like the pig. It was like this heavy, cumbersome thing. And a lot of people used ramps. to be able to say, like, I don't want to carry that. It's in the way. I got to carry a billion rounds on my chest. It's not easy to use. But the automatic rifle is the most important weapon system inside of a fireteam because it's what's establishing your base of fire. When we get into, you know, troops in contact, we need immediate, massive amounts of volume to get the enemy to stop what they're doing and allow us the opportunity for some form of engagement to be able to assess assess and then react. But at the time, the Boots get the broken weapon systems, or the non-working weapons, or the shitty weapon systems, and the SAW. So Charlie Graham then goes to load his SAW into his version of Condition One, which— God, someone's gonna roast me if I get this wrong— basically he's putting rounds on the feed tray, the, um, uh, the charging handle is forward, and he's ready to go.
All he needs to do is rack the bolt to the rear because it's an open bolt weapon system, place it on fire, and he's good to go. So he puts his rounds on the feed tray, he's ready to go, we're loaded up. I load my.203 first. I don't know why I did, because now, you know, we load our primary— like, I get it, like, I totally fucked all this up. But I load my.203 first, and now I have my magazine inserted, and I go to rack my bolt to the rear to go from condition 3 3 to condition 1, and I rack it to the rear and it stalls on the way back. Right. And it like the charging handle kind of like wiggles behind it. Right. And I don't know what to do at this point. Now, I say all this to say, I know now, right? I got better, but I was a Lance Corporal on my first deployment, 6, 7 weeks into the fleet. And I basically, had a weapon system that was Condition 3.5, right? So I had a failure to, out of battery, right? So it just— all I, all I needed to do was rack the bolt to the rear one more time or have a cleaner weapon system.
That would have helped. And the bolt would have been, you know, sent home and I would have been completely fine. But here's how the culture worked at the time. I was so afraid of my seniors. I was so afraid of certain members of my squad. That I was unwilling to ask for help. And so I looked down at the squad. I looked down at this person. He was a Southerner with a particular disdain for boots, and he was the only one— it was the closest one to me. So I had a choice. Ask him for help or conceal my mistake. I look at Charlie Graham, who's not carrying the same weapon system, and I'm like, what do I— I mean, you know, we had this track, we're like whipping through the dust. I was like, what do I do? And he goes, He goes, "I don't know, man." And so we just have a choice at that moment. So what did I decide to do? I closed my ejection port cover and I conceal my mistake and I enter into Iraq now gaining my Combat Action Ribbon by entering into contact or whatever it is with a gun that wouldn't fire.
Wow.
And I was like that for an embarrassing amount of time.
Really?
Yeah. Charlie Graham and I had to wait until we stopped. Stopped. And all of it becomes a blur at this point. I don't know if it was a day, I don't know if it was 2 days. We waited until we stopped, and then him and I went around the track away from the squad and then like MacGyvered my gun together so that I could take the, the magazine out, clean it, clear it, and then rack the bolt and now make Condition 1. So here's the challenge where all of this comes to play. I was a squad leader in boot boot camp. I was meritoriously promoted to Private First Class. I was the honor graduate out of the School of Infantry and meritoriously promoted to Lance Corporal or to E-3. And in my first opportunity for a gunfight, the very first thing I do is cause my own malfunction and not know how to fix it. If that's not an abdication of the training continuum that I entered into, I don't know what is, because I was the best, if you will, right? And I couldn't solve my own problem. Now, eventually we did, right? And, and this is— and I tell this to people because I need them to know that it's okay to fail.
It's okay to ask for help. And as a leader, what that corporal who I don't name anymore— all he had to do was be a better leader and less terrible to me, and I would have asked him a question. But instead, I thought the 51st Mechanized Iraqi, you know, army, army brigade made was less of a threat than the fucking corporal sitting inside of my track. Now again, I wasn't near my team leader. I would have asked him. But all that to say, nothing happened. But it was an embarrassing moment that I used to highlight kind of where we were at. So the first few days of OIF-1 are relatively, um, I would say limited for us. You know, people were surrendering in droves. We didn't have to shoot a lot. It was a lot of like search, silence, safeguard, segregate, and tag, right? Like 5 S's and a T. A lot of people were surrendering. Our first place that we went to was the Rumalia oil fields, and the Rumalia oil fields— excuse me— were famous from the Desert Storm invasion, or the Desert Storm, you know, war, was because Saddam Hussein had lit the Rumalia oil fields on fire during that time frame as a way to slow us down, to waste, you know, a ton of Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil.
And so that was something that we wanted to prevent. The gas oil separation plants, or GOSPs, we had to secure those first. So the first few days of the invasion was just that, riding around in a track for like a million hours a day, standing on air sentry, black exhaust coming out of the side of, half our face was black, right? You know, breathing in whatever we were at that timeframe, right? And then just literally on Highway 1 driving north. So these tracks just driving north. And General Mattis was the division commander at the time, and his— now, an incredible tactician— was— his thing was speed and violence of action, which is really great for Marines because that's what we're purpose-designed for. Get to Baghdad as fast as possible, topple the regime. This is what would be classified as third-generation warfare. Warfare. We use our supporting arms to limit the Iraqi Army's ability to make war while our combat troops blow past less, um, tactically advantageous units and go for the heart. And so we're on this like bull run trying to get to Baghdad. Now there wasn't a ton of contact here and there.
Well, then what happens is we 4 or 5 days into this thing, and then the sandstorm hits. And this is pretty big for Iraq at the time because I actually write in the book— it was interesting, like, I'm a very, very, very, very proud Marine and very proud of the Marine heritage. That is one thing Marines are taught very much, is, is the lineage of which we are joining, right? We get to be Marines, we have the privilege of being Marines, and so we want to hold that, keep our honor clean, right? And live up to the legacy from, you know, the Marines before us. And so I write in the book that we face this— the wind starts to swirl, and then all of a sudden we enter into this like near Armageddon-type sandstorm. We're cruising along, and then eventually we start slowing and slowing and slowing and slowing. And then what I write was, then nature accomplished what every adversary in the world had tried and failed to stop the advance of United States Marines. So we trickled basically to a stop. Earlier that day, 3/5 got in some pretty, pretty heavy contact with what was called a CAT team or a combined anti-armor team.
Those are heavy machine guns and then anti-tank missiles. They were led by a then unknown Lieutenant Brian Shawntosh. And Brian Shawntosh and his, and his CAP section had entered into heavy contact of an entrenched Iraqi Army outpost, and they were outgunned and basically ambushed by this group. What Brian Shawntosh and his unit chose— like, one of the Marines— we took our first casualties that day. An RPG came through. These are soft-skinned Humvees at the time, but it was a 4-pack Humvee with a gun on top, came through one of the windows or— yeah, one of the windows of the Humvee, immediately killed a corpsman. That RPG came in, didn't arm and detonate, but it came through a corpsman's head and then lodged in the gunner's stomach and it stopped in his stomach. And so there was— in this firefight was massive carnage happening. 4 days into this, into this conflict. Shontosh had to be able to triage all of that, all the while trying to break the back of this enemy resistance. They were so engulfed in gunfire that what they did was they ended up turning the Humvees into the trench line, driving the Humvees into the trench line of the Iraqi army, and then exiting the vehicle.
And Shontosh and 2 other Marines Marines cleared down this trench by themselves. And when they ran out of their own ammunition, they took dead Iraqi Army soldiers' AK-47s and continued to clear the rest of the trench. Brian Shawntosh was eventually awarded the Navy Cross for this action. Hopefully it's up for reinvestigation for a Medal of Honor, because what he did is literally classified as a Medal of Honor on him and the two Marines that went with them. These 3 Marines decimated like 20 to 30 Iraqi Army soldiers by themselves and didn't have a scratch on them. They just went through this trench line. And this starts to percolate through the battalion. We hear, you know, actions. We're on radios. We can hear certain things as it's going on. And then the sandstorm stops us dead in our tracks. And we go out, and part of being a boot was like digging a lot of fighting holes. So every night, the thing was this: we would drive all day, and then at night we we would stop and we would get out and set security, and I would have to dig my fighting hole. And then my squad leader was having to go and get like the brief, right?
And go get the plan for the next day and updates. And so we had to dig his fighting hole too. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but when people were like, what'd you do in OIF-1? I was like, I dug mostly. That was kind of what my experience was. And so now we get in, the sandstorm is set in, it is I'm talking hand in front of your face, not visible, orange dust, Armageddon. And then we hear movement. We hear mechanized movement off to our flank. There is a column of T-55s moving on one of our flanked companies, one of our companies on the flank. And now our aviation assets and our artillery and mortar forward observers have to fight night through this obscurity of the sandstorm and bring in artillery and aviation assets to kill this T-55 or column of like T-55s. And so all through the night, we're hearing this massive, like what's called DPICM, dual purpose incendiary munitions, some cluster munitions. So basically it's a canister that fires out an artillery shell. It pops and then sends, it's an anti-material shape charge that sends like, I don't know, like 100 of these shape charges down.
So it goes pow, boom, and sprinkles down on the ground, right? And then kills all these things. So our forward observers had to fight through all of this, you know, literally fog of war, right? To be able to save this company on the left flank. So all of this is happening. And then we sit for another 2 days as we wait through for this storm to subside. And then one of the things that I write is I said, and then to finish off what the storm had started, it begins to rain. And now it rains for the next 2 or 3 days. And all of that sand and that storm that everything brought in turns to like peanut butter mud. And so that's— and then we continue to move north. Part of all of this is we start moving so fast that we are outrunning our logistics trains so have fuel, the food, the water, can't keep up with us because we're— as soon as it clears, we're driving to get to Baghdad. And ironically enough, we're taking what's called Highway 1. It has letters in English that says Baghdad, so we just like all know we're just driving towards Baghdad.
And the 1st Marine Division had 2 regiments or 3 regiments that split, and so one went to Nazariah. I think it was 7th Marine Regiment went to Nazariah gotten some hellacious firefights in Nazariah, and 1st Marine Regiment and 5th Marine Regiment, which was— I was a part of, continued up Highway 1 heading towards Baghdad. Our biggest firefight was April 4th, 2003, and it's what the— what 3/5 eventually called the Killing Fields because it was a Republican Guard and Fedayeen training camp. Camp. And so the Republican Guard was Saddam's elite, and they were marked with a red triangle on their shoulder. On their— they had green fatigues and like a red triangle. Well, they also had fedayeen, and fedayeen were Islamic militants at the time before they had become whatever they became during our time. And so we're cruising up there and there's not much. So like, the movies don't really tell it very well. As a low guy on the totem you just sit in the back and you just wait. And if you're not on Air Sentry, you're just, you're just sitting there in some semblance of falling asleep. Um, a track is supposed to hold anywhere from 13 to 15 combat-loaded Marines in the back.
But since we were driving so fast and so far, we started losing tracks along the way. And so what happens is we have our bump plan, just like we brief in everything else that we do, a bump up having something like 24 or 27 Marines inside of the back of this. Now, the way that a track is, is you have two benches along the wall and you have one bench in the center. And that is a metal, just a metal bench with a thick or a thin foam, you know, kind of like rubber foam kind of thing. And that's your, you know, comfort, if you will. And we are strewn everywhere inside of this, all of our kit and equipment. So like all of our packs are on the outside of the track because we don't have room for it on the inside. So all of our like chow and extra ammo and fucking sleeping bags that we never use, right? They're all on the outside. So we're just sitting in this like, you know, sweatbox, right, with a giant diesel engine. Ironically, ours was called the Higgins Boat, and we called it the Higgins Boat for two reasons.
Our driver, his name was Lance Corporal Higgins. But also some Marines are big on history. When Marines were landing in the Pacific, they were ferried ashore by things called Higgins boats. In Normandy, on D-Day, they're called Higgins boats. So we had this kind of like moment of like, you know, irony or, you know, lineage of we were driving a Higgins boat up to, up to Baghdad. So on April 4th, relatively early in the morning, We're cruising up Highway 1 and I'm on, you know, not on Air Sentry. So I'm like sitting there, I'm kind of falling asleep, and then all hell starts to break loose. We drive in. I mean, you know, the tactics aside, we— the movies make it seem like it's something like we all know what we're doing and everyone's got like an idea. It was not that way. It was literally like, drive the bus down the center of the street, and when someone shoots at you, we all get out and then we go and like locate, close, within, destroy. And that's exactly what happened. So I'm sitting in this thing, I think I'm asleep, and all of a sudden I hear, "Contact!
Contact left, right!" And then Rats— Charlie Graham racks the saw and just starts ripping. So that's how I get woken up, ripping the saw to the left, because now we have green tracers coming in. I look up through the air sentry, we're like in between the guys who are now shooting. Brass casings are kind of falling because There, there's 3 people who can understand what's happening and 20-some-odd of us who have no idea and are inside of a, of an armored, well, light armored beast. RPG, you know, streaking across, you know, wobbling like across the sky. The track in front of us gets hit with an RPG, but they didn't pull the firing pin out of the RPG. So it hits the RPG, hits down, doesn't detonate, but a side hit from an RPG would've decimated the inside of the track. So all of a sudden what we hear are the things that kind of splits all of us into action. It's a clink, clink, clink, and it is of this hydraulic hook at the back of this 1-ton ramp. And that is letting us know, it's like click, click, click. We're opening the ramp and now the ramp starts falling down and we're hearing machine gunfire on top of the track.
We have a Mark 19, which is our grenade launcher and a 50 cal. Cal that looks like a, it's almost like Star Wars. It's like all this little turret and this like the gunner turns, it goes, and he's like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And like, so both guns shoot simultaneously. So they're all shooting off to our left and this track ramp starts to go down. And I've been inside this like dark, cramped track and all of a sudden you're getting dust and sand and light piercing through the opening of this track as it's coming in. And I remember looking around and taking inventory. This was all of our first, like, big firefight. And I see people praying, I see people sipping water, and then I see Corporal Eric Olson, son of an LAPD SWAT officer. He was born for this. This is his moment. This is what he was put on this earth. Red-haired, you know, Viking warrior kind of guy, right? My team leader. And he's leaning on the edge of the ramp. Not that he's gonna be able to help it, but he's like pressed in, ready to go. This is his moment.
And he's going out, the ramp is now barely level, and we start pouring out, clink, clink, clink, clink, like our hard-soled rubber boots clinking on the outside of this track. And we pivot and we start making our turn to the right. So we have a term that we used a lot, and I've adopted it for a lot of like leadership philosophies later on. On is what we were supposed to do then was the tracks would normally pull to a position, they would open the ramps, and the squads would peel out on opposite sides of the track. And then the tracks would turn into the contact or into the engagement. We would get online. So the, the saying is, get out, get online, make a decision. And that was what we always wanted to do. So the tracks turn, we start peeling out. And now Eric Olson is, you know, moving into his position. I swear I got better. The very first thing I do when I step on the track is I pivot. I come out of the track. I step into the peanut butter mud that has been, you know, now developing over the last few days.
I trip, I fall forward. And what do I do? I jam my muzzle of my rifle into the mud and I fall over myself. Very first gunfight, right? Not only am I like a dipshit when we cross the border, my very very first gunfight. I fall over myself, bury my muzzle into the, into the mud, and all hell is breaking loose. There's a PKM, I don't know, I fucking don't know, 300 meters, right, in a specific direction that's like peppering us, right? RPGs are swirling, the tracks are now— it's chaos in the beginning. Get out, get online, make a decision. Now what happens is we start to gain a little bit of like wherewithal. This fucking idiot, right? And I'm on my knee and then all of a sudden I look up and I see two men from a different track. And these guys, cool as ice. One guy has got an M40A1 Marine sniper rifle tucked underneath his arm. One guy's got an M16A2 with, at the time it was an ACOG scope mounted on top of his, on top of his rail or his carrying hand. Candle, and they're floating across the battlefield.
Their eyes are narrowed. They're looking out into the distance, not fazed by anything. Remember, I'm in like sheer panic mode, just like figuring my life out. And I see these two guys just sprinting, and they've got something in mind. And I watch them like careen past us, but like eyes of a predator. And they get into position. I watch the shooter take his butt pack off, because at the time we wore like H-harnesses, and we didn't have bipods on the sniper rifles at the time. And so the shooting platform from the snipers was always a butt pack. And they would take like a piece of, of isomat and foam and they would build a little shooting platform on their butt pack. Takes his butt pack off, lays it on this little berm. This is happening very fast. His spotter gets up behind him, near laying on him. And I see the spotter pointing. He has his binoculars out and he's pointing and guiding the shooter onto position. Position. And then I see this break in this berm where we're getting contact. There's like PKM, there's RPGs, and they're, and they're, and they're eating our lunch at this, at this moment.
And I watched this guy, like, just, they communicate very, very quickly. And I watched the shooter wait for somebody to cross in front of this space in this berm of where they're getting ready to shoot again, crosses in front of the space. He pulls the trigger, drops this dude, falls down, right, silences that, he racks the bolt to the rear, and they just nonchalantly grab their equipment, put their butt pack on, and then keep moving, looking for the next target. And I was like, what the fuck was that? Who are they? And that was my very first moment of seeing an actual sniper in action and not just the movies. And then all of a sudden, snap back, my shit's going crazy, and I'm, "Paschoudy!" Get the fuck up here, right? You know, like that kind of thing. So now the squad is moving, right? And I'm still here like, like private dipshit, right? Trying to like figure out— I'm looking for a rock, anything. I don't know how far this thing is jammed into my weapon because if I pull the trigger on that, I have the wherewithal to know if I pull the trigger and my muzzle is jammed, there's a strong potential that I could blow this gun up in front of myself, right?
And not have a good day. So eventually I get my cleaning rods out. I have to break this thing down shotgun style, all while running and people are shooting and I'm I'm like freaking out. I'm like jamming cleaning rods down this thing to clear this obstruction. And I turn around and fucking, I can call him Eric now 'cause he's not my corporal anymore. But Eric Olson, man, like, bitch, Jonah, get the fuck up. He's like mad as all hell. Imagine him, he's like this fucking idiot, right? You know, laughing at me. So we start catching up. Now the tide starts to shift a little bit, right? We have a bunch of Marines kind of getting online, we get into a wadi, we're moving up, and we've got now our platoon. First Platoon is starting to be able to move. We get 3 platoons online, and we're going to do what's called a hammerhead left, is we're trying to flank the enemy's position. So we have 2 platoons going forward, and we have First Platoon— my platoon— is going to come up here and eventually close the door and flank the enemy position and run through their trench on the side.
Base of fire maneuver element is what we're looking to do. And I've been dicking around with my fucking M16, right, for way too long that now I'm falling behind. But Charlie Graham stays with me. But we're kind of like tail end Charlie on this thing. As we're cruising up towards the right-hand side, Charlie and I get zippered up big time. A PKM has a bead on us and is peppering the top of this berm, this wadi, like, because we're having to kind of run up and down. We're sprinting as fast as we can. A lot of it's a little fuzzy too. And all of a sudden I feel the heat and the pressure. I don't hear the machine gun, but I feel the heat and the snap, right? And all of a sudden I know, like, it's close. We fall to the ground, we get down, we hunker down, and the squad has now made it past. There's like this gap and they're shooting at this gap. And we were about to cross this gap and now we're stuck on the other side of this gap. And this machine gun has a bead on us.
Is eating away at this berm of like loose sand that's protecting Charlie Graham and I. We're fucked. We're like super fucked. Like, we don't know. Can I cuss on this? I'm sorry. Yeah. Okay, cool. Sorry. And we're looking at each other and Charlie Graham— I love that man to death. He has a nose that tells a story. He was a hockey player growing up, like rough and tumble lifestyle. His nose is like crooked 7 different ways, like a big old parrot beak on him. And I remember looking at him, and he's got like the sweat streaks, the white around his— I just remember this image, you know. People talk about combat and how it like blurs, and then there's flashes of moments of, you know, real clarity. This is a clarity moment for me. I look at him, I look at his eyes, right? His helmet's kind of crooked, and he's got like the white around his, around his lips, right? And we're— we don't know what to do. We're fucked. Like, we don't know what to do. My platoon sergeant Staff Sergeant Jorge Gonzalez is just the Marine's Marine of all Marines, right? Super, you know, super disciplined.
Doesn't ever give me the time of day. Like, I'm well, you know, but like, he's just like the old core kind of thing. You know, you've kind of seen those guys before, right? He notices our predicament. And as a good platoon sergeant, what he does is he gets on the hook with aviation assets. Sets, and he hucks a yellow smoke into the middle of this field. So how it sits is like basically a big, I would say, rice field, if you will. And they're on the other trench and we're trying to maneuver around this square to get to them. And he throws this yellow smoke into the field. And in a moment that truth is stranger than fiction, Charlie Graham are laying there on our back, not knowing what to do. And this yellow smoke is billowing in the air. And I see two AH-1 Cobras who were operating very different at the time. What the Cobras did was basically just follow our convoy and wait for us to get into contact, and then they would just go hunt. And so they see this thing happening. These guys are 30 meters off the deck. Like, I can feel the heat from their engine.
They come in, streak over the top of of us. And the way that Cobras and Apache— Cobras specifically— like to attack is they kind of come in and then they come into this pop. They shoot up, they gain an elevation, and then they fucking streak down. This guy comes in over the top of us, right? Dash 1 comes in, streaks up. I can see his chin-mounted cannon, right? It's a 3-barreled cannon and it's chin-mounted. I see him looking for the target. We— now we start getting a little bit more, you know, because the Cobra is on our shoulder, so we stand up and we start like, ah, you know, like shooting. I have a 203 and I'm like lobbing smoke grenades in that direction, like wildly, you know, in that direction. This guy then is like, and just starts just waylaying this position. Hydra rockets, white streak, boom, boom, boom, just hitting this position. And then he ducks out and then Dash 2 comes in, does the same thing to finish the fucking job on this PKM that had us completely pinned. Hand to God, they come back around and they're like looping on their— you know, now Dash 1 is coming back to a holding position.
They're coming back, comes back over Charlie Graham and I and hovers and allows us to be able to gain our footing. And he's like, I've got you, little brother, right? Hovers above us and allows us to get up and start moving. He fucking looks. I see the pilot look, looking outside. I make eye contact with him. Charlie Graham and I, we make eye contact and he fucking throws us a salute. And then, and then we're like, wow, we're like freaking out. Like, oh my fuck yeah, like doing this, right? And then we start running and then I just see Marines emblazoned on his, on his tail or on his fuselage flying away. It was the most epic thing I think I had seen in my career at all, right? Like all count everything all together. Seeing that guy tilt, throw a fucking salute. Like, it was the most Marine shit ever, right? We get back to our squad and Corporal Olson is pissed. What the fuck? You dumb motherfucker, what the fuck are you doing, right? And so then we continue to, you know, finishing the flank. And then at that point, what I do is when I talk about how I'm not supposed to be here, right?
I'm not supposed to be in the position that I am. It's because of other I see Olson and I start emulating Olson. I'm like mini-me to him, right? And I start following everything that he does. His weapon system is the same as my weapon system, an M16 with an M203. We move around. We eventually see the carnage that was created from the Zuni or from the Hydra rockets and the, and the, you know, the chain gun, right? And we see these guys just like just decimated. And then we get into a position and now we're clearing through the back end of this trench and we're on the back side of this trench. French, looking further, you know, deeper into the field. And we see 8 reinforcements, right, like a squad minus, running towards us of Iraqi Army, and they're running towards our positions. And so Olson and I get down behind, you know, a little berm, and he starts calling out ranges, and he's like, 300, right? All right, sounds good, 300. When we put our 203 up on my, like, leaf sight up on my 203, which is super not accurate, but put my leaf sight up on my 203, We're like, plump, plump.
And we send these little Easter eggs of, of, you know, 40mm grenades out towards these guys. And they're running towards us. So it's kind of an interesting shot. So as they're running, it crunches in front of them and he's like, fuck, wrong range. Give it 350. So now we're like max effective of the 203. And, but I, I do exactly what Olson does. I'm holding it the way he is. I'm watching him as we do it. And then clunk, clunk, you know, we fire two more of these things, and we land these grenades right in front of the 8 Marines or 8 Iraqis that are running towards this fight. And then they're effectively pinned down. Now, like, you know, the movies, there's not like a big explosion. There's not fireballs, right? The dude just like, they just like fall over, right? But then more of them continue to kind of get up and are charging towards us, continue because they know they're in a kill zone. And so they're charging towards us. So then Olson and I fire like 8 more 203s at these guys as they're moving towards us. And eventually what happens is the final 2 of them get into a position where they're, they're about to start breaking contact at this point.
And we already fire our 2, 2 more lob, you know, volley pair is flying towards them and they get up to break and run away and it lands at their feet and we, you know, kill both of them. And then the fight like literally picks up. So now what we've done is we've We've got online. Go ahead.
So those are your first kills.
They are. They are. With a 203 at 200 to 350 meters in around that timeframe. Very different than future ones. That was very— I was like elated, right? Because again, I'm doing my job, right? I'm in this. There's adrenaline, norepinephrine, right? And chemicals are flying everywhere through this whole thing. And so I'm like high-fiving him. I'm finally getting like, great job for shooting, you know, fist bump, nice job, right? Like, I'm finally getting this. I'm just mimicking, right? You know what this guy's doing? And he's like taking me under his wing. He's making sure I'm safe through this thing and I'm rising to the challenge. And so we've done this. We've come up to this flank. We've kind of come down here. Now we're coming back and now we're making almost like a, almost like a final move to get back. We've cleared almost all— this is over hours of time frame, right, of like different, you know, there's lulls and there's, you know, pickups through the whole thing. Well, we're moving back and we're coming back towards the road where we started this little adventure. And 3rd Squad and 2nd Squad have already moved through and they've killed or shot a few Iraqis that are in different trenches along the way.
And 1st Squad, my squad, is the last squad to move through in this like move order of movement. And as I'm coming up, Olsen's in front of me. I'm not tailing Charlie anymore. But what happens is I see a Raky guy on the ground and he's on his stomach and he rolls from his stomach to his back. And that catches my eye and I stop and I look at him and I come over the top of him as I'm like, again, all this is happening very fast and I'm running and I see him reach for his gun and I'm I'm 5 feet away and I'm 18 years old and I just fucking unload on this guy. I don't remember what I yelled. I don't remember what happened. All I know is I shot this guy a bunch in the chest. And then I remember, I remember, I remember his eyes. And it was very different because moments before, you know, half an hour, hour before, I just, you know, presumably killed people with a.203. And now I've shot this guy in the chest and I remember his eyes and I remember he had tears and he had, you know, dirt and mud and blood coming out of his mouth.
Right. And I remember he had tears that were streaking through the brown dirt. And I'll never forget— I'll never forget his eyes because his eyes were almost like gray. They were like searching. And you can see— I've seen it before on a wounded animal. Animal when an animal is laying there and it knows it's going to die and it's looking for anything. And I remember looking in his eyes and not being able to see anything other than panic. He didn't look at me with rage. He didn't look at me with anger. He looked at me. He was like pleading with me, like, do something. But he was already dying and I was like on his way out and we're in the middle of a gunfight. Right. And so there's no chance for me, like, render aid. Right. And all this. And I just watch him. I watch him die. And I'm like 18 years old, fucking going, what is happening? And then all of a sudden, let's fucking go, Pashoni! Right? So I'm getting yelled at again, right? So I'm just getting yelled at through IF-1. And I get yelled at and I pick up and I start running with my squad.
And in front of us, 3rd Squad of 1st Platoon is in contact. There's another trench out here. And as they're in contact, contact, there's a man by the name of Joseph Perez, who was the point man of the Third Squad. So he's the first person in our entire platoon's movement, is super pinned down. There's a couple of different bunkers that are just— I don't know what type of weapon systems they're shooting, but they're shooting at him, right? And now he's like laying down in the prone and he's got this giant fucking AT-4 on his back. As a boot like me, that's what the boots do, is they carry the fucking rocket as well, right? So I remember watching this happen, and I'm maybe 100 yards away from this whole thing. I watch Lance Corporal Joseph Perez, who was also an honor graduate out of SOI. You're watching two different types of honor graduates from SOI, from School of Infantry, right? Lance Corporal Perez is fighting with his M16. He's shooting forward, and then he gets up on a knee, takes his AT-4, somehow pivots this thing around, puts the right— puts the missile in the right— or the rocket in the right direction.
Fires this AT-4 into a bunker, destroys a bunker, and then the other bunker is now— because he's on a knee, not in the prone, like zippers him up, right? He gets right— he gets shot. He's like standing up at this moment, right? He gets shot, spins around. I'm watching dust kind of fly off him. He spins to the ground. He's been shot, I don't know, 3 or 4 times in the chest. And Sergeant Nicanor Galvan is 5-foot-nothing, right? Love the man to death. Hated soft— what he called soft-ass Californians, right? Um, and was the squad leader and is now incensed. This was one of his squad members that just got shot by this, and he's freaked. Like, so he's bringing all this hate and discontent forward. The squad, and now our two squads, are pushing forward to get to Perez, to get to this other trench to put this enemy out. And fucking Perez will not give up. Now he's on his stomach with his M16, still shooting back, grabbing a grenade out of his pocket and like skyhooking a grenade into the trench while all of us are still trying to get to him.
A corpsman's trying to get to him. He's still holding their heads down so the rest of us can get there and eventually clear the trench. And so we've now made this kind of almost big square as we've gone, kind of gone through this thing. And we've killed or captured most of the Republican Guard. And again, this is many, many hours. Perez is still alive. And there's medevac birds that are circling around. They land in the middle of the freeway of Highway 1. We get Perez to the bird. We have no idea if he's going to live or die because he's shot up super, super bad. And then he takes off and then that's it. We don't know if he dies or not. That's just the end of Lance Corporal Perez for for us. And then we get back to the road and there's still pockets of resistance that are shooting at us. And then we have a lot, a lot of the other assets have kind of come into play. And we have, I'm going to get the terminology wrong, but basically a battalion of artillery, I think is 18 cannons and 18 cannons when they open up a fire for effect.
I think I'm going to get this wrong. Each one of these cannons fires 6 rounds and each one of these projectiles is 110 pounds. And they do what we call a shake and bake mission, right? So it's HE super quick. So it blows up on impact on the ground. And then they also have white phosphorus and white phosphorus is generally used for marking, marking targets. And so they're doing a mixed load. It's a battalion. And again, I might be getting this wrong, but 8, like, and they're, they're not super far away, but now they've established they're maybe a click away. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I don't know how, I don't math in public, but how many rounds of that is now crunching into this field in front of us? And it's like the earth is vomiting its own entrails, just screeching, just the, you know, you've heard artillery, right? And just geyser blizzards of dust and blood and people's souls are flying into the sky out this thing. And they just decimate this entire field because on the left side of the road, India Company, my company, is fighting. On the right side of the road, Kilo and Lima Company are fighting.
So they're trying to get as much— because it's a huge kind of, you know, terrorist training camp, if you will. And they're trying to kill as many things as possible. But you've shot the Marine Air Ground Task Force full to full bear. This is Marine Corps fighting on Marine Corps' terms. Locate, close with, to destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver and repel the enemy's assault by fire in close combat. The artillery, aviation, mortars, tanks,.50 cals, infantry guys like myself are all, are, are all in unison. It was one of the most impressive displays of American firepower because we were fighting a war at that time that we had trained for, for the last 30 years, fighting a Warsaw Pact enemy dug in an entrenched position on our terms. They pick the position, we pick the time. And that was April 4th's kind of big gunfight called the Killing Fields during that time. It was my first big firefight. Fight.
Shit. It's hell of a first firefight.
I was basically a fuck-up through the entire thing, so I don't know, you know, how we go through it. But again, how'd you process that afterwards? So a lot happened.
Buddies got shot. Perez, your first kill. Got your first close combat kill.
So Perez ended up living.
He did. He did.
And after, after the war, he was awarded the Navy Cross as well, of which I have consternation with because from what I saw, that was not Navy Cross worthy. That was fucking Medal of Honor worthy. Watching what he did after getting shot, like, again, it's the Marine Corps is, is very well known for not being good at giving out medals. That is just part of, that is part of our culture. I don't agree with it, but 2 Navy Crosses came out of OIF-1 for 3 5, Lieutenant Brian Shontosh for the day before or the sandstorm day clearing the trench. And then Lance Corporal Joseph Perez. Both of them lived, you know, luckily. And then we processing it was different, right?
Because did you even have time to process? What was the next day like?
That night we had to dig in again. So like fucking white phosphorus is like blown around, right? There's fucking dead people everywhere. But here's the thing. I became so desensitized to it so quick. We had been at that point in Kuwait, we got one shower, I think, in the entire time we were in Kuwait. At that point, it had been 40 days without a shower. And we only had 2 or 3 pairs of socks. And remember, we outran our logistics train. So we didn't have food, we didn't have water, and I didn't have socks. And so when we were doing our post-casualty analysis, we went through their stuff and we were like, you know, make dead checking, making sure there was no intelligence and maps and all that kind of stuff. And I found a dude who had died from— I mean, it was fucking ugly, dude. I saw what marking targets looks like for the Marine Corps, what white phosphorus does. And white phosphorus comes out in little like sponges and white phosphorus cannot— it's activated by oxygen. So when it comes out of this, it can basically melt through anything. And it's a very good way.
It's like it, it burns white. It's a very good way to literally mark a target so we can see something. Also very good for obscuration. Also, in that, in that instance was, was, was, was used for killing enemy combatants. And so you just see you watching a person kind of go through their last minutes. And this mattered to me later on as a sniper. You can watch this like CSI kind of thing as you see this person who is like trying to render buddy aid or self-aid. Gauze ripped open, fucking open, burned wounds, tears, blood everywhere, right? But I didn't care. I needed his spare socks. And so I went into his pack and I grabbed his socks because mine were wasting away. They were melting away on my feet. I had trench foot, you know, like the pockmarked feet and things like that, because you can't take your boots off because you never know when you're going to get in contact. We never took our boots boots off. So for like 30 days, you take one boot off for 10 minutes at a time and put your other boot back on. Like, that was— OF-1 was miserable.
Um, and then I had to dig more fighting holes that night. And then we put— then the fucking mosquitoes set in because it's like April, springtime in Iraq, and it's marshy, and the rain had just happened, and the mosquitoes just eating all the corpses. The flies hadn't set in just yet, but the mosquitoes were there. And then the mosquitoes would eat the corpses, and then they would fly over us. So we had this like 100% DEET, you know, like little green tube of DEET. It literally says like, don't put it on your skin, right? And I'm like, and the mosquito, like, I'll put it on my gloves and the mosquitoes are like, oh, a little bit of pepper, right? You know, like, thanks, right? I had that all over my face. My lips would go numb. It would eat through your watch band. I'm like getting all the cancer, you know, whenever that comes up, I'm getting it all from that DEET, you know. And then we just didn't really have time to process it because that next morning we picked up and kept moving. And then we eventually moved into Baghdad, and Baghdad was more chaos and more, you know, less carnage at that time because we had really worked like the military had kind of folded pretty quickly.
Once we had gotten through some of the, the major units, Baghdad started to fall. And so Baghdad became a lot of patrolling, a lot of stability type stuff, preventing from looting happening or looting from happening. What?
Preventing looting?
Yeah.
What?
Because the military was decimated. The police force didn't move out. There was a lot of cultural stuff. So I— Iraq has a ton of history and a ton of history that goes back to like biblical times. Right. And they had museums in Baghdad. And so people were looting. So think of like the Watts riots in like 1992.
I heard the soft guys were going in there fucking taking Picasso paintings and all kinds of crazy shit. Of shit.
We weren't stopping— like, we didn't— I didn't see any Americans looting stuff. Everybody was looking for dinar, I'll say that, right? Yeah, the gold bar and things like that. Um, but we were in like the outskirts of Baghdad and like moved in, and we were stopping— we were— that now all of a sudden, like 2 days earlier, we were like, you know, the Republican Guard, you know, Fedayeen training camp, and then we're like stopping people. People are now asking us for gas and money and food, and we're just— we're Dude, we're Marines, man. This is not our job, right? Not our space. And so it was a really, really, really quick transition. And then it really turned into stability operations very quickly. We were in Baghdad for a week or two after setting up at some like, like a soda factory or an electrical plant of some sort. And then we went to Samarra where that spiral tower is at. And then eventually what started to happen was now that Baghdad had been secured, we had to send out the military or the units to different locations to secure the rest of the country. Because the problem that we did, the strategic misstep that we made, was yes, we had to decimate the Iraqi military, but the Iraqi military was tied to the country's national pride and ideology.
They were also run by, um, the, you know, I think it was the Sunni— God, I remember, uh, what, like, Saddam's, you know, uh, the Ba'ath Party, right? They were pretty much run with the Ba'ath Party. And so once that fell, the entire ecosystem of civilization in Iraq fell apart. And so very quickly we had to get all of the supporting agencies, all of the engineers, all of the, you know, whatevers into the place to now, like, not nation-build but stabilize the region so we're not causing tons of chaos. Water purification plants, food, jobs, cops, like all these things then came up Highway 1. We were just the tip of the spear, if you will, kind of going through there. And then we settled to a town called Adiwaniyah at an old army Iraqi Air Force base, if you will, which was like had barracks and shit like that. And we stayed at Adiwaniyah for the next 4 or 5 months before we rotated out. Out. And the, the posture there was so different because OIF-1, at the fall of OIF-1, before the Awakening, before the insurgency, was docile. Here's what I've learned, right? We say it's the American dream, right?
In fact, I think it's like a global dream, is we have, you know, life, liberty, and pursuit. That's just a human dream, right? People want to feed their family, they want to make sure their kids are safe and they want to get their kids to school and whatever that thing is and make sure that they have their normal life going on. People just wanted that to happen. They were very happy that Saddam was gone. Bush good, Saddam donkey, right? You know, mister, give me, right? Like, wanted— the kids wanted chocolate and they want— we had to secure all these banks because the banks were getting robbed. The dinar was collapsing because was that the currency? Was it not the currency? It was this weird kind of time. So we basically went to a lot of banks and secured the banks themselves that were looted pretty heavily, or people tried to get into the banks to loot whatever cash they could. It was a smash and grab that a lot of the locals did to be able to, you know, fend for themselves. I remember driving around Diwaniya by myself in an open-back Humvee, like a 4-pack Humvee, no armor, with a fucking boombox, with my M16 by myself, driving supplies from one place to the next.
Could you imagine that in our time frame too? Like, it was fucking wild.
Wow. When is the first time you got to decompress? Was it that— where did you stop?
Diwaniya? Yeah, that was— it was the— OIF-1 was very different than anything that you and I saw. Like I said, for me, I was— again, I was very low on the totem pole, very chaotic. I didn't know what was going on. I like ran out and shot where they told me to shoot and tried not to die. That was my goal. And so the decompressing, like we got to live in squad bays later on and Marines fall into squad bays pretty easily, you know, smells like butt crack and feet, you know, and we kind of— and then you fall into this normal thing. But then what I like to call is a fate worse than death. And this will transition us into like, like trajectory type change. So we're in Diwaniya. I have just completed OIF-1. I'm like high on the hog. I'm feeling really good. I've written some really good letters back to my family because because I had not consternation. I had confusion of how we were in Iraq and not Afghanistan. Like, I wasn't naive, but I was like, well, this doesn't make sense. How are we here? But then, like, the fall of Saddam, we got a chance to see how bad Saddam actually was.
Murder rooms, rape rooms, you know, all these palaces, fucking bodies, women, children, bodies strewn. Like, not good. Like, in various stages of—
Epstein Island in Iraq.
Seriously, dude. Seriously. That was like, serious. Seriously, and just, just, just gross. So we were very happy to get rid of him and the Iraqis were very happy to get rid of him, too. So I remember writing a letter being like, I finally understand what this is for. Like, this man approached me in the street and he was like wailing at me and I'm like a kid, so I don't know what to, you know, back off, right? Kind of thing. I rack my bolt. It works this time, right? You know, get the fuck out of here. Right? And like, the interpreter comes up because he sees some kind of commotion. And this Iraqi man is like, not yelling at me, but like talking very vividly. And the interpreter— and he's like crying and he's like bawling. And then this interpreter starts bawling. And then the interpreter is like explaining to me, right, what's— what he's saying. And then I start crying because this man is literally like kissing our feet. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. You've shaped our life. And we have been waiting for— he says, we have been waiting for you.
For so long. Thank you, America, for coming here and freeing us from Saddam. And I'm like watching this guy's reaction. We have now hope. We have a chance at life. And like 3 of us are like— and I write this letter, it's in the book. I'm writing home about it, about this moment in time where I'm an 18-year-old kid watching this grown man cry to me about how he now has a second chance at life because we were there. And I'm like, I finally know what all of this is for. And it was for a good cause because we freed the world. World of evil. We gave people a chance at democracy. So like my theme, people ask all the time and I don't, I try not to tell them, right? But political affiliations, that doesn't, that's not important to this conversation. Democracy is important to my ideology, to what I believe that I'm fighting for. If we are going to give democracy a chance for free and fair and people to make their own choices, sign me up. I will go there. I will fight in any climate, any place to do that. And we did that in Iraq.
We had it. We had it in our hand. And then we let it slip through because we couldn't finish it. So to your point of decompression, we're in Diwaniyah, and I'll tell you a story about a guy that changed my entire life. His name is Gunnery Sergeant Ricky Jackson, at the time, Gunnery Sergeant Ricky Jackson. And I owe this man everything. Everything I am today is because of Ricky Jackson, born in the depths of poverty in southern Georgia. Black man from Georgia. I joke with him— I don't know that I joke far away from him, uh, looks like Cheeseburger Eddie, right? You know, like big traps, right? You know, got a bald head, pencil-thin mustache, traps. Everybody's bigger than me, but Gunny Jackson was like larger than life. First time I saw Gunny Jackson, before we go into Iraq, I am, you know, we're in Kuwait and I'm like sleeping next to my fighting hole while we're staring into the desert looking for nothing, right? We're maintaining our posture. We have all these gastros like we talked about before. First time I see Gunny Jackson, Corporal Olson wakes me up, he goes, hey, shooty, you know, hits my leg.
He's like, hey, put your gas mask on, we're doing a gastro. And I'm like, okay, cool. And I hear and I'm like, I roll over, I like open my gas mask and I like put my gas mask on. I'm on my like hour of rest, right? So I get to like go to— I'm going back to sleep and then I hear, no, Gunny, I won't do it. And I'm like, what is this? And I'm hearing somebody yell kind of— it's kind of like ethereal, right? I'm kind of half asleep and I'm hearing somebody yell and I'm like, no, Gunny, I won't do it. And I see Gunny Jacks. Not the tallest man in the world, but to me, again, very big, right? Probably 5'10". Big dude, right? And he's standing over another PFC who has just crawled out of his fighting hole. Part of our process for decontamination or scaling back our MOP levels from having our gas mask on is that we'll go through certain layers of, of what's called selective unmasking. The final stage of selective unmasking, if, you know, the pigeon's still alive, right, and all this kind of stuff. Now, this is before the war kicked off, right?
I look over and I'm laying on my side and I see off in the distance this guy standing nose to nose, gas mask to gas mask, with Gunny Jackson. White guy, big black dude, putting gas masks near each other. Part of it's called selective unmasking. Masking. And the last thing that we do in the final stage is we have one Marine take off their gas mask and they have them sit for 15 minutes to make sure that they are not going to die. Part of that is—
are you shitting me?
100%. Wow.
Will you draw straws or—
so, well, this Marine wasn't the best Marine in the platoon, if that says it. Obviously less shitty than I was.
Take a vote.
Seriously. So he's standing and he's like standing up himself. And part of that is taking your gun away. So when you take your weapon away in case you go like freaking crazy with sarin gas, you're not shooting people. And so Gunny Jackson— it's hard to kind of visualize, but Gunny Jackson standing toe-to-toe with him, right? I'll be good because I know there's a mic. And he's like, give me your fucking rifle and take your mask off. He's like, no, Gunny, won't. So Gunny Jackson does this like sweep, and I'm trying to remember it. He takes this sweep, grabs the rifle with like his right hand, right? Snatches it out of this guy's hand, passes it behind him, right behind his back. And now the weapon is in his left hand. The Marine goes to grab for the rifle. Gunny Jackson places his hand on the forehead of the Marine and then leans back and Spartan kicks this guy back into his fighting hole. And then Gunny Jackson turns around and he's got an M16 in his left hand and a fucking gas mask in his right. And that's my first introduction to Gunny Jackson. And Corporal Olson and I was like, because I'm a fucking boot, I don't know who these people are.
And I was like, who is that? He's like, that's Gunny Jackson. Don't fuck with Gunny Jackson. So now fast forward, we're in Diwaniya after, you know, the major conflict is done, and I'm in my squad bay. I'm in with my squad. We're just bullshitting, whatever, playing cards, right? Um, and, uh, Gunny Jackson comes in and cannot pronounce my name. Nobody can pronounce my name, right? And I'm fine with it. And he was like, fuck, fuck it, where's P-Shoot at? And so he has this like interest. He's like, come here, Dale, P-Shoot, right? And I'm like, I snap too, right? Because he's not gonna want to get eaten, right? So I like stand up, yes, Gunnery Sergeant, right? And then I like sprint up to him. And then like the weirdest conversation in my life ensues. He goes, and I won't do it in his accent because I don't want to be super rude, But basically what happens is he asks me where I'm from and I go, uh, California. And he goes, no, you're from Silicon something, place with all that silicon shit, right? And I was like, Silicon Valley. Yeah, Silicon Valley, Northern California.
He's like, good. That means you can type. We need a new company clerk at the company office. You're now out of India Company. You're India Company's company clerk. You're out of 1st Platoon. You're India Company's company clerk. Company clerk, which is a fate worse than death for an infantry Marine. I am now out of the line company and I am a, um, you know, a non-infantry— I'm an admin bitch. And then I finish out the rest of the deployment as an admin bitch. And then eventually we go back to California and then Gunny Jackson is there to help change the trajectory of my career.
Oh man, what a miserable ending. Admin bitch.
I never because I could taste—
yep, uh, damn good taste.
And then, right, I had just been like promoted to fire team leader, like I was moving up, right? And they're like, you can type, probably you're our office guy. So I get pulled back to being office guy, uh, we redeploy back to California. And then what happens is—
hold on, hold on. Sorry, when do you call home for the first time?
Back in Diwaniya.
You've got an artist mom.
Yeah, yeah, dude.
And a dad that doesn't want you to join the military. You just took part in the invasion of Iraq, got your first kills, buddies got shot. What do you tell your parents? What do you leave out?
Good question. Um, a lot at that time period. Later on, I was a little bit more vivid, not explicit with them, but I was a little bit more vivid, I think, with it. There was a little bit of like boyish pride, I think, in some of these things. In my letters, what I tried to do was not write, hey, Mom, chow's good, my feet stink, right? I tried to write stories. My mom was an artist. I considered myself, I don't know, like maybe a writer at some level. And so I was right. I would write these like long stories of things that I had experienced over there. And I've included some of those in the book as well. I think that were more poignant. But the first phone call back was on a DSN line. So the DSN line has a 10-second delay and you're like, right, and you have this little like it's a green phone, right? And so you called like once or twice to like let them know that you're alive. But there's a 10-second delay. So the conversations are kind of broken. And if they answered right, you know, because we didn't have a lot of cell phones at the time, so you had to call the home, home number.
And kind of try to gage it. But I was pretty, you know, I was pretty okay with it. My mom's a very, very, very proud Marine mom. I love her to death, absolutely love her to death. My mom is a proud Marine mom, um, to the point where I'm like, Mom, keep it, you know, pipe down, right? She's like, well, my son, right? Love her absolutely to death with that. And my dad was, um, not distant from, you know, being disappointed, but distant from not being able to relate, I think, in that, you know, part of the process of joining the Marine Corps is every boy has a moment where they have to cross their father and stand up to their father. And mine was, was joining the Marine Corps. He was vehemently against it and, and didn't want me to die, you know, for this thing. He had his own views on the war and didn't want me to die for it. And so I had a lot of, a lot of consternation with it. And so I said, Dad, I'm going to do it anyways. And so he was— he had made come to terms with that to the point of where he shaved his head when I went to boot camp.
Wow. To shave his head in solidarity. Right. So good. Again, what I've seen as fathers go— and I'm not a father— but what I've seen as fathers go is, you know, you want your children to do— sometimes you have your own expectations and then sometimes there's recognizing that your children have their own identity and their own way that they want to be in the world. And it's finding a way to best support them. So he found the way to best support me.
Right on, man. Yeah, right on. So you're back in California.
Back in California. And I am an office or India Company clerk. And then, you know, I'll kind of try to move through this relatively quickly. But we have a— I see a flyer on a— on the chow hall door as myself and another guy named Gregorio Sanchez. Reyes from Houston, Texas. He is what's called the police sergeant. So he had another fate like me. He is the gear and equipment guy for the company, right? So we have 120 Marines and he's in charge of getting chow and ammo and water and things like that. And I'm like the admin guy, Excel spreadsheet guru. And so we're back at Camp Pendleton. I'm miserable. I have no desire to be in this kind of thing. But we also didn't know the war was going to continue, right? So I see a flyer on a, on a chow hall door for something called the Scout Sniper Indoc. And the Scout Sniper Indoc is, you know, it had like the, like hastily drawn, like Reaper, you know, like Reaper is kind of the scout sniper thing. And it was like February 4th, show up at the pull-up bars at 0400 with this gear list, right?
Do you have what it takes kind of thing? And I was immediately, like, I was drawn to it, but I was, again, low idea of self-efficacy, right? You know, like, I did okay in OIF-1, right? But I was still— I was like 115 pounds after OIF-1. We didn't eat much, right? So like small kid, right? You know, that kind of stuff. And was still 18 years old or just now turned 19 years old. And so we're back at the company office after chow and fucking Gregorio Sanchez, Gunny Jackson walks in because now he's at the company, right? So he works at the company office because he works for the entire company. And I get to see him more and more often. And he kind of takes me under his wing. And he was there for me when I was struggling, what would eventually be called with post-traumatic stress. I didn't know I was— I couldn't drink at the time, right? But I didn't know how to handle all these things. I had presumably killed 8 men in the grenade thing. Know that I killed one in, you know, 5 feet in front of me, and then the rest is kind of a blur.
And so I was kind of working through that with him, and we would have long conversations, and in his own way, you know, was there for me. But Sanchez, as soon as Gunny walked back in the door from that chow hall thing, Sanchez, fucking little dick, betrayed me. And he was like, Pashutti wants to take the endoc, takes the sniper endoc. And I was like, right, you know. And Gunny Jackson was like, oh, you want to all that snooping and pooping stuff, right? And he looked at me. He was the first person in my life to see my dream or my desire for that and not laugh at me. And he says, okay. And he says, pishut. He always called me pishut. He says, pishut, is this what you want to do? Are you sure you want to do this? And I said, yes, I want to try out for the Scouts Library Doc. And we had like 6 months before it happened. And he says, okay. He says, every, every afternoon, every morning, right from 11 to noon, your lunch hour is mine. And then we're going to PT after, after, you know, we've shut, we closed shop.
So for twice, twice a day for the next 6 months, he says, your ass is mine. And he says, and I said, he's like, are you sure you want to do this? And I said, yes. And he says, okay, we'll see. And that was it. And for the next 6 months, Gunny Jackson and his wife another Marine, like a fiery-ass Latina, right? They just ran me up and down Camp Pendleton, sprints, you know, lift— like, he would lift big weights, I would lift little smaller weights, right? You know, we would sprint, I would vomit. For the next 6 months, they got me ready. But the challenge was I was— I did not work for the gunnery sergeant. The police sergeant worked for the gunnery sergeant. I worked for what's called the company first sergeant. So he would be an E-8, and he was the lead administrator, if you will, for the company, and he was not a good man. And, um, I'll be brief when I describe him, but people will often forget what you say but always remember how you made them feel. And that man made me feel worthless. He didn't call me by my name.
He called me OB1, and he called Sanchez OB2. And OB1 stood for Office Bitch 1, and OB2 was Office Bitch 2. And so he'd open up his little window, like, OB1, get in here. Like, I didn't even have a name with this this guy and he was, you know, with the— I won't go into too much detail on him because I try to forget him. But one of the things that kind of like marked my career, ultimately what happened is after 6 months, I go inside the company office. Gunnery Sergeant Jackson is sitting on the left-hand side on this little couch. The first sergeant is sitting where you're at, at his desk. And I go and I stand 6 and center. I bang on his hatch. Lance Corporal Prisciutti requests permission to speak with the first sergeant. Right. And he's like, get out here. Right. You know, and again, which is super demeaning, but whatever. Whatever. I go in and I stand at, you know, position of attention with him. And I was like— so at the time we called the sniper platoons the STAI platoons, Surveillance and Target Acquisition. Eventually it transitioned to Scout Sniper Platoon.
That had to do with putting ground sensors, listening devices, all kinds of— that was the thing. Also sniping was, it was, you know, encased inside of that. But it's called the STAI platoon. And I was like, request permission to take the STAI in, Doc. And he says to me, and he looks over at Gunny, and he says, I got your STAI in, Doc, right You're staying the fuck here. Get out of my office. And I have to, you know, 6, whatever the turnaround thing is, right? And I turn around, I leave the office and I'm like looking at Gunny Jackson and I was like, betrayed, dude. He had got me ready for 6 months and he sat there quiet, didn't say a word, didn't defend me. And I was so mad at him. And I go back into the company office and now it's like the end of the day on a Friday, right? And I'm like cleaning up. I'm like fucking vacuuming. I'm just being an office bitch, right? You know, I'm cleaning up, doing my thing. Everyone's gone home for the day. And Gunny Jackson walks in the office and he says, don't speak.
Puts his finger up, says, don't speak. Sit down. And I sit down. And he brings up like this faded, you know, shitty red Marine chair, office chair. He rolls it up and he gets kneecap to kneecap to me. He breathes in and he's choosing his words very, very carefully. And he says, pishut, every man is in charge of his own destiny. Destiny. If you're not here on Monday morning, I'll know where you're at. So what he was doing was giving me an order that he couldn't openly give. He was giving me an order to follow my dreams. Monday morning was the sniper in-doc. I had requested permission on Friday afternoon. The first sergeant, my boss, said no. And Gunny Jackson said, you have a choice here. Choose your destiny. And so Monday morning at 0730, when I was supposed to be in my company office, the chair was empty and I was at the sniper endoc getting my shit pushed in by a bunch of snipers. Go through a long kind of thing, right? The next, on Monday morning, I have to make this decision. This is, I'm an E-3, right? This is not like an E-8, right?
Is like a god, right? To an E-3, this is not something people do, right? Especially in the Marines. I don't know how it is in other services. It's just not something that we do. And so I go and now eventually run two back halfback PFTs, like there's extra training that they put in because, you know, why not, right? And then we go to the pool. I had no idea snipers needed to swim, but someone was like, the great equalizer, right? And like, we go into the pool and I'm like, what the fuck? I like, I grew up like boogie boarding in Santa Cruz, right? I'm not a fish, right? By any sense of the imagination. And so we get in this pool and we're doing the, we're in formation, like a formation kind of tread, right? In the deep end of the pool. And this thing's fucking freezing. The heater's broken. Marine Corps, right? Everything's broken. It all sucks. And we're treading water and I am not doing well. Now they're passing bricks around and they're sharking people, right? Like, I am not a Navy SEAL. No, did not want to be a Navy SEAL.
Didn't think I could be a Navy SEAL, right? And I am treading water in the deep end and I'm fucking losing it. So I get yanked down to the bottom of the pool and I'm like clamoring up. And then I come up for air and I see the first sergeant enter the pool. Deck. And then I see the Gunnery Sergeant enter the pool deck and I'm like, you know, like, like, you know, trying to breathe with my lips above the water. And I'm watching this scene unfold. Gunny Jackson saw the First Sergeant coming down to pull me out of the endoc because he was pissed where I was at and he was going to pull me out of the endoc right there. And Gunny Jackson went down there to defend me. An E-7 yelling at an E-8 telling him to get the fuck out of here. Now, the E-8 was not an infantry Marine and Gunny Jackson was an infantry infantry, like a Marine's Marine. But during this whole thing, I'm trying to watch this with like my one eyeball, like above the water, right? I'm trying to watch this thing. What was the other guy?
What's that?
Was he an OB-3?
Uh, yeah, he was a— what's called a MIMS inspector, which is he is an administrator who inspects administrators to make sure that they are functioning correctly. It's a weird thing the Marine Corps does where they have non-infantry Marines inside of infantry units in certain levels. It's like a— they try to do cross-pollination. I don't really agree with it sometimes, but it's the thing that they do. So I had a non-infantry guy in charge of my life.
Oh great. Yeah, within there lies a massive ego.
That's exactly correct. And so, you know, I was not necessarily kind to him in the book, and I'll never give his name. I'm not here to like, you know, blow people up. But, um, he was trying to hold me back from the thing he couldn't do, which was follow his own dreams. Yeah. And so, like crabs in a bucket, right?
So I thought this a lot in the military.
It's a weird— I mean, it's an eclectic group of people, right? We have people from all walks of life. Not all of them are good. You know, it's a cross-section of America, right? So I get sharked down to the bottom of the pool and I'm, I'm fucking done. I inhale water, I come up hacking, right? And I'm about to D.O.R. I'm swimming towards the side of the pool. I'm done. I can't do this anymore. I can't swim. You know, you know that when the water hits the back of your throat, right? You— your mind makes a conscious— a subconscious decision that you're like, I'm fucking toasts. So I'm DORing, I'm swimming to the side of the pool and like a fucking sailor marooned on an island, I like come up to the wall, right? Right. And I see two tan combat boots and I'm like this, right? And I'm like, and I look up and I see Gunny Jackson standing like a fucking drill instructor going, what in the hell are you doing on this side of the pool, Pashuti? Right. And I was like, I can't do it, Gunny. I'm not going to make it, you know?
And he's He's like, "Like hell you are." He's like, "Swim your—" He's like, "You worked too hard for this. Swim your little scrawny ass back out to that pool and finish what you started." And then he paces off talking about how, like, wasting his damn time. You know, like a Black guy's like, "Waste my goddamn time," right? That kind of thing, right? Like pacing away this whole thing. And then I knew, like, I didn't— I couldn't do it on my own. I had to do it. At that point, he was carrying the weight for me that I couldn't carry myself. He saw something in me and gave me permission to believe believe in myself. So I went out and I finished the swim portion of the in-doc because I couldn't quit, because I wouldn't be quitting me, I'd be quitting him. You didn't want to let him down. 100%. And he just stood up for me. So when I go through the rest of the sniper in-doc and I'm, you know, and I'm pretty open about— I'm kind of like a runt, you know, through that thing. I didn't do super well. I have this thing where I like, again, I curve up later on, but, um, I was not— I was the slowest PT-er.
I didn't know how to do land navigation super well. I didn't know what a protractor was, right? Like, again, honor graduate at a school of infantry. When they asked us to bring a protractor, I literally went to Office Depot and brought a protractor. Not like a pro— like, not like an MGRS protractor. And they're like, what the fuck is this? And I'm like, it's a protractor. Like, I was that guy. Smart, just untrained, right? Um, and then I, I eventually go through the week-long in-doc, which is basically to weed out the weak or faint of part, right? And then we enter into a probationary period of being what's called a PIG. A PIG in a sniper platoon is called a professionally instructed gunman, and we are snipers in training. And then you have a HOG, who is a graduate of Scout Sniper School, which stands for Hunter of Gunmen. So you have very few HOGs in a sniper platoon and a lot of PIGs, but their job is to get us ready to go to sniper school. And so I enter in as a PIG and then and then the Awakening happens, the Al Anbar Awakening, and all of a sudden all these things start percolating and we have this Iraqi insurgency start picking up while I'm training to go back to Iraq now.
So you, you're training to go back to Iraq before sniper school? Yes.
So I don't go to sniper school until 2005. I go back to Fallujah. I deploy to Fallujah as a pig in a sniper sniper platoon. So this is now February of 2004 is when I take the sniper in-doc. So February to like, I don't know, June-ish, we are now like the insurgency's waking up, right? All these things are starting to happen. And then we, 3/5 gets orders. We're going back to Fallujah or going back to Iraq and we're going to Fallujah. We know the Battle of Fallujah is about to happen because in April of 2004, 4 Blackwater contractors were murdered and their bodies were hung and lit on fire from what eventually was called Blackwater Bridge on the outskirts of Fallujah, letting the world know America was not welcome in Fallujah. So here's where some consternation comes in with politicians. And there's a little history for, you know, some of the audience here. The Marine commanders in 2004, in April, didn't— not that they didn't want to go into Fallujah. So after the Blackwater contractors were killed, politicians in the United States wanted blood. They wanted like, this is not acceptable. We're going to take the city.
The Marine commanders were the ones who actually urged restraint. They said, if you want us to go in, we're going to need more people. And the only thing that we ask you to do is if you send us in, Do not pull us back. They enter into Fallujah with 2,000 Marines. So like a regiment minus 2,000 Marines. And they start clearing through the city like wildfire. They enter into like the first few blocks. They're decimating the mujahideen right at this time frame. They're— the insurgency is falling apart. A guy by the name of Ethan Place is a Marine sniper. And so I'm a pig in a platoon. So we're getting all these afteractions as they're happening. Happening, right? The platoon sergeants were really— snipers are really good at sharing information. So the platoon sergeant of the deployed unit wouldn't go home or wouldn't go back to base and call his family. He would send up intelligence reports to get back to other people who are getting ready to deploy, right? So it's almost like a SEAL team, right? You're like, hey, this is what we're seeing right now. Start training for this. These are the things that are happening.
So Ethan Place, Corporal Ethan Place, had 34 kills in Fallujah. 21 of them on a single day. Holy shit. Because he was taught to ask why. This is the difference with snipers inside of the military. They're taught to think outside of the box. And so what he did was he moved into a position of advantage and he found a long axis down a very long road. I don't remember which road it was, but he had a long axis and a, you know, and a concealed position. At the time, mujahideen started to use amphetamines when they were fighting, right? This was kind of a newer thing for us. The Iraqis didn't really do it before, but these guys get like hopped up on speed or whatever it is, and then they would come and fight us. Our ammunition, the 5.56 with the hardened steel core penetrator, was meant to fight the Russians and defeat body armor, right? We're blowing through people's bodies and we're not getting a permanent wound cavity. We're not even getting a temporary wound cavity. We're shooting lasers through people, especially people who are hopped up on speed. They're not doing anything unless you hit— unless you lights out somebody, right, or you hit their heart.
They're gonna keep charging. So what Place started to do was he started to move towards the pelvic girdle. And so with the pelvic girdle, no matter what amount of amphetamine you have, if you break the pelvic girdle, 2 liters of blood sits in your pelvis, right? Also, if you snap the pelvic girdle, there's no movement. You can't get up and run away like we'd plug a dude, right? And he'd fall and like, and then like a zombie, he would like take off running somewhere else, right? So what he pioneered was shooting them low, breaking their hips, and then allowing them to, you know, either they would bleed out from that, right? Or they would continue fighting and he would have a follow-up second shot. But he had a position of advantage over a long axis of a road and killed 21 people in a single day. Yes. Yeah, man. And then got out of the Marine Corps like a sergeant and became like a high school football coach. Nicest guy of all time, right? Absolute savage. So, yeah, it was, it was an interesting time frame to kind of have all this start to percolate.
And then in June of 2004, my platoon sergeant brought us in. So our sniper platoon sergeant brought us in and he he gave us an after-action. It was June 24th, I think it was. A Marine sniper team had been in Ramadi, had occupied a hide site on multiple occasions. It was an overt position that was a forced overt position by their commanders and was, you know, again, like I said, in this, in this hide site, they occupied a number of times and was somehow ambushed pushed and killed. And with them, they lost— when they were killed, the mujahideen took their, all their equipment to include an M40A1 sniper rifle. Corporal Tommy Parker was the name of the team leader who was killed. There was like a scuffle on the rooftop. Nobody really knows what happened, but basically a number of people got inside of the building. There was construction on the front, on the bottom half of the building, so entry couldn't be controlled. In an overt position in Ramadi. Some people got in, ambushed the 4 Marines on the, on the rooftop, killed all of them within seconds, and then decimated their bodies and then took all of their equipment and then put all of it on the internet to include, you know, M203 radios and an M40 sniper rifle.
And then that sniper rifle fell into the hands of a pretty bad person. Person that ended up hurting a number of Americans. And so that was not lost on us. That was— the IEDs had now picked up and now there was a sniper threat using our own weapons systems in Iraq. And so we took that pretty, pretty seriously.
Man, are we moving into— let's take a break.
Cool.
When I first got out of the teams, One of the biggest shifts wasn't just the schedule. It was how easy it was to let things slip. In the military, everything is structured. You've got routine, accountability, and staying in shape is just part of the job. But then life fills up. You've got work, family responsibilities, and it gets harder to stay at that same level. And then you hit your 30s or 40s and something just feels off. Your energy isn't the same. Recovery takes longer. And even when you're doing the same work workouts doesn't hit like it used to. So you start looking into it, and honestly, the whole space can get confusing fast. A lot of it sounds extreme or like something you're locked into forever. That's what led me to Mars Men. What I like about it is it's designed to help your body use the testosterone it's already producing, because as you get older, more of it gets bound up and isn't actually being used. And since I've started taking it, I've noticed more consistent energy, better recovery, and just a steadier drive throughout the day. It's not a spike like caffeine, it just feels more dialed in.
I also love that it's made here in the USA, third-party tested, and they've got a 90-day money-back guarantee. For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life, plus free shipping and 3 free gifts at men-go-to-mars.com. .com. That's mengotomars.com for 50% off for life and 3 free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. All right, AJ, we're back from the break. You're in Fallujah.
Are we still in Fallujah? Haven't gotten there yet. We haven't gotten there yet?
No, you're going to Fallujah. We Okay, you go into Fallujah, Juba as a sniper, as a pig.
So Juba is 2006. So I have two— I have sniper— I had Fallujah first. Fallujah first. And then I come back from—
So you're going in as a pig. Uh-huh. Okay. All right.
Let's pick up right here. Yep. So June comes right after we lose Tommy Parker and his sniper team. Team. Remember I said I was kind of the runt of the litter, right? And again, I tell these stories because I want people to know that failure is part of the process of success. I got brought up to the scout sniper platoon loft where we all worked, and in front of me and part of my trainers were the two snipers that I had seen on the— on my first day in combat, right? In OIF-1, Sergeant Jimmy Proudman, and at that time, Sergeant Blake Cole, and I have to face this effectively a performance review board. I was falling behind. My physical skills just weren't there and they considered me a liability. So my technical prowess, my tactical prowess was there, but I was last on ruck runs. I was last on any of the PT stuff. I just wasn't keeping up physically. And so I faced a performance review board and I had an opportunity to advocate for myself. And the one thing that snipers don't allow for is weakness. And I understand it and I totally understand it.
And so I was kicked out of the sniper platoon. Oh, shit. 3 months before we deployed to Fallujah. And so, and I was heartbroken, right? Because this is what I worked for. I felt like I had failed Gunny Jackson. He and that first sergeant had now moved to different units. So I was really isolated, super alone. I was drinking pretty heavily at the time, you know, illegally. And then not only did I get moved back to being a company clerk. I got moved to being a company clerk in headquarters and support company, which is even further from the fight. And we were going into Fallujah. So I was absolutely like destitute. So now fortunately what happened— so back to the Silicon Valley thing— is about 2 months later, now we're like maybe 4 weeks or 4 weeks out from deploying to Fallujah, and we know it's going to be a fight because in April of 2004 when the Marines pushed in, the general said, just don't pull us back. 48 hours after the Marines made entry into Fallujah, a lot of reports started resurfacing on like Al Jazeera or, you know, any of these other networks that weren't, that were kind of not loyal.
And that's not loyal is the right word, not necessarily accurate. They were producing false reports. I'll just say that of a lot of, you know, human casualties, a lot of civilian casualties. They were producing all these false reports. And the same politicians that advocated for, for the Marines to enter into Fallujah when the generals advocated against it, then all of a sudden lost their nerve. And they— and within 96 hours of entering into Fallujah, all the Marines had to stop their advance and pull back out of Fallujah. So that did two things. Technically did three things. It gave the mujahideen an unearned victory. We gave them Fallujah. They had ceased the advance of United States Marines. Two, it broke the heart and it broke the spirit of the Marine Corps and the Marine generals themselves because they had advocated against it. And then they— again, the same thing, a weapon in our hand and a rulebook in our pocket. And the politicians lost their nerve. And then the third thing that happened with that is it gave the mujahideen an opportunity to claim a jihad. And so any single person We— they knew we had to retake the city.
We told them we were going to retake the city. And so what they did was they riled up every single person from the Muslim world who wanted to go and fight an infidel. We made it the OK Corral. And so they reinforced for 6 months, dug tunnels, dug booby traps, you know, IEDs everywhere. And the— the— the— there is a direct line between the blood that— between the bloodshed by Americans in Fallujah in November of 2004 that goes straight back to the spineless politicians that advocated for blood and then pulled the Americans back. And that's one of the distrusting things that we have for these kind of war hawks in this space. If you're going to ask the Marines to do something, let them do it. Now, again, now I'm not saying Marines are going to go out and be absolutely crazy. We have our own rules. We understand that. But this playing politics with warfare is not— we saw this in Vietnam, right? And we're repeating the same mistakes in 2004. So April 2004, fucking do this everywhere we go. It's, it's the American way. It's as American as apple pie and baseball. Politics getting in the way.
Politicians starting wars and then trying to control the war from Washington. So April 2004, they pull out. June of 2004, we lose a sniper rifle and 4 snipers. I get kicked out of the sniper platoon. And then Abu Ghraib happens. And Abu— I'm not— I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but Abu Ghraib, the prison scandal happens, which again, when you don't have good leadership, when you don't have good leaders and you let people run amok, the American soldiers or service members that caused that to happen. Again, just like the politicians, the blood of Americans is on their hands. A direct line can be drawn from Abu Ghraib to the amount of American deaths and the loss of the coalition's moral high ground during that time frame. And so in September, we're getting ready to deploy PAC to Fallujah. I get a stroke of luck. A shadowy figure enters into the, you know, you know, the doorway of the H&S Company office, and his name was Guillermo Sandoval. I called him Memo. He was in the sniper platoon, um, and was, uh, had just come from the Marine Corps shooting team. Now, there's a little bit, you know, here and there with that.
Memo technically wasn't a sniper, uh, and I need to clear the air on that, uh, but he was acting as a sniper inside of a sniper platoon. There's a lot of consternation of how that happened, but that's not my fight to fight. But Memo was acting as a sniper at the time. And part of the deploying kit that we had was a new technology that came on called MSIDS, Maritime Secondary Imagery Dissemination System. It was basically our Toughbook computers and our reconnaissance cameras that we could transmit pictures instead of drawing field sketches. We could transmit pictures through radios and give real-time information back to any gaming unit. So it was a toolset, but had a lot of computers in it. And the cool part about being from Silicon Valley was they didn't know how to manage all the stuff that came with all the computers. And so they decided to bring me back into the sniper platoon as, again, as a probationary period, as a pig, to manage the communications and the MSIDS systems. So technically, I got a second shot at this, but But I was a marked man, right? So I came back into the sniper platoon, but I got in on like an asterisk, you know what I mean?
Like, so the other— some of the other Pigs were fine. A lot of the other Pigs, you know, eventually Hogs, whatever it was, never forgave me for that. Never looked past that, that I got a second shot when they didn't think I deserved it. And rightfully, I don't think I deserved it either. They dropped me from the platoon because I wasn't performing. That's okay. But I got back into the platoon under for that, you know, that, that reason. We deployed to Fallujah, and how it worked was, as we're getting ready to go into Fallujah, we knew we were getting to a fight. Everybody knew this, right? The, the Taliban— the Taliban— the mujahideen knew. We had dropped flyers. The city was starting to evacuate. Everybody knew when-ish we were kind of going into the city, and we knew it was going to happen. So November 7th, I'm back in the sniper platoon. I'm in what's called general support. So we have the way that we liked at the time. We would attach a single 4-man sniper team to an individual line company. So the infantry had their own snipers and they came from those companies generally.
So India Company generally got 4 school-trained snipers that came from India Company. There was relationships with squad leaders and platoon commanders. And so they, they kind of like knew each other. Didn't always happen that way. but each line company, uh, India Company, Kilo, and Lima had a 4-man sniper team attached to them, uh, as they pushed through the city. And then we had one team which was called General Support. We would either go to Weapons Company or we would stay in Headquarters Company and be an asset that could move freely throughout the battalion wherever they needed sniper support. The General Support team would move to that, if that makes sense. Kind of like a linebacker. So I got placed into Team with Memo Sandoval as general support. November 7th, I wrote a letter, you know, what we would consider a death letter. I write a letter to my family explaining what we're doing, explaining why we're going in. We have to take Fallujah because Fallujah is one of the epicenters of the Sunni Triangle. Also, in what we're hoping is January timeframe, will be Iraq's free— first free and fair election. Elections, their first chance of democracy.
And Fallujah has to be taken to be able to make that a possibility, to be able to have polling stations and all these things. So Fallujah has to be taken. There's no ifs, ands, or buts. So November 7th, I write this death letter. We're, you know, getting— we're getting ready to go. We have, um, PSYOPs, right? The PSYOPs, Humvees, they have like these big speakers on top. They're playing like Pantera and Metallica and everybody's like we're in this, like, we're a place called Camp Bahariya. We're in this big square and there's 1,000+ infantry, Marines, and Navy SEALs, specifically from Team 3, if I'm not mistaken. And we're all getting ready to get— Force Recon's there, the SEALs are there, right? We're getting ready to go in and we're all loading magazines. We're having the final briefs, taking pictures together, right? The last company resmoking cigarettes, all that kind of stuff, going through these final final kind of final checks. And then we move out to our attack positions. And my role with Memo on November 8th in the morning is we attack the city from north to south. And the way that 3-5 is getting in is we are on the furthest western flank of the city covering what's called the Jolon District.
And so it's split. Fran is this— is the horizontal MSR that splits the city half. So what we're going to do is we're going to push as— I may get some of the, some of the units wrong, forgive me— 3-5, 3-1, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, 2nd Cav from the Army, and then I think it's 1-3 and another Army unit. And so we're basically squeegeeing our way down through the city. It's just a mop-up operation. We're just going straight north to south. Our first objective as the general support team is with Kilo Company to take the apartment buildings over the northwest section of the city are these like, I think it's 8-story tall series of, think of like projects, but like apartment buildings, like high-rise apartment buildings outside of the city. But they have an incredible vantage point over this 1,000-yard by 10-kilometer wide open field that the infantry has to cross to get into the city. It's a huge danger area for us to cross. So we have to get into position to cover for them. So Memo and I start this thing off, you know, November 8th in the morning. The rain's falling, it's super cold, it's like winter.
And just like clockwork, we have, you know, F-18s are screaming in, Cobras are striking. We're doing all of our preparatory artillery hitting the city. Most of the civilians have evacuated at that point or been told to go to ground and stay in their buildings. And the place is teeming with insurgents. And so we come up and the very first thing is we're in this Humvee and all of a sudden we come and we park next to this apartment building and we're trying to make it in this building and we get like zippered up, right? Like our Humvee's getting hit and we're trying to get in this door and we don't know where we're taking fire from. It's not really our concern right now because if we can get into cover, we can handle that problem later on, but we're super exposed. So Memo is carrying an M4 M40 sniper rifle. He's carrying an M16A2 and he's carrying a Benelli shotgun because this was what Fallujah was like. We did not know what we were— we had to have the M4 to fight. We had to have the, you know, the shotgun to breach the doors and we had to have the M40 to be a sniper.
So he's just like, fuck it. And probably a pistol. I don't know. He's like, just— he's like a video game, like running through, right? And I have a Barrett.50 caliber special application scoped rifle. So as a pig, I'm also carrying the biggest gun for some reason. So I have this like.50 caliber, you know, it's not technically a sniper rifle, but we use it as a sniper rifle. The delineation is minute of angle. The.50 cal has what's called a 3-minute of angle, you know, tolerance. And a sniper rifle, to be a sniper rifle, has to have a 1-minute of angle tolerance. And for the audience at home, basically it's 1 inch at 100 yards. I'm oversimplifying this, but it can hold a group at 1 inch at 100 yards. The Barrett doesn't do that. So even though it's an anti-material, but it shoots a lot further than our other stuff. And it has the Rofus round, which is this really, really cool incendiary, you know, munition that we use. So we're getting zippered up. We eventually break into this building, right? We've got a squad. It's this huge apartment building. The power's been cut. So imagine this apartment building that probably holds like 1,000 people.
People, maybe 500 to 1,000 people, completely empty. All the power's cut, super, you know, like you can hear like shit dripping, right? Just empty. Also, windows are all blown out from the barrages and things like that. We go in, we see a couple of dead guys that the infantry squad that's clearing the first floor, and then it's super quiet. Memo and I need to get to a position of advantage. And so we start, the very first thing we do is we have this like wraparound kind of staircase, right? A quintessential like Iraqi staircase. And it's like 5 6 stories up. And so we start climbing. We're like pieing our way up there and like tiptoeing because we don't know who's in there. That we— like, everything is like Indian country at this point. So we're having to clear everything that we do, and we're bypassing floors because we don't have time to clear all these things. We don't have the manpower, we don't have time. We got to get to like basically the top floor as fast as possible so we can provide coverage because India Company's about to cross. So we get up into the position, we have this small apartment building building that we find.
And we're, you know, first up there. Memo sets up the M40 in one room, kind of looking south-southwest, right? So he's covering like the western flank of the city a little bit south. I'm covering south-southeast. And I'm, I can see, you know, portions of the, of our sister unit 3-1 going down, right? You know, making their way. And they're, we're now we're in tracks, like moving across. We get into position and immediately targets are presenting themselves because what had happened was the day before, we can— the, the Marine Corps conducted a feint, like a fake attack on the eastern side of the city. So all of the mujahideen assumed we were coming in from the eastern side of the city and we're going to be going from east to west. And so now, now that we're coming from north to south, they're scrambling to get back. So people are in the streets. There's technicals with like dudes with AKs like, like wet dream kind of shit for snipers, right? And the very first thing I see is I see a memo is spotting for me because I'm on the.50 cal. He puts me in a really small room, thing has like tons of percussion, right?
And he puts me in the small-ass room and he starts spotting for me because I can reach out and I can also break through a lot of material. So he sees a guy that's like over a wall and he's like shooting, you know, like the typical at the time, like spraying and praying right over this wall. Wall. And Memo's like, Pashuti, I want you to hold at this position, right? Hold, you know, I don't know, 6— like, go to the top of this red gate, and it's a, it's a flush metal gate, right? Hold 6 inches to the right and 6 inches down, or whatever the hold that he gave me was. And he's like, I want you to, you know, take the slack out of the trigger and fire when I tell you to. And so the guy's like shooting. I really can't see him because I can't directly see him. All I see is the gun. And he's like, now! And I ripped the fucking and the.50 does exactly what it's supposed to do, especially with the Rafis round. It rips through this fence, detonates on the fence, and then sends the Comp B and whatever classified mix of explosives go through the wall and the penetrator.
And I see a, an arm fly into the air, an AK fly. And so he's able to help spot me to take a second or take a shot into this thing. The next shot I take is to break the lock on the door. We're talking 4 to 500 meters, like nothing, nothing super hard for us. But especially, you know, we can, you know, blow the door open. And then I'm eventually able to see that there's a dude, you know, laying on the ground. And Memo was the person who helped spot and get that on. After that, we had a couple of hairy situations come up. We had the first thing that we saw was a technical coming across this large open danger area. Area, and they were in a, um, you know, like a Toyota Hilux, right? And a bunch of dudes in the back of the truck, like, like I said, like wet dream for us. And I have the anti-material weapon system, and so Memo can shoot the 40, and he's like shooting the 40 into this, and they're, they're literally driving towards us. They don't know where we're at because we're depressed back inside of our hide site, right?
And so it's just open windows that they can see, and I'm just sending, you know, rounds out of this thing. Eventually what happens is I shoot the engine block of the Toyota Hilux as it's coming down, and then it like engulfs in flames. So I kill the engine, it engulfs in flames, and then we think everybody inside is dead— inside the vehicle is dead. People jump out of the vehicle, and Memo's hitting those guys with the.40, right, as they're— because again, they don't know where we're shooting from. And as this thing's coming down, it starts moving again, right? And now there are people inside, you can see them kind of like freaking out because they're on fire. And then the guy, the driver gets out of the door or out of the driver's seat. The vehicle is now still moving. The dude is engulfed in flames, but he has an AK and he is spraying towards our Marines who are making this advance into the city. And so he's still trying to fight. Remember all the drugs and all that kind of stuff? Yeah. And so what happens is the way that the vehicle ends up stopping is he's standing in front of the vehicle.
And he's shooting wildly again. He's on fire. And I remember vividly, we laughed about it later on, you know, hindsight being what it is. And he was like, "Shpashooty, hit him," right? Because I think he was like out of ammo or whatever it was. And I was— and I remember he's like, "Shoot him." And I remember yelling back, "But he's on fire." And he's like, "Fuckin' shoot him," right? Dude, so I like— I know it sucks that we're like laughing, but like, I'm the same way, right? I shoot and the projectile does exactly what it's supposed to do, but the projectile doesn't detonate on the body. It goes through him, hits the truck behind him, and then detonates, literally blowing the guy in half. Right. And like two pieces. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, you know, these moments you're like, what the fuck just happened? Right. So all of this is happening. We're ripping with the.50. My ears are ringing, right? You know, because no no ear pro, right? Or whatever it is. And then we hear footsteps. We have like this creaky metal door at the very bottom of the stairs, and we had broken glass on the stairs on the way up.
And we start hearing the creaky door open up. It's like in between kind of a lull. And then we start hearing footsteps and they're coming up towards us. And so I jump off of the 50. I leave the 50 where it's at. Memo and I post up. We're on the door. I'm getting a grenade ready. We're holding I'm on the top of the stairs and I'm waiting for whoever this is to come up the stairs. And because we don't know who it is. And then all of a sudden I see a camouflage spray-painted M4, and then I see a Mitch helmet come above that. And we're like, I have friendlies, friendlies, you got friendlies up here, friendlies. And it is none other than at the time unknown, two Navy SEAL snipers, one of them by the name of Chris comes up the stairs and then is looking at it and we're like, hey, what's up? Nice to see you. Like, we're working, right? And they like— the funniest part about this entire story was they were pissed because they come over and we've got like the dream sniper hide, right? We're in this thing, we're recessed back, everything's— we got a great vantage point.
And they come over and they're like, you think, you think we can get into some of these and some of this hide site? And Memo was the consummate politician and he was like, sorry, Bubba, you know, this, this apartment's full. And he's He's like, but if you go across the hall, which the hall is not big, if you go across the hall, there's another room, there's a crib and a good position of vantage that will cover our western flank. So then what happens is Chris Kyle and his partner, and he actually writes about this in his book, American Sniper. Kevin Lays? I don't, I don't know the gentleman's name. I don't know. He probably said at one point, but I think it was his partner at that, at that time, they set up on like a crib on the side and they have like a bed and they're in position. But the problem with Navy SEAL snipers is they have 300 Win Mags. You guys have way better gear than we did. So then what happens is now we get into position and Marines and SEALs have to compete with one another, right? So now we have 3 actual snipers and then 1 pig are now covering the northern flank of Fallujah as we have the Marines starting their advance in.
And so Chris and his, you know, and his partner are just ripping rounds because they can go like 1,800. Ours at the M40 was like 1,000, right? So they're ripping rounds in the city and they're like, Navy one! And then we would shoot and be like, Marines one! So we're having to— and we're fucking yelling at each other about this thing. And, you know, all of this to say, there's always a joke about competition between Marines and SEALs. We were very happy to have them there. With us because we needed their guns. And that point, the SEAL teams were completely integrated with 3-5 at that time frame. And so for the next, I think it was 6 to 8 hours, they were with us until like sundown and they stayed with us. And then eventually they were like, hey, because they were operating super independent and they were like, okay, hey, we're done here. We're going to go link up. And that was it. That was the last time that I saw Chris Kyle in, you know, Fallujah. I was around him for like 6 hours or whatever it was. Was. And we would all take turns on the gun, you know, and, and spotting for one another and confirming each other's kills, uh, as best we could through that.
And it was an incredible opportunity to have like the teamwork through that. All the other— again, all the politics, all the whatever, you know, shit goes out of the window. It was just 4 Americans trying to save a bunch of other Americans crossing a large open danger area. And so after that, um, man, that is fucking cool. It was wild. My only challenge with Chris was, was in the book American Sniper. I was a little perturbed that he didn't mention us there because I read that section and I was like, damn, dog, fuck that. You know, we were right there, right? And first, right? But there's another book called Hogs in the Shadows was written by a Marine sniper that told other people's stories. And Milo Afong is the author of that. He wrote about that story. Covering Memo Sandoval's exploits. So Memo is the center of the story. I was an additional character in that, but it was about Memo. But we also write that we were next to, you know, Chris Kyle and his, and his partner during that time frame. But kind of an interesting crossing of paths for sure. It was, it was a wild experience.
You guys were on each other's guns?
Mm-mm. Okay. I thought you meant—
No, no SEAL's going to let me touch their.300 Win Mag. We were just spotting for each other, you know? On, right on. They did have some nice, nice equipment though. We were always jealous of that. Um, and so that was the first day of Fallujah, and then we continued down for the next, um, you know, couple of weeks. As I moved from general support, remember I had like, I had a bunch of kills from there, um, and I was a bunch of kills as a PIG, which is also not something that Marine snipers really enjoy because there's kind of a pecking order. And I had the Barrett and I was just in the right place at the right time and then was able to, you know, prosecute a number of targets there. And then what happened was on, I think it was November 10th, the Marine Corps birthday, there was an India Company got in a huge, huge firefight and our corpsman, HM3 Pell, who was with our platoon callsign was Banshee. And so I was Banshee 4, General general support. But then Banshee 2 was with India Company and they got in a big, big firefight, a ton of wounded, excuse me, I think a number of friendly KIAs as well.
And Doc Pell, so we have a sniper platoon corpsman who's like a higher level corpsman that we train up to be a sniper and work with us. So again, when we're forward of lines, we'll take a corpsman with us. And that was Doc Pell. One of the best sailors I've ever worked with and was really, really beloved by the platoon. He got shot up pretty bad. He was crossing from one building to the next, almost like over an alleyway. And there was mujahideen across the street. And it was this huge, huge firefight that I was not a part of. And he got injured, you know, really, really badly. Survived, thankfully. But that team then had a gap in it. So Banshee 2 was now down a man. And so what happened was the general support team then got broken up and I was a combat replacement for Doc Pell. This was my shot. I had a shot to join a line company sniper platoon or sniper team as we continued through the rest of the push south into the city. And I remember getting to Blake Cole, who was this— who was the sergeant team Blake Cole had advocated to kick me out of the platoon.
He was one of the first people that I saw in OIF-1. He was the shooter on that sniper team in OIF-1, and he had advocated to kick me out of the platoon because—
I mean, your inspiration for becoming the guy that— Yep.
Ran, took out the PKM, and then— That's exactly correct. So he was the sniper. He was a corporal then. Strawberry-haired and cocky is what I say about him. right? Kind of like a surfer, kind of, you know, almost like a seal out of Coronado, right? Kind of has this like long hair, right? You know, a little like self-confident, right? Very much, you know, truth to your face. You always know where you stand with Blake Cole. And I sat with him in Fallujah when I checked into his team. And he says, listen, I advocated to kick you out of the platoon because you weren't up to the task. And he says, Doc Pell getting hit really fucked this, but you're here now. Stay tight and I'll teach you everything, everything I know. And he took me under his wing. He put all that bullshit aside, how whatever the thing was, whatever the past was. He says, you're here now, you're in my team, I'm going to take care of you. And so he did. And so myself, Tony— so Tony Scardino was another. So Blake Cole was the only sniper in the team. He had 3 PIGs in the team with him.
He had James Powers, myself, and then Tony Scardino. And the three of us were a four-man sniper element. And that's kind of how the Marine snipers work. We have very few numbers of snipers in teams. And so you have like one actual sniper, and then you have two or three other school-trained snipers in a sniper team. Sniper school has an incredibly high attrition rate. It's not easy for us to get through. One of the reasons why snipers went away in the conventional infantry in the Marine Corps, of which we can talk at a later date or a later time frame about is why that happened. But he took me into his team. And so for the next, next 2 weeks pushing south, every single night what the infantry would do is we were all on this like squeegee, if you will. We would stay online with Lima Company and Kilo Company to our east, and then 3-1 and 2-7. So all of us stayed online and all of us pushed down and would gain house to house, block by block, street by street, clearing every single house along the way, fighting every single insurgent that they could along the way.
And it was absolutely brutal. And so one of the missions that we would run is since the, the Mujahideen had plenty of time to do reinforcements and all the battle preparations, they would have fallback positions. So they would fight us from a house. Incur a ton of casualties on us, and then they would squirt out through a tunnel, or they would come out through the back and move to ancillary positions and continue to fight from further down the street. So one of the techniques that we developed there was Blake would lead us out. So the infantry companies would— it was almost kind of comical— is the infantry would fight from like 8 AM to like 6 PM, pretty much like clockwork every single day. We didn't really do much night fighting. It was almost like people like checking in, you know, like, hey, you know, checking into work, right? Sun comes up, Harriers, Cobras, arty, and then we would fight all day. And then at night we would all bed down. Now we would keep watch and all these things, but they wouldn't really attack us at night. We wouldn't really attack them at night.
But the thing that Blake did, and he was a pioneer of this thing and ballsy as all hell, is he would take us and we would move a block into enemy territory every single night, and we would set up on a position. Remember, like Ethan Place, who shot down the long axis? We would find a position in a building in enemy territory covering a long axis. So when the infantry would push the mujahideen and they would break position and fall back, we would cut them down as they ran across the street to their next position. And so almost every night for the next 2 weeks, we would run run. At the time, it was only like 500 meters, but we would push 500 meters, you know, past the forward line of troops. We would gain surreptitious entry into the house and then set up in these houses where we didn't— it was 4 of us clearing a house in the middle of the night on NODs, PVS-14 Bravos at this time, right? And clear these houses and then take up these positions and then wait for daybreak and then the ensuing fights to occur. Were.
And we did that all the way up until December. And then in December, we had to make a second push. What we did is we, we fought down to Phase Line Fran through the Jolon District. And then in December, there were still tons of pockets of resistance in the city. So they moved our unit further east and had us push back north through different areas of the city. So we conducted a second push bush into Fallujah to be able to clear it in December. Shit. Yeah, dude, it was, it was, it was—
how long were you in Fallujah fighting?
Uh, Fallujah was basically 4 weeks of, of like fighting every single day.
How often are you guys needing resupply? Every day. Every day. How are you getting resupply?
So what we would do is we would own— God, the, the amount of bravery. So I think this is my—
this is like one of the— probably the bloodiest fucking battle since this generation.
Yep, since Hue City. Uh, we lost 100 Americans in that, um, uh, in that specific fight, uh, and then, you know, hundreds more wounded. So we would push down and we would have avenues of escape, right, where our resupplies would come back in. Camp Fallujah was like Bravo Surgical, where anybody that would be seriously wounded would go back, and we were constantly flooding getting, you know, uh, resupplies in, the, the infantry guys. So 4 fucking weeks, every single day, killing every day, every single day, every— and again, I was a pig in a sniper platoon. I did clear my fair share of houses through this thing, but I cannot express to you the amount of bravery that these 18 and 19-year-olds had. So existing in the, you know, podcast, right, space, I am cognizant of the algorithm as much as anybody else is. Right. And so I interview people as well. And this is the thing that breaks my heart. It breaks my heart is I know what hits in the algorithm, right? If I put Delta Force, if I put sniper, if I put SEAL, right, the algorithm picks that that up, right? And it spreads that, and more people get to see those things.
And I think that those are fantastic stories. But the, the, the term hero gets thrown around an awful lot. The men that I have found to be the most heroic are the motherfucking infantry Marines, whether they be Army, whether they be Marines or infantry, whether they be Army or Marines, because because they have terrible weapons systems, terrible gear, right? They have— they, they have— they're, they're living on cigarettes and adrenaline, right? And they every single day would soldier up, soldier on and kick down a door when they knew somebody was on the other side. You know, I've spoken and I've trained and worked with a ton of the whatever, you know, you know, major entities across the world. And they are so kind. Kind. They are so kind to the infantry Marines and soldiers because— and this is never to discredit them— when a D-Boy or a Team Sixer, right, when they're going on to something, there is a ton of other assets that are helping them engage their mission. Now, they have a very high-fidelity, high-probability of success— sorry, high-probability of failure, right? They have to snatch and grab hostage. Totally get it. But to a man, every single— what's so great about those guys is every single one of them, the reverence they have for the 11 Bravo or the 0311 Infantry Marine is beyond reproach.
You know, December 11th, I told you a story earlier on about this, about the book and who I'm giving it to. December 11th was when we lost Greg Rund. And Greg Rund, I said, was in Columbine, right, as a high school student and then joined the Marine Corps. And he helped me out. Me out when I was going through a really rough time. I was going through like my first divorce at like 19. I was doing like all the Marine Corps things. Like, at least it wasn't a stripper, but I, you know, like I had done all the Marines. That was the next one. No, uh, truth is stranger than fiction. No, um, and, and he helped me, man. I was in a dark place. I was dealing with post-traumatic stress or whatever it was at the time. And I remember he'd smoke Parliament cigarettes, right? And he'd help me out with that. We'd drive around something best, dude. I don't—
right, I fucking love Parliament, right?
I don't understand. Smoke? No, not, not since then.
Yeah, yeah, I don't either. Yeah, but damn, I do love a good Parliament.
I think every once in a while it's kind of nice to have a cigarette. Sarah hates it, right? Every once in a while I'm like, nah, man, I just like a cigarette. And then I'm like, smell like crap, right? You know, and hate myself.
I'm gonna have to burn one with you after this.
I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. Let's do it. Um, so December 11th India Company had unknowingly bedded down for the evening across the street from Mujahideen, who had bedded down as well. And so the very first house of the morning, all hell breaks loose and these guys are in contact. I mean, they haven't even finished, you know, digesting their breakfast and they're in the— an absolute fistfight with the Mujahideen. And it was— there's always like a— there's like a survivor's guilt, right? Because I wasn't there this day. I was in a blocking position down the street doing what we would do every single night. And I couldn't be there for this. I couldn't have done anything either way. But, you know, a series of events had happened and it does get kind of hazy. But basically they walked into a hornet's nest right in the beginning of this, of this morning. Marines were wounded very, very quickly. And Greg had a decision to make. There was a wounded Marine in the house and there was a bunch of mujahideen who were, you know, going to kill this guy or this Marine was already dead.
And Greg had a choice and he made the decision to kick the door in and to go in anyway. And so my struggle when I talk to these young Marines and I work as much as I can is like the algorithm we talked about, right? Is like a striker, you know, guy, what is 11 Fox or what, you know, or or an O311, right? They have some incredible, incredible stories of just absolute amounts of unhuman-like bravery. But unfortunately, their stories don't get told as much or don't get as much traction when they're told because it just doesn't, it just doesn't hit as well. And it's so hard for them because I try to, and that's what I write this about, right? Is I try to tell the story from their perspective as best as possible because I would get to go with them oftentimes. And so sometimes we'd be in firefights with them and sometimes we wouldn't. But these guys would kick through a door. Greg went in, got shot immediately, fell to the ground, continued fighting. But then what happens is we have to continue to commit. So you have a decision to make.
Do you commit more forces or do you leave the Marines to die? And these guys always, always chose to commit more forces because we had chosen, we had made a pact with one another to enter into the first circle of hell together and never leave a Marine behind. It wasn't just a slogan to us. These young men lived that. It was heartbreaking to watch this stuff because you watch these young guys, 19 years old, just get fucking chewed up, man. Absolutely chewed up going through this stuff. And they would take the first floor of the house, they'd frag the entry, they'd continue through the house itself, and the Mujahideen would run to the top of the stairwell and start picking these guys off. Every single inch had to be earned that these guys went through. A friend of mine, Travis Pollack, he owns a company now called Texas Custom Rifles, and he makes long guns, right? He's a fantastic guy. He was considered the old guy. He was 23 years old. We were all 19, right? So he's the old guy. He had a bunch of tattoos, and his mom hated his tattoos, right? Because he had them like all over his body and his chest.
She hated his tattoos. But what happened was Travis Pollack went into a house as a Lance Corporal. He got shot 6 times in the chest, all around sappies, through his sappies, all kinds, 6 times in the chest, was bleeding out on the floor. And they're dragging him out, our corpsmen are dragging him out, you know, piss and fucking blood on this linoleum or whatever marble floor thing. And the only thing this guy's asking about is his tattoos, right? He's like, are my tattoos okay? Right? He's like on the edge of death. Right? But the cool thing was, if there is anything cool about it, all of his tattoos happened to be over his vital organs. And so he never got any of his tattoos hit by any of these bullets. So therefore none of his vital organs were hit by all the bullets that penetrated his body. Wow. And he ended up surviving. Right. You know, he was medically separated from the Marine Corps, right? With fucking 6 bullet wounds, right through that. And it's just an amazing, an amazing guy. And one of the people that you would just walk by on the street, just a super kind, normal person running through any, you know, everyday life.
And that's who these people are. They're just normal, good Americans, you know. And then they would take the first floor of the house and then the Mujahideen would barricade because they would— a lot of them were freshly shaved. A lot of them would have their Quran. A lot of them would have said their prayers, right? You could hear hear them screaming to us, right? We would literally be screaming matches back and forth. Our interpreters would be yelling at them, whether it be expletives, whether it be telling them to give up, right? I remember a scenario where we're in this house and we're trying to take the second floor and all of us are down there. They're lobbing grenades down. The Marines are charging up. They have to go up the stairwell. And these guys have M16A4s. It's like a fucking musket, right? They're not CQB experts, right? They're doing their best, right? And so the way they would do it is they would climb the stairs and they would grab up— well, a Marine would be— the one man would be going forward. The two man wouldn't have his gun up. The two man would have his hand on the guy's collar so that when he got shot, he didn't fall forward into the front of the stairwell.
They would yank him back down the stairs to safety. And these guys did this every single day for 4 weeks. Weeks, day in and day out. They fought and fought and fought. And I remember they were screaming, the interpreters— God bless our interpreters— fighting for, for a country that they believed in, right? Fighting for an idea that they believed in, knowing full well what America does to its allies when we're done using them. Screaming, pleading with the mujahideen, literally saying, go up, give up, or meet your And I write in the book and I said, the mujahideen responded with gunfire and the Marines responded with the only way that we could to arrange the meeting. And so they would throw grenades up top of the stairwells, come out, blow the balsa wood doors up and have to take every single room because they were committed to death and taking as many of these young Marines with them. And I cannot overstate the amount of love and bravery I have for these guys and what I want to do is using this to say thank you to them because of who they are. Man, I would just like to second that.
You know, I've said it. I know I said it in Cody's. I think I've said it in Prime Halls that it's fucking Fallujah, man. Like, I've never seen anything like that shit. And You know, I think infantry guys don't get enough credit, especially the Marine Corps. And, um, it really fucking pisses me off, especially when you see— I can't remember, I counted them up one time and it's like hundreds of nonprofits for special operators, SEALs, Green Berets, Delta, DEVGRU, PJs. MARSOC. You just don't see that shit for the infantry. It's fucking bullshit, man. It is fucking bullshit.
You know, it's tough. It's just, it's just a large demographic of people. There are 30,000 infantry Marines in the Marine Corps. It's just hard to wrap your arms around that as a 501, right? And I understand that. It's just that it's the, it's the economy of scale, but the opposite effect, right? There's just too many to be able to handle through that. I'm just so proud of them and just so enamored with what they're able to do because these guys would go through that and they would get a 15-minute break to smoke a cigarette and reload their magazine.
I mean, and every time I interview one of you guys, the best shit is from the infantry. Yeah. You know, the best stories, the best, like the most graphic, you know, and it's, they just don't get enough attention. Yeah, it's fucking bullshit. Good men.
And you know, that's— to me, that's why I, you know, I look at whatever chaos is going around the United States or whatever the, you know, vitriol or that stuff that we're hating each other for, you know, like there is a purity in that love of one another. You know, we would argue politics. It was an election year, so we would argue politics all the time, right? I'm from Northern California, so people would assume what I was, and which is not true, but we would assume we would, you You know, we've debated. Who the fuck is arguing politics?
All of us.
It was like, it was, 'cause there's a lot of boredom, right? You know? And so we're sitting like staring outta nothing and they're like, they're like, this was like 2004. So it was like Bush versus, I forget who, no, I don't know who it was. And it was just, it was funny, you know, like when you're looking at the fucking stacks of tires burning, you know, and you're trying to figure out what to do with the next mission, you know, it was, it was a, it was a good, good group of men. You know, so we lost Greg on December 11th. And the worst part about that was that December 11th is Jane Rund's birthday. And so Jane Rund, who lived in Littleton, Colorado, was having a birthday party at her home when the Marines showed up to her front door. And we have since tried our best. You know, life gets in its way, but we have as a group of people who loved Greg, Ig have tried our best to be in contact with Jane as much as possible, to try to change the day that her son died, you know, to being the day that she gets a phone call, a visit, a knock on the door from somebody that, you know, loved her son.
And it's like these commitments that we make to each other. I talked with her 3 days ago and had like— we're like, we're both crying on the phone, right? You know, talking about it. And one of the things that I think that we could do better as a country is taking care of our gold our families because they are the ones who have paid, I would say, the most to be able to earn our way of life. And being able to take care of them is a debt we owe them. They have given their flesh and blood to us. We can't do anything for the dead, but we can do a lot for the living. And so I'm part of some organizations that do work with that, you know, as best as possible. But again, the infantry is just very large and the units rotate so quickly that it's very hard to be able to wrap their arms around it. What organizations are you a part of? So the, the Marine Reconnaissance Foundation is one of the organizations that I've been helping a lot as well. They are a 501. It is— the difference between them is they are an all-volunteer organization.
No single member of the organization takes a paycheck whatsoever. So there are natural business expenses and things like that that happen. But no, there's no— I understand why 501s have a C-level structure because they have to run like a business. Totally understand the compensation. The Marine Reconnaissance Foundation chooses not to, and because of that, they're able to have much more money that they, you know, get donated to them go straight to the Marine or Recon Marines specifically. So we have the, the Recon Challenge is happening this Friday, and the Recon Challenge is like a big homecoming for us. It's like a 30-mile endurance course where we go and do all things Recon And it's active duty guys only right now, but they'll— we won't jump in, but we'll helocast in, swim ashore, and then start a 30-mile ruck movement with a 55-pound ruck and do, you know, anything from breaching to shooting to rappelling to radios to land navigation, all in this competition. Every single Marine carries an air panel on the back of their ruck that has a name of a fallen recon Marine. Marine who died at some point during service to our country.
And the Marine Recon Foundation brings out Gold Star families from Recon to come to the Recon Challenge, be a part of that, see their son or daughter or husband— sorry, son or husband's name running across there, as are the Marines. When they cross the finish line with that name, they carry the dog tags of the fallen Marine and they put it on a, you know, they put it on a, you know, the Soldier's Cross, if will, and they kneel and they say thank you to that Marine. And then the Marine Recon Foundation, all self-funded, takes the Gold Star families, flies them to Hawaii for a week for a family event on Lanikai Beach with a luau, a private tour of the Missouri. They go to the mountains in Oahu and they plant a tree in honor of their, their fallen Recon Marine. And it's this creating a community within the community. A lot of these Marines died many years ago, but they keep coming back because this is their family now. Recon is one of the most special places I've ever been a part of in the Marine Corps because they don't just preach brotherhood, they breathe brotherhood and they mean it.
So the Marine Recon Foundation is a really, really good organization that does that. I'm also— so to answer your point on the larger infantry, there are organizations that are starting that are trying to help. So I'm a Marine gunner, so an infantry weapons officer. The Marine Gunners Association is the same structure as the Marine Reconnaissance Foundation. No board members get paid a single— I'm the treasurer for it, right? So I hope I don't go to jail. No, there is no, no compensation for us whatsoever, and we only help infantry Marines now, because again, snipers have an organization, recon has an organization, MARSOC. We help infantry Marines. And because of that, now the Master Gunnery Sergeants, the op— the operations chiefs, so our enlisted counterparts to gunners, are now starting, or in the conversation of starting, their own organization. So it's like a rising tide raises all boats in this instance, is now we're going to have two organizations that directly support Marine infantry specifically. But it's a very large— I mean, small organizations trying to take care of a 30,000 Marine Marine, you know, group for whatever issues, whether that be, you know, I— the Marine Recon Foundation helped me.
I had a team member who took his own life. And by the time that I had finished getting the news on the phone call that my team member had taken his own life, I had airplane tickets that were booked for me without my asking by the Marine Recon Foundation to go to be with his family and to give him a paddle, which is a reconnaissance tradition, and to give him a paddle, their family a paddle in honor of his service. Service. Like, that's the stuff that makes America what it is, right? I don't believe in America because she's perfect. I believe in America because she's possible and because people can do things like this. Like, the fucking hatred and the vitriol, the Republican versus Democrat, it tears me apart. I literally lose sleep over this because this is not who we are. We are better than this. We cannot continue to be reduced into this. A Republican is not an enemy. A Democrat is not an enemy. Like, we are just people who look at two sides of the same coin, right? We're trying to work together, you know, through this thing. And I cannot stand trying to break one another apart because I've seen us at our best.
I've seen Americans who have no conversation surrounding politics, do everything and risk everything. And when they can't save them on the battlefield, they're there for their families in the end. And that's the stuff that matters, uh, matters for us.
That's cool to hear, man. I appreciate it.
Very cool. Very cool.
Should we take another break?
I'm good to push. If you are, you can take a break. Let's take a break.
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Tallest building. What do you think, Sean? We're high. All right, AJ, we're back from the break. I think we're getting ready to head to sniper school. Yeah, finally, after you've done a whole bunch of sniper stuff.
Yeah, dude, I—
we're going to send you to sniper sniper school. It's got to help. What does that mean? What is that like, going to sniper school after you've done the job in the bloodiest battle in modern history?
It was— I mean, do you even, do you even know how many guys you guys killed? No, no. I mean, people like the, the Abrams in Fallujah were just decimating people. Right? I mean, there was just dead bodies everywhere. I mean, the dogs would eat them. You know, we would— we had to clear them as best as possible because they were like IDing them. You know, like it was— it was— there was just— we would go into rooms in Fallujah where there would be 10 or 15 dead guys who had been there for a couple of days. And I remember— I remember walking into a room and human bodies just excrete fluids and you would walk in and and it would hit you. And I remember a guy slipped on whatever the goo was and like fell into this. Oh man. And but you have to keep clearing the room, right? Because they would reoccupy positions and stuff. So yeah, it was— the carnage in Fallujah was unlike anything I'd ever seen. It was, it was just like, again, you become numb to it because the— just the amount of it. I think what shocked people the most was really the finality of death.
That's where a lot of us— we had lost some people in OIF-1, but we had— 3/5 had lost 19 Marines in, in Fallujah. And it was, you know, not Vietnam numbers by any means, but the largest numbers that we had seen in a very long time. And so it was just hard. You would, you know, these poor guys would get, you know, I'd hear them, you know, we'd sleep in the same rooms with them at night, you know, and they would sit there and smoke cigarettes and laugh. And sometimes you would hear people people kind of like going through their own personal hell because they know that they would get— they would be afraid to go to sleep because they knew they had to wake up the next morning and do it again. And so there was really no— there was never any victory for them to get through that. But one of the things that mattered in Fallujah was on January 30th, 2005. So the city was deemed clear on— I think it was December 24th, 2004. We had cleared most of the city. It was now allowing civilians to come back in. But January 30th was Iraq's first free and fair elections, and 3-5 was lucky enough to provide security for that.
And so you had Iraqis from all walks of life, women, men, having their little thumbprint, and they would hold their thumbprint up to us, you know, as they'd walk by after they finally had their opportunity to vote. They'd hold their thumbprint and they would say, thank you. Would you go back though?
Would you ever go back to Iraq?
Yeah. You know, I have— I've become very close with a friend of mine, with a new friend of mine. And I'd love to introduce you to him. His name's Mike. Mike was a young kid in Iraq. He's ethnically Kurdish. A very similar story. Ethnically Kurdish, taught himself English by watching movies. And then in 2014, he was 18 years old and signed up to to be an interpreter for the 101st, the 82nd. I think he worked with like 6 different SEAL teams, a Marine Special Operations team. This is the most American story ever. And he was captured by ISIS, you know, broke out of prison, like all kinds of stuff. Holy shit. It's wild. Gets adopted by a United States Marine. My old sniper platoon sergeant and Fritz Slayer was his name. So my platoon sergeant in Fallujah eventually went over to Marine Special Operations as a counterintel guy and then met Mike. They became friends. He had eventually, like, adopted him and gave him and worked with him to get his SIV. So he came to the United States. And then what does this guy do when he gets to the United States? He enlists in the Marine Corps to become an 0311 rifleman because he's still— because in his own words, he's like, I feel like I didn't do enough.
What are you talking about? So we met at University of San Diego at the Veterans Center. We were just having it like, you know, like trying to figure out how to pay for school. And he's in a master's in cybersecurity and he's like 36 years old. Just an amazing guy. He goes back to Iraq a lot and he tells me about it and he talks about how good it is now, how like nice it is. And I would be interested in going back, but I wouldn't go back without him. It's also hard for me because I don't like— do I need a gun? Do I need security? Right. It's weird to enter into that space where we never really technically ended the— I mean, we technically like left, but I don't know that we like ended it, you know.
I just meant, uh, I guess I didn't mean— it's kind of hypothetical. If it was safe, you know, would you go back to Fallujah? Yeah. Would you see what that looks like?
Yeah. It'd be interesting to walk those streets again. Yeah. Yeah. I'll bet it would be. It was a mess. I mean, everything was on fire, just decimated. Looked like Armageddon. We eventually had to like backburn because of the Taliban or the mujahideen would use the food and supplies that we would pass by. They would circle back around us. And so we had to backburn a whole bunch of stuff. It was wild. It was absolutely wild. Guys used anything, any— the ingenuity they would have to use RC cars. They would break into stores like little convenience stores and they would get RC cars and they would drive RC cars to detonate IEDs. They would drive RC cars with like cameras on them as best as possible. Just Marines just being in, like, having a bunch of ingenuity because they just stopped wanting to lose guys, you know, carelessly.
Damn, man. So sniper school.
Yeah. So I get my shot. So generally you only get, you know, 1 or 2 shots in sniper school. They have about a 75% attrition rate. And attrition at the time, attrition was the mission. And so it is a very tough course to get through.
this is 2004, 2005.
Yeah, so July 2005, I go to sniper school in Camp Pendleton. So now also, there's the time— there's 4 sniper schools in the Marine Corps, and we had this like competition between, you know, West Coast versus East Coast, right? Um, of which will come into play a little bit later on as well. But I went to West Coast sniper school. Uh, we like to call it the real sniper school. Um, but they are, uh, notorious for having a very physical entrance exam. And so without going into like too much detail, basically what happens is if you think you're going to get a, you know, if you go in with a perfect score, a 300 score, when you test with them, you're averaging about 50 points below that. In order to get into school, you need to have a what's called a first class PFT score in the Marine Corps, which is a minimum score of 225. And they don't count pull-ups if you don't do a complete dead hang, if there's any kipping like they are just by-the-book snipers. And I totally understand it, right? Eventually I was an instructor there later on. And so I understood there that they just don't sacrifice on standards because if you, if you sacrifice on standards once, right, you know, then that becomes the new, the new, I guess, level.
So through a series of weird events, I end up not scoring very well on the physical entrance exam. Again, my physicality was not there, right? You know, or for whatever reason, season, you know, it was. And I technically scored a 224. I think it was a 224 getting into school, uh, which did not meet the requirements. But through an error, like, they miscounted my crunches. And so, like, my crunches to get in, they— I thought I had a 226. I ended up having a 224. They made a clerical mistake. They added the, you know, they did the math wrong. Wrong, and they let me into the school unbeknownst to them. But then 3 days later, they were reconciling the record, like putting it into the digital thing, and they were like, this motherfucker didn't pass. And so I get a call. They're like, pshh, right? As I'm going, like, you know, pig at the hatch, right? And sniper school is about pigs and hogs, right? So there are these things. So I apparently didn't pass the PFT, and I am standing in front of the chief instructor of sniper school who is like reading me the riot act at this point, like, what, who, you're a fucking liar, right?
What's going on here? And I have this Force Recon Marine who I've never really dealt with Force Recon guys before. Bald, tattoos on his knuckles. He's got the jump dive, right? Which is synonymous with us. And he's like just staring at me, right? Baby blue eyes, wants to like kill me. The fact that we're having a conversation about a barely passing PFT score is like an abdication of his, you know, his entire being as, as a whole, right? So he— Sniper School has a choice. They can drop me right now and admit they made a mistake, but they didn't allow other people to enter the course because I was— I had, you know, passed that threshold. So they turned other people away so they could admit their mistake, or they could just thrash the piss out of me until I quit, and then nobody would ever be any of the wiser, right? So fortunately, they chose the matter. And they were like, hey, we're just gonna make this pig quit. And so I was like a marked man going through sniper school. But I got a chance to meet another two people that profoundly impacted my life.
The first one—
let's jeopardize our integrity to teach this guy who we think jeopardized his integrity. That's actually a perfect fucking sense.
So it's like, if it's Marine Corps logic right there, is what it is. So I meet Staff Sergeant Dave Slawski, uh, and then a gentleman by the name of Corporal Wesley Payne. So the way that we worked, educational, uh, way that they did it was very different than my early education in the infantry. What they did was they had one main instructor that would teach, I don't know, uh, stalking, or teach, you know, long-range marksmanship, or what. And then you had your TAC instructors who would be like, these were a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. I'd have a marksmanship instructor who would teach us internal, external, and terminal ballistics, and then we would have our TAC instructors who were like our mentors through this thing. So we had, um, you know, Dave Slawski, who was just the most sarcastic, unimpressed guy, you know, by anything in the entire world. Loved him, you know, absolute to death. And then a gentleman by the name of Wesley Payne, who I describe as a 6-foot-3 square jaw broad, like black Terminator is what he looked like. And all like this guy in Fallujah. So he was with 3-1 in Fallujah as a sniper in a gunfight, pulled shrapnel out of his own head and then continued to fight for the next 3 weeks.
Right. Like this is the kind of person. And he was the same rank as I was. I was a corporal at this time. And I'm like, there's no fucking way I'm going to make it through sniper school with people like this, you know, in this caliber. But those two guys like took me under their wing. They PT'd me every single day. They were like, we're going to guarantee that you never struggle with the PFT ever again. So every day, and any single, you know, we had a piss break, I would be in the office. I didn't get to pee much in sniper school. I'd go to the office and they had me doing all kinds of things to make sure that I was nice. Like, I— they knew that I was smart, but they were going to make me strong. And so I really appreciate it. I mean, again, hindsight, like, I appreciated that. We go through everything and I have an absolute Knackford. I'm loving sniper school because what I say about sniper school is that the sniper school at the time was 12 weeks. While the, the subject matter was different, I believe that I learned more knowledge in sniper school, in the 3 months of sniper school, than I did in the totality of my high school career.
It was just so much information to know, to pack through, and to understand because you were operating ahead of friendly lines in enemy territory, being the eyes, ears, and potentially trigger finger for that battalion commander. And that was a ton of responsibility. And so their, their markers, right, and where they were at were like a wall of expectations to get through. And a lot of guys didn't get through that, understandably. But, um, I just took to these guys. They were making me in their own image. And so I was very fortunate to have these guys kind of go through that.
Did everybody teaching have the experience that you had?
At that time, we were in a really rare time in the Marine Corps where everybody was somebody, you know, everybody had some sort of experience somewhere. And we all knew we were going back to Iraq. So Afghanistan was kind of cursorily happening, right? You know, but everybody was going back. So we had Iraq veterans teaching sniper school to guys who were going right back to Iraq. And so it was really this like utopia. Utopia right now. Again, there was pig hog. I got jacked up all the time by these guys. Totally understand it. But we were able to compare notes during sniper school. So Dave Slavske and Wesley Payne were— we break it into field skills and marksmanship, and there's always a constant, you know, you know, bucking up because field skills is what we believe sniping is about, right? The marksmanship guys feel that's what sniping is about. So we're always kind of arguing with each other. But these guys were mission planning and employment. And so they taught us how to play chess, proverbially, like, so they wanted us, they said, Wesley Payne specifically said, you exist to take chess pieces off the board.
You are, your primary mission isn't to be a killer. If you want to be a killer, go be a machine gunner. You're here to strategically remove pieces from the board to help the infantry unit. And so they taught us a lot about advocacy. They taught us a lot about like politics, like how to work through and get work work. You know, part of sniping is being able to get employed. So getting a Marine Corps haircut, rolling your sleeves the right way, looking the part that the Marine Corps really, really likes— those things pay dividends when you're briefing a commander who's an infantry commander who's used to that. If I roll in there with my no-boot blouse on, got some Vans and long hair, they instantly attack my credibility on that, whether it's right or not. It is the way that it is. And so they teach us about not wanting to lose our voice. To, to, to, you know, we're always under observation. So we learned long-range marksmanship, you know, unknown distance, known distance. We learned to read the wind. And then we learned a lot about mission planning and employment. But this was the time.
So remember that sniper rifle had disappeared in 2004. And during this period is when the first series of what would eventually be called Juba those started to come to life. So what, you know, Juba did, right, was whether it— now, again, I will be 100% transparent. Whether Juba was a person or a cell is up to anyone's determination, right? So I think that it was a cell of people acting as snipers, but Juba may have been a singular individual of where the story kind of leads to. So we would— they would film these videos, and I don't know if you've ever seen them, but they're fucking— watched them this morning— they're fucking awful. It just— it's just brutal. So they'd show us these videos, right? And you'd have the, you know, the guttural call to prayer, which was like a war hymn for them. And then have the horses neighing, and then you have a dude, you know, with either an SVD, right? And they would draw these little shitty tick marks right? And they would upload them to Ogrish after, or, you know, Al Jazeera. And they'd film these poor Americans, you know, whatever service they were.
And it was gut-wrenching to watch these things because you're watching Americans in their final moments of life. And you know that, you know that this— they're going to die or something's going to happen. And they go and their fucking pride and their, their, their, their laughter and their joy in our carnage. Right. You know, like it was, it was, it was, it was infuriating. But in their hubris, by uploading these things to the internet to try to, you know, scare us through propaganda, they, they gave us, they gave us intelligence. They gave us information to analyze. So as a class in sniper school, this was this professional, you know, academy, super tough academy, professional academy. Dave Slaski and Wesley Payne had us watch the videos together and analyze that. And they taught us to turn the map around, to try to look— and interesting. So when we talk about masculinity early on, we talk about like empathy and compassion, right? Turning the map around is literally empathy, right? In a different form. It's saying, how would I do this, right? If I were to walk in your shoes as a sniper, how would I kill Americans?
And so we sat as a collective group of 18 to 24 pigs and a bunch of sniper instructors solving a collective problem. That was what sniper school was about. It was this, it was this institution of thinking outside of the box or trying to solve a problem. The United States government had, you know, what they always do is try to throw money at a problem. They bought listening devices, they bought, you know, nets and, you know, Hesco barriers and all these things. And they bought these things like these acoustic trackers that if a shot rang out, then they could acoustically backtrack where the shot came And my first comment was, yeah, but doesn't someone have to get shot first, right? You know, like, that's very reactive. And I know what they're trying to do, but someone's got to die first before this tool is even remotely successful. And then we have to, like, get everyone together and go, like, chase this, you know, you know, ghost story down somewhere. And so we worked through that whole process, and it was, it was fascinating to be able to learn that and to try to do what we call a red cell analysis, right?
How would we, how would do this. And Wesley Payne and Dave Slawski were completely instrumental in that, uh, to be able to help shape that framework. And then, you know, we go to stalking, and stalking was one of my favorite things in sniping, but I struggled with that as I struggle with a lot of things. And Wesley Payne was very, very kind to, uh, help me out on an occasion where I didn't need to. And so this is where things got a little difficult, right, or different, is sniper school is a lot about science but a lot about art. And this is where an infantry Marine commander struggles understanding sniping as an art form, because art, what I learned from my mother, right, is it defies boxes, it defies boundaries, it defies limitations. And so sniping as an art is trying to figure out how to hunt your enemy, how to figure out what they're doing against you, and find a unique or novel way to able to stop them or take them out. And that's what sniper school was about. So part of that was stalking and learning to veg in and blend into your environment.
And it was super, super fun to go through that. But some of that nuance is that stalking allowed for sniper instructors to help out a student if they wanted to or not. And a very long story, very, very short. Short, I needed to get 100 to be able to graduate sniper school. I was like, skin of my teeth, right? Not going to make it if I didn't like blow 100. And getting 100 is starting from 1,500 meters out from the truck. And the truck is 2 observers, right? You know, think of like, oh God, whatever the movie is, The Hunted or something like that. And there's 2 guys with like— and they're not using like run-of-the-mill binoculars. They're using like Leica Vector 10, like super good glass. And they're just scoping this, you know, 1,500 meter by 500 meter kind of plot of land. And we fall off the truck 1,500 meters out and we have to get to within 200 meters of the truck by, you know, skull dragging, weasel walking, whatever the techniques are to get to within 200 meters. And then we have to set up a final firing position and inside of this 200 meter meters.
And then we have to take a shot on— it's firing a blank. You take a simulated shot on the truck, and then the truck has to ID, and I have to be able to tell what that ID is. So I have to burn a window— not like physically burn, but like burn a window through the veg, be able to see my target. They can't see me. I have to fire a shot. Then they hold up a, you know, Yankee 7, or, you know, card, or whatever it is. I have to be able to see that card, identify that and then the walker walks within 10 meters of us, of where I'm in my hide site. And then the sniper instructors have 3 chances to try to find me in that position. And if I pass all of that, I get 90 points. And then what they'll do is they take the walking stick and they touch the gun, they touch the head, and they touch— or they touch the gun, they touch the scope, and then they touch the head. If the wa— if the the spotters in the truck cannot see you through all of that, you get 100.
Shit. Yeah, dude. And so, and you have like 15 stocks in sniper school. You gotta maintain an average. I was at the point where I needed to get an absolute 100. And so the story goes is this, and this is like, some people might get mad at this and I don't really give a shit, right? Is I am under 200 meters. I'm like, I'm in my final firing position. I'm wearing cotton, burlap, vegetation everywhere. It's in the middle of summer in Camp Pendleton. It's like Africa hot, right? I've run out of water. I got to piss at this point. Like, it's just— I'm losing my mind, right? So I get into position and I'm— and I think I was in like the low sitting position, which is not comfortable, but I'm sitting there. I've got my drag bag all kind of together. And then I take my shot, my simulated shot with my blank, and in front of my muzzle, muzzle. I didn't clear my muzzle. So basically you need to be able to clear a line of sight about 2 meters in front of your muzzle because of the blast of the bullet. So I fired my blank and right in front of me a bush wiggled and I was like, oh, fuck, like I'm dead.
Because now what happens is I have to take a second shot under observation. Like when I get the walker, he comes within 10 meters. I have to take— I have to ID and take the second shot. And they do the the tap, tap, tap, that's under direct observation. So if the spotter can see that, I only get an 80 because I fired and ID'd. It's an extremely complex process, but I fired my first shot. No, excuse me. I was laying in the prone position. I remember this. Sorry. I was laying in the prone position, right? I had to get as low as possible because I was super close. So I fired my first shot. I see the bush move, and then I hear the walker coming coming towards me, right? And they're like, the walkers are non— um, they're, you know, just unbiased, you know, tools basically. So the, the truck will move the walker around if he sees something, and those like, freeze, right? And everyone has to freeze, and then the walker goes and spots someone, and that person gets— it's like hide and seek basically, right? And the walker is the arbiter of that.
So I hear the walker coming through the dried brush. I've shot my first shot, so I have 70 points at this place, but I've moved a bush in front of me and there's no way that I can get— I'm done. I'm toast. Right. And I remember hearing the walker come up and I hear him come over the radio and it is Wesley Payne. So my TAC instructor, Corporal Wesley Payne. Right. But on the glass is Staff Sergeant Slavske, who is known as the Pig Killer. So what he is, he's really good on the glass. He's a great observer and nobody gets by on Dave Slavsky, right? So Payne's walking up and I'm like, I'm fucking toast. And the walker's like, yep, we got movement. We're going to, you know, have him ID, right? Let him get through the scenario. And I fire my second shot and that stupid bush moves again. And I was like, this is it. I'm toast. I'm only going to get an 80. I'm about to fail sniper school. I was still the runt, so I only get one shot at sniper school, right? I'm not getting another one, right? And then they have to now walk the walker within 3 feet of me.
Excuse me, I'm sorry. They have to walk the walker within 1 foot of me since I have fired 2 shots at this point. So they get next to me and they're like, he has a little walking stick and they're like, hey, Roger, pig at your feet, right? And he was 2 feet away at this point. And they're like, and Wesley Payne says negative. You get— and now the walkers, or excuse me, the spotters get 2 more tries and they're like, Roger, take 1 step forward, pig at your feet. I'm dead to rights, right? Wesley Payne's toes are now touching my rib cage as I'm laying right here. They've technically got me and they're like, "Pick at your feet." And Wesley is standing there and he goes, "Who is this?" He doesn't move his lips. He's under observation. He goes, "Who is this?" And I go— and talking on a stock lane is an immediate droppable offense from sniper school. And I go, "Squirtle was shooting your friend," you know? And, and he goes— and now Payne has to make a choice. And you can feel the weight shift. And they're like, "Picket your feet!" And he says, "Negative." And so now they get one more shot.
And Wesley Payne— and a lot of people may be mad at this or whatever it is, and again, I don't really frankly care— is they say, "Roger, baby step forward." And Payne takes a baby step forward, puts his left foot on the small of my back, and then takes his right foot and is now standing on my butt cheek. Cheeks. He gains 4 inches in the process, right? And they're like, pig at your feet. And he goes, negative. And Dave Slawski is now 200 meters away. I can literally hear him yelling at this point. And he's like, you're telling me there isn't a literal pig under your feet? And he goes, negative. That's 3 tries. And he walks away and he like ends the thing. So I get the 100. And what Payne says to me is, he He says, this is your one shot, Pashuti. Don't fuck it up. Consider yourself hugged, right? Like a pig hugger, right? He says, consider yourself hugged. Don't fuck it up. So what happens is we gained a relationship during the time in sniper school, and I worked really hard to be able to try to emulate them as best as possible.
And I had kind of like won them over from like working. Like, I wasn't good in the beginning, but I got better in the end. And I worked my ass off to be able to be a really, really good sniper. And he gave me a shot. Shot, and it eventually allowed me to graduate sniper school. The thing that I found out 20 years later when I was telling Wesley Payne this story and reminiscing about this after he and I are both retired, he says, the funny thing is Dave Slaski in the truck did the same thing for Wesley Payne when he was a sniper student, you know, 3 years beforehand. So it's this way of being able to pull people forward, right, and help them through this entire entire, you know, situation. I was fortunate enough that my grades were good enough through school that I was— I graduated as the class honor man, the highest GPA. Thankfully, stalking wasn't part of the GPA in that. And then they, they made me instructor's choice. And instructor's choice was the one, like, the one that meant something. It was the first time I felt validated because it's something that all of the instructors vote on, on the person they would most like most want to serve with in combat.
So my 3 months in sniper school, I had had this sort of, you know, almost epiphany. Everything that I had learned up until that point with 3/5 and, you know, Fallujah had really culminated in this moment where I got a chance to prove myself. And I proved myself to the sniper instructors, and they saw me as one of their own. And so when we graduate sniper school, we have a former Marine sniper from the last war. He gives us what's called a hog hog's tooth. Are you familiar with a hog's tooth at all? Mm-mm. So hog's tooth, again, hog is hunter of gunmen. A hog's tooth is, it goes by the idea of live by the gun, die by the gun. And it came from World War I with British, originally British snipers. When they would kill an enemy sniper in World War I and they had the opportunity, they would take the last round chambered out of the sniper's gun and that would be their their trophy, if you will, that was the bullet that was meant to take their life. And if they wore that bullet around their neck, they could never die.
And that was the thing that protected them in combat. And so the truest definition of a hog's tooth for us is killing an enemy sniper and taking the last bullet out of that gun. And so what we do as a symbol of that is when we graduate sniper school, every sniper gets a hog's tooth, a 7.62x51, 7.62x51, Hollow point boat tail, and a sniper from the last war puts that on 550 cord around their neck. And that's the graduation ceremony from sniper school. And so I had a Vietnam sniper that did that, and he whispered in my ear and he was like, you know, good luck and good hunting. And I graduated sniper school and deployed to Iraq 3 weeks later for my third tour.
Damn, that's cool. Yeah, it was fun.
Again, it was like, it's these moments in time that like when you have, there's like letter of the law and spirit of the law, right? And they made some concessions. But when I say I wasn't supposed to be where I'm not supposed to be in this chair, you know, yeah, I worked my ass off, right? I didn't get anything for free. But there were people through that entire process that helped me along the way. And I would be remiss if I didn't, if I didn't share that story, because I think that it helps turn other people around and saying, how can I help somebody else out? How can I make them better than me? Wesley Payne and Dave Slaski wanted to make me better than them, and they did. Did. And they— and, and, and my job, my way to pay that back was to do the same thing to the next generation. And you're going back to Iraq.
I am. So you get back to Iraq, finally a sniper. Finally a sniper.
My God, it was a journey. What's your loadout? So, um, that time frame, uh, M16A4.
Sniper with an M16?
Yep, it's the Marine Corps. Uh, shit. Sniper with an M16A4 with an RCO and a Knight's Armament suppressor, and over the— not an over-the-barrel, an extended suppressor. So I had like, you know, like, you know, like a black powder— what's an RCO? Uh, Rifleman Combat Optics. So like a, a Trijicon, you know, early versions of the Trijicon. Okay, fixed 3 power. Uh, I don't know if it was first or second focal plane, I don't remember. Um, and, uh, on a Picatinny rail. And then I had an M40A3 3. So that had bipods on it.
It didn't have a Remington 700, right? Yep.
Remington 700 short action, designed by the Marine Corps Shooting Team. A very different kind of process, but the Marine Corps Shooting Team likes very heavy guns because they're more accurate when they're in a bench. Uh, but they designed them and we carry them. So I had a 24-pound sniper rifle. Um, holy shit. Yeah, it weighed as much as a 240 Bravo. Right on, man. Yep. So I had that and then I like an M9, and I was a terrible shot with it. What's an M9? The pistol, the Beretta, which, yeah, I would like the Beretta sidearm. Like I would sooner throw the pistol at somebody than shoot at them with it. Suppressed? No, no way. No way. We gotta pump the brakes a little bit. This is the Marine Corps. I didn't have any bluing on my M9. That shit was silver. I looked like Saddam running around with some silver-ass pistols. Nice. Well, I got you a present.
Really? I did. You want it?
Yeah. Holy shit. It's not the Marine Corps here, but—
oh my God. Clear and safe. Here you go. Wow. So that is the P365 Macro from Sig Sauer with the brand new optics line. Holds 17 rounds in the magazine. In the pipe, plus one in the pipe. And you know, I got a buddy over at Sig— I love Sigs, they're the shit, aren't they? Oh my gosh. And, uh, so he wanted me to give that to you. And I got another buddy over at Silencer Shop. Are you familiar with Silencer Shop? I'm not. Well, they gave me the Sig Sauer can to give you. I mean, I figure you're a sneaky guy. I appreciate Lots of sniper work. We might, uh, I mean, hopefully that doesn't come in handy anytime soon, but you know, always a good thing to have. And so freaking cool. So Silencer Shop, they have these kiosks all over the country in these gun stores, and, uh, basically they really streamline the process to get suppressors. And, uh, if you go on there, they got a pretty damn good selection. And the other thing they do is they also fight for gun rights. Yeah, so it's a really cool company. Wow.
But, uh, and they were ecstatic to hear that you were coming. Really? Yeah.
Well, thank you so much. This is super kind of you. I am— I was not expecting this. This is great. And it fits.
You weren't expecting a SIG pistol with a SIG suppressor? And no shit, not a bad podcast to come on, huh? No kidding. Thank you. You're welcome, man. Break that in here in a little bit. Oh God.
Does it have bipods that I can put on it? Because I'm usually better with bipods. I could probably get you one.
Thank you very much. Yeah, man. I really appreciate that. You're welcome.
Wow. So we go to Iraq '06 and it's police operations we've talked out a little bit, you know, the sandstorm was the first 2 weeks of that deployment. A lot of consternation, a lot of trying to figure out where we are and what we look like. But that was a very good deployment for snipers to be hunting because that's who— but that, like, the infantry didn't have an offensive capability. They were predominantly maintaining firm bases, right? And then driving roads to maintain the patrol bases. That would get blown up to keep the supply lines open. It was this whole like, these poor guys were just super frustrated through that. And so they looked to snipers to be their offensive capability. And we, we hunted every single day in the Zaidan and we put, they just weren't expecting us down there. And, you know, different units moving into specific areas. But that was like, that was a sniper deployment. Ghillie suits in veg. Yeah. Ghillie suits in veg near the Euphrates. The Euphrates, when they would come from the Zaidan to Amariya, south of Fallujah, they would have— they would ferry weapons in the evening. And so our sniper team would just post up on a long axis on the Euphrates.
We did have cans on the M16A4s. And so a lot of people met their end in the Euphrates there. And it was, it was, it was a hunting trip down there. You know, it was, it was 4. So Jimmy Proudman, Gabe White, Tony Scardino and myself were the 4-man sniper element down with India Company in that area. And I had a really good working relationship with a guy named Captain Len Coleman. He was the company commander. And what I mean, talk about trusting your, your attachments. So as an attachment, as a SEAL, you get attached to a unit and there's sometimes potentially distrust or you don't work together well or whatever the thing is. We were always attachments and Captain Coleman trusted us explicitly. And our rule was we would never lie to him. We would never, ever violate that trust. And so we kept that. And he allowed us to hunt a lot down there. You know, there was a moment where, you know, I joke, you know, a knife to a gunfight. And I think we were talking about that earlier on, one of my, like, less cool moments. But again, the team comes together.
We were in the Zaidan and we'd just play the idea of turning the map around. How do we, how do we hunt these guys? Right? We're sick and tired of getting hunted by them. Let's be, let's be aggressive. And so we did some map studies. We had already taken out a couple of IED emplacers in the iron and zinc kind of intersections. We had let them know the Marines had landed pretty quickly, right? We're an aggressive, you know, force of people. And so we established that baseline and then we started to start, we started started to spread out a little bit and hunt them in their own backyards. And so we got into this, you know, huge, like, vegetated area near kind of a farm field and on the cusp of a small little village. And we found it in the middle of the night. I get— we have like a 6-man element at this point. Sometimes a lot of the commanders in OIF-1, snipers and Marine snipers operated in 2-man pairs, a partner pair. In OIF-2 in Fallujah, they were required to be in 4-man elements. In, you know, OIF, whatever it turned into in 2006, we were mandated to be in 6-man elements at a minimum.
And then in Afghanistan, when I was a reconnaissance Marine, we were minimum— we were mandated to be in a minimum of 8-man elements. And these are all levied on us from higher echelons, not understanding that our stealth is our security. They think that security equals numbers, body armor, helmets, throat protectors, groin sectors. These are all leveled requirements that we have to wear as snipers operating in Iraq in 2006. Absolutely wild. And there was no way that we could ask for waivers or have any kind of deviation from that because we're not— we weren't SOCOM. And so SOCOM has waivers because they're SOCOM, right? We're a conventional force operating and doing a lot of the same things, but we're a conventional asset that's owned army or Marine commander. So there just was no leeway in that. So I'm in like this fucking RoboCop outfit as best as possible, trying to stay concealed in all these different places through the Zaydan. But what that does is when you have a society that has too many rules, you know, you make everybody criminals, right? And so in this thing, it's like if I need to be effective as a sniper, I would have to take my helmet or my, you know, chest rig or my plates or whatever it is is and leave the wire with that, take a security halt, take all that shit off, put it in my ruck, and then continue to patrol if I wanted to.
Because they wanted us to stalk in a ghillie suit with a fucking flak jacket on, you know, either under or over. And you're like, that doesn't— I get it, I get what they're trying to do, right? But none of that makes sense, right? So we're sitting in this hide site, and I'm sitting there, and I'm, you know, I have my, my musket next to me, right? It should have been over my lap. It 100% should have been over my lap. Like, you don't— we don't sleep without our gear completely on, right? We never take our boots off in a hide site. We never— like, these are lessons that we've, we've learned in blood over this period, right? Our gear is always on. We're always ready to go. Uh, so I'm sitting in a ghillie suit or some sort of like a quarter ghillie, and I have my rifle and I place it next to me. It's the middle of the day in the sun, like early spring, so my team is mostly on a rest cycle and I'm like the only one up. It's not like— everybody goes to sleep during the afternoon in Iraq, so nothing's happening.
So I'm chilling there, and I'm like, literally, I got a Strider knife, right? And I'm like picking my nails. I'm not like looking at my nails, I'm just picking at my nails, looking out, right? Just the radio's on my— you know, we've all been there, right? You know, just kind of sitting there bored on mission number 800 while you're staring out into nothing. And then about 40 yards ahead of me, two men round a corner and they start walking towards us. Now they can't see us because we're all ghillied up and we're in defilade, so we're super well vegged and super well hidden. And they're walking directly towards us. One of them has an AK, I think, right? Like, I see a sling and I can kind of see— I don't know if it was an AK-47 or 74, I couldn't tell you, but they have an AK slung on their back and they have like this little black box in their hand, and I didn't know what it was. And so now I see them like coming right for us, and I start clicking. So we had like, instead of being like whistling or whatever, I would click.
I would click at my team. And that was either a squeeze like on the thigh or a click, but I couldn't move my hands, right? So I'm trying to reach for my weapon system. These guys are coming towards me and I start clicking and my team isn't hearing me click and I can't click louder because they're getting closer. So I get this point of like no return. They're 15 meters away from me and the only thing that I can think to do is jump out of the bush at them and start chasing them. And I'm yelling while I'm doing this, right? So I'm like, yeah, right? I never would have occurred to me. I don't— because like, they're, they're looking right at me. They are literally coming into my hide site because apparently my hide site was also their hide site, right? So they're walking to me. I'm trying to like not grab— and again, hindsight being what it is. I'm like, right, I jump out and I have a fucking knife in my hand and I start chasing these guys and they freak out because again a bush just jumped out of nowhere. Yeah, they freaked out.
They start running and then I realize as I'm running, I go, shit, right? Like I've got a knife and I'm bringing a knife to a gunfight here. Luckily they were super panicked and they didn't do much, but my team— Jimmy Proudman jumps up, Tony Scardino's got the parasol, and he comes come— like, God, these guys, again, the team, they come up and they start— Tony's like almost like hip-firing, but he's coming up like this with the saw, and he just lays down a line of lead. And one guy zips right through it, zippers him up, right? You know, falls and dies around the corner. The other guy turns and books it, right? He's the dude with the AK, and he's booking it down here. And then Jimmy Proudman, who is an amazing sniper, right? He's actually on the COVID of book called Hunters by Milo Afong, right? And it has him in this like perfect shooting position and he gets into this like kneeling position. This dude's running, right? And, you know, has this— he's— he still has this black box and he has this AK and we don't know what this black box is.
And he takes him and with the M16A4 lines up and goes, right? And then clips the guy right in the back, severs the spinal cord. The guy dies immediately on the ground. And we go up to go go do, you know, an analysis on who these guys are. Dead check one dude, he's got nothing on him. We go over to this other guy, we open up this camera. It ends up the black box that I see is a Sony Handycam, and we press play. We rewinded, we press play. These two guys were the IED instructors in the, in the area. They literally had like the green flag, and they're like, this is how you— like, they had like the whole like how to make an IED at home kind of thing. And they were the two instructors of us. So we take their pictures, whatever it is, we have this whole intel analysis. We absolutely decimated the, you know, the resistance in the area because we were able to be aggressive. Like the thing that Marines have over any other person in the world is we are aggressive and we need to be able to be allowed to be aggressive at certain points to allow that to, you know, create the space that we want.
Because we were aggressive and went and fought and hunted them, we were able to stop an IED team because they literally walked— I mean, it wasn't skill or anything— literally walked into my hide site. And these guys were able to, you know, they got the kills, right? You know, we were joking about it, you know, like, this dipshit, you know, brings a knife to a gunfight. But we killed the IED cell in the area. And then everything was quiet for like a month. Like nothing happened in the area. We had killed any IED emplacers. We had killed the bomb makers. There was nobody that wanted to play there. But the problem with sending combat troops to do, you know, police security operations is when it's secure, when the area doesn't have any more bad guys, we have to go. And so now we had to leave this area and go and move somewhere else in Iraq. And we had to abandon the, you know, our little hunting trip by the river, you know, came to an end. Damn. It was super wild, fun, you know, fun, kind of fun stories in there.
But I don't know too many people that were running around in a ghillie suit in Iraq.
It was just because it was the spring and the zaidan, you know, on the eastern side of the Euphrates itself, it was the same recon. First recon and second recon worked out of there a whole bunch. We would talk to them at night, you know, we'd find their freaks and, you know, recon and snipers didn't always have the best relationship. So like battalion snipers and recon would always, you know, chirp up. We go to same schools together and whatever it is. But we just want to chirp at one another. It's a normal, you know, normal thing. But yeah, they worked a lot in the Zaidan down there, a lot of greenside patrolling. It was not something you would expect in Iraq. Everyone thinks it's all deserts. And that was a very fun, you know, fun deployment for us as far as hunting goes.
Yeah, we got to do a little bit of that. Yeah. Ghillie suits in Iraq. Yeah. Fucking wild times, man. So where do we go from here? Here.
We moved to Habaniya and we start— we, we run into Juba.
Let's take a quick break. Cool. I need you to stop what you're doing for a second and really listen. If someone relies on your income and you don't have life insurance yet, this needs to move to the top of your list. I've had to think about that myself, making sure my family isn't left dealing with everything if something happens to me. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today, made for busy parents like you, all online, on your schedule, right from your couch. You could be covered in under 10 minutes, often with no health exam required. If you've got kids, especially if you're young and healthy, this is when locking in a lower rate actually matters. And Fabric has flexible, high-quality policies that fit your family and your budget, even something like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day, or more or less depending on your needs. They've also partnered with Gerber Life, which has been trusted by families for decades. And Fabric gives you more than just a policy— things like free digital wills and tools to plan ahead for your kids, all right from your phone.
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When did he pop on your radar? So it was the— he really got on our radar in, you know, sniper school, you know, in 2005 when we checked into— so when we left Amariyah and the Zaidan, we moved up to a place called Habaniyah. And Habaniyah was just north of Al-Taqaddum. So if you think MSR Michigan that ran between Ramadi and Fallujah, there was TQ and then Habaniyah was an old Royal Air Force base. And so we took this area over. There was an Army National Guard unit that was, you know, finishing their like 13 months. And so 3-5 was sent in to relieve them and own and take over that battlespace. We first checked in, and now I had— I had been promoted to take over my own team. So I had taken over Banshee 4. Jimmy Proudman was still Banshee 2's team leader, and him and I had a really good working relationship. He's a fantastic kind of mentor to me. We check into what the Army calls a TOC, their Tactical Operations Center. The Marine Corps calls it a COC. And we check in with them and we're doing like an intel dump.
We were very much the idea of trying to get as much information as possible, wanted to not show up and be like, yeah, we'll figure it out. One Iraq is the same as other Iraq. Like, we really dove into that. And we had a gentleman by the name of Mike Musselman, and Mike Musselman was what's called a Marine gunner. And a Marine gunner is a very rare rank in the Marine Corps. There's only 100 gunners in the entire Marine Corps. Out of 175,000 or 210,000 people in the Marine Corps, there's only 100 gunners. A gunner is considered an infantry weapons and tactics expert. They have to have been enlisted for a minimum of 15 years as an infantry Marine. And then as an E-7, they can apply to become a Chief Warrant Officer and then get selected as a Marine Gunner. We're the only rank in the Marines that has a rank and a rate. So the rate, almost like the Navy, is a rate is a Gunner and the rank is Chief Warrant Officer. Okay. So Gunner Mike Musselman is an infantry extraordinaire, right? And he, and he works for the infantry battalion. Battalion.
So we use a little bit of his rank to set up a brief from this National Guard unit to kind of give us a, you know, what's going on in the area. Well, when we go in for this brief, there's like manila folders, there's after-action reports, there's a ton of— this unit was kind of leaving with their tail between their legs. They seemed like they'd been beaten up pretty bad while they were there. And when we go inside the COC, there was a, you know, 4-foot by 4-foot plywood table that had an isomat or a mat underneath it, and they had laminated maps laid on top of it and, you know, taped on top of it. And this was their map that identified significant events. And they, you know, I don't remember all of the colors, but whether it would be like IED Strike, IED find, weapons cache, and then sniper attack. And sniper attack was red pushpins. And when we looked at the map, it was covered in red pushpins. There was a sniper. When they go through this brief, they said there is an active sniper and he is killing everybody. Like he is out here decimating this unit to the point that— where's he getting them at?
So basically— convoy Yes. Everywhere. Static positions, convoys, security patrols, mounted patrols, dismounted patrols. He had—
Always on a movement outside of the wire?
Oh, no. Even, even when, like, nothing inside the wire, but posts on the exterior. Oh, shit. So he would— He had his— Yeah, he had his run of the area. Fuck, man. You know, I remember, I remember talking with them and they were, they were just, I mean, absolutely, you know, decimated by that to the point of where where the last month of their deployment, they didn't run a single patrol. And that's really bad because what happens is that allows the enemy to play freely, lay IEDs, right? You know, again, gain an advantage, a tactical advantage over the area. They basically shut down because they were smelling the barn and they wanted to get home and not lose anybody else. But the problem is, again, that's an abdication of responsibility. That's not taking care of the next unit. That's not taking care of us. And so when we showed up, we had massive amounts of casualties because the Marines had landed and we weren't backing down. We needed to show the mujahideen in the area that we were a different breed. Not only were our cammies different, but there was a different breed. And so we started this cat and mouse chase.
They briefed us on all these things. And then we sat and, you know, earlier in the deployment, we sat with all of the Juba videos and they were all our intel shop stitched them all together for us.
Hold on, I mean, I asked when Juba popped up on your radar. I know that was sniper school, but I mean, this— it's, it's real, but it's different when it's in a schoolhouse. Now you're— now you're deployed, first deployment as a sniper, and you're hunting the fucking guy that you were studying in sniper school. Exactly. We— that's pretty surreal.
I think it was, it was more— we didn't get, we didn't get caught up in that. I think what we got was, oh shit, right? You know, like there's this guy here who has complete control of the battlefield. We— and he's going to hurt our Marines if we can't— if we don't stop him. So it was almost like a running clock for us. The weight was felt, you know. And you're right, it was— you're right, it was surreal. We didn't want to give him too much credit, but he was— he was very much in our thoughts.
I mean, I just want to say a couple of things. I mean, this is the sniper rifle that was taken off the body of one of your guys, right?
We didn't know that yet, but you didn't know that.
And I mean, One of the snipers using it becomes the most lethal enemy sniper of the Iraq War, publicly known as Juba. Juba is credited by insurgent propaganda with killing well over 100 Americans. You've cited figures of potentially 140-plus Americans. Juba is the inner inspiration for the enemy sniper character Mustafa in the film American American sniper. I mean, this guy's got quite the reputation.
Now, we took that very seriously. We watched every single video that he put out. And that was the hardest. Are there—
what's that? Is there a lot of them?
Yeah. Well, like, so what our S2, our intel shop did is they stitched it all together for us and we would sit— our 4-man team would sit smoke cigarettes, and it was not a jovial time for us. We would sit and watch every single video go and go and go, and we would analyze each one. We would take notes. The thing that got us— so the book is nonfiction. There is one fictional portion of the book, and that is when I describe a Green Beret getting killed. Killed. The reason why that is fiction is I would never publicize the way an American died. That is an amalgamation, that is a culmination or an accumulation of multiple different stories into one. I would never want someone's mother or father to read the story of how their son died. It's the only portion of the book that is is contextually linked together from multiple different videos. And that was a conscious choice because sitting and watching Americans die is not something that we— we would sit and we would eat chow and then we would like dread going up there, but it was our duty. We would sit on this couch, said cigarette smoke in consideration, this old cigarette-stained green couch, and we would sit on on it.
And the four of us would just, like I said, we have a Panasonic Toughbook and we press play and we turn the music off right when we wanted to. And we would just watch every scenario. And what eventually stood out to us was not— we didn't care about the marking things. I just wanted to see the kills. How is he doing this? We had a saying that we kind of came up with is, is, you know, the National Guard unit that we were relieving was like they said that he's a ghost. And my response to them was, snipers don't believe in ghosts. We believe in patterns. And so that's what we needed to do, was we needed to put his patterns together. It's all just math. It's a, it's a recognition of a pattern. And humans have them. Nature has them. And if you pay attention close enough, you can find out what those patterns and you learn to read them. And so we sat and we went through every single one of these things and we started to notice a specific trend. First, he was well under or within 200 yards is what we guessed between each engagement.
Now, each one of these things leads us to a series of potential questions. This was like a— almost— we almost had like a board and we were kind of like workshopping different things, right? So the first one was his distance, 200 meters-ish. Okay. What was— what was the thing that led him to be 200 meters? Was it that the Was he not a good shooter? Was the optic destroyed? Was he firing iron sights instead of, you know, because again, we didn't know he was shooting an M40 at this time. We just knew single well-aimed shots were killing Americans. And so we had to kind of piece this whole thing together. Was it— was he shooting iron sights? So that's why 200 was his preferred distance. Was it the limitations of his weapon system? Did he have an AK? Was he shooting a sniper rifle? Rifle. They showed Dragunov or an SVD, but those weren't super prevalent all the time, and their scopes inside of those things were a little wonky. Was it the limitation of his camera? Was— could his camera only zoom in so far? One of the things that we noticed was he was videotaping, and the videos were normally at what I would say hip level, hip to to, you know, nipple level on an average-sized body.
And we noticed that. So he wasn't shooting from above. He wasn't shooting from below. He was generally always around a specific height. Then we noticed the population. The population was walking in, in front of the camera, you know, and so either they were complicit with knowing there was a sniper there and they were just acting nonchalant. But that's not something humans really— no Iraqi wants to be around that. They know how it we respond to gunfire. So then, okay, so he was concealed. He was concealed from civilians. He was about hip to nipple high is where he was at. And the thing that tipped us off the most after the shot rang out, chaos would ensue, right? They had that stupid little red dot or the red crosshairs or reticle they put on there, and the shot would ring out. The Marine or soldier or airman, you know, or sailor would fall, and then he would move away from the scene at a steady rate of speed, but not bouncing. And so to us that went, okay, so he's not walking, right? Because these aren't stabilized gyro cameras, right? This is like 2005, 2006, right?
So we— I literally leapt off the couch when I was watching it. I went, holy shit, he's shooting from a car. So if you remember in and around that time frame, if I'm not mistaken, then or just just beforehand there was the DC sniper that was like shooting people at gas stations. He was shooting from a car. I don't know if it was before or after, but there's a strong potential that he had learned from that, you know, tactic and technique. Right. But that was kind of, you know, in our, in our mind in that. So once we realized that he was in a car, that's what, again, almost like appears to be right. You know, like it's kind of our— we think that he's in a car. You know, we're not going to not, you know, we're going to wave our hand and say he's only in a car. We started going to every single one of those red dots. I read every single after-action that associated to one of those red pushpins on the map. Where was he hitting the victims? So a lot of times all over the place. Well, predominantly high center chest, between the plates, or in the face.
So he'd move around the plates whenever he could. There were some times where I'd see a guy get, you know, hit in the plates, dust and shit fly up, and then he would like scramble away. Um, but he wasn't re-engaging very fast. I didn't see multiple shots, right? I saw one shot, chaos ensued, civilians would scatter, the Marines or whoever it was would respond to the thing, and I didn't see follow-up shots. So I was like, okay, he's potentially kind of exposed, right, at some level, right?
So he would either shoot in the side or the head. Yep, yep. So iron sights at 200 is pretty much out, right?
It gets a little harder, right? And so when we start looking at these, all of it is this like, maybe we're not 100% sure, but it's starting to paint a little bit better of a picture. He's not a click out. I mean, that makes— that would make a difference for us if he's a click out and we could see Mirage in the camera or something like that. If he was sitting at a super long distance, that would have been very hard for us to be able to manage. But he was close. So that meant that he had to get close. That meant that he had to be near our our main supply routes. That means he needed to be able to scout and infiltrate and find static positions. When we were changing over with— excuse me— that Army National Guard unit, while we're doing our changeover with them, there was a soldier on post. They were going home like the next week. A soldier on post, they had camionetting up every— you know, this— the coalition was afraid of this guy. Side sappies became a thing. The bulletproof glass on the, you know, any post, camionette everywhere became a thing because this guy was changing all of our techniques because he was just killing us at random.
So this unit's about a week from going home. One of the guys, one of the soldiers is on post and their NVGs, like the sun is starting to set. The NVGs that he's about to put on roll out of his little window and onto the sandbags in front of him and he reaches his hand out and he gets shot in the hand and it mangles his hand. And we were like, okay, this dude doesn't play like he knows what he's doing. He's able to pick. Now, let's say size of a hand at 300 meters. That's 1 minute of angle, right? You know, ish, right? You know, with movement, all this kind of stuff. Like he's either very, very close or he knows what he's doing or worse, he's both. So we started to follow these pushpins. Every single sig act that had a pushpin on it, we went to that site and we would literally try to turn the map around. My team and I would go out in the middle of the night and we would go to where one of the ones was an intersection. And I'm standing in the intersection at the exact place where a soldier had lost his life.
And I'm looking around. Could you reference the videos? No, I couldn't. I wanted to. Maybe technologically now we could. I couldn't georeference the videos. That would have been great. But all of it looked— it was super zoomed in, right? A lot of it was just washed out. But that's a great question. You know, no one's ever asked me that before, but that would have been very nice to have because they didn't have any like geotags or anything. Then we would go to people's doors. So our team did a lot of knock and talks. I had no interest in clearing their houses, right? It was a very different time frame. So I'd knock on their door and through like my broken Arabic, I would talk to them. And the word for sniper is kanas, right? And so I would say, you know, whatever the Arabic was, and I would say kanas, and people's eyes would widen and then they would shut the door in my face. And they weren't rude about it, but they were like, nope, nope, don't know, don't want to talk about it. He was working in and around the area and people were very scared of him because the way that the mujahideen worked is if you talked or you spoke with the coalition or if you gave them any information against the Mujahideen, they would kill you and your entire family.
Right. So we didn't do that. We tried to be, you know, a better force for that, to be able to have them like win over their hearts and minds. But they were just so afraid they wouldn't touch it. La la, kanas is what they would say. And they'd close the door. Another trail cold. So for about 2 months, maybe 2 and a half months, every single night that I could get a patrol out there, there, we would go out and, and, and hunt this guy and go to every single sig act. So one night I'm standing in an intersection and I'm looking around and we're frustrated. I mean, at this point, there's just like, we're just not getting really any leads in this thing. There's not a lot of tech to follow. We don't really have drones like we have like a few, but it's nothing like persistent, you know, all-weather observation. But he's still shooting people, not in our area. Area, right? But he's shooting people in adjacent areas and we're getting those SIGACTs in. So he's standing in this intersection, it's the middle of the night and we're like, it's like washed in orange, like the orange streetlights, right?
And I'm standing under this thing and I'm pretty brazen at this point, right? You know, I've been, it's my third tour, it's middle of the night, the optics aren't super great on any enemy kind of stuff. So I'm standing in the middle intersection and we're looking around and I'm sitting next to my partner, Gabe White. And, and I lean over at him and I look and I go, God, like that. Like, it wasn't like anything other than, I think, a stroke of luck. Like, I look in a specific direction and I go, man, that— it's a, it's a, it's a building. It's set back from the street, so it's not right over the street. It's set back, but it has a pretty good line of sight. Let's just go check that out. And this is what we did, like, almost every single night. And we eventually get to this building, we knock on the door, and then this one's like, we're a little curious. Serious. We go inside. I work with the family because we have to wake them up. It's the middle of the night. We're also not assholes. Like, I'm genuinely not an asshole.
So I'm not like, you know, you know, fucking, fucking like, no, like, I don't want to create more terrorists, right? So we're like, hey, we're just going to be here for a few minutes. We start going to the upstairs where the position of advantage would be. And so we get to the second deck, can't really see what we're looking for. And then I go to the roof. And if you remember the roofs in Iraq, they're like like the exposed brick and they had that kind of like thin wall and then they had tar on the, you know, the black tar on the roof. Well, a lot of Iraqis in the summer would sleep on the roof because they didn't have air conditioning, so they'd sleep on the roof. So when I walked up there and I saw a mat on the ground, it wasn't exactly out of place, but I have my like shitty 7 Bravos and my, you know, I don't have a sniper rifle at this point. I just have like an M16, you know, on my back and I'm looking around And then I see and I walk up and I put my arms on the, on the, on the parapet, on the ledge, looking towards the intersection.
And then I look down and when I look down, I see a spider hole about 3 inches in diameter at the base of this. Oh, shit. At the base of this thing. And then I look back and I see that mat for a second time. The mat is not a sleeping mat. If you imagine, like, you ever seen cabbies that have like the little ball thing, it's like the walnut ball looking things, right? That's the mat that's laying on the ground. And I'm— and I perk up. Jimmy Proudman is now up here, right? And I'm like, yo, dude, check this out. And he's looking around. So I do what any sniper does is I get in my sniper position on the mat and I look through this hole. Mind you, it's like pitch black, right? There's no lights up there. And so I, I get in the push-up position and I get down and I look through this spider hole and I can see the intersection. And as I go to get up, I put my— I move my hand to get back into push-up position and my hand rolls across two pieces of brass.
No fucking way. Push myself up. I stand up, I look at the brass, and I have my little red light. Lens, on the back of the brass, it says LC, Lake City Ammunition Manufacturing Plant. Lake City, I think it's Missouri, if I'm not mistaken. And I call Jimmy over and I say, oh shit. That's when I knew it was an American rifle using American ammunition. So the M40s can actually shoot D-linked 7.62 ammo. So you can shoot machine gun ammo out of an M40. Obviously less accurate, right? I couldn't tell. I didn't know at the time whether it was, you know, long range. I don't remember it saying LR because it would say LR on it. I don't remember it saying that, but I remember seeing LC. So he's probably shooting D-Link 7.62, which is pretty prevalent around Iraq. Finding, you know, 7.62 long range is not— snipers keep a pretty good inventory of our bullets, right? But machine gunners just shit falls off, right? And so So I was like, okay, he could— so the 7.62 machine gun ammo is pretty accurate. Like, you can get 700 out of it. You know, it's not going to get you 1,000, but you can get 700.
You can definitely get 200. And so Jimmy and I knew right there that we were, we were hunting somebody with an American rifle. What was the distance? About 200, maybe even less, right into this middle of this intersection. But he was bar— fat bar— far back enough that a person in the chaos of whatever is going on wouldn't see a 3-inch spider hole. And I went, oh shit. So remember at sniper school, right? We have a saying at sniper school called pain retains, right? And what we found was something called a target indicator. Anything— and this has been ingrained into my memory, right? Anything a sniper does or fails to do that reveals reveals his presence, equipment, or location to the enemy. At sniper school, specifically with the M40A1 and the M40A3 with an internal magazine, we were always taught to shoot 2, load 2, shoot 2, load 2, always, because it's a 5-round internal magazine. Shoot 2, load 2. You always have something in the gun and you never ever leave your brass. That's like a, a death sentence in sniper school for you. And so then I knew that no American sniper would have done this because the Army sniper school is just as good, right?
The Navy sniper schools are just as good. This is not something that we— we don't leave our brass laying around. And I went, okay, we don't have a sniper, we have a trained marksman, which is a difference because a sniper wouldn't have done that. But he left his target indicator for us, and now we were salivating. So now we move out, but I still have normal operations I have to do, right? I'm still working with the Infantry. So along MSR Michigan between Ramadi and Fallujah, the Marine Corps owned to the 5-5 easting, and then it picked up Ramadi and then Army battle space. And so from Habaniya to the 5-5 easting was like a bunch of kilometers. And so we were getting a lot of IEDs in there. So what the Marines decided to do was establish patrol bases on the north and south side, kind of ticking our way out to the 5-5 easting. We're going to establish eyes on so that they can't plant IEDs in this thing and blow us to, you know, blow us to hell. So we established 3 different patrol bases with India Company. Len Coleman was from Chicago, so he got to pick the names, right?
So OP Falcons or OP Bears and OP Cubs. And then I worked out of a place called OP Falcons on the southern side of Route Michigan. And now OP Falcons was an old— it was a government building that hadn't been finished yet. So it was like moondust and exposed brick, but that's where the infantry platoon lived. No electricity, no running water, and the platoon just lived there day in and day out for like the next 3 months. And we'd rotate people out. Well, we rotated out with them and we would go there and we'd stay there for a week and we would go hunting at night and go try to find IED emplacers. And during the day we had our own spider holes and we had our own areas to be able to watch because that was part of our job was to— we didn't think that we were special. We wanted to help the infantry out as best as possible. And we had long-range optics and guns. So we get into OP Falcons and we establish this thing. And so we had pretty clear line of sight. We're on a hill. We have pretty clear line of sight to our west, pretty clear line of sight to our east.
But we're on this hill back about 200 meters from the road. And in front of us is about 100 to 50 to 100 meters of dead space. Something I can't cover with direct fire or observation. It's just there's buildings in the way. Way, and I just can't see this little spotter road. So very early on into Falcons, remember the, the mujahideen is very active in this area. IED strikes, all kinds of stuff. We were really hunting IED emplacers as much as possible through there. I get a shot that lines up. It's like 847 meters or something. It's not an easy shot. Plus, I'm shooting through a spider hole, over buildings, across the street, right? Like MSR Michigan and then down across a wadi, I see a guy digging a fucking— like pulls up in a car digging an IED. And I'm like, I got this dude dead to rights. But here's the challenge. That's a very long shot. 847 meters is a very long shot through all of these different mediums. So I have— it's super embarrassing, right? I can tell you, you can tell where this is going, right? Right? But I'm like, hey, I've got this thing.
I catch him through observation. We radio up to higher, we get approval. Second Platoon has been sitting out there for a week just in their underwear baking, right? And they're like, oh my God, we get to kill somebody, right? We get like, finally, right? And I have an entire platoon of infantry Marines surrounding me, and the lieutenant's like, pashuti, you're cleared, cleared, cleared hot, take the shot, right? And I'm like, and I'm going in, I'm zoning it. My other sniper member, sniper team member, is getting up on his gun. Jared Ramsey's his name. So I see him, so I'm not— I don't get like first dibs. This guy is just moving quick, so I'm trying to get around Adam. Jared's getting his gun ready. I'm walking him on while the whole platoon is around us. I'm giving him the distance. I've already shot it with my rangefinder. I'm kind of giving him some wind, but because he's on MSR Michigan is elevated, and then there's a hill on both sides. It's just like a, you know, wadi on both sides. But the challenge is, since he's elevated elevated, I can't get a very good wind call because I can't see what the wind is doing below it.
I can't see what it's doing above it because I'm in a spider hole. I'm making a whole bunch of excuses for basically saying I'm taking a really fucking hard shot and the probability of missing is very, very high. I go ahead. The platoon is behind me and I go and I take the shot. And like a deer, what happens is I send the round and I, and I, and I watch him. It's like if you ever shot over a deer's head or a fox or whatever, whatever it is, they stop and they kind of like snap down. The round shot right over his head, which is fine. I'm okay with missing there because he told me where my miss was. When he ducked down like that, he heard the snap over the top of his head, which gave me an indication. So now I worked with Jared and I'm yelling because I'm racking my bolt and I'm getting another shot downrange because I have seconds before he darts somewhere because the snap, the snap happens before the report of the rifle. Right? And I can conceal the report of the rifle because I'm inside of a brick building to a certain extent.
I have like a couple of seconds. Jared's on the gun and I'm yelling to him to be able like, "A47!" I missed over his head. So we use a technique called frame shooting, and frame shooting is when you can use it for two different, you know, two different ways. Frame shooting is basically two or three different snipers, however many you want, who, if you don't know the distance or your elevation You can have somebody aim belt buckle and somebody aim head. Now we're both— one's aiming low and one's aiming high, and we're hoping that either one of us will split the difference and hit the target where we want. Or I can aim high or he can aim low and we have a wider window, if that makes sense. Also, when you have windage, you can do frame shooting there. If I don't know what the wind is doing, I can say, I'm going to hold left shoulder, you hold right shoulder. Will send 2 bullets simultaneously down there, and one of them will get him. If you don't know windage or elevation, or you're— you can— you're guessing on both, you can do diagonals.
Left hip, right shoulder. Same. It just basically gets you a wall of lead down there. So Jared's on the gun, he's like, I'm good, someone's— 5, 4, fire on the 3, on the TIA 2, 3, 2. Within— this all happens within seconds. We send 2 rounds out there, this guy falls to the drops and is like bleeding out on the ground. The entire platoon cheers, screaming, and runs over to Jared. And they're like, yeah, nice shot, Jared. I'm like, what the fuck? Like, we don't really know if I made the shot or not, but I had missed the first one. So everyone was like, fuck this guy, right? And they're like, like high-fiving him, like, ah, nice job, Jared. You suck, but you did it, right? You know? So right after that, a vehicle screeches up while this guy's laying in the street. A vehicle screeches up and two guys get out. It's like a truck, right? And I'm watching them. We already have our windage and elevation pretty well locked, but the rules of engagement were so convoluted at the time. Technically, he would be— the people picking him up out of, like, for the vehicle that pulled up, By the way that I interpreted the rules of engagement, would they— were a medevac platform, so they were a noncombatant that I couldn't engage.
Now, again, I, I don't know what the right answer is, but I know that a lot of people are starting to get to go to jail for things. Right. And there's investigate every shot that we take. We have investigations on like we had to do like any time that we fired, we had to do a full report on it. This was not OIF-1 or Fallujah. Asia. Every bullet had to be counted for after every single firefight. And if you were short on bullets, then you had to answer some questions for it. And if the person that you killed didn't come back with gun residue on his hand— if they got a hold of that and he didn't come back with gun residue and they couldn't find a gun, you're flying to Baghdad and you're getting— you're having to answer some very hard questions. It was a tough spot for us in this place. Rule books, weapons in our hand, and rule books in our pockets. So I made— I I was the senior guy, I guess. So I made the decision like, hey, we're not engaging. There's two guys that loaded this dude who was shot up in the vehicle and we let him go.
Two days later, the battalion commander comes out on a, you know, on a patrol and we explained to him the story and he's like, hey, nice shot on that. I heard about that, right? Congratulates Jared, right? And then we tell him about that and he kind of like yells at me and he was like, why didn't you shoot them? And I said, because they were a medevac platform. And he goes, No, unless they are a marked medevac platform with a Red Cross or a Red Crescent, then they are within the Geneva Convention. And I was like, fuck, I don't know, man. You know, like, these are— so I don't know if he's right. I don't know if I'm right. I know that I got questioned for not pulling the trigger in this scenario. But all this shows like how confusing this time is for all of us and what we're trying to do. And this will become important later on. So we go by another week, all in this time frame. We're still hunting this mysterious sniper. We're still going out on our night patrols trying to find this as best as possible. We're back at OP Falcons, um, and it's like the middle of the day, nothing's going on, um, and all of a sudden we have a, uh, track rolls by in front of us on Route Michigan and they hit an IED, and they hit an IED in our dead space, in the dead space that I'm trying to watch.
I'm watching the road, and I watch this explosion shoot up into the air in fucking pieces and parts, and I— and they're in my dead space, and I can't— there was nothing I could have done. And I'm fucking losing it because I'm, I'm their sniper. I'm the one that's supposed to protect the infantry, and I failed at my So what happens is this vehicle, we end up getting a medevac down to these guys. These trackers are, they're, they're trackers with amphibious assault vehicles. They're fucked up, right? We've pulled them back. My, we get them back to our firm base. We're starting to call in an aerial, you know, medevac. And I'm standing there helpless. I'm watching this dude who's got shrapnel up his body, fucking bleeding everywhere. My platoon corpsman, AJ Barr, Barth, right, who's in my team, is working on him, and I'm trying to help. I don't know what to do. I mean, I know what to do, I'm not an idiot, right? But like, I'm trying, I want to get to help, and Barth comes to me and fucking, get the fuck away from me, this is my fucking patient! Now I get like, I just didn't know what to do.
I felt personally responsible because they fucking hit this guy on my watch in my dead space. We get the medevac platform, we get him out to the bird, he ends up surviving. Doc stabilizes him, saves his life, we get him to bird. What happens is when that IED went off, the way that we got the medevac to us was at the 55 easting. What the Marine Corps did was we parked an M1A1 or a track at the 55 easting at the western edge of our battlespace, and it stayed there in a static position. When that track hit the IED in our dead space, that track left its position mission to come here and render aid to their brethren and then bring them back to us for the medevac. They were gone for 45 minutes. By the time they come back and they go back to the 55 Easting, another IED. So what happened was they had— the enemy had identified our— a gap in our lines. Once they left that area, it left it vulnerable, and they came back and hit another IED. IED. And then all of a sudden, within 45 minutes, we have another urgent surgical, another Marine who was on the edge of death that we're trying to bring back.
And I am beside myself. I am like standing, like I am, you know, like tears of rage, screaming like, they're fucking toying with us. There was nothing that we could do with these IEDs. They were so prevalent and they were so quick, and I was so angry. So Jimmy Proudman and I, he was now— we were again running two sections. He was Banshee 2 and I was Banshee 4. We started talking and we were mad. How the fuck do we do this? How do we get this IED in place? I want to kill this motherfucker, right? He's done this to me twice. I'm going to bury this bitch. We come up with a plan, and the plan is this. We want to run a bait mission. I used to teach, later on I taught sniper employment at sniper school, but my favorite class in sniper school was mission planning and sniper employment because sniper employment is the way in which we can affect the enemy. One of the things that snipers can do is they can fill gaps in friendly lines. One of the things that we can do as well is we can fill the gap through an overt position, which we don't like to do, or we can create a gap and then fill that gap with a sniper in a clandestine position.
So now the enemy sees that as a natural line of drift or a point of weakness. They try to exploit that weakness, and we're waiting for them. So we devise this type of mission. Jimmy and I plan this whole thing. We brief it to Captain Coleman. Captain Coleman's a fucking gangster, and he's like, absolutely, we're going to run this mission. We end up running this mission up through the chain of command. Now, mind you, we're 3 weeks from going home. Like, we are starting to smell the barn, right? Things are— we're starting— our new unit is like en route to come relieve us. Like, we are getting ready to leave. So by no fault of the unit, I don't know where it got shut down, but the mission was scrapped. They said, no, we're not willing to take that risk. I don't know why. There was no risk involved, but they were was— they didn't want to take the risk. And fucking Coleman, we get back, we're pissed. We're briefing with him and he says, I don't give a shit, Pashuti, that's a fucking good plan. You're going to run the mission. Sounds good, sir.
You're the captain, right? You're the skipper, right? So Proudman and I leave a few nights later from OP Falcons. We patrol, I think it was 6 kilometers through like the desert by Lake Habaniya, and we move west. West out to where we've identified the 5-5 easting. And this is the western edge of our battlespace. And so we're going to get into position. I'm going to bring 2 bolt guns with me. He's bringing 2 bolt guns with him. We're bringing 4, uh, security patrol, like 4 infantry guys as security with us so I can put 4 snipers in 4 fucking windows covering this thing on each hide site. So Jimmy's got his team set up and they're looking north and west into kind of into Ramadi. I'm looking north and east. We're both— we've got this like web set up. And now I've got my security covered for me. I bring a squad from, uh, Kilo Company, and Jimmy's got the same thing. We move out at a— you know, we're trying to get into position by, uh, generally sunup. We don't want to be moving with sunup, but I also need to wait for the quietest portion of the evening there's the more— like the time, the hour or two before beginning morning nautical twilight is like when truckers fall asleep.
It's like the 2 to 4 AM time frame. It's when the body's just at its natural circadian low. That's when we have to step off. I'm trying to get nobody to see us. So we patrol low and slow as an 8-man element, and he is ahead of us as another 8-man element. He leaves half an hour ahead and we move into our positions. Now again, we don't have a lot a lot of like overhead imagery. We don't have a ton of— we've got like maps and like Falcon View at the time, and we're kind of guessing. There's no like whiz-bang line of sight or line of sight stuff. We're just kind of trying to figure it out. So now it's like 5 o'clock. We get there. The sun is starting to creep up. Things are starting to get like— I'm starting to get nervous because I have to go to these hide sites and I have to look at them in the middle of the night, not getting seen, being like, does that window have where I want? And I I have no idea. Like, I'm trying to figure this thing out. So we finally find a house that I think is suitable enough.
And so we go up, and Brett Stidfool, my, my point man, you know, opens the gate to the courtyard. We go inside the courtyard, and I have my, like, Oakley gloves. So I need to show these people that we are not their enemy. And so I make a conscious decision to show vulnerability first. So I have my team around me, and I'm protected by that. I have my bolt gun slung across my back. I have my fucking M16A4 slung down here, and I've got my M9 Beretta here. And I take all my weapons off, right? I have them all slung and I knock on this guy's door. And then I wait 5 seconds and I knock again. I want to make sure that he knows that I'm not going away. And then the door peeks open, just an eye, just like an eye shooting through. And the first thing I do is I put my hands up like this and I go like this. I'm not here to harm you. I need you to stay quiet. And he opens the door and we— in my best thing, I said, we're coming in. And we go inside this house and my team starts moving in as quiet as possible.
Remember, we're setting a trap. There is a track still in front of this place right now. They're sitting there right now. Even the Marines, they know that we're in the area, but I can't get seen by the Marines because I don't want them to shoot my ass either, because sometimes word gets kind of messed up. So there's still a track sitting somewhere at the 55 Easting, and we're trying to hide from them as well. We go inside the house. I get Sergeant Kevin Homestead, who is, uh, the squad leader for Kilo Company, whatever squad it was. He's like, um, he's a buddy of mine, right? And he's like a fantastic hunter, right? I'm from California, right? I've— I mean, it's northern. I've never hunted anything in my life. The only thing I've ever hunted to this date walks on two feet, right? So I've— I don't— so he like talks to me about mule deers and whitetails, and he's explaining the difference and stuff. He's just a good old boy, right? And I love hearing about this stuff. It's just not my thing, right? But I know he knows what he's talking about. So he takes the squad, and he's in charge of putting the family— we take them all out of their beds, out of their bedroom, we put them in one room, and we have to keep them quiet because they are are.
Imagine some dude armed to the teeth showing up at your house with your children. There's a couple of options people would make on that. Americans might make a different choice, right? You know, nobody's coming into my house without a fight, right? And we have to keep them quiet. So we're super respectful through everything. We're trying Arabic as best as possible. We're showing how compassionate we can be to them. We put them down, put them into their, into their room, bring beds and shit like that. And then my team goes to work immediately. Kevin's handling that. My team goes to work. We're setting up our hide sites. Brett Stidfohl's covering east, long axis down Michigan, huge. He's got 2 kilometers of visibility down Michigan. And we've got Leica Vector rangefinders with GPS-guided whatevers. I can get a grid mission in 30 seconds to hit wherever I need. That's what I'm trying to do. If my bolt gun can't get you at a click, my optics can get you at 3. And so that's what we're trying to be able to advertise. So I get into my position, and now it's like 6 AM. We're back on track.
I'm feeling more comfortable, and I have my little space, and I'm kind of like— I open this window up, you know, like the movies. People like, oh, it's just perfect, and it's— and you have this perfect overwatch. It's like, not that at all. I've got to like make this thing happen. So I have this like little Iraqi window in their bedroom. It's still warm from when the husband and wife were sleeping, so I'm sitting on the corner of their bed, and I have this little Iraqi window. I'm like, and I'm opening this thing up. Well, luckily for me, it's got a screen in front of it, right? So that helps me for creating a clandestine hide site. And then through what I won't go into, you know, on, on, you know, on the show, but we have our own way of setting up our hide site to be able to maintain our, you know, concealment behind there. So I go through that process and I set up my concealment, and this is not a good hide site. Like I'm just trying to make— I have a nightstand and a fucking pillow as my bench rest for my gun, right?
And then I have— I've like scooted the bed over as quiet as possible and I'm just sitting at the top of the bed, but I'm looking right at this, at the 5.56 Easting. I'm like on it and I'm, and I'm looking at this market and I can hear the track in front of me. I know where they're at, but I can't physically see them. I got like an antenna or something like like that. They're technically in my dead space, but that's okay. I'm covering this area. So the plan is this: at exactly 07:00 AM, our guns, both teams, will all be set. Everyone set, set, set. At 07:00 AM, the track is going to screech out of there like it has somewhere to be, as fast as humanly possible, rubber or whatever it is, right? And going to leave as fast as possible and leave the area open until we tell them to come back. And this like a couple of days kind of thing. I want— like, we are here. I need to kill this IED emplacer. And so we go through this kind of rotation. I sit there. It's now 7. You know, the track takes off.
Doc Barth is my partner in this scenario, right? Also named AJ, and a very, very good friend of mine. But the way that we treat our corpsmen in the Marines is you can insult me me, but you can never insult my corpsman. The relationship that we have to corpsman is, is, is the reverence that we have for them. The two people that Marines cry for when they're dying is their mother and their doc. There is nothing higher than a Navy corpsman to us. My breath, my blood. The challenge with corpsman is they kind of take on the team mom role, right? And which is great, but when what doc says Doc's advice goes. It outranks anybody. If Doc says you need to sleep or you need to take a knee or you need to drink water, you need to do it. You needed to do it a few hours ago. So Doc comes up to me. I haven't slept yet. It's 7 AM. The trap has just been set. And he comes up and he says, hey, P, uh, why don't you— why don't you go down and rest? Like, I'm no good. And he's like, hey, you haven't slept yet.
You're no good to us, you know, exhausted, right? So I was like, roger that. You just don't argue with Doc, right? Right? And so I go down— all by, by going down, I mean I roll off the gun into the warm bed behind me, and I like put the blanket over, you know, on below me, and then I just fall asleep. But the challenge is, at the time, we didn't know a lot about this stuff. We were doing hour on, hour off was the cycle. We understand now that you need more than an hour to be able to get some sort of restorative sleep. So I should have been doing at least a 2-hour increment between between breaks or whatever it is. But we were doing a 50%, so both— each gun had one sniper on it and the other guy went down for a rest cycle for an hour. But also, when we're in the day and whatever it is, if you're feeling good, you kind of just keep going, you help the guy out. But what Doc did is our rotation was hour on, hour off, which meant I should have been back on the gun at 8 and been down, uh, or yeah, from 8 to 9 I should have been on the gun.
But what Doc did is he like he wakes me up at 9 a.m., he squeezes my thigh, right? Because we had a couple of signals. Was like, hey, it's— if you squeeze my shoulder, shit's in trouble, right? Wake up now. If you squeeze my thigh, it's friendly and it's okay. So like little subconscious things. So he squeezed my thigh twice and I woke up and I'm looking at my watch, I'm like, it's 9 a.m., what are you doing? He's like, I was feeling good, I got you an extra— I got you an extra hour. I was like, oh cool, appreciate it. So he gives me this kind of rundown. We've got a— we've got a range card. Our range card goes to 300 meters. I don't have a ton of visibility. The place I'm actually thinking is going to get something is Brett Stidfoe in the window next to us, because he's got 3 clicks of visibility. I just have to cover this market because I don't know what the fuck's going to— there's also a lot of stuff there, so I don't know what's going to come out of this market. So Doc finishes up his little brief.
He explains to what's going on. Hey, the chai shop's been set up, right? Everything, the market's now open. People are kind of milling about. Out, um, and he points at a car and he goes, yeah, this guy just pulled in. This guy's over here, driver got out and he's grabbing some chai. And I said, okay, cool, great, sounds great. And then he gets up and in like the most Midwestern way possible, he's like, all right, I gotta go take a shit. And he like, and he stands up and walks out of the room and then he pokes his head back and he goes, hey, try not to kill anybody while I'm gone. And then he leaves and like goes to do his thing, right? Within, you know, now it's, it's like 9:00 AM, it's starting to get all hot. Do you remember the— we called it formaldehagen, it was the Copenhagen, but it was like the expo, whatever shit they put in it. Japenhagen we called it as well. So I throw in a Lipper, right? It's, it's 9:00 AM in the summer, so it's already Africa hot, right? And I've got like my bathwater, you know, Nalgene bottle that I'm trying to drink, and I'm just doing my thing.
I get back in the gun, I'm doing the 50-meter overlapping strip search, right? So like reading from right to left, right? So I can catch any movement along the way. I'm just going through and getting an analysis of the area. And I'm there for like 15 minutes, you know, cruising through. And I noticed the car that had been parked there, a little gray, I think it was an Opel, had been parked there. Nothing out of the baseline, just a normal market on a normal day. Well, then what happens is I hear a track rolling down MSR Mission Michigan. And they have that high-pitched whine, like they're cruising down. And they come up and they park at the 55 Easting. And I'm like, hey, Red One, Red One, this is Banshee Four. We're running a mission here. I need you guys to get, you know, I need you guys to not be here. And the guy that comes back over the radio is a dude named Kyle Burton. Kyle Burton and I had done like two tours already at this point. And he was like a squad leader with India Company and was an absolute savage.
Like just a hero in Fallujah, right? And now he's got his own squad and he's like, hey, Banshee, this is Red One. We're just cooling our engines down. We're going to be out of your hair in like 10 minutes. And I said, okay, no worries. Just running a mission. I need you not to be here for a very long time. This is fine. It's still okay. I just need you to leave. And he's like, yeah, no worries. So then I'm back to doing my thing, right? Kind of 50-meter overlapping strip search. And I'm working my way down. And then I get to the car. And as I get to the car, I look. So the car is now parked, uh, parked away from me. Yeah, it's like this. Nope, it's like this. Sorry. Parked away from me, kind of like, uh, you know, 70-degree angle, if you will. But the front end of the car is pointing towards the market. The back end of the car is pointing towards me. It's a little 4-door gray sedan. And, you know, just like a run-of-the-mill Iraqi sedan. Dan. Well, what I noticed, what, like, I have my, at the time I'm using a Schmidt Bender variable power optic.
We just, the Schmidt Bender 8541s, we had just gotten those. First time Marine snipers had a variable power optic. So I'm looking through my vectors, doing my work, kind of cruising through the vectors. And then I'll, all of a sudden I catch like a little glare, like nothing, nothing like in the movies, right? But I catch this little thing and I was like, what was that. And so I get behind my gun and I have 3 power on, uh, at the— on the Schmidt Bender, and I'm looking at it, and then I zoom in to like 8 power, and then I zoom in to 12 power, and I go, holy fuck, it's a Sony Handycam. So what happened was, if you imagine the back of the sedan, do you know where, like, in the back seat of the sedan, you have that little back rear triangle window so you have like the front passenger door, you have the rear passenger door, and there's usually like a triangle window that helps wrap it around to the trunk, you know, and there's that flat platform, whatever. Every single window in this car is tinted, like California illegal tinted kind of thing, right?
Except this rear triangle window. And on— and inside this rear triangle window is a like almost like a little carpet laying on this little kind of rear area. And a Sony Handycam with its window open, and it has this like viewfinder or whatever it is open. And I freak the fuck out, right? I zoom in on this thing and I go, oh shit. First thing that crosses my mind was IED. Oh my God, another one snuck in. They got underneath my nose again. They found my dead space. They're going to kill these guys. Holy shit. So the first thing I do, and I might I'm like hissing this because I'm in a sniper hide site and I go, "Red One, Red One, this is Banshee Four. Button up right now. You're about to get hit." And I don't know why they didn't do this, but their first response was, "What?" And I was like, "Button up right now. Like, get down." And then I hear him, his mic is keyed. And he goes and he's like, he looks left, he looks right and he goes, "Brace for impact." And he like closes his, the TC hatch.
So he's in the troop commander atch of the track. And the track is just, you know, uh, it's like the engines are just cooling down. And I can hear him yell this, and then all of a sudden I'm alone. It's me in this room. Burton is now in the track, and I see a Sony Handycam. I have no confirmation that anybody is inside of this car. I have not seen anybody touch it. I've not seen anybody leave of it. Doc told me that the chai shop, the driver and whatever had sat at the chai shop. And I was like, all right, I'm, I'm like on the radio. I'm kind of trying to walk this in at the firm bases or the little patrol bases. We have squawk boxes so people don't have like hanging the radio on their neck and they're hearing this. Right. And so Captain Coleman hears this, gets up on the net and goes, Banshee 4, Banshee 4, this is Diesel 6. What's going on? And I said, I have got a Sony Handycam recording our patrol there. Something's about to happen. Now, everybody looks like super cool in the movies and how all these things like this is not like we, we weren't prepared for this, right?
You don't know that somebody, you think that this is, I'm about seconds away from a fireball, right? And killing 13 Marines in front of a fucking sniper. So now we begin this like three-way standoff. Again, I don't know that anybody's in this car. So what I start doing is— technically, a camera is positive ID. I can destroy this thing, but I can't shoot anything. I don't know that anybody's in the car, so I can't shoot it. What am I going to shoot at, right? So I start— I hear Cobras in the distance, right? And we're near TQ where all the Cobras are out. And I'm like, let's get a fucking Hellfire on this guy now. So I start calling Captain Coleman, right? India Company is jocking up. They're throwing all their gear on because something's about to happen and we're not about to be be victims. So they're spinning up, all the platoons are like getting their react moving, people are dressing up, and this is matters of moments, right? And I'm like, you know, calling in, I've got my Leica Vector, so I got a fucking 10-digit mensurated grid, right? Like there's no math I need to do in this thing.
I know where this thing is at. Get me a Cobra. Well, Cobras are like bingo on fuel or something like that, right? So they can't come in to hit. And immediately I switched to India fires, India fires, request immediate suppression. So I'm not doing a polar, I'm not doing a grid. I've got immediate suppression. Get me rounds now. Immediate suppression grid, you know, 11 Sierra, whatever it is, right? And I read this thing back. They start spinning their mission up. Now they have to go to TQ because TQ is where the artillery is at. So TQ starts spinning the mission up. And again, all of this is happening in minutes while I'm way waiting. The track is still gurgling. There's no movement in the vehicle. I don't know what's happening. I've just got laser eyes on this thing, and I'm in the room by myself. And what happens— I mean, it seems like an eternity goes by. Captain Coleman comes over the net, uh, Banshee 4, immediate fire, immediate suppression fires denied. You're within a no-fire area. And I went, what? And I look at the map, 400 meters north of us, of the 400 meters north of the car is a mosque.
And a mosque has a 500-meter no-fire area on it, meaning I can't do shit. Like I have to get, you know, permission from like the Queen of England if I want to shoot inside of this thing. So that's not happening, especially with artillery, even though I've got a 10-digit mensurated grid. So then I'm sure I've got 60s at OP Falcons. I've got a mortar section. That's low, low ordnance, right? I, I can guarantee where they're going to hit. India fires diesel— sorry, Banshee, you know, adjust fire polar, right? I'm trying to do a polar mission. All of my sniper training is coming through. I'm trying to just get me fucking something on this. Solve this. Get me some HE to solve this problem. And as I'm spinning this mission up, I see a left hand, an ashy left hand come forward. I didn't— again, I didn't know anybody was in the car. I can kind of see a Sony Handycam, and then I see what— I mean, now I know what it is, but like, I saw like, like a, almost like a, like a 2x4 kind of look at that. I didn't know what it was, right?
But I saw something, right? Like an oblong 2x4 looking thing. And I see an ashy finger come up and start messing with the camera. And then I'm like, oh, Diesel, you know, we've got movement right now. And kind of breaks protocol on this thing because what's happening is by no fault of anyone else's, the battalion commander is actually on a local patrol. He's driving down Route Michigan and he's tuned in to Indy Attack. And so he's able to hear all of this happening. And because he's a good commander, he's trying to like not have civilian casualties, whatever. He's trying to not necessarily delay, right? He's not denying any of our fires. He's also trying to get there. So there's a little bit of hesitation in what's going on. The cavalry is literally on its way. And then all of a sudden I see a hand and Captain Coleman comes in. I was like, break, break, break. We've got movement. I've got a hand. You know, I'm not yelling this, but like, we've got movement and he's messing with the camera. And Coleman breaks the total protocol and he says, Pashuti, take the shot. Well, he buys the bullet at that point, right?
And I totally understand it, right? So what I have to do now is I have this triangle window. Window. I can't see anything else in the car except a hand. That's the only untinted portion of the car. And so what I do is I'm imagining where he's looking at, because the window— the little Sony Handycam window's tilted up like this. So I'm trying to guess where I think somebody's head is at, because he's not looking through this. I'm trying to guess where his head's at. His left hand is this, he's looking at this. I'm— and now I'm trying to punch through this window. And I said, hey, I'm going to send one bullet through to try to break the glass, uh, and then send 2 more right after it. The challenge is there's fucking civilians everywhere. It's an active market, and I've got to send a 7.62 into a medium tempered glass. I don't know where that bullet's gonna go. The math stops mathing at that point. So I could literally ricochet and kill somebody. And we've already heard how all the investigations are happening. So there's a ton of weight and a ton of indecision.
It's not like, yeah, blast that fool. Like, it's like, I've got to weigh all this as it's going gone. So I, you know, I go through and I'm trying to— Kevin Homestead now comes into the room and he said he's hearing all this. Now he comes into the room. Breathe in. I'm trying to steady myself. My heart's in my throat. Breathe in. Breathe out. Fire on the natural respiratory pause. Boom. I slam one forward and then I slam two right after it within a minute of angle. Like one goes through, like one's an inch high, and the two more right after it. And then all hell breaks loose because the— nobody knows that we're there. The family below us starts screaming because they think that we're in a gunfight. The family next door starts screaming because they think Americans or whatever's executing, you know, the family inside the house. People are— the block starts screaming, right? And, and the radio is going crazy. I'm trying to get, you know, Burton— I have now shot into this car and I said, red one, red one, I need you to get over that vehicle now. So what they have to do to get over to that side, because there's a wadi in between, the way that they have to get over, they have to scream 200 meters down the road to cross the wadi to come back up the surface road to go where the car is at, at the market.
So all of this picks up. I get off of the gun because now I'm trying to control the scene. Kevin, get on the gun. Now, in the Marine Corps community, this is like a big no-no. We like— snipers get all weird about having non-snipers get behind a gun, but I don't really have an option at this point. And Kevin's an avid hunter, right? I don't really give a shit. Cover this. It's 197 meters. It's not exactly, you know, a hard shot for us. So now I'm on my knee. I'm trying to be able to get the track around. We've got the battalion commander coming down. We've got the cavalry rolling in. In, and I'm trying to coordinate all this because I still don't know what's going on. I still think an ambush is coming. I don't know. I've not confirmed it's a sniper. We don't know any of this stuff because an IED can start an ambush. It's like the, the textbook way of doing this. So I'm trying to cover their shoulders, and the track leaves the scene, and they scream out of there, leaving the scene. And then what happens is Kevin taps me on my shoulder and he goes, hey, P, check it out.
The dude shit— the dude sitting at the chai shop finishes his last drink of chai, stands up, and starts walking towards the car, super nonchalant. He has his prayer beads in his hand. He's like wiping the crumbs on his little kaftan, right? And he's got this smug look on his face. But if you think about it, there were 3 shots fired from an unsuppressed M40 series sniper rifle. And then what happened was a track slammed the door shut. There was chaos in the street and they took off screaming down the road. This is par for the course. This is their MO. This is what happens every time that they shoot. So this spotter, if you will, has no idea that nothing— that everything is different. So he walks towards the car, and remember the conversation before? I said, Kevin, as soon as he touches that car, plug him. He becomes a combatant. He has made his choice. I am now just a hammer. He opens the side door of the car up, looks in the back, goes like this. Kevin shoots him in the side of the chest. He turns, puts both of his hands on the roof of the car and the door of the car falls back a little bit.
Kevin puts another one in the center of his sternum, breaks his sternum. The dude falls to his knees. More screaming, right? More chaos. Everyone's freaking out. And then I'm like, hey dude, get off the gun, I need to grab this, right? And so I— because I don't know, the situation's like super deteriorating at this point. So I get behind the gun, and now this guy crawls inside of the car. And mind you, the car is parked like this to me, so I can't see the driver's seat. I don't know what's going on in the back seat. I can't see shit. I fired 3 rounds into it. Kevin's plugged this guy twice and he's still moving. He crawls across the front of the car. And now what happens is he kind of like lays his butt in the driver's seat and he has his feet over the center console into the passenger seat. But I can't— I can't get a clear shot to his— I'm trying to kill this guy, like, but I can't see through the window, you know, to be able to get a clear shot at his head. Head. The only thing that I can see are his knees.
I can see his knees and his feet. I've got a squad of Marines coming around a corner. I don't know if he's a suicide bomber. I don't know if they have some sort of tripwire, some daisy chain. I've got this track that's now coming up. 13 Marines are barreling down this side street to get there. The only thing I can think to do is continue to plug this guy. I blow his right knee away. I blow his left knee away. He's immobilized at this point. And then I'm trying to, like, I don't know, curve the bullet, like wing things through the rear side window to try to catch this guy, 'cause he's like this. I'm trying to catch him in the head, 'cause I don't know what's happening, and I'm just trying to control the situation. Burton's guys scream up through the tracks, like, you know, Dukes of Hazzard, right? Turn into this thing. The back opens up, the Marines pour out, and I'm talking to Burton. I'm like, "Hey, you've got one guy unconfirmed. We've shot him a couple of times in the front." There was movement in the back of the car. I have no idea what's going on inside of there.
And so he comes up and he's got his, you know, saw gunner, and they open the front door and the spotter has now died. He has got his prayer beads in his hand and he basically, like, drowned in his, you know, we long shot at him twice. And so he basically drowns and he's, and he's gone. And I'm like, hey, dude, back of the car. Don't know what's happening. Happening. They open the door and they go, uh, yeah, there's another one back here. He's dead. So from there, the scene is like, now we've got the cavalry starting to show up. There's a lot more going on. I'm feeling a little bit better. The Marines are now safe. There's the— the ambush potential starting to fall. And, and I said, hey, like, I'm over now, uh, Kyle Burton's left shoulder. I said, listen, dude, now I'm his like guardian Angel. And I said, listen, in the back left rear window of this car— back right rear window of this car— you're going to find a Sony Handycam. I need you to grab the Sony Handycam and hold it up in the air for me. And he goes, yep, it's a Sony Handycam, got it.
And then he puts it, and they like put it in the track, right? And then he goes, yeah, there's something else in here. Now his back's to me, so what he does is he grabs this thing and he takes it. Now he's not on— like, we're not like super we're, we're not Navy SEALs. We don't have like cool headsets at this point. We're like grunts, you know, like we have like shitty radio antennas and he's got like an Icom radio, you know, like a walkie-talkie. And so I'm— so he's doing things and I'm not trying to bother him super much. So he takes this thing and he goes, yeah, it looks like a rifle. And he grabs it and he moves it into the track. And I go, whoa, stop for a second, pull that back. And he turns around and I said, hold that above your head. And he holds the rifle above his head, McMillan stock, Remington 700 short action barrel, a scope I don't recognize, no bipods on the front, olive drab, sort of multi or tricolor green. And I said, holy shit. I said, Kyle, I need you to read me the first serial number, the first digits of the serial number from that weapon system.
So M40A3s had, I think it was Echo 676, if I wasn't, if I'm not mistaken, was the first 4 digits of a Marine sniper's serial number. The M40A1s were a November 6 or November, some series of that. He says, Remington Model 700, November 8 or whatever the numbers are. And now I've got my entire team in the room at this point. And we realize right there it was 2-4 sniper rifle. It was Tommy Parker's rifle. So the situation continues to deteriorate. Now there's kind of a riot kind of starting to form. People are angry. They think that we're just killing— they were not happy with us at the time frame, especially near Ramadi. So we got to get out. We got up now. We're loading up into this track, right? They load us up in this track and they hand me the rifle. And the first thing I do is I look at this rifle and I'm like blown away from it, like blown away by it. The first thing I do is I take the last round chamber chambered inside of that rifle. And I take that, that bullet and I take the next bullet, that bullet.
So technically, that would be my hog's tooth by the definition. I killed another sniper. I took that hog's tooth from him. That was the round that was meant for somebody else. But what we did with that was we ended up getting that and being— got it put on a plaque that had the single bullet vertical, and then it had 2-4 and 3-5. 5, because the way that the Marine Corps regiments work is even though it's 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, they're part of the 5th Marine Regiment. They are all in the same camp with us in Camp San Mateo in Camp Pendleton, California. They're a sister battalion. That round was never mine. The round belonged to 5th Marines. It passed from 2-4, it went to 3-5, and we brought it home. So the last bullet chambered in that thing was placed on that plaque. Back and then given to the regimental commander later on. The worst part about the whole thing is that Juba's hand was turning the camera off. When we did a post-analysis of that, you could see Kyle Burton. He was the next target. He was in Juba's sights. Holy shit. And he was going to kill Kyle Burton.
Curtain. When I saw the camera and had Kyle look left and look right, you can see it in the camera. He looked left and looked right and he slammed the TC hat shut. His shot went away and something spooked him. He was starting to sit there. We were in a three-way cat and mouse game. The best part about that was inside of that video, you could see my hide site. You couldn't see me, but he was looking directly at me. So in his field of view for that camera, I was behind it. Kyle Burton was the target. The only bad part is that he turned the camera off because you would have seen the report, the flash from my rifle coming out of my window and into his car and blowing that whole thing up. Right. And going through that process. But he turned it off. But that's eventually what got me to shoot him, was seeing his hand coming through. But by an unimaginable, you know, stroke of luck or timing, we were in the right place at the right time and we were able to return that rifle.
Wow. Wow. You fucking picked up a small Handycam in the middle of an active market. Wow. Holy shit. You're a fucking observer. Wow.
I appreciate it. City boy learned it in sniper school. Holy shit. Hit, you know, if they— if, if they—
how'd that feel, man? So did that hit right away?
Yes and no. Yes, it did. The first call I made was not to my family. The first call I made was to Quantico Sniper School. They're the lead schoolhouse. My old sniper team leader, Sergeant Blake Cole, was a sniper instructor at Quantico. He was my first— we got on the Iridium, he's my first phone call. Jimmy and I got on the phone together. Blake, we got him. And we gave him a full after-action. They briefed everybody on what was going on, and it was the shot heard round the world for the Marine sniper community because it came— we lost 4 Marine snipers when that thing went away. And the poetic justice that it was taken back by a fucking Marine and brought back to our hands was so perfect for us. Nearly 2 years to the day, June 16th, 2006. June 24th, 2004 is when it was lost. The best part of this story— well, there's an interesting kind of thing. The rifle was actually lost for a number of years. We thought that the Marine Corps had lost the rifle because it went into an armory and the Marine Corps does what the Marine Corps sometimes does and isn't the best about it.
A long story short, I get a call from Quantico, Virginia, and a buddy of mine, another sniper, legend in the community, calls me up and he says, hey man, not many people know about it, but a rifle just arrived at the museum. We think it's the one that you got back. And I went, what? I like— we effectively— what happened is 5th Marine Regiment owned that rifle when it came back and it was at display, kind of like some of the displays in here at the regimental headquarters. I had brought my mom to go visit visit that rifle at one point. It's like on a weekend, dude. Marines are assholes sometimes, right? So it's on a weekend and I'm like visiting 5th Marine Headquarters and I'm showing my mom is like 4 foot nothing, right? You know, like, and I'm showing her this gun and I'm in the regimental headquarters and like the regimental duty comes down. He's like, can I help you? And I'm like, oh, I'm just showing this thing, you know, whatever here. And I don't really tell the story. I was like, I'm just showing, you know, this rifle here. And the guy's like a dick and he like asks, he's like, I need you guys, if you're not, if you don't have any business being in the regimental headquarters, quarters.
I need you to leave. And I was like, all right, cool, you know, like, have a good one. My mom was so mad at me. She was like, why didn't you tell him? I'm like, it doesn't matter, you know. Like, so it was on display at the regimental headquarters, but then the regiment deployed to Afghanistan as a regiment. Well, when they do that, they put everything into storage, and the rumor was that they didn't pay the storage bill. So for 10 years, I thought this thing got Storage Wars, right? And some asshole bid on this thing and this piece of Marine Corps history, right? But through a stroke of luck, somebody found it in the regimental armory randomly, super rusted, not taken care of. Right. And just like in the back, it just wasn't— nobody really took it that seriously. It was this weird phenomenon. And then we, you know, I had a conversation in 20— I think it's 2022. And they're like, hey, we think we got it here. So I email like the Marine Corps, Dear Marine Corps Museum, right? And they're, they're super suspect of like some rando who's like, hi, I'm the guy who got the rifle bag, right?
You know, and again, nobody knows my name. Like Soldier of Fortune magazine picked it up and they have a, they did a whole article on it. But in the article, I deny, I, I deny anything to do with it. It just says That's my battalion commander. Great guy, by the way. Like, wrote my letter of recommendation to become a gunner later on. That's the last bullet chambered inside of Juba's rifle. No shit. Yep. And what we did was, it was a Marine Corps victory, and so we wanted to give it back to the Marine Corps. And so I think in the article it says a 21-year-old Marine sniper from San Jose, Jose. I think that's all it says.
That is fucking badass, dude. It's—
it was just— it was something that we wanted to give, I think, to the unit. And when, you know— and again, I think we've talked about it a couple of times— to anybody that's, uh, you know, mad or whatever, the validity of the story, sure. But, you know, like I said, here's my gun book, and here's my gun book from that gun gun from that day. And you'll see over here above the black, it says June 16th, 2006, and it says 2 kills next to it. Wow. I'm not supposed to have the gun book. The Marine Corps may want it back, but it's supposed to stay with the gun. And then that is pamphlets that we dropped, that the service dropped or started to spread out there to let them know that, you know, we got it back and we killed Juba.
That's the car. That's the car. That's the rifle. That's the car. There's the body. Wow.
What does this say? I have no idea, honestly. It would— it would— wouldn't take too long to Google Translate it. And then here's my muzzle velocity randomly from that gun. It's just things we kept. The cool part, the coolest part about this whole story was when we got it and it was confirmed armed. The Marine Corps told me, and I got a chance to go see it in the— if you ever get a chance, you may have the connections to do this, and I'm able to connect you to people. The Marine Corps Museum has an armory of all of our historic— I mean, water-cooled machine— German water-cooled machine guns from World War I, uh, um, Smedley— not Smedley, but like, uh, the original Mameluke sword, right? Like the pirate pirate guns with the, you know, the pistol with like the cone or whatever, the scatter guns from pirate hunting days in the 1700s. This armory has everything. It's freaking amazing. And they had the weapon system in there. I had to go through some like pretty heavy vetting because they were like, all right, yeah, nice. No one's claimed credit of it, you know, for it.
You know, now this like rando 20 years later or 15 years later is like talking about it. But I showed them some of the things that we showed here. And we had a good conversation. I showed them I have a picture of me with that rifle from the day that we killed Juba, me holding that rifle, to be able to tie the whole thing, you know, to kind of gather. And that was the piece. When we talked to the Marine Corps Museum about putting it in the museum, I was adamant that I wanted my name nowhere near it because I— the reason why I started stepping forward was because, one, some people were monetizing it. Some people were taking the story and taking it, making whatever it was. And I just wasn't comfortable with that. But really what happens is there are three parts to the story. The first part of the story is how the rifle was lost and whose rifle it actually was. The second part of the story was what that rifle did while it was in enemy hands. And the third part of the story was how we got it back.
Got it back. People only wanted to focus on the third part of the story. So when it got put into the Marine Corps Museum, I made sure— and I— and they were— they were— and again, like, I didn't really demand anything. They were very easy to work with on this. It's Tommy Parker's name that's next to that rifle because it was never mine. I held it for one day, for 10 minutes. That was his rifle, and he died protecting it. And now You know, I saw on the internet recently, and I haven't shared this, but I saw on the internet recently, uh, is his brother and his son went to the Marine Corps Museum and stood in front of his dad's rifle. Damn, that's what it's about, man. That's brotherhood. That's like, I get to live on. That was, you know, I get to move on with my life and go on and live and I think it was his brother. And if I'm not mistaken, it was his son that got a chance to be there in front of his dad's gun and his brother's gun. And it's not going to bring him back.
But that family knows that his death was avenged, that his death was not in vain. He was a, you know, a good man with a kid. I think it was— God, I think it was son. Forgive me on that. But he, you know, and now they have a place. Like, and that belongs to the Marines. If I put my name on it, it belongs to me, and that's not what the Marines are about. If I put his name on it, it belongs to the Marine Corps.
Good man. Good man. Wow, dude, that is something.
I appreciate it. Congratulations. Oh, thank Thank you. Thank you. I still have the second bolt. The first one they got to keep. The second one, I made sure I kept that one. I got that one at home. Cool.
Let's, uh, let's take a break. Cool.
Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elite's The Watch Floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters, and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Tariffs, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime— not everything is urgent, but this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know.
All right, AJ, that was quite the accomplishment there. I appreciate it. Thank you. Wow. I mean, I know I think I already said it in the last segment, but I mean, to pick a handycam up as a sniper, and I mean, you just showed me the vantage point. You see the, the, the photo, the vantage point, and wow. I appreciate that. That's impressive, man.
I was just doing what the training said, you know, taking an opportunity to run the 50-meter, 50-meter overlapping strip search. Just honestly, it was something that I had learned in sniper school. And, um, you know, one of our sniper sayings is, you know, suffer silently and silently suffer and patiently wait is, is what our thing is. Our job is to do that. Um, and what was interesting about that was it was a three-way standoff. Off, and each person was waiting for the other to flinch. And we just had to make sure he flinched first. Now, we were doing a lot of things to try to get him to flinch earlier with, you know, missiles and artillery and things like that. But it's, it's, it's just kind of, I think patience is the virtue in that, you know, and it kind of, you know, plays back to the testament of, you know, the sniper ethos is just, you know, patiently suffer and suffer patiently.
Right on, man. So then you move over to recon. On?
I go to sniper school as an instructor, so I get asked to come back as a sniper instructor, and I was a sniper instructor for about a year. And then now First Sergeant Jackson— so remember Gunny Jackson from earlier on— so I'm a sniper instructor at Camp Pendleton, and I'm teaching employment. I'm with Wesley Payne and Dave Selasky, so the guys that brought me up. Now I'm working under them as a sniper instructor, and About 6 months into that, Afghanistan starting to pick up. And then what happens is now First Sergeant Ricky Jackson comes and pays a visit to Scout Sniper School. And in that visit, he's just coming to check on me. He's been keeping tabs on my career and where I'm at. So he walks in and we have a conversation and I let him know, you know, that I'm thinking about, you know, going over to recon. And his answer was, It was, oh man, you know, you know, pshh, you just love getting your ass kicked, right? You know? And so it was a goal of mine once I had become, you know, a sniper. It was, it was like this kind of pivotal moment when I was going through sniper school.
And I think that what Wesley Payne taught me was when I was going through sniper school, he told me to write whatever it is that I wanted most in this world. He told me to write it on my mirror. And so he said, part of being a sniper is visualization, right? We have to visualize the path of the bullet, the arc, right? The rotation of the earth, the way that the wind works. Part of being, you know, a sniper in life was visualization. So as a student, he had me go home and he had me write Scout Sniper in a non-permanent marker on my mirror. So every morning when I was shaving what he said, my, my nasty little pig face, I'd shave my face. I'd visualize that. So I came back to sniper school after everything, you know, the deployment and and, you know, he helped to reinforce that. Gunny Jackson came back, talked to me, and he said, you know, in our conversation of what I wanted to do, he said, okay, pishoot. And he said, this is something you really want to do? And I said, yeah. And he says, we've already been over this.
He says, every man is in charge of his own destiny. I'm going to come back in 6 months. If you're not here, I'll know where you're at. And so Gunny, or now First Sergeant Jackson, gave me permission and kind of helped me to, you know, accomplish my next goal and kind of, you know, join the reconnaissance community. And so when I got to BRC or the Basic Recon Course, I'll probably just say Recon School because it's easier here, but Basic Recon Course, I did what Wesley Payne told me and I wrote Reconnaissance Marine on my mirror. And so part of that visualization was every day reminding myself that that's what I wanted to do. And we pushed into that. And so for those that don't know, this is fun as we have a SEAL and a Recon Marine kind of having a good conversation about this. It's a good chance to talk about, for me, of what Recon is, what it means to me, like some of our lineage and where we come from. So Recon as a whole, it's a very interesting organization within an organization. What I found from a, you know, kind of anthropological kind of study was that recon Marines always revere Navy SEALs because they have a very good community.
They're a tight-knit group of people. I think that there's roughly 3,000 Navy SEALs, if I'm not mistaken. I think there's 800 reconnaissance Marines. And we look to SEALs in a lot of ways as a, as a partner pair, because I think that we, you know, competition breeds excellence. When I talk to people about about, you know, the joke is— so a good friend of mine, and I'll just say his first name is John, he's at, uh, SEAL Team 5 currently, and he heard me say this one time, and I'm probably never ever going to live it down, but I was— the thing that kills reconnaissance Marines is our motto is silent professionals, right? So like on our— Solaire, Solens, Mortalis, right? Swift, silent, deadly is kind of another one of our things. But the joke is is, um, whenever I'm talking to someone and I have to explain what a reconnaissance Marine is or a Force Reconnaissance Marine is, they go, okay, cool. And I look at them, like, not registering that in their eyes, like, okay, neat. Like, they're just kind of giving me, like, the north-south to be nice. And I go, do you know, do you know what a Navy SEAL is?
And they go, oh yeah. I'm like, we're like the Marine Corps version of that. So, like, every time that I have to explain what a Marine or a Force Recon Marine is, I have to use a Navy SEAL. The cool part is recon and Navy SEALs have grown up together in the special operations realm. So in 1938 was around the first time reconnaissance Marines came into existence, and it was when the Marine Corps was developing their amphibious warfare doctrine. Now, this started in, you know, in the early 1900s and moved into the late 1930s. The first, I think it was called Observer Group One, started 1938, and then eventually in 1942, what we needed to do was develop an amphibious reconnaissance capability before large landing forces made the island hopping campaigns. So I think it was, correct me if I'm wrong, but Navy UDT teams or underwater demolition teams, Navy UDTs and recon Marines or Observer Group One or amphibious reconnaissance worked together in the Pacific, a lot of us coming out of naval shipping or submarines. So specifically reconnaissance Marines, when we see each other, it's an inside kind of greeting that we do.
Like the Marine Corps likes to do "Oorah," right? Recon Marines say "Aruga" to one another. And that comes from our tradition of originally being born on submarines or coming out of submarines. Recon Marines, because what happens is when the submarines would dive or they would surface, they would say, "Aruga, aruga, aruga," right, with their kind of their, their whatever their horn was. And so Recon Marines adapted that. So Recon Marines, when we see each other in passing, we'll say, "Aruga," and like do a little fist bump. It's kind of a lineage back to, you know, where we came from. And so stepping into that role as a reconnaissance student, coming from the sniper community, I had kind of a leg leg up. I did what's called a lateral move. So I was a sergeant before I moved over to become a reconnaissance Marine. I was a little older than most people, but I had a little bit more experience than, you know, the average, uh, Marine coming through it. And then I met this person who I instantly, um, competed with, and I would say at times I, I hated. His name was Matt Ingham, and he was an East Coast sniper.
He was also a pistol instructor for for high-risk personnel, which was a course in Quantico, Virginia. And so he was an East Coast sniper and I was a West Coast sniper, and we had very similar kind of upbringings in the service and similar experiences. And we both checked into the basic reconnaissance course together. And so he and I kind of, you know, were both vying for honor grad. We wanted to be as good as we could through the process, and we competed with one another relentlessly. Relentlessly through this entire thing. Well, during the course, which at the time was I think 4 months— now BRC is around 5 months in its whole or its totality— um, we somewhere along the way we became really, really good friends. And so since he was an older guy from the East Coast, he stayed at my house, like slept on my couch, we would study together. And he was this kind of guy that like was always, always, always nipping at your heels to be a little bit better. And it's really fun when you're in an environment like that to find someone to compete with. Matt was my, like, polar opposite in a lot of ways.
I'm, like, boisterous. I talk with my hands, right? I'm all over the place. Matt was the silent professional type when we were going through BRC. And through the course, you know, we do an amphibious phase in Coronado, um, and then we do, you know, land phase up in Northern— or up in Camp Pendleton. And then we do a lot of pool phases, a lot of very similar training. I don't know that our training mirrors BUD/S in as far as the sequence of events. And I know that you guys have diving inside of your, your basic course. Those are follow-on schools for us. So our, what we would call pre-BRC or our reconnaissance training and assessment program is like a 4-month or excuse me, a 4-week kind of gut check. That's our weeding people out of the system. And then you enter into an individual skills phase phase, you enter into a land navigation— excuse me, a patrolling phase, and then you have an amphibious phase down in Coronado. And the fun thing I like to do is, you know, everybody knows the Navy SEAL boats, right? You know, you guys are always carrying them on your heads.
And so the funny thing that we like to joke with, and especially as a reconnaissance instructor later on, is we liked to kind of, you know, joke around that we're carrying our actual Zodiacs. And so I think your guys' boats are like 195 pounds. The reconnaissance Marines' boats are about 380 pounds. And so there's always like a joke back and forth. We have to take a lot more people underneath that to be able to carry that load. But running the Zodiacs, one of the things that our instructors would do is in the Pacific when we would go— we're on the Silver Strand, actually on Coronado. We're on the dry side of Coronado where you guys are on the wet side of Coronado, on the, on the, on the strand itself. So we would come out into the surf zone and the recon instructors and the SEAL instructors would always somehow link up and then we would go hand in hand or arm in arm. The Recon Marines would go into the surf zone with the BUD/S students. Right. And so it was, you know, thrashing together kind of thing. So it's always been really fun.
We've never actually, you know, any of the stuff that people see on the internet between like Recon versus SEALs, that doesn't really exist for us in the, in the community itself. It's always been, you know, yeah, we compete for missions when we go overseas, but we also have different bosses. So I think a lot of people people get confused as to where Recon falls inside of the Marine Corps hierarchy. So we have MARSOC, who are Raiders now, and we have Recon. So the way that I would describe MARSOC is they are a special operations unit that works for SOCOM. They are Marines who work for SOCOM. We are a special operations capable unit that works for the Marine Corps. When we created MARSOC from from the Force Recon companies in 2006 and 2007, we had something called Marine Corps Detachment One, and DET-1 was this experimental unit of the, you know, the top dogs of Force Recon companies and brought them together and had this experimental unit in 2006. It was a Rumsfeld initiative, and that eventually turned into Marine Special Operations Command and then eventually turned into raiders. So the best thing— when we did that, what we realized— and, and the Marines then worked for SOCOM— what Marine commanders lost was they lost a special operations capable asset that worked directly for the Marine Corps.
And so what Recon does now, and what they're currently doing now, is a lot of special operations missions or clandestine missions around the world, but staying working for Marine Combatant Command commanders, so that a Marine general or Marine colonel can always have access to Snake Eaters. We lost that when we allowed MARSOC to work for SOCOM, a very different role. And there is no, again, I know the internet tries to do some stuff. There is no bad blood between Recon and MARSOC. We have very different jobs. There are areas where we have similarities, but I would compare a lot of what MARSOC's roles are is very similar to the ODAs or really similar to the Green Marine Berets, where I would say that recon falls a little bit more in line with Navy SEALs. And so we have the visit, board, search, and seizure. We have, you know, you know, long-range reconnaissance, parachute and dive insertion, all those same methods of insertion and extraction. We just happen to work for the Marine Expeditionary Unit or the Marine Expeditionary Forces themselves. So it's kind of a fun, you know, nuance through there. And Matt and I got a chance to learn this as we were kind of going through the basic Reconnaissance Course together.
Right on.
What did you think of the Reconnaissance Course?
Well, like all courses, uh, that I've attended in the Marine Corps, I was terrible at first. So I'm not an aquatic, you know, monster. So what thankfully what happens is we have a very steep pool phase in the beginning, and our pool phase is again the kind of the great equalizer, meant to weed a lot of people out. And so I got really, really good at, you know, treading, really, really good add our underwater, you know, crossovers, brick treads, all that kind of stuff. The thing where I struggled the most was our open water fins. And the way that Recon does open water fins is different now than Navy SEALs do their open water fins. So we have to use— I think you guys are familiar with like rockets and jets, like the fins that we put on those things are like 2x4s, right? When we— when I was going through BRC, SEALS were experimenting with a type of stroke that was— I think it was called the combat side stroke, and it was this like interesting hybrid of a full, almost like a crawl stroke, but they were doing it on their side, and it allowed for a lot more efficient movement.
The recon community didn't allow that as part of their testing criteria, so there was no side stroke or combat side stroke allowed. And then going into the amphibious portion down in Coronado, pushing all that weight— I had a smaller frame and had extra large jets, and so my legs weren't able—
wait, how were you guys swimming if you weren't doing a combat sidestroke?
We put our rucks in front of— so the way we— all of our fins is a 2-kilometer ruck swim. So we put our rucks in front of us, we have a rifle, you know, mounted on that, and we have all of our, our equipment we're wearing it, and we push this ruck. So we're just like this, this like, you know, wake coming through the surf. And that's part of our— of how we get to work, right? And how we, you know, we move with these things. And so just always becomes the requirement. We're really never— we're always spinning with a ruck. We're always spinning, pushing a ruck because it's part of their, you know, part of the idea of that's, that's what we're going to have to do eventually anyway. So it becomes part of the curriculum very, very early on. Right on. Um, but BRC was fantastic, a really professionally run course. Really enjoyed kind of going through that. Um, and I had some really good recon students with me that again helped me through the process. What we've started to realize is there was a shaping of, you know, early on, I think in a young male, in a young man's career, is they start kind of chirping at one another or finding areas of weakness in one another.
What Recon does is we try to find each other's weaknesses, but not exploit them, but find places to be able to fill that gap and wanting to be able to make sure that the team as a whole, you know, we took the term from you as, you know, boat bootduckers, right? You know, it's a negative term in the SEALs, you know, is not carrying your own weight. What we would do is when a reconnaissance Marine in training would start, um, putting themself ahead of the team, we would have 6 Marines carrying the, you know, 380-pound Zodiac. If we noticed, you know, if as a student, if the instructors noticed a student not carrying their own weight, they would pull that student out of the boat team and have them walk beside the boat team while the rest of the Marines, now 5 Marines, would be carrying the 380 pounds. And if another person was doing the same thing, that started to compound. What we really, really emphasized was that the team was above all else, and that changed our mindset from being individually focused to saying, if you have a weakness, my job is to be able to ensure that I can cover that gap because the team lives or dies by each other, not by individual skill sets themselves.
And so that really started to shape a mentality towards— even though I was a sniper team leader, you know, and it operated that environment for a long time, snipers are relatively, you know, it's a solo craft at some— in some periods, and you have, you know, ebbs and flows. But as a reconnaissance team, we require and rely on one another 100% of the time, all the time. And so that really built, I think, a framework for how I was going to carry on for the rest of my career was learning that earlier on in, uh, in BRC. Right on. Where do you go?
How many, uh, recon units are there?
So there are technically 4 reconnaissance units. There's, uh, 3 active duty reconnaissance units and then 1 reserve reconnaissance unit. And they're— so the 3 active are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd out of Camp Pendleton, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and then, uh, Okinawa, Japan. And then 4th Recon is split between a number of coasts, but primarily headquartered out of San Antonio. Not a lot of water there, but that's where they're primarily headquartered out of. Where did you go? Okinawa, Japan. And so, um, immediately got stationed to Okinawa, Japan. And when I graduated BRC, I ended up graduating as the honor graduate from BRC, and Matt Ingham graduated as number 2, and I beat him by one, like a half of a percentage point. So like one answer on a test or one, you know, ruck run time or whatever it was. Now, since we were heavy competitors, what I did was I made sure to kind of rub it in his face, and I always called him number two, right? He had this, again, a very stoic kind of mentality. He had this like snaggletooth— he had an extra like canine or a canine that was a little up, and his lip would catch on this little snaggletooth.
And so I'd always know when I'd piss him off when I'd call him number two and his lip would catch up here. It was always kind of a fun little banter. But what happened is when we went to 3rd Recon Battalion, 3rd Recon at the time was, we're in this like middle period between Iraq and Afghanistan where Afghanistan's starting to heat up. We haven't had a lot of, the surge hasn't started yet. But what happens is we have kind of an atrophy of, of combat veterans in the service once Iraq starts to kind of pivot out. And so now when we get to Okinawa, Japan, we have a relatively green reconnaissance unit. So a lot of the Marines themselves are on their first deployment. They're new reconnaissance Marines. And Matt and I fall into a very heavy, I would say, mentor instructor role as junior reconnaissance Marines ourselves. The benefit was we were both snipers, you know, beforehand. So a lot of the skill sets transitioned over quite nicely. But immediately getting to 3rd Recon, we started the transition for for what would eventually become the plus-up in Afghanistan. And we started training across the Pacific, you know, going everywhere that we could to be able to train for the mountains of Afghanistan.
Right on. Yeah.
What year did you deploy to Afghanistan?
So, nah, the end of 2009. So I graduated BRC in 2008, and then October 31st of 2009, I deployed to Afghanistan, and I deployed part of our advance party. I got to Camp Bastion and then eventually Camp Leatherneck about a month before my unit did. And I was, I ended up being attached as a special operations LNO or liaison officer with the SAS and the SBS. And so I got a couple of opportunities to run some long-range reconnaissance missions with the SAS in Southern Helmand. And it was was, you know, a wild experience to say the least. The SAS at the time worked with the Afghan National Commandos, and they had their own version of the SAS inside of them, and they were some of the best, you know, partner forces I'd ever seen. The Brits had a long history of desert patrols, so like Lawrence of Arabia, right? So like part of the SAS SAS's— excuse me— part of the SAS's history was rooted in long-range desert reconnaissance. And so when I went on this, you know, uh, you know, the liaison officer position with them, um, my role was to learn as much as I could about, you know, desert patrols with the experts themselves.
And it was fascinating to be able to go with these guys. We did something like 400 miles. We drove for 2 weeks basically down to the southern end of the Helmand Province on the border of Pakistan, doing drug interdiction and using a lot of the SAS's assets to be able to interdict and get in a bunch of gunfights with a whole bunch of, you know, really, really rooted Taliban in the southern portion of Helmand Province, you know. And then at the end of that mission, we got a number of gunfights with them. We drove— they had a thing called— they were called cannibals. Or Jackals, was this open-air 4x4 buggy with a Heckler, with an H&K Mark 19 variant on that open air, right? You know, like, so, you know, dust mask or shamogs over your face. But the funniest part about the Brits is these are British-designed vehicles and they had a portion of the radiator that was routed that the radiator would, would through whatever, you know, method that they had would always have the opportunity for hot water. So as we would be doing this, you know, 18-hour movement a day down to southern Helmand Province chasing drug dealers or drug interdiction, we would stop every 4 hours for what they called a cuppa, right?
So they would stop for a cup of tea, like literally in the middle of Afghanistan. We would stop in the middle of the desert and everyone would stop and have a piece of chocolate and a cup of tea. And that was their, you know, their whole, you you know, it was really fun to see like the culture come through that. I got to work with the Royal Marine, which was interesting because the Royal Marine Commando, how they're shaped and function and how they're formed as an individual unit or as an entity, I think the United States Marine Corps could learn a lot from. They are all infantry first, and then they come and then have the opportunity to have other jobs or other skill sets afterwards. Words. One of the guys that I deployed with had— or on this mission, he had the word "boot" tattooed across his neck. Now, the Brits can have a lot more tattoos than the Americans, right? But he had "boot" across his neck, and I asked him about it. And I remember, so "boot" was a negative term for us, but in the British Royal Marines, they were called bootnecks.
We were called leathernecks. And the reason is exactly the same. They would take boot leather, and so like the Marine Corps, like high collar that you see in our dress blues, that used to be leather, and that was there for protecting against scabbards, right? Or, you know, sword slashes when we were pirate— when we were eventually— when, or essentially when the Americans and the Brits were fighting each other. And so bootnecks came from the same thing. It was boot leather. So they're called bootnecks, we're called leathernecks, and it's this really interesting kind of, uh, you historical kind of dichotomy between two nations that are now partners that were once adversaries a number of years ago. What do you think in working with special ops now from a conventional unit? So I really like the idea of how they thought. I think that the idea of thinking outside the box, of seeing a problem and being able to not have a templated solution. So in the infantry, a lot of their speed was generated by having templated solutions. There was an action and there was always this templated reaction. And that matters, especially when you're dealing with a lot of, you know, Marines that are on their first enlistment.
We need instant, you know, kind of, you know, instant willingness, like, to be able to respond to a stimulus. In the special operations community, kind of like what I alluded to a little bit early on, was we were taught the word "why" from the very, very beginning. The thing that I can say is the difference between a reconnaissance Marine and a conventional infantry Marine Reconnaissance Marine is simply just the word "why." We teach Reconnaissance Marines from infancy to ask why, and it's not to question the commander. It's to seek the commander's intent, because if the Reconnaissance Marine can understand what the commander's intent is, when clarity falls away, they can still solve the problem or try to solve the problem to what the— or try to solve the commander's intent through a non-conventional means or trying to be able to figure that as best as possible. That doesn't necessarily work with a larger Marine Corps because that's not how the service is built itself. Part of us is— Recon is not, you know, dare I say, like complaining. And I wouldn't want to— I'm not here to complain. Recon isn't really generally liked by the service, by the Marine Corps itself.
We may make their recruiting videos. We may they fall into, you know, the ball videos. There's a lot of jumping and diving and shooting and stuff like that, which is a lot of the predominantly recon spaces. But what happens is I did an LNO tour with a SEAL up in, up in Virginia Beach, and we were doing like a, like a virtual exercise. This is later in my career. So it was a SEAL chief, right? He's got his trident, right? And I was a force recon, you know, chief or sorry, Gunnery Sergeant, and I had my jump dive. And as we're walking on this ship, we're walking down the P-ways, the Navy personnel are like falling out of their way to allow the SEAL the opportunity to cruise down the hallway. Right. Well, the Marines themselves didn't provide the same opportunity for the recon Marines. And it's— and again, this is a very isolated incident and I'm not speaking for the entire service, but the way that I look looked at it was the Marine Corps itself is built to be a warfighting force and specifically a ground warfighting force. And they tell us, and we act as such, is the most, you know, violent, most lethal, best fighting force the world has ever known.
And you have 30,000 infantry Marines who believe that, and they do that. But then what happens is you have a small group of people where they're like, well, who are those people? Like, well, those are recon Marines. Those the best of the best. Well, we're like, I thought we were the best of the best, right, as the infantry and the Marine Corps. Like, well, those are the best of the other best. And so at some times, at some points, an animosity can, can occur because people already thought that they were the best, right, and, and didn't want to be able to associate that maybe they weren't, you know, the peak of, of the pinnacle. Um, at some level, SEALs— when a 400,000-person organization in the Navy, there are 3,000 Navy SEALS. The reverence that the Navy— we believe this is from an outsider's perspective— the reverence that the Navy has for SEALs is not shared with, you know, the reverence that the Marine Corps has for recon, if that makes sense. Does, does make sense. Yeah. Now, we love the service, but it's just not— we have a very small budget inside of the service.
We have a very small number of people, and we're constantly having to fight for our own advocacy. And that motto that I mentioned earlier, "Silent Professionals," actually doesn't do us a lot of justice because what happens is later on when we'll see in Benghazi and the incident that happens in Benghazi is nobody at a higher level really knew what the reconnaissance element was. And it caused us some issues in an area that needed a little bit more clarity. but so Matt and I deploy to Afghanistan in 2010. He shows up. Matt is— so part of our kind of our arc, right? So Matt and I are fierce rivals, right? We're both in the same platoon. We're in Bravo Company, 3rd Recon. We're in 3rd Platoon. And the way that a recon platoon works, and I don't know if it's the same in the SEALs, but your number one team is your go-to team. It is the, you know, the pipe hitters of the group, and then they have like an order of precedence, Team 2 and Team 3 and so on. The way that our organization worked is we had a smaller platoon of, you know, I was a team leader and Matt was a team leader, but we had bounced all throughout the Pacific in our training regimen as we were getting ready to go to Afghanistan.
And our platoon commander and our platoon sergeant, the O-3 and the E-7, didn't denominate who was Team 1 and who was Team 2. And what they said was they were going to allow us to compete with one another. So I was team whatever and he— leader, and he was team other whatever, team leader. And so we had this competition throughout the Pacific as we were training. We get to Hawthorne Army Ammunition Depot and there's a training area. Hawthorne looks extremely like, uh, Hawthorne, Nevada looks a lot like the southern end of the Hindu Kush mountain range, specifically Nauzad, where we were going to be operating. And so it's our final day of training out there. Been training for 9 months, a year, ready to go on this first deployment, you know, to Afghanistan. And the platoon commander, platoon sergeant gather all of us together and they're like, all right, here we are, we're going to decide who's Team 1 and who's Team 2. And so Matt and I kind of gather around, we get our teams together, and Captain Kevin Kincaid, you know, the platoon commander, he pulls us in, he says, okay, you guys are neck and neck, you guys have both had good qualifications, bad qualifications, we you can't— there's no air between the two of you.
So what we decided to do is we're going to flip a coin, right? And I'm furious about this. I'm like throwing my hands, like, there's no way I'm gonna associate this, you know, flip of a coin. We're both arguing like I should be team one, right? Because my team's done this and this, and Matt's messed this up, and yada yada. And we're doing the same thing. So we all gather around. What happens is the platoon commander's like, all right, here are the rules, right? We're gonna flip the coin in the air, we're going to allow it to touch the ground and bounce, and then whatever whatever lands is how it's going to break up. And he says, "Ingham," to Matt, he goes, "Ingham, you pick." And he goes, "Tails never fails." So, Kincaid flips the coin in the air, it falls to the ground, it bounces off of a cot, the whole platoon jumps down, we're all trying to figure it out, people are covering it up, and it ends up being heads. And Matt is furious. He's like, "No!" You know, kids, like, "Interference! Reflip!" And I'm like, owned Team 1, I fought for it, I've got my win, I'm gonna hold on to Team 1, you know, with, you know, life, you know, forever and ever.
And so then eventually he gives up on that fight, and then what happens is the platoon commander is like, also, we've come up with our call sign, and we couldn't decide on a call sign. You know, some people try to pick like badass call signs or whatever it is. Our call sign that we've decided is going to be— we had to look and say, what is this, the best animal on land and the the best animal in the water. So we came— we come up with the term Bear Shark, and I was furious. I was like, this is the dumbest fucking name I've ever heard in the entire world. I was like, what was Bear Shark or Bear Killer Whale already taken, right? So eventually— and Matt loves this because he knows it pisses me off— so we eventually turn into Bear Shark, and that's our platoon call sign as we go into Afghanistan. But as we cruise over, you know, And now we're in Afghanistan. I've done my mission with the SAS. We got in a couple of gunfights with them. The Brits are fantastic with what they're able to do. And they, you know, had a ton of, you know, opium and black tar heroin that we interdicted down there, fighting a lot of the drug fuels that were feeding into Iran and eventually feeding the Taliban itself or funding the Taliban itself.
Now the whole, my, you know, the whole battalion shows up or my, excuse me, my company shows up into Afghanistan. Bravo Company's there, and we start parsing out where we're going to go. Well, Bear Shark gets slated with going to Now Zad, and Now Zad is kind of a no man's land, and it is, like I said, at the southern tip of the Hindu Kush Mountains. And part of that is there is one lone infantry company from an infantry unit from 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, and they're at a FOB, or a forward operating base, called FOB Caffaretta. And FOB Caffaretta is kind of at the bottom of this valley in Now Zad, and Now Zad once had something like 30,000 to 40,000 people inside of it, and now it's a total ghost town. The Brits fought there, the Estonians fought there, and then now we're fighting there. And the Taliban were ruthless in the area. Uh, tons of IEDs, not a lot of snipers that we saw in the area, but we're— Afghanistan was not Iraq, and the fighters in Afghanistan were very, very different than Iraq. The Taliban were a hardened group of fighters, and they would stay and they would fight.
They wouldn't break contact, and they would go toe to toe with us as often as they could. They, they had earned my respect as an adversary. And so what happens is now we're going into full greenside patrols in Afghanistan. We're working. It's wintertime in the southern Hindu Kush, so it's exceedingly cold. And so what we have to do is as a now 8-man reconnaissance element, we are required to, you know, keep all of our kit and all of like our helmets and our sappy plates and flak jackets and all this kind of stuff. But we're making 15, 16-kilometer movements to be able to get into these mountain ranges. So what you have is in Afghanistan, you have, or in Nowzad, you have on the eastern mountain range are called the White Mountains and on the western mountain range are called the Black mountains. And inside you have all these little villages that are pockmarked with Taliban and Taliban networks, kind of ranging all the way up to a place called Dosang. Well, we get into this area and we start working. And as we're working through December, we're going up into the mountains. We have some success at some limited success with call for fire, hitting IED emplacers, hitting smaller, you know, limited scale raids and things like that.
But the terrain is just unyielding. And unfortunately, what happens in Afghanistan is compromise was something that happened almost instantaneously. You would patrol all night in the sleet, in the freezing rain, and you would get to the worst, tallest mountain range that you could in the worst possible position so that nobody would ever find you. And you would wake up in the morning and there was a kid goat herder with like, you know, a random pack of goats. And you're stuck with this, like, what do I do, right? You know, you're not gonna, you know, you're not gonna zip tie the kid, right? You know, because then people will notice. And, you know, you're stuck in this kind of, you know, rock and a hard place as you go through these processes. But over time, you know, Bear Shark worked with a unit called Scarface. Scarface was our Cobras and Hueys, and we gained a relationship with them as they I think Afghanistan was different for us because we were able to generate habitual relationships with units that worked together over and over and over again. In Iraq, we owned a lot of— each individual unit owned battlespace, and so we worked as more homogenous units.
In Afghanistan, we had to rely on a lot of external assets, but we worked with them over and over. So we were with 3/4, and we had their sniper platoon that we worked hand in hand with, as well as SCAR Scarface. And so Scarface would insert us with their— they had the new Hueys, the first time that they had the Yankees, I think it was. And so they would have a heavier lift capacity and they could take a full recon team and they would insert us deep into these mountain ranges. And then we would patrol another 15 kilometers to get into position. And it was Bounty Hunter was the— was 3-4's call sign with their sniper platoon and Bear Shark. And we just owned the mountain passes and the Taliban hated us for it. It. They called us tree people, whatever the, you know, Pashtun word for tree people was, because they always knew that we were there. They knew we were always watching, and they hated us, you know, for that. And we worked with that for about 6-8 weeks and were pretty successful at limiting Taliban movement. You know, we killed a number of them through that, but it was relatively limited through that section.
Um, and so Matt and I would alternate teams, and we had a really good working relationship where he would be forward for for 6 to 8 days at a time. And since the mountain ranges were so cold and we couldn't bring sleeping gear, we couldn't have fires, we had to bring a lot of communications equipment and a lot of batteries. And the batteries were incompatible with one another, like the military-industrial complex, right? So we had a fucking ton of batteries that didn't work with one another in the individual— the optics, the radios, whatever it was. And so the thing that we had to choose to leave behind was food. So we literally survived on like Clif Bars that we stole from the chow hall. And that was the only thing because they also, they wouldn't freeze at night. Right. And they were some sort of sustenance for us to survive on. So whenever a team would come back from, we would alternate Alpha and Bravo elements. Whenever a team would come back, the other team would like make a feast for them. We had like a 55-gallon drum that we cut in half and we would, you know, barbecue for them, do a whole bunch of stuff that was It was just a lot of like this family kind of unit that we built.
And so right before Christmas, we get a care package that comes in. And now Matt is like this big stoic, right? He's just a very quiet guy. He, he kind of had like, um, um, you know, not like resting bitch face, but like he just kind of looked like he was generally not in a good mood all the time. But he was a genuinely jovial person. He just had kind of RBF, right? Um, and was— and I'm more of the emotional kind of, you know, boisterous guy, and Matt was a good honor to that. So what happens is right before Christmas, we are sitting in, in our FOB, and there's this huge commotion because we're trying— the coalition effort is trying to get our Christmas care packages to FOB Caffaretta, where we're at in this isolated patrol base in the middle of Afghanistan. But you can't land there because the Taliban is too robust that if anybody lands in the area for more than a few minutes, they're getting RPGs or they're getting recoilless rifles, you know, in our landing zone. So the way they're working this whole thing out is they have a whole bunch of C-130s that they're flying over that, that all, all of our resupply is done through C-130s and they parachute everything in.
And so I remember standing in, you know, the drop zone as we know, you know, our, our next drop is coming in. And as they're flying over, I see 3 packages or 3 bundles come out of the, you know, of the aircraft. And I'm looking up on my NVG. AVGs, and I see 3 come out. I see 2 good shoots open up on 2 of the bundles coming down. And then I see one that's got like a cigarette roll or cigar roll, and I'm just watching it flap on my AVGs. And my only question, my only statement was I was like, please don't be the mail, right? And so this thing fucking lawn darts into the LZ and like explodes across the LZ. And this is all of our care packages, right? Everything for Christmas. And so we're out there on like a working party in the middle of the night trying to pick all this stuff up. So in this care package— so my high school in Sunnyvale is called Fremont High School, the one that I graduated from. Their leadership class, if you will. My mom worked for the school district at that time frame.
And so they knew that there was a connection and they wanted to help and support the troops somehow. So they contacted my mom and they got my address in Afghanistan. And so this group of, you know, high school students made us care packages. And one of the things that they made in their care package was this big poster, you know, and you've seen the posters like, we love our troops, and they have like handprints and really nice notes and things like that across it. And I— and they asked me, they sent it to me and they asked me to present it to the platoon. And I remember presenting it to the platoon and saying, hey, this is from them. You know, sometimes we just don't carry those things. We don't have room or space for them or whatever it is. And Matt was adamant. Matt was like, Hey, we should hang that on the wall. And it was something that was uncharacteristic of Matt because he said, hey, you know, it reminds us of home. It reminds us of why we're here. So we posted this poster up next to our little, like, you know, fire pit that we had in our little compound in FOB Caffaretta.
And so right before Christmas, Matt is out on a mission and we got an opportunity to run kind of our own intelligence. We had places where it was— we were just hunting Taliban as much as we could. And so we would go to new areas, we would pick up intelligence or, you know, from briefs or from local sources. And so Matt wanted to go deeper into, into what we would consider enemy territory. So there's a town called Dosang. Excuse me just for a second. Let me check on this. I want to get the names right. Bear with me. I apologize. So a town called Bar Nawzad, which is like northern Nawzad, and then a town called Dosang. But what Matt had discovered on one of his, you know, on his like 8-day reconnaissance patrol was he had found what we had considered the enemy's rear area. So Bar Nawzad was kind of this black market bazaar. It was the Taliban moved freely through there and they were pretty easy to identify. You know, they wore a lot of black. There was weapons that they were carrying out and they had kind of a black market bazaar.
But what he had noticed through pattern of life analysis was that a lot of the leadership that he was able to identify would move to a town called Dosang, and that's where they would bed down at night. Right? So information drives operations, and so reconnaissance helps drive that as well. So he comes back, you know, Christmas Eve from this long mission, and he briefs, you know, the battalion on, we've found an enemy rear area. They're not expecting us there. They're literally walking around with AKs on their back, right? Like, this is prime target for Marines to be able to conduct like a huge raid on, which develops this very large, you know, heliborne assault, you know, in the, in the new year. So we run all of these kind of, you know, pre-planning everything that we're going to do. It's going to be two companies are going to do a helicopter assault. One's going to land in Bar Now Zad and clear Bar Now Zad like, like Fallujah. And the other is going to land in Dosang and we're going to disrupt this, this Taliban network. And this was all generated from Matt's intelligence. So we get back, we plan this whole mission, it rotates into the new year, and as we get through this, we— the decision has not been made on who is going to take Dosan.
Dosan is the rear area. This is the hornet's nest, and we absolutely know that. And Matt and I both want that fight, and we're— we go back to this now. We're arguing back and forth with our platoon commander and the platoon sergeant, advocating on why our team needed to be there. We both wanted the fight. Dosan was the main objective. Bar Nawzad was, you know, the alternate objective, still integral, but kind of the alternate, the, the lesser of the two. And so what Kevin Kincaid decides to do is he says, hey, we've solved this this way before, we're going to flip a coin. And so we had— we didn't have like quarters, but remember those pogs that they had overseas? That was like the currency. So we had this like pog, um, that we end ended up flipping and I argued incessantly against it. Like, I was like, you know, we're fresh, we've got good legs, I've got a good team. Let's get out there. Send, send my team out there. And Matt was like, dude, fuck you. Like, we've been there. We know the terrain. This is our mission. We found it. You know how it goes.
You know, two, two guys, you know, bucking heads, you know, through this piece. And so what happens is we go to the coin flip again and Kincaid, you know, says the same rules and Matt Matt says the same call and he says, "Hey, tails never fails." And what happens is this time the coin flip ends up landing on tails. So Matt gets this mission. And so as this battalion mission is kind of starting to plan, everything's coming together. We've identified where Matt's going to go and, you know, Bear Shark Team 2 is going to go. The intelligence is coming in and then we just know that this is going to be a huge fight. So we're bringing you know, rockets. We're bringing tons, you know, tons of machine guns. This is going to be— this is going to be a big one for us. So how this whole thing starts is on January, January 10th, 2010, we're going to do two different inserts. Matt is going to insert via helicopter. And so he's going to take a pure section of Hueys and they're going to fly you know, the 20 kilometers north or whatever it is, and they're going to drop off and then they're going to patrol on an offset of like 10 to 12 kilometers into Do Sang, and they're going to do pre-raid reconnaissance for the helicopter assault that's coming the next morning.
I'm going to take a vehicle convoy up the eastern side of this valley, and we're going to get into position and we're going to get into, to, uh, Barnau Zed. The challenge was we had this, um, we had a pretty poor relationship with our supported unit, that the unit that we were supporting. So in the Marine Corps, we have something called direct support or attached, and these are operational terms that matter. So what happens is when you're direct support, what ultimately happens is my platoon commander has denial authority. He has the ability to say no. When you are attached, you become part of that unit, and then you fall within that unit's chain of command. So now our captain has less authority to speak and have a little bit more autonomy, if that makes sense. So we are attached to 3-4 for this mission, and we had had some interesting conversations with them. It was an organization, like I had mentioned earlier, that didn't trust recon. We had never worked with them before we deployed with them. We had, we had, uh, a pretty adversarial relationship because we looked different. We had non-standard gear, non-standard boots.
We rolled our sleeves. We didn't wear rank. We had longer hair. And this was something that the infantry battalion did not like. And they didn't, and because of that, they didn't trust us. Um, and it led to some pretty hairy conversations over the radios, some arguments back and forth with the operations officer. Um, and the, the trust was absolutely just not there. And we actually, before this mission, we began, um, conversations to try to pull our platoon out. We had seen that we were running headlong into a problem. Our unit that we were supporting didn't trust us, and we didn't trust them. And it was a really, really toxic relationship. That's a problem. Yeah. Yeah. And so we went ahead with the mission, um, and we were going to, you know, see how this mission went, uh, essentially And so what happens is Matt's team. So it's January 10th, right? And I'm in our COC and I'm watching the drone footage as Matt's team's inserting. What they're supposed to do is they're supposed to do 3 dummy drops, or it's technically 2 dummy drops. You know, the helicopter lands, it hangs for 30 seconds, picks up, goes to another LZ, does that for 30 seconds.
They're supposed to drop Matt's team on the 3rd dummy drop, and then they're supposed to do another drop afterwards, trying to conceal— it's an old Vietnam tactic that recon used to use, and NSW used to use as well. And it's a good tactic. It helps confuse people on knowing where the absolute landing zone is. The Taliban also knew that we flew— Special Operations flew in small aircraft, right? Little Birds, right? '60s Hueys for us. So they that tree people flew in these things. So I'm watching on the drone feed as this mission kicks off and it's, you know, 0 dark 30 or whatever it is. And Matt's team takes off and they move in and they land at the first LZ and the bird sits there for 30 seconds and then it sits there for a minute and now it sits there for 2 minutes. And this is something that nobody likes to do, right? The bird is burning this, this LZ, right? We're letting everybody in these valleys know where we're at. And eventually what happens is there's a miscommunication through some of the coordination between the unit that we were supporting, that the 3 dummy drops or the 2 dummy drops and the 3rd after wasn't communicated effectively.
So the pilots didn't know that we wanted or the plan had changed somehow. And so they're sitting in the wrong LZ with a team that is now— Matt is arguing with the, with the pilot saying, this is the wrong location. We're not supposed to be here. And he had this equally bad— two equally bad options: stay on the bird, wax the mission, or scrap the mission, or, you know, have this large footprint, or get off and start moving early in the wrong LZ at the wrong location at the wrong time. And so he chose to get off of the bird, which I think was the right call at the time, because again, you're sitting and there's always— you've seen it, you know, where you're on a bird and there's some sort of confusion and there's chaos going on, and you're like, just get this fucking helicopter away from us, right? Because this is telling everybody in the valley where we're at. So Matt gets off the bird, and I see him, you know, start to get his team together, and then I watch them on the drone feed, like, move off into the valley. But now it's my turn.
My insert begins, and we're taking a combined anti-armor team in MRAPs, and we're driving up the eastern eastern, you know, valley to get to our, our location. About 20 minutes into our insert, my vehicle hits an IED and it's— luckily we're in a V-shaped hole, but we hit what was like 80 pounds of homemade explosives and it rips my vehicle into the sky. It knocks me unconscious. We fall to the ground. My point man and my radio operator in the vehicle with me, they're both knocked unconscious. We have a gunner in the, in the turret of the vehicle who's cut up beyond belief. He's bloody, he's, you know, facial laceration. So he's bleeding everywhere. We pull him down and start to work on him. But what happens is we're not allowed to leave the vehicle because the Taliban at the time were using a lot of tactics like toe poppers, right? So they would have a large IED and they would have the smaller ones to get any of the people, you know, and blow our legs off that, you know, any of the first responders wanders. So we're stuck inside of this vehicle. We're all pretty, you know, our bells are pretty rung.
And then, you know, I check on the driver and the A driver and make sure that they're okay. I'm the senior guy in this vehicle. And all of a sudden, once they roger up that they're good, you know, the smell hits us almost as much, as fast as the yell, is that an electrical fire starts in the front of the vehicle. And my team is all greenside RNS, so we're all wearing quarter ghillies, right? So I have a ghillie suit that's covering up the top of my body and we're full of burlap and this fire starts to spread. So the driver and A driver get out of the vehicle, we get the gunner out of the vehicle on the top, we hand them to the driver and A driver, and then the fire spreads to the back of the vehicle. It's moving towards the ammunition. And now we can't get— the 3 of us in the back of the vehicle can't get past the fire to get through the turret of the vehicle. And so I lean over, we look at the door. The vehicle's now on its side, right? I'm able to get the door open enough to get Johnson and Jacobs, my point man and my RTO, out of the vehicle.
After they get out of the vehicle, the vehicle shifts and the door seals on us, seals on me. And I'm the only person left in the vehicle. And so what I did was I sat there and I looked and I was— I was stuck. There was nothing that I can't go forward because the radios are starting to melt, right? The fire is moving towards the radios. It's getting towards the ammunition. My, my exit is now sealed. And so I start bringing, you know, I have a sidearm with me and I grab my pistol and I'm going to kill myself. Right. And I end up that moment, you know, I, I think of Orion, right? I think of my mom. I think of where I go when all all of this is over. And I start having this moment of like, I'm— this is a very quick, rapid succession— I'm, I'm gonna kill myself. I'm gonna take my own life because I'm not going to burn through this. Well, unbeknownst to me, about 200 meters away, we have a young Marine by the name of Lance Corporal Chris O'Connor. And in the recon community, we have this thing where when a new guy comes to the unit or a young Marine graduates BRC, we instantly trust them and we have to, because if we don't trust these Marines, it would be an abdication of the training pipeline itself.
It would be saying that BRC is not adequate enough to make a reconnaissance Marine. And so this is an exact example of that. I, I loved Chris O'Connor and I trusted him explicitly, and I'm so super mad at him for what he did. But eventually what the fire starts to accumulate, we see this, they now see that I'm trapped. The radios are crackling. right? The whole team is trying to figure out what to do. Chris O'Connor leaves his vehicle, leaves his weapon in his vehicle, but grabs a fire extinguisher out of his vehicle and runs across the 200 yards of IED field to get to my position. And my two team members are on the back, like, using their M4s. They're trying to, like, wrench the door open to get enough. They're able to get the back door open just enough that he can take the fire extinguisher, duck my head down, and shove the fire extinguisher over the back of my neck and try to extinguish the flame. For the first time in my life, I was happy to be the small guy because Chris O'Connor is like square-jawed. He just like looks like a recon Marine, right?
You know, like the quintessential, just good-looking, square-jawed American grabs me by my collar and yanks me out of the vehicle. Like, I slither out of this vehicle, and then they're able to put the rest of the fire out. At this point, my team is severely concussed. The team leader, the point man, and the radio operator. We're seeing stars. Our ears are bleeding. Our noses are bleeding. We've perforated eardrums. We're pretty fucked up at this point. We have to wait another hour for EOD to get into position to be able to help clear the vehicle, get us out of this place, and they eventually pull us to a compound. And now at that compound, I'm sitting there and I am having a conversation over the radio with the operation operations officer. So I have my platoon sergeant with me because this is a bigger mission, and my platoon commander, Kevin Kincaid, is with Matt's team. So we split up the leadership, but I'm still the team leader and they let me lead this. So I'm sitting there arguing with the operations officer over the radio because his words to us was, "We are—" and I'm asking, I'm saying, "We need to roll this thing 24 hours.
Our first team was inserted in the wrong location." in, you know, at the wrong time. They have to make a long movement that's only going to give them 3 hours of pre-raid reconnaissance before the cavalry shows up, which is not what we like to do. We like to have a lot more time on, on the objective to help our grunts out. My team is severely concussed. I can't see straight. I'm sure it's just Rolex. 24 hours. Give us 24 hours. We will reset. We will redo this thing. And his answer back is negative. You will reinsert and you will conduct a foot movement from where you're at to get to your position. That adds something like 7 additional kilometers to our already 11-kilometer-ish movement to get into position. And I'm hours behind schedule. So the only way that I can get to this position is to literally ruck run with my 8-man team. And we're in there, we're planning on an, on a 4 to 5 day mission So I've got patrol rucks, 110, 120-pound rucks loaded to the gills with ammunition and supplies. And so we have to ruck run basically the 7 kilometers to get to our initial position, our initial insert location, and then climb these mountains to get into position.
And I remember trying to, you know, navigate by the stars. The world is spinning, right? You know, I'm vomiting on the side of the rocks. I'm fucking completely concussed. This point and still trying to figure out which way is up and down. Eventually, by like, the raid is supposed to start at around 9 a.m. That's kind of time on target. I get into position about 8:30 in the morning. And now, because we were so— the mountain ranges were so close to the objective, we had to get to the forward slope of the mountain ranges themselves, which is exposing our positions. And I can't hide. I have 8 reconnaissance Marines, 2 radio recon Marines, an interpreter, and 2 signals intelligence Marines, as well as Afghan commandos. So I've got, I think, 15, 16 people. Like, I can't hide 15, 16 people in a, in a, you know, in a barren mountain pass on the forward slope. So we're like immediately compromising ourselves. And Matt had the same predicament. So we get into position very, very, you know, very close to this raid kind of kicking off. Off, and I can't communicate directly with Matt. VHF is— we're out of line of sight, he's too far.
But what I do have the ability to do is listen through HF communication. So Matt was also a JTAC, and so he's communicating with the Harriers circling above. And so I can hear his communication sort of, and I can hear the Harriers talking back with him. So I know the team is okay. And what I hear Matt talking about about as I hear him explaining at the time we had these things, you know, we had a troops in contact, right? And troops in contact is a way to associate all of the air assets in the area to help break the back of whatever's going on. When Matt got into position, his position was compromised very, very early on and he was in Do Sang, right? And so he was in the enemy's rear area. So with a rifle in our hand and a rulebook in our it, he was— the Taliban know our rules of engagement as well as we did. And so what they started to do was move men in two by two, which if they were a group of three, that would tick our ROE. If they had weapons, that would tick the— tick our ROE.
But they moved in two by two to get into position. And he was watching upwards of 40 Taliban fighters move into an area, but he didn't have positive ID. And because he didn't have positive ID on a weapons system, him, he couldn't declare a tick. At the time, they were also using children to probe his dead space and to find his weaknesses. So they were sending kids up and down the mountain. And I could hear them explaining this to the Harriers to try to get slew sensors on to help declare a tick. Matt tried to declare something called an imminent tick, like, we need as many air assets as right now. We are not in contact right now, but we are about to be. But the challenge was that had to go through our higher command, and the higher command changed the priority of that imminent TIC or the priority TIC or whatever it's called, and reduced it down from service within 15 minutes to service within an hour. And at that moment, our Harriers that were on station had to go get gas. They were bingo on fuel. And so the Taliban recognized that we were without air coverage, or Matt's team was without air coverage.
So on the western slope, we have Matt's team, Bear Shark 2. We have Bounty Hunter, a sniper platoon or sniper team that's about 7 kilometers from Matt. And I'm another 7 kilometers from them over in, um, Bar Nawzad. And I'm listening to all of this kind of unfold. And then about 9 AM, all of a sudden I start hearing, you know, the difference between an RPK and a 240 Bravo is pretty distinct on the rate of fire. I start hearing, you know, a huge, you know, troops in contact start, you know, developing over in Matt's position. And these are kilometers away, right? I'm seeing green tracers pop up. I'm hearing radio chatter. I'm listening to Matt plead with the aircraft to try to bring them back on station and watching the situation start to devolve. And I'm stuck in this dilemma because this is around 9 a.m. We had all of our air check off station so that we could have air with plenty of fuel when, you know, with plenty of, with a lot of reserve fuel when we began the air assault itself. So we had no air coverage during this time frame and the Taliban recognized their moment.
Moment. And so what we understand is, you know, we don't really know, but what we estimate was 40 to 50 Taliban fighters enveloped Matt's team and ambushed him. And they were, you know, two positions that were separated by, you know, 500 meters apart, mutually supporting. And they ran towards Matt's team, specifically where he was at. And I remember listening to Matt plead over the radio, trying trying to slew sensors, trying to bring aviation assets back, all while this is kind of going on. And I had a choice to make because I was listening to my best friend who was decisively engaged by a larger enemy force. And you understand this, right? As a, as a SEAL team, you can only handle so many people, right? Our job isn't necessarily to— on a green side mission isn't to get in gunfights, right? Our job is to be able to bring other assets. If you bring too many people, I can't fight that back. And so what we estimate was 40 to 50 fighters, you know, enveloped Matt's team and his specific 5-man element that he had, you know, put out as a leader's recon. And I, and I listened to him fight and I listened to the comms and I was watching the rockets or hearing the rockets explode, you know, as they're fighting through this process.
And I faced a choice. And the, the choice I had was break down my position and try to get to Matt, or hold my position because my role was staying in position when the air assault started, and I needed to be there for the infantry Marines. So the thing about recon, and the reason why recon has stayed working for Marine combatant commanders, is our loyalty is always to the rifleman, is always to the 0311. Our job is to live, sleep, eat, breathe, and potentially die for the 0311. They matter. They're our reason. And so I was faced with this dilemma: run to save my friend, or potentially save my friend, or stay in position for this mission. And as I'm going through this, I'm having this conversation, I'm having this moral dilemma. I have two CH-53s rocketing in over my right shoulder. As the air assault begins. And so what happens is, as this thing starts to unfold, the assault begins on the town in front of us, and we're trying to do our best to support the young infantry Marines while this is going on, while my left ear is listening to Matt and his, and his situation.
So eventually I stopped hearing Matt's voice, and the last things I heard was Scarface, our Hueys, as they came in, as our 53s came in, the Hueys and Cobras broke off to go support Matt's team and to get as much firepower as possible, as much firepower possible to Matt's team. And I heard Scarface yelling Bearshark's name, saying, Bearshark, where are you? Bearshark, identify, right? We can't see you. We can't engage if we can't see you. So all of these people that we've built this relationship with are doing everything they can to be able to help save this team that is now cut off from everybody. And then what happens is we get a call from Kevin Kincaid, comes over the radio, and I no longer hear Matt's voice, which instantly sinks my heart. And then I hear Kevin Kincaid's voice and he comes over the net and I mean, in the middle of a gunfight and is saying, we've got two friendly KIA, one MIA, and we don't know what's happened to, you know, this, this other Marine. And so every single asset is now trying. The infantry has landed at Do Sang, the infantry has landed at Bar Nawzad.
Matt's team is decisively engaged. Bounty Hunter is given direct orders to stay in position and fight for this landing force. And Bounty Hunter is the sniper platoon. Some of them were my sniper students beforehand. They chose to, to defy the direct order, and they run the 7 kilometers across the mountains to get to Matt's team. And they're the first, you know, American forces to help break the contact, and they help to try to find and figure out what's going on. Every single asset together is one of the proudest moments I had as a Marine, because what happens to us is when we hear that call as a Marine that another Marine needs help, we drop everything to be there—life, limb, or eyesight. To get there. We had a CAT section that was blown up the night before with us reinsert and come back into the battle position, fighting their way through Barnau Zed, fighting their way through Dosang, trying to get to, to Matt's team. The Harriers come screaming out of the sky after sipping gas, and they run across my field of view at like a sonic boom level, trying to do anything. The amount of assets they put in to try to save this recon team was, was one of the most impressive things I've seen in my career.
But my focus was on the infantry Marines of my specific mission set. And so for the rest of the day, we sat and had to clear the rest of Bar Nawzad with this, with this infantry company, all the while knowing that we had 2 friendly KIA and 1 enemy, or 1 friendly missing in action, and we didn't know who. And so for the rest of the afternoon and the rest of the evening, we eventually linked up with our, with the other company. We made this really long, like arduous movement, another 10 or 15 kilometers to get to Bar Nawzad, or excuse me, to get to Dosang, where we linked up with this company. And at that point, the MIA had turned into a KIA. They had found this person's body. So now we knew that 3 members of our platoon of 18 men were dead. We just didn't know who. So what happened was we get into the, the, the firm base for the night. The infantry is a good unit, right? They're good Marines, but they wouldn't even look us in the eye. They were, they were, they were just, they knew that we had lost members of our platoon.
And the, the, the way that they looked at us was you know, sad, was like pity, was guilt, was feeling. And we stood in the middle of this like mud hut kind of farming town in the middle of nowhere on a dot on a map that no one will ever remember. Right. Is my assistant team leader, Joe Galluli, my platoon sergeant, Efraín Martinez, and I go to the radio, the company radio that has, you know, higher power radio. And we have to go and to have to ask who, what the line numbers are. We're going to go find out who the Marines, uh, you know, that were killed. And Matt was always meant to be an infantry Marine. Some people are just meant to be Marines. So we have, you know, line numbers or kill numbers or zap numbers, whatever it is. And it always started with the last, the first letter of their last name and then the last 4 digits of their Social Security number is what used at the time. We don't use that anymore. But Matt's last 4 digits of his Social Security number were 0311. And so the infantry, the MOS designated for infantry rifleman.
And so we always joked that he was meant to be a grunt. And I remember standing there asking for the numbers and my platoon sergeant and my assistant team leader, Joe, we had our arms around each other. We kind of took a knee and we were going to find out this information together. Together. And I remember the first night, the first line number coming over, and it was India 0311. And I didn't hear anything else after that. My ears started ringing. You know, I felt like the stomach, you know, fell out. Didn't know what to do at that point. And then I realized that I had to go tell my team. So the rest of my team is standing in this courtyard yard in the middle of winter, in the middle of Afghanistan, you know, full of cow shit and dung and whatever it is. And they're standing there and they're waiting. These guys were on their first deployment. They had never experienced this before. And so I realized my role as a team leader was now to teach them how to grieve. And so I came to the team and I, and I told them the names of the Marines that had passed.
It was Staff Sergeant Matt Ingham was killed, Corporal Jamie Lowe and Corporal Nicholas Usinski. And the 3 Marines were some of the brightest spots in our platoon and some of the best Marines that we had inside of the platoon itself. And it just ripped my young guys apart and they just didn't know what to do with themselves. And one of the things that I remember was the kindness of the infantry Marines. You know, as a reconnaissance unit, we always fall into their, you know, their security plan. We stand watch with them. We do all of these things with them. We don't want them to think that we're better than them. So we do everything with them. They gave us the night off that night and then they let us kind of grieve together. And I remember we were somehow out of food at that point. And so I remember going into the small, you know, the small hut, mud hut, and my team was just laying there on our backs. Packs and we had, you know, SureFire, you know, lights or whatever it is, you know, the lights on the bottom of the M4. We had that, you know, turned on and that was the only light that we had inside of this thing.
And we shared a pack of M&M's and a pound cake and we passed that around as a team, as the large team. And we sat and I taught them how to grieve. I taught them to share the stories. I taught them to laugh. I taught them to cry. We had this moment together where we had, you know, the evening to remember our friends and the shocking finality of death and kind of go through that process. And then the next morning we had to compartmentalize that because we had to continue the fight in, you know, in Do Sang the next morning. And we fought for another few days. One of the things that the sniper platoon did for us was they, they were the first people to get to Matt. And Matt was wearing his hog's tooth as a sniper. And what they did was they took his hog's tooth off his neck and they gave it to me and they gave me his hog's tooth so that I could take it home and I could put it on a paddle and I could give it to his family. And I'll never forget, you know, their platoon corpsman was the one that did it.
And the reverence and the honor that they had with that was some of the most respectful and profound moments of my career. And I remember after that, I was broken. Matt was my rock. Matt was better than me in every single way. And I wished more than anything that I had won that coin flip because Matt had a wife, he had a family. The team members themselves, they were just put in a bad situation and there was nothing. Matt was the— he represented the best of us and there was nothing that he could have done to salvage that situation. and it broke my heart. And the platoon looked to me to be able to guide them through this. And I had nowhere to go and I didn't know what to do. Ultimately, we got back to Nauzad. I had to inventory all of his equipment, all of his gear, all of his personal effects. And we fly back to Camp Leatherneck. We leave the unit. We are not working with that unit anymore. A number of things— there was an investigation that happened that got real weird. Heard afterwards, where it was a lot of COVID your ass kind of stuff.
And if I'm not mistaken, I think the reasons why, in my, in my research, the reasons why I think you started this podcast, or one of the reasons why, was because you didn't like other people telling your stories and doing a disservice of telling those stories or telling them in a specific way that may not have been truthful. And so the reason why I speak out and the reason why I talk about this was the very easy thing to do is to start blaming the special operations teams and saying that they were cowboys or they were sleeping or they did whatever and that they had somehow fucked up. But I listened to the whole thing unfold and I listened to that situation deteriorate. And like holding water through your hand, you couldn't grasp it for, you know, very long. And I watched that happen. And then I watched that unit close ranks and protect themselves. At the expense of the reconnaissance unit. And that hurt. And so we got back to Camp Leatherneck, and that was month 3 of our 7-month deployment. And so I had to carry on. And the teams, the platoon was like kind of looking to me.
So that's where it goes into the second part of this story is in the power of, of connection, of community. Why we do these things is is I got back to Camp Leatherneck and part of the things that they have at Camp Leatherneck, and I don't know if you guys have seen it, we had these things called Any Marine Boxes or Any Soldier Boxes, whatever it was. And people would send care packages or they would send letters and oftentimes schoolchildren would send letters to, you know, any Marine. They were addressed to just any Marine and they would be in a box. And so we had a random box that that was, you know, outside of one of our tents that we were back at Camp Leatherneck where the rest of the company was at. And I, you know, guys would reach in every once in a while and they'd grab a card or they'd grab a letter and they would steal a moment away and they would read it. And it was some cute kid somewhere that was writing something, you know, about, you know, just saying thank you or whatever it is. So I went and I reached into one of those boxes and I grabbed a letter.
And if you don't mind, I'll read a portion of the letter. To you. It says, to whomever gets this letter, hi, my name is Angela and I'm 14 years old and I live in Sunnyvale, California. That's the Bay Area. Lots of people don't know that. I'm writing this letter to you at exactly 10:48 PM because I found myself lying in bed remembering what my teacher had told me the day before. You see, our class made a poster for the troops, especially for this one guy that graduated from my high school. We wrote things on there like thanks and good job. Yesterday, my teacher told us that the Fremont graduate— that's my school, Fremont High— had lost his best friend in the war. But what she told us next really hit home for me. She told us how much joy the poster brought to the troops. She told us how every morning the friend would just look at the poster and that poster would bring a smile to to his face. It turns out he did this right up until the day he died. That's when I started crying. I never realized how powerful the words of a freshman in high school could be.
So I decided to get up and write this letter to you while my thoughts were fresh in my mind. Now, I know this isn't some fantastic poster, but the intent is the same. After hearing what my teacher told me, I hoped I could touch some of the troops or at least brighten their day. So that's what I'm doing in this letter, and I hope you hear these words that I'm about to say a lot, but thank you. Thank you for being so brave that you can stand up and fight for our country. Thank you for being so brave and selfless that you let your lives and loved ones— you leave your lives and loved ones to fight for a people you don't even know. The bottom line is thank you for all that you do, because every time you have to do something like stay up all night or look out and witness death and destruction, you are protecting and saving me. This little girl Angela wrote an anonymous letter that sent out to Afghanistan and somehow ended up in an anonymous box that I grabbed on the way in to a random tent in Iraq.
And she wrote me a letter. She wrote an anonymous letter about me. And I carried this letter with me for the rest of the deployment. We went into Marjah and we fought in Marjah a few months later in February, which was considered Afghanistan's Fallujah. Marjah. We lost more Marines in Marjah, killed more people, fought through everything we could. And everything I did through that, I kept this in my flak jacket the entire time. Because I think for me, what it was, was that it's a simple gesture. It's a young kid, you know, who doesn't understand what it is that we do or why we do what it is that we do. And that little piece of home, that little piece of of what she had done, what she had written, was the thing that solidified why we join, who we fight for, the red, white, and blue, these people back home. And that woman, Angela, that little girl, 14 years old, she saved me. She saved me. And when, you know, I used to think that after Matt died, like I said, I was broken. Dead. But I lived for Matt for a long time because I wanted to live as good of a life as I could in honor, in remembrance of the dead.
The Marines have a slogan that was from World War I, and it says, "For the honor of the fallen, for the glory of the dead." And that's a tattoo I have across my collar. It's what the Marines would yell before they would leave the trenches in World War I to fight and, you know, start another, you know, uh, another, another attack. And then what I did was I realized, as I moved through later in my career, and I fought issues of substance abuse, you know, earlier in my career, or potential suicidal ideations, or whatever it was, harmful thoughts, those kind of things, I realized that I was no longer living for Matt. What I realized was that I was living for Angela, because that little girl and her hope and her determination and what she felt in that was something so powerful. You know, I told you initially that I wrote the book "Dark Horse" because it was a love letter to tell the Marines and the people that I served with along the way, thank you for bringing me to where I'm at, bringing me to this position, because I didn't do it alone.
This 14-year-old girl has— the thing that gave me, you know, permission to continue living and permission to find a good life. And I got a chance, you know, many, many years ago, after I got back from that deployment, I got a chance to visit Angela and have a conversation with her. And I've since lost contact with her, but if she's ever out there, I want her to know. And I wrote that as part of the thing, and it's in the book as well. And I want her to know how much she meant to me and what that letter did for me. And it was something that, you know, she goes on to talk about movies and cell phone companies and sleeping with stuffed animals and whatever a 14-year-old kid talks about. But that purity, that thing that was, was, was the reason I think why we fought and what really brought me home.
That's some heavy stuff. It's good kid.
It's a good kid. I'm sorry. Matt was a good Marine. His wife's name was Yasmin and a fantastic Marine. I mean, absolute represented the best of us. And sometimes— and I know that you've seen it in your career— sometimes you can do everything right and still fail.
I'm sorry, man. Take a quick break. Yeah. Want more from The Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content content, like our Extra Intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions, our new SRS on-site specials, and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission, and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story. Well, AJ, you've had, um, one hell of a career. And, uh, wow, that's a hell of a ride, man. That is a hell of a ride. And I know we're not even done yet, but, um, I think this is a really good, good point to end this. I appreciate that. And you know, usually I ask ask, you know, when, when we talk about losing a comrade, a friend, you know, what advice you have, but you already gave it.
And, uh, ironically, it's the same advice I always give: you have to live for your friend, you know, and, and honor his sacrifice. And, uh, it sounds like you did that. Appreciate that. So I'll ask you for another piece of advice. We talked at the beginning of this about the wars that we're starting to engage in right now. Seems like the machine's spinning right back up. What advice do you have for future Marines that are going to face the same, the same type of stuff that you did?
You know, the— sometimes the reasons why and all of the other chatter is just noise. At the end of the day, it's always been about that Marine to your right and to your left and ensuring that they have the best opportunity for success to get through a shitty situation. It is a tale as old as time. That, you know, governments will put their best into the worst. I would say the fabric, the best of the, of the countries that they represent into the worst scenarios. At the end of the day, locking eyes with, shaking hands and fist bumping or shoulder bumping another brother, another comrade in arms, that bond that we share is something that is special and should be cherished and should be, I would say, respected. And part of that is continuing after the fight and being with each other throughout after the fight. The strongest communities that I have are the people that I've walked with, you know, through hell. It's, it's a tough thing, you know, going into this. I know that no matter what I say, every single young Marine out there is going to want to get in the fight.
And that's just who we are. I wouldn't have listened to the same advice that I would be giving now, right? I would still want to do that. Be careful what you wish for. Be careful what you ask for. And at the end of the day, every decision that you make, you will have to live with for the rest of your life.
So choose wisely. That's good advice, man. Man, you know, just reflecting on your story here for about 30 seconds, you know, I think that I'm not a Marine, but if I was to give any advice to the upcoming warfighting generation, it would be give a motherfucker a chance, because somebody gave you a chance and it wound up panning out. Yep. What was his name? Gunny Jackson. Gunny Jackson. Yep. That's who I'm talking about. Yep. He took you under his wing. And then when it was the right time, you took guys under your wing. Yep. You passed the buck on. And that's what this shit's all about. Yes, sir. Major, God bless, brother.
Thank you very much for having me on the show. Anything that I can do for you and the team in the future, this has been an absolute honor. One of the most professional organizations I've come in contact with. Thank you. Thank you for this.
Thank you. You've already done enough.
God bless you. Thank you, sir.
It was an honor. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you.
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AJ Pasciuti grew up in Sunnyvale, California, the son of Italian and Argentine immigrants. After 9/11 reshaped his sense of purpose, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division — one of the most storied units in the Corps — where he served as a rifleman and team leader.
Over twenty-one years of service, he deployed three times to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, including the Battle of Fallujah. He led a Scout Sniper team that tracked and killed the most lethal enemy sniper in Iraq — a figure known as "Juba" — and recovered a stolen Marine sniper rifle in what was the first mission of its kind by an American service member since Vietnam.
He went on to serve with 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion and 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company, deploying to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, during Operation Enduring Freedom and later with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. As an instructor, he taught at the Scout Sniper School at Camp Pendleton, created the Recon Team Leaders Course, and helped develop the Infantry Marine Course at School of Infantry–West, modernizing foundational training for enlisted Marines.
Selected for the highly competitive Marine Gunner program, he became an Infantry Weapons Officer and rose to Chief Warrant Officer 3 before retiring from the Marine Corps in 2023.
He holds a Master of Business for Veterans from the University of Southern California and a Master of Public Leadership from the University of San Francisco, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego. He is the host of the Combat Story podcast and the author of Darkhorse: Harnessing Hidden Potential in War and Life, releasing May 19, 2026.
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