Transcript of #346 James Lechner - Army Ranger Recounts the Battle of Mogadishu: Black Hawk Down New

Jim Lechner, welcome to the show.

Thanks. Great to be here.

It's good to have you. So, uh, our mutual friend Mike Durant recommended you, and, um, so I'm excited about this. You've got, uh, one hell of a career.

Yeah, thank you. Me too. And Mike's a great guy. We got a long history together. We may talk about it, but, uh, he and I worked together for 3 years before Mogadishu, and then he was my pilot in Mogadishu. So—

What a good dude.

Yeah.

Do you guys keep in touch?

A little bit. Not as much as, as, uh, we'd like to, but I talk to him a couple times a year. And, and then there's different veterans things. That's how we got reconnected on this. We were working on a Medal of Honor, um, project that's going on up in Knoxville, and, uh, we're both involved in it. So, uh, We were on a meeting with that and talked afterwards, and I got connected to this through that.

All right, Jim. Well, let me start you off with an introduction here. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Lechner, you're a 27-year US Army veteran and former Army Ranger with deployments spanning Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. As a young Ranger officer, you fought with Task Force Ranger in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. where you were wounded in combat and later received the Purple Heart. You later served as deputy brigade commander during the Battle of Ramadi and served in assignments involving SOCOM and the CIA. Most recently, you went to Ukraine, first as a war correspondent and later training and advising Ukrainian forces, including service with the International Legion. Today you work in the drone and counter-drone defense space and are an adjunct professor at Liberty University teaching American and military history, and you are also the author of With My Shield.

That's right. Yeah.

Welcome to the show. Thanks.

Great to be here.

So a couple things to knock out here right before we start. Everybody gets a gift.

Oh, great.

I got you a couple gifts. First, we had Vigilance League gummy bears, made in the USA, legal in all 50 states.

Fantastic. Love gummies. Yeah.

And second, Oh, wow. I got a buddy over at SIG. His name's Jason.

Wow.

And they just developed this brand new handgun, which isn't even out yet. Wow.

But thank you very much.

He told me you were coming on.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

He wanted me to give that to you. Wow.

Wow, that's beautiful. I love SIG. Yeah.

Hold it up. What do you think?

Yeah.

So that is the new P385. It's kind of a cross between the 365 Macro and, uh, the 320, but it's got a compensator up front to help with, you know, recoil.

Wow.

You can mount any optic you want basically on the back, pistol optic, without getting, uh, one of the plates. And you can actually adjust that grip from 15 rounds to 17 rounds, shorten the grip up if you want.

There's just a feel about cigs. I mean, they just have their own feel that's just amazing, I think.

I totally agree with you.

Fantastic. Thank you. I've got a couple things for you as well.

All right.

Um, so one of the things I do is I'm part of a whiskey company, and we got a castle west of Dublin called Kennedy Castle. And then this is our whiskey. It's distilled by the oldest distiller in Ireland, Jack Teeling. It's our 10-year. So anyway, that's a little gift. And then, then of course the book.

What do you mean you have a castle?

So my buddy actually owns it. The owner of the company, of our Kennedy Castle Whiskey Company, owns the castle.

He owns a castle?

Yeah, yeah. I bought my plantation a couple of years ago and was telling him about it. He goes, well, I hate to one-up you, but I just bought a 1,000-year-old Irish castle.

Are you serious?

Yeah, I stayed over there. It's a hotel and a venue. It's a fantastic place. There's about 150 monks buried in the courtyard.

Oh, wow.

It's a fantastic place.

A castle?

Yeah, 1,000 years old.

Wow.

That's a whole other world, huh? It turns out one of my ancestors actually earned his knighthood fighting in that county.

Are you serious?

I didn't know that when we first started, so I just found that out. My Irish friends don't even know that.

That's badass.

Yeah, that, and then the book again. I signed this on September 11th, the 25th anniversary, in the— in New York City for you. So I wanted to give you that as well.

Thank you.

So thank you.

Well, we're going to talk all about that here in about 2 minutes. And then one other thing, I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account. They've been with me since the beginning when I started this, this thing in my attic.

Yeah, I love them.

And, uh, perfect. So they get the opportunity to ask every guest a question. So this is from Wesley Sturgill. Looking back at our involvement in the Middle East, specifically your time in Iraq, how did your personal perspective on the effectiveness of foreign interventions evolve over time?

Yeah, that's a great question because being a history guy, I'd studied the British involvement in the British partition of different Arabic tribes and things. And I probably went into it like a lot of Americans thinking, you know, we should apply standard you know, standard approaches and frameworks to try to build democratic countries. And I still believe, you know, in democracy. They deserve democracy and to be free. But as time went on and I dealt more with the Iraqis and figured out ways to be successful over there, their tribal network, dealing with the tribes, dealing with their culture, their Bedouin culture, they're some of the greatest hosts in the world. You know, leveraging that and trying to fit into that framework of their culture over there, I think I evolved in my thinking from the time I went in there to about 10 years later. And I'm really, you know, I'm a fan of Arabs and their culture. Again, I was very well treated and they're great hosts. And so that's really how my thinking evolved over there is not just try to put a square peg in a round hole, but adapt the good things of democracy in our culture, the good parts, uh, to their culture and then let them run with it.

Could you allow— I'm just curious, could you elaborate a little bit on that? I mean, do you, do you feel like we maybe, we force democracy down people's throats?

I, I absolutely think that, you know, the U.S. government is— and I'm not necessarily saying the U.S. military— the U.S. government is horrible at trying to do, uh, foreign interventions and foreign policy. And part of that is because the State Department and other agencies come in and, like I said, try to pound a square peg into a round hole. And I think we're going to talk more about this, but, you know, it's just the unrealistic things that the State Department wants to achieve in a region. They'd always give us a list of like 10 things that you got to do, all these different social issues and things to achieve.

Hmm.

And I'd always be like, why don't we just achieve 2 of those and win? Or we'll try to do all 10 and we'll lose because it's ridiculous what you're trying to achieve here. And I think that's what the US government is terrible about. is trying to approach a country or a democracy and establish it using our standards and our cultural norms.

I think we're kind of saying the same thing here. I mean, yeah, we'll get into more later. I know we have a whole segment on this, but let's get it. So I want to do a life story on you. And you've seen— you've been a lot of different places, deployed to a lot of different places. Uh, the one that I'm most interested in, especially as the anniversary is coming up, is, uh, your time in Mogadishu.

Sure.

Um, on October 3rd.

Sure.

And, um, but let's start with where did you grow up?

So upstate New York, uh, small town pronounced Chili outside of Rochester. I grew up there. My family had been there for generations. Um, went to high school, played football, played hockey, did all the normal things, enjoyed Boy Scouts, uh, we'd camp year-round, unbelievably. Even in the winter, even in February, we'd go camping. Um, my, my Boy Scout master, uh, his Boy Scouts had been Hitler Youth. They were German refugees. His father was smart enough to get him out of Germany in the '30s, but he, he did about 5 years in the Hitler Youth. Great guy.

Wow.

Great guy, but very tough guy, as you'd imagine. And, uh, so we just, we hiked and camped and canoed year-round. Uh, essentially. And so great experience doing that. And like I said, growing up in Rochester, it was a great place to grow up, uh, you know, 40, 45 years ago.

What were you into as a kid?

Uh, I was into hockey and football and, and, you know, sports, uh, like that. A little bit of wrestling, but mostly football and hockey. And, uh, and I was into history. My dad and my mother were into history, and so we'd take family vacations, historic sites. So I'd go see Rogers Rangers stuff out in the, in the, uh, Adirondack Mountains. And, and we'd go down to Washington, DC once a year. So that's— I was into history and I was into sports and outdoor things.

How did you— I mean, you went to the Citadel, did you start off at the Citadel?

I did, I did. I joined the Army, I joined the National Guard out of high school when I was 17. So I was actually a junior in high school. With your parents' permission, you could do it at the time. So junior in high school, Joined the Army, went to basic training at Fort Benning, came home, finished my senior year, and then I decided to go to the Citadel and applied and got into there. So that's where I went to college.

How was that?

Fantastic. I mean, I, I had wanted to go to West Point. I thought about that. I was looking at Virginia Military Institute. I wasn't even aware of the Citadel. Um, became aware of it because there was a plane crash in DC, and one of the survivors, uh, kept helping other survivors of the plane crash. It was in the middle of the winter and they were in the river, and so they were freezing, and he was helping other survivors get out, kept passing the rope off. And I'm like, that's pretty heroic. And the— and on TV the announcer said, you know, this guy, uh, went to the Citadel and that prepared him to be a hero. And I thought, I'm gonna check that out. So I went down to Charleston. As soon as I got there, I knew that's where I wanted to go. Fantastic place. I mean, it fit— it fit with everything that I wanted perfectly.

Right on. Where do we go from there?

Uh, so then I got commissioned in the Army. Um, it was the first time, you know, that I realized there's, there's 2 parts to the Army. There's a field army, then there's a bureaucracy. And I wanted to be infantry.

You figured that out pretty quick, huh?

Yeah, it was my first, uh, first out the gate I figured that out. I, you know, I'd been in the infantry, I wanted to go in the infantry. That's all I put down on my wish list. Uh, was not great at math, and so I didn't even consider artillery. And the Army put me in the artillery. So I basically, you know, fought it, but was told, no, this is— these are your orders. So I marched off and went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I went through the artillery, ended up being a great experience. You know, it expanded my mind. I'm actually much better at math, as you'd figure, than I was back then. You know, learned fire support, learned 3-dimensional aspect of the battlefield. But I'm an infantryman. So I went into the fire support area, and that put me back with the infantry even when I was in the artillery. I was an artillery liaison officer, essentially, down with infantry companies. I did that for a few years until I got selected to go to the Ranger Regiment.

How did you get selected to go to the regiment?

So a recruiting team comes around the Army from the Ranger Regiment. I was in Korea. I was at 2nd Infantry Division in Korea. Again, I was a fire support officer, so I was in an infantry battalion doing infantry job— excuse me, artillery job, fire support. And then when the recruiting team came around, I went I interviewed, I think I took a PT test, and then I kind of forgot about it because not long after that, the, you know, Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Army, everyone was focused on Desert Storm, Desert Shield, Desert Storm. So I kind of forgot about applying for the Ranger Regiment. I was just focused on getting out of Korea and going to Desert Shield, Desert Storm, because they weren't letting anybody leave. They basically said the rest of the Army is going to go fight that, but 2nd Infantry Division you're going to stay here in Korea. And I wasn't having any of that. So I, I worked really hard at it, talking to DC, found out I had a replacement coming anyway. So I said, okay, then I'm clear. And I, I got orders to go to the 82nd. Um, and I actually had my going away party.

I was 24 hours out from flying to Fort Bragg from Korea when I got a knock at the door and it said, hey, they got a, they got a phone call for you from the Pentagon. So I went down to the headquarters and, and called, and it was infantry branch— or excuse me, it was artillery branch. And they said, hey, we got this slot that just came open in the Ranger Regiment. Do you want it? And I said, well, of course, you know, because I didn't think— there couldn't be a war without the Ranger Regiment involved. And so I took that. So 24 hours out, I changed my orders, reported to Fort Benning, started going through the process, and then the ground war kicked off in Kuwait and Iraq. And then the war was over so fast that, that 3rd Ranger Battalion didn't even get to deploy. So that was, uh, that, that's how those events went real quick, but, uh, kind of shocking. But it got me to the Ranger Battalion, uh, you know, fantastic experience.

Which Ranger Battalion?

3rd Ranger Battalion out of Fort Benning. Uh, 1st is in Savannah, 2nd's out in Fort Lewis, 3rd Ranger Battalion's at Fort Benning, Georgia, Columbus, Georgia. That's where I went. There had been a training accident The lieutenant who did my job was injured, so I got pulled in to replace him. That's why it was the last minute, last minute thing, um, and got assigned to Alpha Company, 3rd Ranger Battalion. What—

I mean, what was your pipeline into there? Did you just show up and fill the slot immediately? Did they put you through—

Yeah, there's— that's a great question. There's a selection process, uh, beyond just being selected. So being selected is essentially an invitation to come. There's a 2-week course you go through, and At the time, it was called the Ranger Orientation Program. Basically, for officers, it was a gentleman's course. But what was great about it, my first introduction to the Ranger Regiment, was they weren't going to yell and scream at you, but here's the standards you're going to meet. You're going to do a 5-mile run in 40 minutes, and that it's time now. And you'd go and run, and if you had to make that time— if you didn't make that time, they said, thanks for coming. There was a number of events like that that you had to do. So PT test, physical training test, 5-mile road march, uh, or excuse me, a 5-mile run, a 12-mile road march in 3— less than 3 hours. So you had to meet these standards, and if you met all those standards, then you were accepted into the Ranger Regiment. About 2 weeks, and then I was— I passed that, and then I was assigned to Alpha Company, 3rd Ranger Battalion.

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Yeah, it was a challenge. And, and the reason is I showed up, um, at right a year after they jumped into Panama. So all of my team All of my team were combat veterans. The guy— not the injured guy that I replaced, but the guy that took him into Panama had won the Bronze Star. My guys were, in my view, my guys were all heroes. They'd all jumped into Panama, got combat jumps, all done a fantastic job. So it was a little bit of a challenge. But the good, you know, the good part was I'd done a similar job in Korea. I had a year of experience doing that. And I, you know, I had my background and I was extremely happy to be motivated to be there. So I just hit the ground running as hard as I could. Did you learn a lot from them?

Absolutely.

Absolutely. The— I say that I did a similar job in Korea, you know, calling in artillery, the basics of air support. But the Ranger Regiment obviously does everything a couple levels higher than the conventional Army. So I had to learn to work with special operations platforms such as the AC-130, Helicopter gunships, all those types of things. And that was new. And then the other good news about that is they send you off to school. So I went to the Marine Corps School for CAS. I went to the Air Force School for CAS. I went to the Naval Gunfire School. I got all kinds of great schools, and that gave me a lot of background as well. But my, my guys that have been working with those platforms for years did a great job teaching me and showing me what right looks like. And then, and then I just fell in step and ran with him.

Did you— were you working under Major Bill Garrison?

Well, eventually Bill Garrison was our commander when he was the JSOC commander. Yeah.

How was it working with— I mean, he was a founder of Delta Force.

Absolutely an icon, you know, and I think he's a Texas native, too, but definitely an icon. He'd been in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. So when I worked for him, he was the JSOC commander and the overall general officer in command of us. in Mogadishu. And I, I really loved his approach because, um, a special operations task force like that, as you know, is pretty rank— can be rank-heavy. So lots of senior NCOs, lots of officers. And he, he made a point of just grabbing the lieutenants. He'd grab us, take us outside, just talk to us, get our opinions on what was going on, give us some of his insight, talk about, you know, the days back in Vietnam. So I, I really appreciated his leadership style. and it was very hands-off. I mean, there was about 4 levels of incredibly exceptional leaders in that task force, and he, he would handle dealing with the phone calls from DC, uh, and the pressure from the 4-stars and things, and then he would let the commanders deal with, with running the unit and the tactics on the ground.

Where do we go from here? How long was it before Mogadishu fired up?

So actually 3 years.

So I, I— 3 years?

Yeah, I got into the battalion, uh, as Desert Storm and Desert Shield were literally kicking off. I was there for the next 3 years. And so, you know, we trained like we were going to the Super Bowl, but, but 3— trying to keep that focus for 3 years is tough. And I, being there 3 years, I got to go through every cycle of training that the battalion does. You know, it's special operations focus, airfield seizure focus, back to building basics. I got to do that 3 times. So I got a lot of experience for a lieutenant. doing that in the Ranger Regiment. But again, it's kind of hard to keep your focus. And, uh, you know, I was a single guy coming from Korea. I'd come from the Citadel to Korea, kind of living like a monk, you know, for about, for about 4 or 5 years there, just doing nothing but my job. And I got to go out and experience, you know, social life and things in Columbus, Georgia a little bit. Met my wife. We dated for about 6 months, then we got engaged, then we got married in the summer of '93.

And not too long after that, she was expecting our first child, our daughter Carolina. And all those things coming together, and I'd been in the battalion for about 3 years, and I'm getting ready to get promoted to captain. And when you get promoted in the Ranger Regiment, you gotta leave the regiment and go back to the regular Army and do a job at the new rank and then get selected to come back, hopefully.

You have to get selected to come back?

Right, it's not automatic. You haven't already proven yourself yet? Yeah, you have to get that new—

Why did they do that?

you have to prove yourself at the new rank. So as a captain, you got to be a company commander, or a major as a battalion, uh, level staff officer, and prove that you can do it at that level, and then hopefully get selected to come back. So, so it really is hard for an officer to leave the regiment because you don't know if you're going to come back.

And nobody wants to leave, I'll bet.

And nobody wants to leave, of course. Yeah, because it's, it's the best thing you've ever done. And so, uh, I was getting ready to leave the battalion because I was getting promoted to captain, and And I had orders to go to the captain's level school, and all that was going to happen in the September time frame. And I had just gotten married and found out we're expecting our first child. So now it's August, and, uh, I got one more exercise to go on. The battalion is going to go on an exercise to Texas, and there's a, a ready cycle of the 3 battalions. There's always one that's waiting for, for the call, for the, for the alarm bell to ring. It's called Ranger Ready Force One. So we were assuming Ranger Ready Force One, where we were normally locked down waiting for the call if anything happened around the world, like firemen in a firehouse. And they decided that they were going to send the battalion out to a training event in Texas. That was a little bit different, but we thought that's fine, and we would go, we'd all be together, and we'd do some training events out there.

So I had one more event to do. I was going to do that, go through this Ranger Ready Force One cycle, do this training event in Texas, and literally come home from Texas and then turn in my keys and my gear and go on to the next thing. But while we were out there, uh, again, I mentioned there's, there's 3 companies: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. I was in Alpha Company. We did our live-fire exercise with the company, and when we came in from the live-fire exercise, we saw something was going on at the headquarters. And the company commander and I went to the headquarters, and they said, yeah, one company's getting selected to go form a task force with, with— at Fort Bragg. and deploy on a real mission, but it's going to be B Company, not A Company. And so again, just like Desert Storm, just crushed. We were crushed. And I went back to A Company. I mean, people were just literally dragging, uh, but I didn't have a lot of time to get depressed about it because not a— you know, I hadn't walked into the tent 5 minutes when a runner came in and said, battalion commander needs to see you.

And so I went up to see him and he said, hey, your counterpart in B Company, the lieutenant that does your job, has just left. on emergency leave like 4 hours ago. So you're gonna fill his role and leave with B Company. Go get your gear and get on the plane.

Holy shit.

And that was like, you know, a life-changing event. And I'll refer to this a couple times, I think, but that's beyond coincidence. The way that I got to battalion 24 hours out from going to the 82nd, my counterpart leaving just hours before the order came down and getting pulled into B Company. You know, there's, as Winston Churchill said, there's things going on in time and space that are beyond time and space. And that absolutely, you know, the Lord had a path for me, a calling for me from the very beginning of my career. And that, that's just pieces falling into place. So I joined B Company and we went to Fort Bragg.

What happened when you got to Fort Bragg?

Got to Fort Bragg and we started training. When we formed the task force, we had our own aviation. I knew most of those guys. Mike Durant and I had worked together for a while. And, and then we had the special operators from Fort Bragg that, that were the foundation of the task force. So all 3 elements came together, the aviation, the, the Delta guys from Fort Bragg, and then the Ranger Company. So we joined them out on the range. A little bit of a, a little bit of a rocky start. They'd been working on this contingency and it was good to go to Somalia and deal with the situation that was deteriorating over there. They'd been working on this all summer. The way the culture worked back then was You know, the Rangers still support, uh, Tier 1 units on missions, but back then we really weren't given a lot of information. We were basically told just to kind of fall in and do what you're told. And that's essentially what happened. We got to Fort Bragg and we got bussed out to the range, and I went with the company commander to meet with the leadership, and they're like, well, are you guys ready to live fire this in about 30 minutes?

And we're like, we don't even know what the mission is. So it was just a—

Jeez.

A little bit of a bump in the road, things falling together, but— and a little bit of culture. Because they explained to us real quick what we were going to do was going to be try to hunt down the leadership of the Somali National Alliance that was opposing the UN and the US effort in Somalia. We were going to try to take out their leader, Mohamed Aidid, and track him down. And they, and they basically ran us through that real quick and they said, well, let's go live fire hitting a target. And again, we had just gotten off the plane, just gotten off the bus. So we had to take a little bit of a step back. kind of get those 2 cultures to align because while, while they are extremely proficient and extremely flexible, the Ranger Regiment is very proficient. But we got young guys. We have a very methodical process. We do planning, we do rehearsals, and then we go into live fire and then we're ready to do the mission. It takes some time for us to get up to that level. So there was a little bit of a culture clash on the range, but, but we worked through it and, and we went back and got our planning together.

And then quickly organized in the way we needed to be organized to support them. They were going to hit the target on helicopters and fast-rope in or land on the building, and we were going to fast-rope out of Blackhawks into the street all around the building and form a security perimeter and provide them security while they were operating inside the building. That's the basic concept of what we were going to do. A lot of flexibility to it because we could do vehicle hits as well. And over the next few weeks, we rehearsed that.

So was this— did you have the exact, like, a replica of the exact target that you thought you were going to hit, or was this more scenario-based? Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, it was extremely flexible. So what we knew was that he was in a city, about 1 million people, pretty dense-packed city. And we— but we also knew that he was a very smart individual. Adeed was. He'd been a former Somali general, been trained by the Soviets. He knew we were going to use signals intelligence. He knew we were coming after him, and so he varied his pattern. He never stayed in the same place, so we didn't have one target that we could train on. We, we had to develop intelligence of where he was going to be at a given time, a window of opportunity with a trigger that gave us an opportunity, and then we'd hit him. But that could be at his aunt's house, that could be at a hotel. That could be him moving in the street in a convoy or a single vehicle. He did all kinds of changes to his pattern that were really ingenious and kept him safe for a long time. But we had to train on all of that. So what we did is we came up with a very standardized template, and this worked out very well because, as you know, normally you can, you can build a model and you can work through every step of a fixed target, but we couldn't do that.

So we built a standardized template. And that template would be that the assault force, uh, the Tier 1 guys, would land right on top of the target. If it was a building or if it was a vehicle, they'd land right on top of that. And then the Rangers would come in and go all around them, be inserted by fast rope from helicopters all around that target, wherever it might be. But the key here was that we went to the same position every single time. So for example, My position was in the southeast corner of the target, whatever that might be— an intersection, a building, whatever it would be. I'd go to the southeast corner. Tom DiTommaso would take his element to the northeast corner, you know, and so on and so on. So it was a set piece. And when you hit the ground, as long as you knew where north was, I'd say, oh, that's north, so I'm at the southeast, that's the target building. Click. Everything falls into place. And so we could take that template to anywhere in the city, and we rehearsed it over and over again until, until it was really second nature to us.

Nice, nice.

How about how long did you guys spend rehearsing that?

About, about, about 2 weeks. Yeah, maybe a little over 2 weeks. Um, just rehearsed it on Fort Bragg and rehearsed it in the MOUT site, rehearsed it on vehicles. They did a great job of bringing, um, you know, opposing forces in to roleplay. And so they'd have crowds converge on us, all kinds of different scenarios, and we live-fired it. And so we really got it down where we felt very flexible. And another important part about that is the commander could make a call in the air. And so we would fly in helicopters to the target, but the commander could make the call and he could say, for example, if the scenario was it was just a deed and one bodyguard, we don't need all 100 guys. There'd be 40 assaulters and about 60 Rangers. We don't need everybody. Just put a small team in to take him out in his vehicle. and keep everybody up in the air. And so it was very flexible. Or if it was a heavy package, we could land everybody, which is what we normally did. But we also had situations where it was just one guy in a vehicle and they put a small element in and we would stay up airborne.

So a very flexible template that we applied. And we did that for about 2 and a half weeks at Fort Bragg.

I mean, what are you thinking from— you spent 3 years of battalion doing training. Training, training, training. You'd, you'd missed Desert Shield, right? And now you're on probably the most high-profile mission since, what, Escobar? Was that— did Escobar happen?

Yeah, or Sante. You know, we, we really, uh, or, or Desert One. We— that's how we felt. I mean, I, I—

You're gonna take out—

Yeah.

Adid.

Yep. We, we absolutely—

Like, from no combat to—

Right.

hey, we're going to take out a deed.

Right. On a moment's notice. I mean, it was literally like the standard Ranger, hey, here's the mission, go. And we got to train up. But no, we absolutely knew, we were cognizant of the significance of it. I mean, for me especially, being in that last 30 days in battalion, I was just ecstatic to be there. And every guy really, I think, That's all they wanted was to keep their seat on the mission. That's all they— I mean, everyone was just— no matter what they told us to do, we were going to do what they said to, to be able to keep our place on the mission. And one of the tensions that was involved is they kept cutting the package. So we actually brought a platoon from A Company that was going to reinforce us. There'd be 4 platoons, and that platoon got cut at Fort Bragg, and those poor guys had to go home. And they kept cutting guys. Um, we, we had wanted the AC-130. They cut it. And these were cuts coming from Washington, D.C., saying, no, the package is too big, you got to scale it down. So, I mean, that was literally my biggest fear, was we were going to get cut.

And the other thing that was going on was the typical thing that I've experienced in every war I've ever been in is the, um, disjointed communications between the strategic level and tactical. And so they brought us in after 2 weeks of training. They brought us into the, to the mess hall on Delta and gave us this big dinner and said, Okay, guys, well, unfortunately, it's been canceled. Just like that. And so we got on planes, the Rangers got on planes, and we went back to Fort Bliss, Texas, to this training event. And we land at Fort Bliss, and a guy ramped the plane and said, no, it's back on again.

Holy shit.

So, I mean, it was an incredible roller coaster. I mean, just a roller coaster that just had us on our— we just don't want to get cut. We just want this thing to go and get— and not get cut. But thank God, um, On that one, we turned right around, flew right back to Fort Bragg, and within 24 hours we were, we were outloading to, uh, to Africa, to Somalia.

Wow.

But, but, but just a hell of a roller coaster. No kidding.

So you get to Somalia.

Got to Somalia. Um, we, we had to phase in there. It took us about a week or so to build up, um, just trying to figure the area out. There was one, uh, small element of US there, and, you know, the background of that is we went in heavy. With Marines and, and U.S. military forces. And then President Clinton was elected and he scaled it down. And what he chose to do was turn it from a humanitarian mission feeding starving refugees to let's try to fix Somalia and build a country. But, you know, while he's doing that, changing that mission, they scaled down the U.S. military presence. So there's a very small element of U.S. military there, but they were backfilled by international forces. like the Turks and the Greeks, like the Indians and the Pakistanis. They all had military contingents there. I mean, can you imagine that's, that's who your alliance is? I remember one day we drove out into the desert to do some training and the brigade— Hold on.

So your, your counterparts are countries that hate each other?

That's exactly right. Turks. There was a Turkish general in charge and there was a Greek battalion on the ground. I mean, just crazy. And And this is illustrated by when we went out, the Indian Brigade, Armor Brigade came in, and we were rolling out one day and we stopped to talk to them. You know, they're on our side. And they had their tanks pointed in every direction, not just out of the city, but back into the city where our camp was. And we asked them, why do you have a tank pointed that way? And they said, well, that's where the Pakistani camp is. So we got to be ready in case they attack us. I mean, that's— that was our task force, the military task force. So We were obviously operating independent of them as a joint special operations task force, but that's, that's the UN, the friendly forces that were on the ground. Very complex. So we got in there and tried to build that, uh, our, our situational awareness, build the intelligence picture of what they were seeing, and they didn't have a lot. Um, again, they were kind of getting overwhelmed by, by Adid and his, uh, this effort that had been growing all summer.

And, um, this whole thing got triggered by Adid started to attack U.S. forces. and planted an anti-tank mine and killed 4 guys in a Humvee. And that triggered our task force being launched. So the U.S. guys, a very small contingent, trying to react to this tide that's growing against them. A million people in this city. So it was a pretty huge, pretty huge resistance. And so as we started getting our feet on the ground, we were talking to the U.S. military that were there. They had a target list. They said, there's this office building that we think Adid's guys use. And so we had that on the list. And while we were getting our feet on the ground, we were based at the airfield. There was a mortar attack aimed at us, aimed at our compound. So 3 mortar rounds impacted, a couple of guys lightly wounded. General Garrison said, hey, you know, we're going to— we're not just going to take this lying down. So what's the top target? It's this office building. So we went and hit it that night just to kind of show the flag. Well, that's, that's where we kind of learned some lessons on the complexity of, of a U.N. operation and the complexity of Somalia.

Because we found a couple guys in there, we detained them, did our standard package at night. Uh, the assaulters assaulted the building, we went in at night, formed the sec— the security perimeter, and then we extracted with some prisoners. Got back to the compound and found out they were UN employees, that the UN used this building as an office building. Yes, it was owned by Adid's guys, it was owned by his number one guy, Osman Otto. He owned the building, but he leased it to the UN. So the UN used it as an office building. So that's what we figured out. This is going to be a little more complex than just, just going and striking the target.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah, man.

Where do we go from here?

So then we, we continued to refine our intelligence. Uh, we had, we had kind of a pickup team. And, you know, you look back on the things, the incredible capability we had during the war on terrorism. This is all before that. And so again, uh, Washington had been paring our task force down. So instead of giving us an AC-130 and our normal intelligence platforms, they gave us a Navy P-3 Orion sub hunter. Great, great guys, some great systems, but they'd never worked with special operations before. They'd never done manhunting before. And so they were trying to do reconnaissance around the city and locate Adid. We had other scout elements out. We started developing human intelligence. You know, falling back on the old standard intelligence systems and putting spies out there and trying to find it. And we made some progress with that, and we started to get some more hits. We got identification that Adid was bedding down at an old army barracks one night, so we hit that. But, but again, just the nature of how our template worked— it was a great template, but, but it had some pros and cons. And one of the cons was the assault force would go in first, but that would let everybody know on the ground know that we were coming before this perimeter could get sealed off.

And so Adid was able to squirt out and get off that objective before we got him. And so we had a little bit of frustration with that, trying to track him down. Again, he was very canny. He was hiding in a very good way. Never used the radio, never provided any signal intelligence, only used his family as messengers to coordinate. So very difficult to track him. But our human intelligence started to gain some leverage. as we went through things. Now, the other thing that didn't happen was General Garrison said, and we knew this all along, you're not going to end this problem by taking out one guy. This is a very united clan, the Habr Geter, against the UN. They're very united now because we've been fighting them. And so you're going to have to take out the network. It's going to expand that. So Washington finally agreed to do that, and that's when we were allowed to start targeting some of the other key players in Adid's network. And the movie Black Hawk Down opens with us taking out Osmanato, and he was the chief financier. He was the number 2 in the Habrigheter clan and in Adid's group.

And so we finally were able to start targeting him and watching him, and he had not known that he was on the target list, that, that we'd expanded. So he was kind of moving around openly, and we, we saw him. Our intelligence saw him. at a mechanic, a garage complex that he owned. And so we launched in the daytime, hit the target. Unfortunately, when we got there, the only guy we found was one of the Somali, one of their enemy militia tribe guys that were chained to a tree by the neck. And he was the only Somali happy to see us that day. And when we released him from being captured by Adid's forces, but we missed Otto. And interestingly, I found out years later Because as you know, we got efforts going on in Somalia now. Some of my friends, a SEAL actually, made friends with Otto decades later, and Otto took him back and showed him the hole that he squirted out. So he had a hole right underneath his desk and a tunnel, and he had jumped in that tunnel and squirted out. So he was there. We just missed him before we could detain him.

Holy shit.

But then about 3 days later, on September 30th, late in September, Otto was riding around town with one bodyguard in a vehicle, and we picked him up. And our helicopter, our scout aircraft picked him up, and we locked on him. So we launched the assault force to take him. And this was really an interesting mission because, as I'd mentioned, it was very flexible, and the commanders knew we don't need all 100 guys on the ground to take out just 2. So we just put in one assault team. They stopped the vehicle, and this is what's shown in the movie Black Hawk Down. That's the opening sequence. It's not really realistic to what, what we actually did, but the gunships were able to stop his vehicle in the, in the intersection. The assault force landed. The bodyguard tried to delay them. In the kinder, gentler military at the time, they shot him in the leg rather than kill him. And, and then Otto himself ran into a building. They began clearing the building. The, the Tier 1 assault guys cleared the building, finally found him. Somali hiding in the hallway, and he— and they said, are you Osmanato?

He said, yes, I am. So then they took him up to the roof. One of the Blackhawks came into the roof, they extracted him. And so it was a very successful mission. That all took about 50 minutes to do that, to stop the vehicle, search the building, find him, get him out. Well, this is one of the most interesting parts of, of our plan is, as I mentioned, the rest of the assault force is in the air because we normally did our missions Coming in from the air. Uh, so we were— this is a daytime mission. We were up in the aircraft. Mike Durant and Ray Frank were my pilots. I'm in the same aircraft every time. We're flying in our formation, circling the target in case we were needed. But again, I'd mentioned we just put a small assault force in. So the Rangers and the rest of this task force are circling in our helicopters over the target, um, and we're observing this. So it gave me a ringside seat. So we're, we're canted left as we're circling, and I'm on the left side of the aircraft, so I could watch the whole mission go down on the ground.

I could see it progress. But as that mission is going down in the intersection in the building, we could see all around the neighborhood tens of thousands of people converging. And the Somalis were not stupid. They didn't have technology, but they would— when they had an action going on, they would burn tires in the street where that action was. Then you saw the smoke and you'd get your gun and you'd converge on the smoke if I was a Somali militiaman. And then they'd get organized and then they'd move in. But it took them some time to do that. But we could see burning tires all around the neighborhoods, and we could see people assembling and tens of thousands of people getting stirred up and starting to move towards that intersection. And as the clock started ticking past 50 minutes, as we're extracting Otto off that roof and and extracting the rest of the assault team off that roof, you know, 20 to 30 guys. Now the Somalis are starting to close on that site. And so our guys on the ground are now having to engage Somali gunmen. And our snipers who are riding the helicopters overhead are starting to have to engage Somali gunmen coming into the area.

So that was, that was really our first relatively big contact fighting the Somalis. We had a couple of potshots here and there before, But this was the first time Somali gunmen had made it to the target and our guys on the ground were fighting. But fortunately, we were able to— it was going smooth enough that at about an hour now, we got everybody off. So Otto goes out at about 50 minutes, about 10 minutes of fighting as the team's withdrawing to the top of the building. And at about an hour, we lifted the last guys off and the task force all returned back to base. But I got, I got a ringside seat to that. And then the other thing that was going on is As we're orbiting the target, and, you know, we're not at 1,000 feet, we're down at rooftop level orbiting because our door gunners were trying to support and we had snipers on board some of the Blackhawks. The Somalis are shooting at us, shooting a lot of small arms at our helicopters, and they're also shooting rocket-propelled grenades. And we could actually, you know, hear them whooshing underneath, beneath us or whooshing behind the aircraft.

But when we got back to base and we, and we did our after-action review and hot wash of all that, A couple of things we took from that, good and bad. Good, we took, as long as we were able to stick to our plan and as long as we could execute within 60 minutes, which was our goal, we could stay a couple of steps ahead of the Somalis and we could deal with whatever they could— had time to react. They couldn't get those tens of thousands onto the objective within an hour. It takes more than that. So if things went smoothly and we could do that within an hour, we'd be okay. We had enough combat power enough in our plan that we could do that. The other thing that we thought was they can't shoot us down. You know, our helicopters are moving too fast, our pilots are too good, we can deal with them and they can't shoot us down. The right and the wrong of those lessons learned, but that's what we took from that mission just days prior to October 3rd.

What was your relationship with those guys while you were there? In the movie, it looks Almost like you guys don't get along at all.

Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that. Certainly there was, as I mentioned earlier on, when we first made it to Fort Bragg, there was, there was some cultural friction. And I think that was mainly at the leader level. And it, it wasn't, it wasn't a crisis. It wasn't unhealthy. It was just different ways of doing business and trying to work through all that. There was, there were some personality issues at the leadership level. Very relaxed, very Special Forces way of doing business versus very regimented Ranger Regiment way of doing business. And, you know, Mike Steele, our company commander, former Georgia football player, you know, he's a great commander, great soldier, but a very one-way monolithic way of doing things and very aggressive way and not necessarily a flexible way. where a lot of the leadership on, on the Delta side did business. It's just different ways of doing business. So there was a little bit of friction there, um, a, a little bit of some of the operators viewing some of the things that we did in the Ranger Regiment culturally as unnecessary or, or dumb. Um, and I'll give you an example. You know, we stayed in our regular uniform no matter what.

Uh, there was— we were— it was August and September on the equator, so it was incredibly hot, but we never came off that. I mean, they might, they might make an exception, let us get into our physical training uniform with shorts and t-shirt for certain things, but usually you're in your full camouflage gear moving around. Other units didn't do that. They, they were senior leaders. They dressed the way they wanted to dress. Um, and so big cultural things.

Gotcha.

Uh, now I will also say that Mike Steele didn't make all those calls, and a lot of people don't know that. And I've told Mike this, you know, you shouldn't get blamed for somebody else's decisions. But Mike approached it as, if these are the orders from our commanders and from, from other people, I'm going to follow them and I'm going to adopt them as my own. So a lot of the things that people thought were dumb going on, like staying in uniform all the time, or Whatever it may be, they weren't Mike Steele's calls. I know that because I was with him. I was his fire support officer, so I'd be with him in these meetings, and he was told, you will do this, and he would go out and own it. So all the guys thought these were Mike Steele's calls, but they weren't.

Got it.

And all the Delta operators thought these were Mike Steele's calls. Now, like I said, he didn't always help himself on, on being just very straightforward, and, and, uh, you know, his, his personality, which is very similar to mine, so I'm not really throwing stones at him, But, you know, a lot of misconceptions. So all that to say, there was some friction at that level, some cultural friction. But I will also say that, again, I was a lieutenant. So a lot of the younger soldiers, the operators did a great job because they were all senior noncommissioned officers, did a great job of trying to bring them in and develop them. You know, we had senior NCOs as well, but we had a lot of junior guys, 18, 19, 20-year-olds.

Uh-huh.

And they did a great job at mentoring them. They did. They would, they would do extra training with them. They would, they would talk to them. We had guys from B Company that were now operators in C Squadron— Dan Bush, uh, and he would come back and, and provide really good liaison. So, so I don't think across the board it was 2 different groups doing this at all. There was some friction, cultural friction at the leadership level that fed into that.

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Wanted to cover, uh, you wanted to cover a little bit more on the friction stuff.

Yeah, as we were saying before, you know, again, I was a lieutenant, so I wasn't dealing with everybody, uh, face to face. But there are a few guys I got to know. And, uh, you know, in a big battle like that with all kinds of personalities, really, really strong individuals and personalities, there's gonna be people talking about what happened and why it happened. And I think a couple of things were— we were all young guys. We're, uh, we, you know, the Rangers, we had 18, 19, 20-year-olds, but everybody was in their 20s, uh, and, and really young. And, and obviously you mature from that. And one of the things I've found over the years, I have gotten to be close now with some of the guys, including Delta operators, you know, over the years, over the decades, because it's a very small group we're talking. Even if you include the aircrew, it's less than 150 people. So it's a very small group that was on the ground that, you know, that day, even though I've met like 3,000 people that said they were on the ground that day.

I'll bet you have.

You know what I mean? Uh, but there's some of the Delta operators I got very close with. And so one of the guys that, that I admire the most out of that whole group is Norm Hooten. And, uh, you know, we'll talk more about Norm later on. But, um, you know, I, I, I never personally had a negative encounter with him, never. But, but I observed his interactions. And there's some thing in the movie about him getting called out for having his finger on the trigger by Mike Steele. And I was there when that happened. That, that did happen.

I mean, it wasn't Oh, that's a real thing?

That's a real thing. That actually— I was, I was standing there when it happened. Mike said, hey, you know, your, your weapon's on fire, and Norm's not on safe. And Norm said, this is my safety. But never had a negative interaction with him. Just thought the world of him, you know, even then. He was an iconic guy. But I've gotten to be good friends with him. And I really— and he's, like I said, he's one of the guys that I admire the most out of the task force now. And what he said to me about a year ago was, You know, it was really cool being in the unit I was in. It was cool being in, in B Company and cool being a helicopter pilot. But what the main thing is that we were all together as Task Force Ranger. I mean, that's the important thing. And I think most people, even though you got some strong personalities expressing viewpoints, I think most people, now that we've matured in age and look back on that, I think most people feel that way, that, that being in that task force.

Mm-hmm.

was the main thing. The rivalry's gone, at least at the personal level, right? You know, between, between veterans of that fight. So yeah, that's good to hear. Yeah. So let's talk about the day of. Yeah, so October 3rd, we'd, um, we'd gotten a little bit of a break because, uh, again, this is kind of how life went, uh, as you know, trying to develop these intelligence-driven targets with triggers. We would start to get good intelligence on something going on. And as that would develop, then we had to be standing by to react to it. So in the 72 hours prior to October 3rd, 3 different times we started to stand the task force up, even to the point of get your gear on, get in the helicopters, engines turning, scratch, you know, that kind of thing. Because the— because it just— the situation wouldn't warrant us hitting it. But constantly chasing intelligence like that. And so that happened 3 times within a 48 to 72 hour period. So they said, hey, Sunday afternoon, you still got to be ready, but I'm gonna let you go to the beach, get in your PT gear, uh, and mess around a little bit.

So we went over to the beach, did some things with that, kind of taking it easy. I came back and, um, I wanted to go get in one of the air-conditioned, uh, uh, huts that they had. Now, we didn't— we didn't have air conditioning. We were living in the big, uh, the big hangar all together. But some of the guys, the pilots, were living in these air-conditioned huts. And I was all about that because, you know, our lives were in their hands. So I wanted them to have a good night's sleep. I was all about that. They felt guilty about it, but I'm like, no, don't feel guilty. We want you sharp. But I want to go over there and get in one of those huts, get some AC for a few minutes. So I kind of— kind of snuck away a little bit. As I came back from that, I saw everything spinning at the, at the operations center. I knew I was already late, so I ran in there. Yep, developing a target. They had one of our human intelligence guys had come forward and responding to the, the bounty that we'd put out on Adid, you know, responding to that, saying, I'll give you information, but it, it's not Adid, but it's all of his leadership was meeting.

Everybody except him. And they were meeting at this building right in the middle of their territory, right in the middle of the Bakara Market. Half a million people living in this ghetto, right smack in the center of that, smack in the area where they had a lot of their militia presence. In fact, as we started to surveil the target, get eyes on it from the air, we could see they had a lot of security in place. They were pretty smart. They did advance party stuff. They would have, you know, lookouts, a pretty good security net. And so we saw all those things developing. And so we knew that there was a lot of security in place for this big meeting. And so that was the target. And as we started to spin that up, task force, it's about 3:00 in the afternoon that this is happening, and the meeting is going to take place around then. So we got to the point where we load the aircraft and the engines, engines are starting to turn. And then they said, hey, uh, everybody off the aircraft. But as we're walking back to the hangar, you know, no surprise, been through it, they said, uh, key leaders come to the TOC.

So we went to the TOC, and what had happened was the human intelligence source, they had told him to go park a vehicle in front of the building to mark it for us. Well, he was too scared to go down there, so he was a block up. And we figured that out. They, they They started to scratch the mission, but as they're scratching it, they were talking to the guy and they're like, go down and park in front of the building. So he did, and he went down and parked, put his hood up, had a big X on the top of his, of his, uh, truck for our, our aircraft to be able to identify him. And the conditions were set, uh, when he did that. So back to the aircraft. Um, a little bit different that day. That was actually like the 7th mission that we'd done. And a little bit different that day. General Garrison— I'll never forget that General Garrison came out and was like shaking guys' hands as we're getting on the aircraft. He'd never done that before. But again, we knew there was extra security on the site, and so it wasn't going to be just one or two guys we're dealing with.

It was—

they, they were estimating 30 to 50 security on the site already, plus their militia forces, a significant portion of them really close, like within 4 blocks. So, so we knew, um, you know, it was a— it was a—

Was there an estimate on their security forces that are staged 4 blocks away?

Thousands.

Thousands.

Thousands and thousands. Because the Somalis had standing militia. They had guys, that's all they did. But then pretty much because of the state of Somalia, it was in constant civil war. Everybody had a rifle. You know, that the government fell. much prior to that, like in 1990. And all their army that had been supplied by the Soviets, all that equipment and weapons and ammunition, the population just took it. So there was— everybody had machine guns and AKs and ammunition, everybody. And so what they would do is they're fighting their civil war, the militiamen are rolling around fighting, but then everybody would, like Minutemen, they would grab their guns and come and get in the fight. And so we knew right in the middle of that territory, population half a million, You know, people don't believe me when I say tens of thousands of people involved in this fight, but it was a neighborhood of 500,000 people, and everybody, all the males are armed, like from 12 and above. So it really was thousands and thousands of people. And right in that area, that's the hornet's nest we were going to go in and stir up.

And we knew that. In fact, there's a, there's a part of that where this kinder, gentler Our gunships, our helicopter gunships, as you know, carried Gatling guns and they carried 2.75-inch rockets. And they would not let us— they would not let the helicopters load the rockets for most of our missions. They said that's too, too much firepower for inside the city. You know, kinder, gentler, early '90s. And I would always ask, I'm like, look, can we just have them loaded in case we need them? Always get turned down. Well, as we're going out the door, the commander General Boykin said, he called me over and he goes, hey, they're going to have rockets on today. And I thought, and I'm thinking, I smile and said, that's good. And then I thought, yeah, that means it's serious. So little things like that were going on. You know, we knew the picture, but like I said, General Garrison came out with us, shook our hand as we're getting on the aircraft. And then I'll never forget, you know, when we finally got the— it's famous from the movie. We got the brevity code, the code to launch.

which is Irene. When that came across the radio, I mean, guys were cheering. You could hear them cheering over the noise of the helicopters because we knew we were going to brawl. Wow.

Um, so when you got over the target to fast rope in, you had to make a decision: night vision, ammo, grenades, water. What did you pick?

Yeah, absolutely. So That's one of the things that people don't understand. You know, fast roping is a great technique, as you know, but it's not designed to do with £100 of gear on because it's your strength of your arms keeping you on that rope. And it's okay from 10 feet, but from 90 feet, that's pretty serious. And we were loaded down, um, as, as much as you can carry. So what you got to do is say, I can only carry so much. And what am I going to carry? And am I going to carry water? Am I going to carry night vision? Or am I going to carry more ammunition? And if I'm going in at 3:30 in the afternoon and I'm only going to be on the ground for an hour, I hope, then I'm not bringing night vision. I'm bringing a grenade or I'm bringing more ammunition. And those were literally the decisions that we'd have to make. Now, people can say we made a mistake. I would love to have had night vision in the, in the fight that was coming. But that's the decision that I had to make, and we all made that decision.

So more ammunition. Uh, I didn't even have water on me. I had ammunition, grenades. In my case, in most of the guys' cases, they had some sort of configuration like this. We had body armor, which was much heavier than it is today. It was the original version with porcelain plates in the front and the back. We had just gotten it issued for this mission. So very heavy body armor. We had ammunition. In my case, I had, uh, a manpack radio that I had to carry on my back, about the size of a cinder block roughly. Then I had 2 other smaller radios about the size of a brick. I had batteries for that, um, and I had medical gear. And so that's, that's what I took, and my, and my weapon. That's what I took. Uh, but again, that's about as much as I could slide down that rope with. I, I would love to have had night vision. Like I said, I should have had water, but those are decisions that we made, and that's why we made them. So, um, that's what, that's what we did when we fast roped down, uh, on this mission.

Where do we go from here?

Well, one of, one of the interesting things is, uh, and I— these are some of the things I remember clearly. We took off from the airfield, and the, uh, the target building was like to our northeast, back up in the city. But we flew out along the coast, out to the west, away from the target. I couldn't exactly understand why until we turned and the sun was right behind us. So like people have been doing, soldiers have been doing for thousands of years, we came out of the sun. So we came out of the sun, and then one of the things that's really crazy that I've determined about this, or learned about this over the years, is in my memory, I clearly remember flying over the target from the west. I'm thinking about it right now, and to me, we're flying from the west over the target. When you watch the video, we took a right turn and came in from the north, and I just don't remember that turn. And so it's weird how your memory, uh, may not even be right, even when you're looking at it. But we did— we flew out of the west, out of the sun, took a right turn, came in from north to south.

Uh, the assault force hit the target. They were able to land mostly in the street and get right off and assault right into the building. It was a multi-story apartment-type building. They went over the wall throwing flashbangs. In spite of everything, they were able to achieve surprise and shock and penetrate right in that building and start clearing it, detained all the guys that they were after. The security forces did not fight right on the objective. They kind of pulled back into the neighborhoods, but then they started taking immediate potshots, especially from the north side. About 2 minutes after the assault force landed basically on the building, the 4 Blackhawks carrying the 4 elements of Rangers came in. And again, I went to the southeast corner. The helicopters hover over each corner, fast rope guys down, and then we establish that security perimeter. There was some issues as we went in. Not only that we were high, we were extremely high, and had nothing to do with the pilots, just based on the multi-story building. We were still at about 90 feet having to fast rope down, but there was a lot of dust kicking up.

And anybody, any pilot knows that you have to have a, a visual reference point on the horizon, especially to be able to maintain a hover in a helicopter, and not possible in a dust cloud.

Mhm.

So the fact that any of those pilots could hover is, is a miracle, uh, but one of the helicopters wasn't able to keep a real good hover. And, uh, as that helicopter's moving, as he's trying to keep that hover The fast rope that gets kicked out, you know, you know this, but you've got to jump out onto the rope. You're— it's not on you as you're going down. You got to jump from the helicopter, catch the rope, and slide down, in essence, at least commit your weight to it. And so as that helicopter is moving, the rope is moving. And so very difficult to catch that rope while it's moving 90 feet in the air. And one of the guys, PFC Todd Blackburn, missed the rope and fell. But so we got a casualty now, fell 90 feet, got knocked out. So we got a casualty now, but we've got the entire security force in on the ground. The assaulters are doing what they need to do. Um, another thing that happened from the dust was one of the assault helicopters, the initial ones, uh, couldn't land because of the dust, so he had to peel off and land about 2 blocks away.

And then those guys are now recovering into the perimeter. They knew where the target building was. They made their way to it. But we're trying to sort things out, and now we're getting, for the first time, some resistance, mainly on the north side. Right away, the security forces are starting to shoot back, but we're in position. It's not anything that we couldn't handle.

How long is it before— how long is it from Delta starting to take the building down to you guys fast roping in?

Less than 2 minutes. Less than 2 minutes. I'd say a minute. Maybe, maybe a minute and a half at the most. And that's just helicopters coming in, flaring, uh, and getting set for those ropes. But, but, you know, they're, they're on the ground. Uh, we've got helicopters orbiting with snipers in place, so that's all set. And again, the dust is, is, uh, settling. But, you know, again, in a period of 3 or 4 minutes, we've got the whole force on the ground. We've got it locked down. Again, Getting some resistance, sorting some things out, but nothing we couldn't handle. And they were able to do what they needed to do, and they detained the entire force of targets. I think it was about 12 targets, 12 members of Adid's group. They've got them detained, starting to sort things out. Um, but again, meanwhile, the Rangers outside in the security perimeter, we are starting to get some resistance. So we're dealing with potshots, and it's starting to increase. You know, the clock is the biggest thing in this. And as that clock's running and time's going on, the level of resistance is increasing because the Somalis are moving toward the, the action and there's more and more.

And so initially it's guys stumbling into us, Somalis, and getting taken out pretty much immediately. But then they start to figure things out and starting to build bigger groups and, and come in and fight more deliberately. The other thing that was really difficult and really crazy for us, and I still to this day find it insane is there's a number of civilians that just got caught in it. I remember one old guy had— was coming from the grocery store, and he's just sitting in our position about as far away from me as you are, and he's just got his grocery bags. And when we'd shoot, he'd just cover his ears, and he just had— he was just hanging out, just, just waiting for it to go to end. But then we had women start to walk through our position, and Rangers, we'd actually be shooting down the street in a gunfight with, with Somalis. And these women would walk through and the Rangers would guns up and wait for them to pass and clear. But we started seeing them doing this and they were, they were coming in, locating us for the gunmen. So the Somali civilians were, were coming into our position and pointing us out for the gunmen.

And it's just amazing to me that, you know, somebody would, would risk themselves that way in the middle of a firefight. Wow.

No longer a civilian at that point.

I'm sorry?

No longer a civilian at that point.

Absolutely, absolutely. They were, they were combatants. But again, rules of engagement, kinder, gentler. We weren't killing people like that initially. Um, but, and again, you're watching these things. These 18-year-old kids are watching these things. I was watching these things and just hard— I cannot believe that we're in this gunfight and this woman's just going to walk right in front of our guns, walk right amongst us And then we started to see her pointing.

That's crazy.

Yeah. And then, but not too long after that, flip is switched and anybody in the street was getting killed. But initially, just amazing the discipline and restraint that, that our guys showed with that going on. And to experience that, that people would be so brazen to, to do that. But again, we're at about 45 minutes now.

I mean, I'm just, you know, you've gone from No combat at all.

Yeah.

To in the middle of the hornet's nest, killing everybody in the streets.

Yeah. At this point, we weren't, we weren't doing that yet. There was a lot of contact, but we weren't, we weren't hammering everything. We were being relatively selective. Um, it, it's increasing, but yeah.

Even that?

Yeah. What—

how are you handling it?

Yeah, it, it was, uh, you know, for me, and I, and I don't want this to sound like bravado, But it was the apex of a lifetime of preparation. I mean, all my life, I had just wanted to be on a real mission, and I wanted to experience— I didn't necessarily want to kill people because I'm a Christian. I wasn't in from that perspective, but I wanted to be on a real mission. I wanted to be actually on a combat mission, not just check the block and say I was deployed. And so we knew it was incredibly exciting. I mean, it was a little, you know, there was the tension there, but it was, it was just for me, it was like the culmination of a lifetime to be actually on a mission, especially with a Ranger battalion, uh, especially in a JSOC task force. And so, um, but, but I won't actually say there was a lot of thought to that. I mean, it was just do your job, you know, do your job, don't fail these guys. We had pretty good responsibility because my job was to talk to the sniper aircraft And we had a threat to vector them in and facilitate my guys at each position doing that.

So I was really focused on that. I was focused on the 3-dimensional aspect of the fight, and I was focused on making sure that those snipers and we had the support that we needed to support the guys on the ground. So all these things kind of rushing together, but really focused on my job. And I go back to time and again, that was the training of the Ranger Battalion is you know, we weren't that uncomfortable doing it. Even, even with bullets coming back our way, we were very comfortable live firing. We live fired so much. And even when there's somebody shooting back at us, we just were comfortable in that environment because we'd done it so much, and that's all we focused on. So, uh, it wasn't, it wasn't that big a stretch for us. The stretch was like civilians walking in amongst us.

Yeah.

That's very surreal. We're like, We don't know how to deal with this. I mean, what do you do? So that, that was the part, um, that was a little surreal. But I, I think everybody there wanted to do their job. They wanted to, to live up to the guy to their left and right and not, not fail them. And that's what we were focused on. And, and things were moving fast too, so you didn't have a lot of time to absorb what was going on.

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Yeah, so they came out of the building and we were right there. I mean, the wall of the building was, was 10 feet away. It was right— I could almost touch it.

Okay.

Right there. So they, they would— they just walked out, started talking to us. Um, we got a status, and I was on the radio too, so we were all linked together and I could hear what was going on. Uh, and so we knew 45 minutes in, they're ready to come out. There was another piece of the task force that I hadn't mentioned yet, and we had a convoy. And so we had 5-ton trucks and Humvees, and whenever we would launch in helicopters, they would launch this convoy out. It was a platoon of Rangers and about 10, 12 vehicles, and they would drive out and link up with us. Now, the good news about that too is they had .50 cals and Mark 19 grenade launchers mounted on the vehicle, so that was heavy weapons coming in for us. The bad news is, again, this is before the war on terrorism— unarmored vehicles. We put sandbags in them, but you're talking soft-skinned trucks and Humvees like my F-150. So that was the bad news on that, but But they arrived, so we got some reinforcements. We know we got an option to get out. Uh, the Delta guys start coming out loading up prisoners.

They load up on the vehicles. We load some of our guys on the vehicles. But all this is happening while we're dealing with more and more resistance. It's still not anything we couldn't deal with, but increasing. And we know the clock's ticking, but we see things are starting to wrap up. 45 minutes, we're still good. We're under an hour. So at that point, uh, I was dealing with a gunman that was shooting down the road at me from about 3 or 4 blocks, shooting into our position. And again, my job, talk to the Blackhawks that were orbiting overhead with snipers on board, among them Gary Gordon and Randy Shugart. And so I called the helicopter, the lead, um, Cliff Walcott, pilot. And that's who I would talk to. And I said, hey, Cliff, I got a threat down here. I'd like you to bring the snipers in. And of course, I'm using our military code to talk that, but that's essentially what I said. So he said, no problem. And again, of course, the pilots of the 160th, as you know, I mean, they're just as much warriors and just as aggressive as anybody on the ground.

Fantastic guys. I can't say enough good about them. So Cliff comes rolling in, and as he comes in, they're looking for this gunman shooting, and the gun, it stops for a couple of minutes. The direct— we're not taking direct AK rounds anymore. So I told him, okay, end of mission, go back up to a safe altitude and I'll, I'll call you if we need you. And Cliff said, I'm going to come in for one more, one more look. And he's coming in from my right. The target building's behind me and he's coming in from my right, coming, uh, you know, west, west to east, south of me. And I, I look back and as he's coming around, he's going to give the trees— he's going to try to come in low and slow to give the snipers a good look at the road down in front of me. And I look back at Mike Steele, the company commander, to check and see where we're at. And we're loading, we're starting to load trucks, getting ready to get out of there. And when I turn back around again, the helicopter's spinning, you know, spinning like a, like an amusement park ride or something.

Definitely unnatural. And there was some gunfire and things going on, so I didn't hear the RPG hit it, but it got hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. And what You know, what's come out now is that al-Qaeda at that time, as you know, Osama bin Laden was just north up in Sudan, and he came down, sent his guys down to help Adid, and they gave him some of the training they'd learned in the Russian-Afghan War and taught him how to modify rocket-propelled grenades to be able to shoot up in the air. And that was just a recent development. They'd shot down a UN helicopter the week before doing that, but we didn't We weren't tracking all that completely. At least I wasn't at the lieutenant level. So one of these al-Qaeda gunmen was out there with a modified rocket-propelled grenade, and when Cliff came in low and slow, put a rocket-propelled grenade into him, and he spun off. And we watched him, and then he disappeared behind the buildings, and then we heard the impact and saw the dust cloud rise. So we knew we'd lost a bird. So I immediately report that to Captain Steele, who's right next to me.

Call goes out. We're still starting to move toward collapsing the perimeter and load the aircraft. But then probably within 30 seconds or a minute, we get the— we get the order from the command and control helicopter, the commander. Okay, change. Uh, guys that are on the convoy, continue what you're doing. The rest of the assault force, the Delta guys from the building and the Rangers on the ground, pick up now and move over toward that crash site. And initially they took one of the Ranger blocking positions, Tom DiTommaso's group, about 10, 12 guys, and they immediately ran over there to the crash site because the crash site's about 4 blocks away. Now, as you know, that's a very short distance, but when you're in an urban area and you don't really know where you're at—

Yeah.

Because all I knew was the target building. I didn't know the surrounding area. A little bit difficult proposition. You can't just run down the street and take a left. You don't know. So we start, you know, trying to figure out, get oriented to where we're going, where the crash is, and where we're going as we're policing everybody up. And so that's what happened. The guys started loading the convoy, the guys that were already on. A few Rangers and some of the Delta guys loaded onto that convoy, but the rest of us, you know, probably about 70 or 80 of us. Moving on foot down the street. And people ask me, why'd you do that? Well, Mogadishu, I mean, just a devastated city with no government or anything. And so those streets were just filled with rubble and burnt-out vehicles and very narrow alleys, and you couldn't get vehicles down them. You couldn't even get a Humvee down them. So the convoy had to go on big multi-lane roads and drive around But we could walk through alleys. And so, so we did that. So we moved off on foot while the convoy started trying to drive down some larger roads.

But that creates a huge command and control problem.

Mm-hmm.

Huge command and control, because again, we didn't exactly know where we were going. We knew where it crashed. We're kind of searching for it. And as we're doing all that, there's all kinds of things going on on the objective, on the crash site. And one of them is our search and rescue team that we had waiting got put onto the site. So they fast roped right onto the site. They got Air Force PJs, they got some Rangers. They pull guys out of the, out of the wreckage. Miraculously, you know, Cliff Walcott and Donovan Briley, the pilots, were able to keep that aircraft just stable enough that it pancaked in and all the guys in the back survived. The nose went in and they were crushed and they were killed. But everybody in the back survives. They literally pull guys out of the wreckage and then they start fighting snipers. Dan Bush was one of the guys I mentioned. So he, he gets out of the wreckage, he gets up on a corner. One of the other problems that we had is, of course, the Somalis now are converging on the original target building. So when the helicopter crashed 4 blocks out, they're in the middle of all that.

Shit.

So it's to the Somalis' strength now. They're, they're already assembled out there. And so now we're dealing with this hornet's nest around the crash site. Immediately, guys on the crash site are having to fight and beat back attacks, get wounded guys out, try to get the dead guys out. Um, Dan Bush goes up on a street corner, uh, starts fighting, takes a round under his plate in his stomach. Uh, he's, he's shot now. One of the other guys has a huge gash in his face. He's one of the snipers they pull out from the crash. One of our Little Bird helicopters makes an unbelievable landing in the middle of all that wreckage, you know, weaves his little helicopter in, lands in the middle of the fighting. His co-pilot's shooting out the side of the helicopter at Somalis. The pilot helps get some wounded guys onto the skids of the helicopter, and then they take off with Dan Bush.

Wow.

The guy with the gashed face, uh, says, nope, I'm not going, stays to fight. with his half his face cut open. So that's just kind of the nature of the guys in the task force, you know. But that's one of the evacuations they were able to do right off the crash site. So that's what's going on as we're sorting that out. We're trying to find it, they're trying to secure that crash site and deal with the wounded guys there. A lot of chaos. But again, what really strikes me in, in retrospect, we'd rehearse these kind of things. We were so disciplined. That we're dealing with chaos, but, but you didn't see panic. You didn't see chaos affecting the unit. You know, we're just dealing with things as they're coming. And I, and I really give credit to the guys and, and the leadership of that unit for, for allowing that, you know, for setting those conditions to be able to, to take such a change. Here you're going from a set-piece JSOC raid to now you're dealing with a crash and combat that's just going off the scale. And so it's really a tribute to those guys.

Damn, no kidding. What are you thinking when you saw the— I mean, when you saw the helicopter crash?

Yeah, again, you know, as I mentioned, you're— you are just reacting. You know, you're sinking to the level of your training.

There's a lot of shit going on.

It's a lot. It's a lot. Oh, no. Yeah, my stomach without a doubt got tight. right away because I knew you're going to have fatalities in a crash like that. And I knew every guy on board. You know, I dealt with Cliff every single day and Donovan. And then I heard the search and rescue team going in, and one of my guys from A Company, Ron Galliette, came with me from A Company, one of my forward observers, and he got assigned to the search and rescue team. So now I know Galliette's on the ground, you know, in this, in this chaotic fight. And just a couple guys out there. So now we got to get up there for all of them, right? But, but I got this 3-year connection with Galliard, so he's like my Ranger buddy. So my stomach is just tight, but you're still— you're just moving on training. And so I'm trying to keep communications with the aircraft. Cliff's aircraft was one of my birds, so that's down now. The other bird is rolled off, and I doesn't— I don't know where it's at because they're clearing the gunships to come in.

But I'm the guy to talk to the gunships. They can, they can clear them into the area, but not to fire. So I'm trying to work that. I'm trying to get comms with the gunships, trying to sort out what's going on. I got Captain Steele next to me. He's trying to get the— all the Ranger elements to link up with the Delta elements. Now, we'd never done this before. We'd never, like, moved through the city together in a fight. I mean, nobody had done that.

Mm-hmm.

So we're trying to sort all that out and do some command and control. And, and I'll say Again, I have no problem bringing out warts, but one of the mistakes, in my view, that we made, and we didn't learn this from Vietnam veterans who told us this was a mistake, is, you know, this is from centuries on the ground. When you have more than one element, there's got to be one commander. You can't just say, well, the Rangers are professional and they're professional, so they'll work it out. It doesn't work that way in combat for anybody. And so we made the mistake of having a command and control aircraft. And, and from a very precise target mission, I understand that. But when the fight started to happen, we didn't have one commander. And so you got Ranger commanders, you got Delta commanders, you got other elements, and nobody's really, I am the guy in charge and giving orders. You know what I mean? Too many leaders.

Who do you think should have been in charge of that?

In my opinion, the, the commander of the operation was the squadron commander from Delta, and, and I think he should have been on the ground commanding that. Or we had some other senior Ranger officers that were there in the convoy, so there were options. They, they could have put more senior guys instead of just letting some captains try to work it out. And I'm not trying to be too critical. I understand why those decisions were made. But the Vietnam guys told us, they said, when you get in a real battle on the ground, helicopters are a great tool, but when you get in a real battle, it comes down to the same disciplines and the same factors that the Spartans had in the shield wall. You got to have one commander commanding everybody, and everybody reacts to him. There can't be any collegiate stuff going on. So I think that's, that's an issue that we had. And I want to emphasize when I make these criticisms, the beauty of it is JSOC learned from that. They took all the good and bad and they learned from that and they retooled JSOC. And so when the war on terrorism started, they addressed all those things.

But I'm just going to be honest, we made some mistakes and that's one of them we made.

I think I read in the outline too that you, I mean, Because of the raids you guys did prior to this, it kind of gave up some TTPs. There were some familiar— familiar— they were familiar with how you guys were operating.

Yeah, absolutely. And refer back to the Osmanato, you know, mission is we did the same template every time. We tried a few things. We did some vehicle-borne, uh, one or two where we'd ride in on vehicles and, and trying to change the signature. But really, the task force would launch in our heavy— with small helicopters and Blackhawks, and we'd launch and we would do that. And, you know, we took that risk on this mission daylight. You know, we never want to operate in daylight. We never, never wanted to. But based on the triggers of the target, and then we launched the same, the same package in. And I think that, you know, in retrospect, that obviously allowed al-Qaeda to look at our template and know that they had a potential opportunity. to bring down a Black Hawk. And that day they actually brought down 5 Black Hawks. And that's another thing that most people don't know, that the 5 Black Hawks were brought down that day. Thank, thank the Lord, 3 of them were able to crash in friendly territory inside the wire. But we lost 2 in the city that we didn't get back, but 3 crashed.

But the enemy brought down 5 aircraft that day.

They were all brought down by enemy?

They were all brought down by the enemy.

Absolutely.

Shit. Yeah, that, that search and rescue team that I mentioned, they went right in on the site. Uh, their aircraft got hit so hard, and it got hit catastrophically, that while Rangers and guys were on the ropes going down, the pilot knew his bird was, was doomed, essentially. Uh, Dan Gelada, but such a fantastic pilot and disciplined, he kept that bird in a hover to let all the guys clear the ropes, and then Crashed back at the airfield.

Shit. Yeah.

So, and another thing, I, you know, I can't say enough about the pilots. I mean, they are watching this from the air, watching birds go down, and they never once left us, never once faltered. I mean, you know, aircraft will go, and I've, I've not had that in the rest of my career, to be honest. I've had 50/50 air support, but they never once even went to a safe altitude. They were, they were all fighting to get down on the deck so their door guns could get in the fight, and they're watching their guys go down. So it's just a tribute.

Where do we go from here?

So we finally get to the crash site. Um, we had to go down a couple blocks to the east, uh, and then take a left. and go up a couple blocks. That's where the crash site was, we, we thought. And as we moved up there, as I mentioned, now you're over an hour.

How are you guys navigating to that? Could you— do you see the smoke in the air? Do you see—

Could not, could not. Had— we were getting a general vector from the air, like a rolling recon. Yeah, some of the aerial assets are trying to, trying to direct us, but you know, that, that's sometimes as, as much a hindrance as a help because they're telling you take left to the next intersection. By the time it gets to you you're already past that intersection. So that really was a problem for the convoy. But for us, you know, fortunately, we only had a couple blocks to go. So we went down a couple blocks, we missed a turn, circled back up a couple blocks. But the problem we were having is that every second that was going by, resistance is increasing. So we went from a couple potshots here and there and a couple different gunfights to now it's just a wall of fighting going on, wall of fire coming in, and we could see them. coming down the, down the alleyways. I mean, just hundreds right around us and thousands behind them. And we're trying to move and, and get— and so the back of our group, the 90 or so guys were Rangers and they had the machine guns.

And we could hear the back, the machine guns now are just roaring. There's no restraint. We talked about rules of engagement. There's none of that anymore. You know, we're just fighting for survival and the machine guns are going. The Ranger platoon sergeants are controlling those. So it's not undisciplined, but it's firepower going out, trying to keep that convoy moving and alive, that group. And we started moving our way up there. And now Rangers and operators are starting to throw grenades, clear walls. There's guys popping up over walls. And again, you talk about, you know, what are you thinking? What are you feeling? You're really in automated mode. I was, I was just like moving like an automaton and I say this because I'd see things and I'd react to them. I saw a guy about 100 meters down in front of me, a Somali, and it was crazy because he was jumping up and running and jumping down, and I couldn't figure out why is he acting so stupid. He was doing individual movement technique. He was maneuvering on us. But I had already started firing at him before I— as I was thinking that, I had already automatically fired at him.

I knew, but in my head I was like, why is he moving around so crazy? You know? But so that's the cognitive in me not catching up with my training. I'd already started shooting at him. So a lot of that was going on. And, and like I said, now you're getting to the point of guys are having to secure your corner. You go to a street corner and now you got to secure it, and you're fighting down the corner, you're throwing grenades over the wall next to you to clear that. And trying to set up positions as we moved and we started to close in on the crash site. So I, I never made it to the crash site. Um, we were about 2 blocks.

How close did you get?

I got within 2 blocks, but I never saw it. I never saw the crash site. I was about a block and a half, 2 blocks short, because as our column started to move down and started to close with it, the front of our column got there and we integrated in with the search and rescue team and the guys that were there. took up defensive positions, and then all the way back we just started fortifying street corners and walls and buildings. Now, the problem, uh, that I had as a forward observer was I had to be able to see, uh, and what I was trying to do was I was trying to get the helicopter gunships on the radio and bring them into the fight, and I couldn't— I couldn't get them to respond. I couldn't get them on the radio. And I'm dealing with that. Well, let me go back to Fort Bragg for a minute. When we were at Fort Bragg and formed the task force, Rangers operate off FM radios, and the helicopters that we work with have FM radios to work with us. But we were told at Fort Bragg, no, you're going to operate off UHF radios because that's what the Air Force uses.

And there was Air Force guys attached to the task force, and that's their radio.

Okay.

But we said, that's not a good idea. Let's stick with our FM radios that we have trained with for years and we can rely on. No, you— this is an order. You will take the Air Force UHF radio. Okay. So we get up there onto the crash site, and now I can't— I can't raise the helicopters. Well, later on we find out that, as you know, when any aircraft crashes, there's an emergency transponder beacon on that that goes off to broadcast the location. It broadcasts on UHF, and it zed out and overrode and jammed our UHF radios and blocked us. But what me and my guys said— and this is standard policy, it's not that I'm exceptionally smart— we said, now we're bringing extra radios because we don't trust this. You know, you always have your backup. So we had FM radios. So I, as I'm getting close to crash site, I'm like, I cannot figure this out. My radio was working before. Reach down my headset, grab my extra FM radio. There's my guys, there's my helicopters. And so I start talking to my guys on the FM backup radio. They've got specific targets they want me to shoot.

I get the helicopter gunships on the line. I relay that information for them. I put the word out to everybody around me, let's put out visual signal panels and mark ourselves so that we're going to be safe from the helicopters and bring them in. But I told the helicopters, the gunships, I said, there are Rangers on both sides of your target, which is kind of unheard of. And also, I'm asking you to shoot like within 50 meters of our guys. Normally it's 300, 400, 500 meters. But I'm telling you that we need you to shoot 50 meters away and there's friendlies on the other side. But they not, not even batting an eyelash. They said, roger, got it. They're coming in. So I told everybody they're coming in, and as we're waiting, we can hear them coming, the Little Bird helicopters coming at rooftop level. And I'll never forget because they flew by and they didn't shoot. But as they come by, every AK-47, it seemed like, in the neighborhood pointed up at them and going off like a popcorn popper or stones on a roof. I mean, it was unbelievable, the firepower. They're shooting at these helicopters and they didn't shoot, and all 4 of them came by to do that.

I didn't know they were going to do it, but they came by dry on their first run to make sure they could see us. They weren't going to risk shooting around. So they— I mean, if you think about how recklessly they exposed themselves to make sure they could see us. And then I asked, I said, what's going on? They said it was dry run, we're coming in hot. Well, for me, the, the second those Gatling guns started going, uh, the battle The battle changed. And so we had been fighting to secure that perimeter and establish our— but the enemy's now— I mean, we're not talking 100 meters, we're talking they're right next to us. They're on the other side of the wall, and that's the fight that we're doing. But when those helicopter gunships started shooting, they started taking out not just the guys around us, but the guys coming, and that gave us breathing space. And so we were able to take out all the guys that were in around us While the helicopter gunships are just mowing down everybody around us. And, and I always say, you know, you just can't imagine the amount of firepower that, that those little birds bring to a fight like that.

And I, I tell this one story to kind of illustrate it. As the fight went on and the helicopters are shooting just all night for the next 12 hours or so, or 18 hours, just continual firing and engaging the enemy. One of the helicopters went back to the base to get more gas and ammo, and the pilot told the ground crew, he said, hey, I can't see out the windshield, there's something going on. And they went to clean the windshield off and it was human remains. They'd been blowing Somalis up so bad and flying through it that there was blood and, and Somalis all over their windscreen. And so that just shows the violence that those helicopters bring to the fight. And we were just— we were very thankful to God for it.

Holy shit.

Yeah, it's unbelievable.

When did you get shot?

So probably a minute after I had talked to the helicopters and they did their initial run and I had to let them know, hey, you're on target, keep it coming. And then that's what they did for the rest of the— that's— and I just kept engaging. But I said, you're good, checked with everybody, I broadcast that. And then it seems to me like seconds after that I could feel the energy of 3 rounds, or of AK-47 rounds, like going over me. And I was laying in the street. And again, this is the problem, is I had to be able to see. So I'm in the street, I couldn't get inside. Guys would say, you guys got to get inside, but I couldn't. I had to be able to watch these impacts. So I'm in the middle of the street and I'm watching down the street, and I can feel these rounds punching over my shoulder. And there was a corrugated steel building next to me, a little shed. And I could— I saw the bullets, you know, the holes punching into the corrugated steel. 1, 2, and then the 3rd round hit me in the leg.

And, uh, so a guy had been behind the wall just to my left, and he popped up over the wall and fired down on me from like 10 feet away and, uh, and hit me with the 3rd round. And so that's, that's when I got hit. Uh, and again, it's probably a minute after helicopters had come in on their initial run, and we're probably talking at about 10 minutes to 4, uh, now we've been on the ground about an hour and, and 20 minutes, somewhere in that range. Around 4 o'clock is when I got hit. So the company commander and his RTO, when the, when the gunshots started, you know, they, they moved into the building.

Were you the first one to be hit?

A lot, a lot of it was simultaneous. So I know there was other guys that were wounded. But, but in our, in our area, our little one-block area, yeah, I was probably the first guy to really take a bullet. No, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Before I'd gotten to that point, we'd had guys going down. So before I'd gotten to that point, this is another event that really sticks with me. As we're moving down the street, before I'd even called the helicopters in, We're trying to move up towards the crash site, and there was a Ranger laying there in the street. But, you know, this will show you the characteristic of what we were trying to do. We were so mission-focused. Normally, your reaction is stop and give this guy first aid. I could see he was bleeding in the hip, but I knew there was a medic behind me. I said, let the medic— I'm in my head— let the medic take care of him. We're moving to the objective. Nothing's going to stop us. Let the medic take care of him. I stepped over him, looked down, it was one of my guys, and I had to keep going.

Mike Goodell. He'd taken a round in the hip. And, and I remember looking at him, and he was pissed because he knew he was out of the fight.

Wow.

He was pissed. He goes, you know, he's swearing that they got me and now I can't be in this fight. And he was pissed about that, but I had to step over him and keep going. And I knew the medic would behind me again. But not easy to do, one of your own guys.

Yeah.

I had to step over him and keep going. So there, there were guys getting wounded around us, um, but, but obviously when I got hit, pretty, pretty, uh, pretty hard hit. Took an AK-47 round right below the knee, uh, blew out my tibia. And as you know, when bone gets hit, it becomes shrapnel. So that shredded my leg. The bullet went down, came out above my ankle. I had a grapefruit-sized hole in the front of my leg, and the bullet had shredded the whole left side. Um, one of the Delta medics, Bart Bullock, came running out of the building, and now there's firing bullets just cracking down the street continually. Came through that fire, grabbed me by my vest, dragged me inside the building that they'd fortified. It'd become the casualty collection point. He gets me in there, uh, Lots of blood, um, hit 2 arteries. So I was, I was, had arterial bleeding and blood was just extremely profuse going on. Um, if you go to the museum at Fort Benning, my boot from that foot is in that museum. And if you look on the back side, there's about 2 inches of stain.

2 inches. Well, that's when I was laying on the floor and the blood was 2 inches deep in the, in the room.

What?

So you can see that on my boot.

Uh, the blood was 2 inches deep in the room.

Yeah, inch and a half, 2 inches deep. And, and I wasn't the only one. There was other guys in there bleeding, but that's how much blood— but, but most of that at that time was my blood, because, uh, the doctors later told me that basically all my units of blood bled out, but I was able to get enough, uh, IV to sustain me. And, you know, the other thing that's, that's miraculous is you got 2 arteries pumping out a You know, a grapefruit-sized hole and nothing really to attach a tourniquet with. And but fortunately, at the time, we had this new thing, Israeli bandages. So Bart was able to stuff Israeli bandages in there, get like a trauma shock thing around my leg and stop it. And in retrospect, thank God, because if he'd put a tourniquet on, I was going to be sitting for the next 13 hours. So I probably would have lost my leg or had more damage. So we didn't put a tourniquet on, but miraculously, you know, the bleeding stopped. And so, uh, he was able to get me stabilized, pop some morphine in me, and, uh, and I was able to, to be stabilized in there in the casualty collection point.

But I was essentially out of the fight. And, you know, one of the things, one of the cognitive decisions I made, um, the guy that I'd stepped over, Mike Goodell, brought him in. He was right next to me, so we both had radios. But I made the decision. I'm on morphine, I'm kind of screwed up. I don't, I don't need to be trying to make any complex judgment calls here. So I handed it over to Mike, and then some Air Force CCT guys took over controlling the gunships. But that's, that's where I was at about 1600, uh, that about an hour and a half into the mission.

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I mean, yeah, morphine's a great thing. Morphine is really, uh, yeah, the world just all of a sudden calms down with morphine. But, uh, but like I said, I, I knew from all that and being on morphine that I wasn't going to be making any tactical decisions. So I, I did some radio stuff, and I had, uh, Goodale, who had been shot before I mentioned, they bring him in and put him right next to me. So we both got radios, um, and we're just monitoring. I'm not making any more tactical decisions. And the Air Force CCT guys kind of took over dealing with the helicopters. So We're able to do that. And, and then we're monitoring the process, the progress now of the UN. Remember, I go back to Indians and Pakistanis and Greeks and Turks. They finally get enough cohesion together to form a convoy to come out and link up with us. And we start hearing that. And as I mentioned, by this time it's game on. So they're, they're making very slow, methodical process and basically using their .50 cals. to just level neighborhoods and then drive through and level the next neighborhood and then drive through.

And so it was a slow process, but we could hear them coming. And then, of course, at that point it becomes—

You could tell it was them.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, we're getting the reports they've left. Now we could hear in the distance, you know, masked .50 cals hammering and then closer and closer. And they're getting progress reports. And I'm getting that on the radio as I'm in the casualty collection point. But then the biggest issue became, okay, they gotta— we gotta make sure they know we're here and don't shoot us, you know. You know, all the complexities of that. Uh, so we had one really brave Ranger went out, and it's dark now, obviously. We've gone into darkness, and, uh, he goes out with a chem light and puts it in the middle of the intersection, and then they, they identified the chem light, and eventually we get them in there. The convoy finally, as I recall, the convoy finally links up at around 2:30 or 3 o'clock in the morning. We finally get vehicles coming in, but we've been holding that perimeter all night. And again, fortunately, because of the, the gunships and because we'd stabilized things, we weren't getting a lot of direct assault after the first couple hours. They're shooting RPGs in at us. shooting gunfire at us, but they're not assaulting into the buildings where we're at.

So we had that locked down, and the gunships, of course, had just devastated them.

How are you guys doing on ammo?

Very low on ammo. So, you know, we, we shot, especially the 240s and machine guns. Um, another one of the Blackhawks made an emergency resupply, came over the site, kicked ammo off, but took RPGs and, and gunfire and and got shot down, but it was able to crash back at the airfield. So that's one of the 5. And they were also assessing when they did that whether they could bring a helicopter in and get any of the wounded out, because tragically, you know, we lost— we had some wounded bleed out in the casualty collection point. So James Smith, who sat back to back with me in the helicopter, one of the, one of the young privates in B Company, had taken a round through his femoral artery. And they, uh, they were able to keep compression on it for a couple hours, but eventually, you know, he bled out in the same casualty collection point where I was at. But they could not get a helicopter in to save him. They tried, and that bird got, got shot down. So, uh, that's how we maintain ammo and, uh, and some more IVs and some water.

Um, we had purification tablets, so we were able to take some dirty well water and, and drink that. I remember doing that. First time I'd done that. Um, but we were able— essentially able to hold the perimeter until that, that convoy came and linked up with us.

Damn, man.

Yeah, it was quite a night. And, uh, you know, I give a lot of credit to the— we joke around about the UN guys, but it was— I rode out on a Malaysian armored car, and, uh, and there was Pakistani tanks basically supporting the convoy. And, and I give those guys a lot of credit. I mean, We weren't their countrymen. Um, they hadn't— that wasn't their mission to support us, but they came into it and, uh, and they lost some vehicles. They lost some vehicles. And that was my— actually, my scariest moment was when I got loaded into that Malaysian armored car, because they strapped me down to a regular stretcher and then loaded me in the back of that thing. And I knew that thing couldn't stop an RPG, so my biggest fear was getting hit by an RPG. And then I'm strapped to this stretcher. And we could hear them going overhead, and we could, and we could hear some of the 7.62 hitting the vehicle. But, um, yeah, about, about sunrise is when we finally pulled out of there. And one of the complications was, I'd mentioned the 2 pilots had gotten crushed in the Black Hawk, and basically the Black Hawk was on top of them, and we just didn't have the tools to get them out.

And so finally had to wait till the armored vehicles got there and, and pull the aircraft apart. So that took a couple hours. So they got there about 2:30, 3 o'clock, and we finally got out of there about 5. But that was kind of nerve-wracking, waiting for all that to go on. And then finally exfilled out to, uh, the Pakistani soccer stadium. That's where they were based at in the northeast side of the city. And, uh, that's another thing that will always stay with me is when that— we rolled in there and the back of that vehicle opened and it was sunlight and I could see. And then I got lifted out of there, and it was a soccer field, and it was an HLZ now, so the medevac birds are coming in continually. But both sides of that soccer field were just stretchers. All of our guys, all the wounded, just lined up on both sides. And then down in the far goal line, we had— we could see at that time probably 4 or 5, 6 guys wrapped in ponchos. So we knew we'd lost, lost guys. So that was really just a stunning sight to see.

And I got loaded on a medevac bird and evac'd to the German Army field hospital. And I speak a little German, so I was joking around with the surgeon a little bit when we got in there. And, and then he put me under, and that started the whole medical, medical chain that went on for the next 2 years, essentially.

2 years?

2 years to full— what I'd say full recovery. Yeah. So I was back in the, in the infantry, and I, I had, I had branch transferred from the artillery to the infantry, and that had actually occurred right before we got deployed to Somalia. And for officers, that's a big thing. I mean, that almost never happens. There's like one guy a year that gets to do it. It's normally somebody in the Ranger Regiment. But, um, you know, that's what I've been trying to do since, since I got commissioned. And so that came through, and I got— Uh, infantry branch on my collar. And then, uh, yeah, that, that medical recovery went on until I went to the Infantry Officers Advanced Course and then on to my next assignment. So when my next assignment out in Hawaii, uh, is when I kind of got the tail end of physical therapy, got the last cast off, and, uh, and got to go and serve as a company commander. But that was, you know, a 2-year road.

I mean, you almost lost your leg.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

And so really fascinating, uh, in retrospect, you know, perspective on the medical process. And I have nothing but the highest things to say about the Army medical system. But as I'm going through getting evacuated, we get evacuated to the airfield, uh, and then put on C-141s and flown to Germany. And, uh, the medical hospital in Germany, and the doctors came in, and this was like my first introduction. These 2 doctors They're looking at my wound, and guys have been looking at— doctors have been looking at my wound, and like, you know, it was stopping them in their tracks because like I said, it was a grapefruit-sized hole and the rest of my leg was just shredded. Um, and these 2 doctors start debating on what to do about it or whether it's savable. They're doing it in front of me. The guy said, I think we ought to do this. I, I don't even know if we can save it.

I'm like—

So finally this NCO, uh, a medic after they left came over and said, hey, here's the deal. You need to go to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. So they're going to offer you a chance to go home to Fort Benning. I know your family's there, but the hospital, the apex of Army medicine is at Walter Reed, and you need to go there. So when they asked me, I said, I want to go to Walter Reed, and I did. And he was— that's probably the best advice I've ever gotten in the military. Um, 'Cause the doctors at Fort Benning are fantastic. They come from Walter Reed, but you only get one. I had teams of doctors. So I had 4 orthopedic surgeons and 4 plastic surgeons and, you know, all kinds of things. So it's really a fantastic place. And when I got in there, they said, hey, we're gonna try this new thing on you. I'm like, oh, a new thing? But they said, yeah, this Russian doctor invented this stabilization device called an Ilizarov device. And he took bicycle spokes and bicycle parts, and, and they bolted into your leg. They literally drill through the bones of your leg and put these spokes in there, and they stabilize it.

It's pretty common now, but then they said it was like the first time they'd used it in the U.S. military. And so, uh, so they did that. Me and a couple other guys had similar injuries, so they did that.

They spoke—

they drilled in and spoked up my leg and stabilized it. Um, but they still hadn't filled the holes in, so they let, they let that all get stabilized. Uh, and then they, they started doing plastic surgery, and they— the first thing they did was they cut my calf muscle and they pulled my calf muscle around to fill the hole. And then they took skin off my legs and covered that. But before they sealed all that up, the doctor literally told me after, he said they took a hammer and a chisel And they chiseled bone off my hips. So they opened my back up and chiseled—

Hammer and a chisel.

Yeah, chiseling bone off my hips and packed that bone in there. And then this is like, again, the miraculous thing. And I can't say enough about Walter Reed, but, you know, also the Lord taking care of me. So the hole was 4 inches long. I had 4 inches of my tibia missing, and they packed this bone from my hip into there. and kind of connected it to my living bone that was still there. And over the period of the next 3 or 4 years, that bone infused into the bone they'd packed in and created new bone. And when you X-ray it now, it's even got a marrow tube and all that, which is—

Holy shit.

It's just like miraculous. And, and so I can't give enough credit to the guys at Walter Reed. I mean, they— amazing doctors— and patched all that up. But it took 2 years for that to, to get to the point where I could run and road march and stuff like that. But they, they initially said, yeah, you're— we might be able to get you to walk, but that's it. And so I'm really thankful that I was able to get back to the infantry and command an infantry company.

And that's really what you wanted to do?

Absolutely, yeah. From day one, you want to be an infantryman. I'd been in the infantry in the Guard and trying to branch transfer back. And so post-Somalia, as I was recovering, the Army let me go to the advanced course for captains while I was still in a cast. So I did all that and then got to the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, finished off my recovery for about another year, and then was good enough to physically to get down and command a rifle company. So I did that.

Where were you when you went to Bosnia?

So after, after Hawaii, after the 25th, I got to go back to the Ranger Regiment.

You got reselected?

I got reselected. uh, for a, for a liaison job at regimental headquarters. And when we were in battalion, we said regimental headquarters didn't count, so I've got to say that it didn't count. I'm sure that'll make a lot of people happy. But just kidding, of course. But yeah, I was a regimental staff guy.

No, you're not.

And I got, I got assigned to be a liaison at 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. Peacetime, not a lot going on. Another one of my buddies was at US Army Special Operations Command. He was handling the classified taskings of, of things going on in the special operations world. He said, I got this job in Bosnia. Had no idea. I mean, I knew about Bosnia generally, but I didn't know we had a special operations task force there. But there was 5 nations that had formed a task force to hunt war criminals. So huge education for me on that. This is in 1999. So at the tail end of the war in Bosnia and the United Nations efforts and through the International Tribunal at The Hague had indicted about 400 people for war crimes in Bosnia on all 3 sides— the Croats, the Serbs, and the Bosnians. And so this task force started going down the list hunting these guys down, and a lot of times they would use the Tier 1 forces to do it, but then they eventually evolved into using U.S. Army Special Forces guys out of Europe. And I was I was on the staff.

I was the operations officer at the headquarters level, and really a great job because I would deal with the NATO commander, the 4-star. We essentially worked for him, and I would do that. And then I would, you know, we had aircraft assigned to us, and I would— it was from Germany. I had an office in Germany doing that. And then I would fly down into theater, into Bosnia, and I'd get to go and help command and control these missions. I wasn't kicking doors, but I was operations officer. you know, doing command and control for these missions. So really a great, great experience. Low threat, but just enough threat that it was a real mission. Um, and because we were hunting these guys down under indictment, uh, and in a relatively benign environment where we weren't fighting, we had to use a lot of law enforcement methods. So we had a lot of law enforcement advising. And so I learned a lot from law enforcement, how to— almost like fugitive task force techniques.

Mm-hmm.

I learned a lot from, from doing that and, and how to do it in a more restrained manner. And some of the subtleties that the police and law enforcement use, we learned a lot of that and, and how to operate within a judicial system, how to serve indictments and set the conditions so that when they go to court, they're going to get, going to get convicted. So anyway, learned a lot from that as the operations officer, got to operate at strategic level with the 4-star, yet go down with the, with the ODAs and the teams and hit targets.

So.

That was a great, great experience. And Bosnia was a lot of fun running around Sarajevo and Tuzla and doing some, some of the operations down there.

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They were, they were there.

Delta was there, Dev Group was there, Rangers were there, SF was there. Yeah, everybody.

Yeah, very— a couple different missions going on. Again, it was low threat, so, uh, you know, but, but just enough that we had to be, we had to be on it. Um, and our task force, again, with just 5— only 5 nations signed on to do the, the war criminal piece. So, uh, we got 6 different war criminals while I was there. Um, the SAS probably did the most dynamic hit. They captured a Serbian general that was driving around the streets, and they did a vehicle interdiction, pulled him out of his vehicle, and then, uh, and we evaced him all the way back to The Hague. And so really interesting, interesting process. And then of course the SAS guys stole all our stuff as they, as they, as they left theater, but they're great guys. But you know, I had to call that C-130 back, say you got all of our furniture and all of our stuff on it, so you got to bring it back. And yeah.

And not long after that, 9/11 happens. That's right.

So I continue on from that mission, um, got promoted to major, uh, and so now my, my, you know, goal is to be a battalion S3 or executive officer, second in command for an infantry battalion. I got hired by a guy named Mick Nicholson. He was forming a new unit called a Stryker, uh, brigade and a Stryker battalion. So he was building the first Stryker battalion in the Army. It's the 8-wheeled armored vehicles that the Army went to for about 20 years. But what was great about that was, you know, Mix, a former Ranger, ended up being a 4-star, and he was like hand-selecting guys from the Ranger Regiment to come build that unit. So he hired me to be his Battalion 3. You know, he would go down to get, you know, Ranger Regiment NCOs. He would go to 2nd Ranger Battalion, which was there at Fort Lewis. where we were assigned and take guys from there. So we really built a great battalion. And what I liked about it was it was like a Ranger culture, but they gave us vehicles. And so instead of moving 20 kilometers, we could move 120 kilometers and do it in a couple hours, you know, and bring .50 cals and things.

So, so it was, it was a great experience to build that unit, but the unit wasn't ready yet. We're still building it. And so I was there as an operations officer. We're trying to get the, the unit trying to receive brand new vehicles and get the unit stood up when 9/11 kicks off. And I, I was in my office with my guys, PT on the West Coast, about 5:30 in the morning, and watched that all go down. And, uh, and we knew that was a, obviously, you know, a huge turning point for not only the Army but for the, for the nation and the world, really.

How long was it before you deployed?

Well, then the problem with that is, you know, in peacetime I'd make these decisions about good places to go, and that was a great place to go. Mick Nicholson, a great guy to work for. Strikers was a great concept that I loved. But now I'm out of position for the war as the whole Army's moving off to this fight. And so I'm stuck with this in this training unit that's not ready— it's not a training unit, but a new unit that's not ready to go yet. Um, so we did that, and, and we watched the Army go off initially, invade Afghanistan, watch that go down. And then now they're spinning up for Iraq and go down with Operation Iraqi Freedom, and we're still trying to get our unit stood up. But I'm coming to the end of my 2 years, my 2-year assignment, and I'm like, okay, this is good. I can go off and join a unit that's going. But the fine print that I didn't read on my contract was, yeah, you get to go start this unit up, but then when you're done with that, you have to go to the training centers to, you know, get the rest of the Army up to speed on this new unit.

And I'm like, that is the last thing that I want to do, you know, going even farther from the front. So, you know, I worked my network, tried to work my assignment, but the best I could do was instead of going to one of the training centers in the U.S., I got to go to a training center in Germany. And I did that because at this point now, we're 6 months or maybe a year, approaching a year into the war. And, you know, we didn't— I didn't think it was going to last. I thought it was going to be over relatively quick. But now that we're seeing it is kind of a slow roll and it's going to go on. I knew that that first wave of the military that went over there, it's a year now, so they got to come home and they got to find replacements. Well, those replacements are going to come from Germany. So that's why I took an assignment in Germany, still in the training center. But I, I, you know, I, I was savvy enough to know that they're going to need people, and that's exactly what happened.

So I got to the training center in Germany, and they started to build the Iraqi Army by this time.

You had no hesitations in going back to combat after what you'd experienced in Somalia?

Oh, no, no, absolutely. I mean, and, you know, that's, that's the thing about my career is, is, is my absolute number one priority. I mean, I wanted— I had to take care of my family and to make sure they were set up for success. But the number one thing that drove me was to get on an operational mission. And so that's why I volunteered for Bosnia, uh, and that's why I fought really hard to get to Germany so that I could deploy to Iraq. Because from the earliest parts of my life, I mean, the earliest things I can remember, I mean, I was called to be a soldier. I mean, from the Lord, you know. That's not just what I was interested in, not just what I like to do. I mean, I was called to do it. And so I'm not going to sit in a training center while the rest of the Army is fighting a war. I mean, that's absolutely where I wanted to be. And I was called to be there, and it was my duty to be there. I should be there rather than— not that I'm better, but that's my role.

And so I should be there, and somebody else that maybe that's not their thing is be at the training center. So that's kind of how I approached that. But yeah, I was fighting tooth and nail to get to a unit that was deploying. So I volunteered in Germany. They're building the Iraqi Army. They needed teams to go down and and form these Iraqi units, the first ones that they formed. So I volunteered for that and got sent down there in 2003. Early 2004 is when I got sent down to Iraq to do that. So it was another, another fantastic experience.

What'd you think when you got to Iraq? Well, I read that you You thought that the Iraqis were much more fit to fight than the Afghans. Did I read that correctly?

It's a little bit of apples and oranges. The Iraqis have had—

For us. I should have—

Yeah. I think the Afghans are—

Well, not for us, for themselves.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. The Iraqis definitely had a a sense of nationality. Now, obviously, they had a huge civil war, so they break down into Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds. So they have that division, but they have an understanding— cultural, social, political— they have an understanding of what a nation is, and they at least have an understanding of what it means to fight for their country. The Afghans do not, in no way, shape, or form. I think the Afghans on the average, you know, are tougher soldiers, but the Iraqis are more professional. They've had a professional army, not as good as ours, but they had a professional army. They had a country. So they got a sense of that. So I definitely felt that. Now, we had a lot of problems with the Kurds, you know, in the divisions because the civil war went on while we were there. But, but no, I found it easier in many ways to deal with the Iraqis. The average Iraqi than the average Afghan. That was my experience. Did you go out with them at all?

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, it was a fantastic experience. I mean, really, for, for somebody like me at my point in my career— so I was a major, I'd been in for about 10 years, I had some experience, I had a certain level of training— they basically said, here's 1,000 guys, form an infantry battalion, and here's a, here's a range complex, and here's resources. For me, it was a dream. You know, it was, it was fantastic. And so, um, it was pretty good funding, so we had brand new AK-47s and machine guns, PKs. We had plenty of ammunition. We had a range complex, and I had 1,000 guys. And they said, you got about 12 weeks, go. And I didn't get a lot of guidance, and it was great. And I didn't want guidance. You know, I just got very general left and right limits. You know, form an infantry battalion. And, and I— and, and it's not that, that I'm any smarter than anybody else, but as a professional, you can look at the situation and say, okay, here's what's going on. We're trying to get forces into Fallujah. We're trying to get the Iraqis out front. You got 12 weeks.

What can you accomplish? Guidance is rules. That's right. That's right.

That's what guidance means.

That's right. And I, I, I loved it. It was one of the best experiences of my life. And so, yeah, there's challenges with the Iraqis and Arabs and all those types of things. But overall, build your own infantry battalion and then go lead it in combat. I mean, it was really a great experience for me. And so we did that. We trained the officers and NCOs, and then we got 1,000 recruits and we trained them in 3 rifle companies and a headquarters company. And we trained them on convoy ops. And I said, hey, here's the 3 or 4 things that I think we can accomplish. You know, we're not going to be a Ranger battalion. We're not even going to be like a regular, but I think I can accomplish this in 12 weeks. And we did. And we got to warm up a little bit. And we were on the eastern province. We actually bordered Iran. I've been in Iran because we walked the old defensive positions on the border. So we got to warm up and patrol in there. A little bit of enemy activity, not much. And then we got the word that they were starting this big pushback.

So they had tried to go into Fallujah, as you probably remember, the first time, and a big disaster. And they started retooling the Iraqi Army, uh, and then they were going to go back into Fallujah. But before they could go back into Fallujah— nobody remembers, but in September— Fallujah was in October— in September, they went and retook the city of Samarra. Uh, and so my battalion got the call And they basically said, hey, hey, who's ready to go? And everybody else was still kind of screwing around with marching and drill and ceremony. And I said, my battalion's ready. We can do convoy ops. We've done company live fire. We're ready. And so we got tasked to go to Samarra in September and do the first major operation that an Iraqi Army battalion was able to do alongside U.S. battalions. They gave us our own objective. It was called the Spiral Minaret, this big tower. And this complex, thank the Lord we didn't have the Golden Mosque, which got destroyed, and that kind of kicked off the civil war. But that was part of that complex. But we were given the spiral minaret and we secured it.

I took a company and a half of Iraqis down and got attached to a US battalion. And the good news is one of my friends from 3rd Ranger Battalion was now the commander of that US battalion, so he and I could see eye to eye. And I said, here's what I can do and here's what I can't do. And so he helped me, and we got the Iraqis in position and then, and then took that objective. We cleared this huge pharmaceutical complex, and then the next morning attacked across into the complex where the spiral minaret was. And so kind of with some help from the U.S. guys, but my guys, the Iraqis, took that objective. Um, and again, you know, what can you do and what can't you do in 12 weeks? Well, the leadership of the battalion, the Iraqis, were not really ready for that. They were old Saddam professional officers and not, not really ready for that. So I tried to integrate them as best I could, but what I really did was I led the battalion and I had my guys, my U.S. NCOs, each leading a company. And I'd talk to them and give them orders, but then the Iraqis would execute.

So it really was kind of a dream for me to do that. And, and it was an initial step, right? It was a crawl, walk, run. It was a crawl. phase for the Iraqis, but, uh, but they got to do it. And so we secured that objective, and it was a great experience. I— very limited casualties. I took just a few casualties. Uh, one or two of my U.S. guys got wounded, and we lost an Iraqi soldier that got killed at one of the checkpoints by a VBIED, by a car bomb. Again, kind of an amazing, you know, crazy experience. But the guy that drove the car bomb into our checkpoint was an Iraqi police car and a guy wearing an Iraqi police uniform. And he drove into that checkpoint and blew it up and killed— wounded one of my Americans and killed one of my Iraqis. So—

Damn.

Pretty amazing experience. But, and, you know, just like the fate of making decisions, I had always had 2 or 3 things going at once with that operation. And I chose to go on a patrol rather than do the checkpoint. And if I'd been at that checkpoint, you know, I guarantee I would've approached that vehicle. You know what I mean? So in retrospect, Lord taking care of me again. But, uh, yeah, that, that was the thing. And then the other thing that was really interesting about that is, as we sorted all that out and evacuated the guys off the checkpoint after the car bomb, we're back at the US base and doing the casualties, and then we're hot washing that. And the Americans are like, Hey, your Iraqis were shooting at us because we had an American quick reaction force come out with medevac. They said they were shooting at us as we were coming into the site. And I went and sorted it out, and my Iraqis were not shooting at the Americans. There was, there was enemy inside the kill zone. And as the Americans were driving through, the Iraqi soldiers were killing the enemy.

And then a Humvee would go by and they'd stop shooting. then they'd start shooting again at the enemy. So I was, I was kind of proud of that, that they were using selective fire and they were having some measure of fire discipline. Maybe not what the Americans were used to, but, but, uh, it was a good validation. And Samarra was a good validation for the battalion. And so I stayed down there with the battalion until I had to— I basically got orders that I had to rotate out. So, but I, I, uh, my team rotated back to Germany in the fall. I chose to stay down there for another 30 days until I got orders that I had to come home. So I did.

How long was it before you went back to Ramadi?

So then after I did that first tour in Iraq, I went back to Germany. I went up to work on the U.S. Army Europe staff. And as V Corps, the 3-star headquarters in Germany, is getting ready to rotate down to Iraq, to take over the headquarters down there. I got pulled into the 5th Corps staff, so I'm an ops guy. And again, you know, kind of a not where I wanted to be, very far from the fight. I was running J33, which is current operations. And the good side to that was, as I got down to Baghdad, we were in charge of the whole country and everything that happened, reports would come into us and I had visibility on every casualty. Every significant event would report through me, through me and my team and our guys, and we would keep track of that. So I had very good visibility on what was going on in Iraq, but, you know, not, not where I wanted to be— stadium seating, working the night shift, just taking reports, pushing paper. There was U.S. brigades down there in, in a big fight, and this is by 2005, 2006 when the war's not going well.

I mean, we're not losing, but we're not winning. And this is the first time I ever really experienced this, is we would talk to units and they would brief us on their area, like Ramadi, and they would say, well, this part of the city we don't go into because the enemy controls that. I'm like, there's not a square foot of ground in this country that the enemy controls. What are you talking about? Like, no, no, we don't, we don't go down there. Okay. So I was just kind of getting an idea of what was going on in some of these cities, specifically in Ramadi. You know, it was a bad place and the enemy had significant influence there. But there's nowhere in any country really that, that the enemy controls a square foot of ground. And so when we went to Ramadi, we addressed that. But that's kind of what I was getting as an ops guy on the staff in Baghdad from what was going on in Anbar. and really every other place. So as I'm kind of hating life, pushing paper up there, trying to get down to a tactical unit, um, I found another advisor team that needed a guy.

And so I cut all these deals, and we were fat in the headquarters. We had 3 or 4 guys for every position, so I wasn't leaving anybody in the lurch. And I had a guy to replace me, and I made a deal to go down to this advisor team. And I went to my boss, was a 1-star, great guy named General Campbell. Smart guy. And he knew me. He could read the tea leaves. And I say, hey, sir, I got this deal. And he said, well, come back tomorrow. I'll think about it. I came back the next day. He goes, ah, I'm not going to let you do that. And I was crushed. I mean, I was really hating life. He goes, because I got this other position for you. He let me stew. Then he laid that on me. He goes, there's a brigade just came from Germany. They need a deputy commander. I'm going to send you up to a place called Tal Afar. with a guy named Sean McFarland, who's a brigade commander. In fact, he's here now. Go link up with him, pack your stuff till you get this. So again, from a— I've been promoted to lieutenant colonel by this time.

So from a lieutenant colonel perspective, about as good as I could, I could get other than battalion command. So I'm very happy. And again, the Lord, you know, putting pieces together and things falling into place. Um, so got to go do that. And the other great thing about that was fortuitous is our brigade, when we went up there to Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq, we were following a unit under the command of H.R. McMaster. And he got out of the Army as a 3-star, but at the time he's a colonel commanding a cavalry squadron, like a— or regiment, I'm sorry, like a brigade. Well, very brilliant guy and knew how to fight counterinsurgency. And I had some ideas from fighting with the Iraqi Army and studying, being a historian, but H.R. McMaster is really brilliant and studied this problem and really took a different approach. And he engaged the Iraqi tribes, he engaged the Iraqis. And, you know, this is the essence of counterinsurgency that a lot of guys don't agree with, a lot of guys still don't get. But if you want to win a counterinsurgency war, here's what you have to do. And he would engage them and say, what is your perspective?

You don't like this is what we're doing? You have a different goal? Let's see where we can— come together as long as we're killing the enemy. And that's what I'm all about. I don't care what it takes as long as we're killing the enemy. So I'll compromise a lot of things that may not smell right to some Americans as far as not comfortable for them. Like, we'll, we'll take some guys that, that used to be shooting at us. As long as they're ready to help me kill al-Qaeda, it's on. And H.R. McMaster's the master of that, pioneered that up in Tal Afar, turned the situation around in Tal Afar. And they had it down to what we call Phase 4, right, where it was just low-level tactical stuff that, that you could handle, but definitely winning. Sean McFarland, brilliant guy, came down from Germany with me. He's a brigade commander. You know what's so— one of the great points about him is he doesn't have the ego where, oh, I'm, I'm as smart as H.R. McMaster, so I'll do my own thing. He goes, no, he knew What was working. He said, yeah, let's take notes.

So we took notes, we learned, we figured out how to do that. And then the call came, the bottom's dropping out in Ramadi and the surge is going to start and we're going to bring more units in. But right now we got to go deal with Ramadi. Remember, that's the place where I said they had said, oh, it's enemy-controlled territory. Okay, well, they're going to bring a tank brigade down now. And that was us. Um, we were excited about it, but I, I will be honest with you, uh, I'd been on enough combat rotations and you could see what was going on there. And I'd been the guy tracking casualties. Ramadi at that time accounted for 30% of all the casualties in Iraq. One city. So I— we knew, meat grinder. We knew that's what we were going into. So I was— there was a professional side of me that was ready for that mission, but another side that knew, you know, of all these guys I got lined up next to me, I'm going to lose a bunch of them. And we did. So I really had to start working on that with the guys, because when you're rolling around a quiet sector getting potshots once in a while, vastly different from the Stalingrad we went into in Ramadi.

So you got to get guys ready. And again, that's the Lord putting me in a place where I needed to be with previous combat experience, with my history background, being able to read the tea leaves, and hopefully enough leadership skills to get these guys ready for what was coming, because I knew what was coming. And unfortunately, it came in spades.

How did you tell them? How do you mentally prepare your guys knowing that?

Well, I did a couple of things. One, We just continued to focus on training, and, and it couldn't be any corner cutting. You know, not that we would cut corners, but I'd say we got to go the extra mile. We got to put a little overtime in here. You need that machine gun to be ready to work because we're going to get hit, guys. It's not a question of we'll do 4 patrols and maybe, you know, all of them quiet, maybe one potshot. No, we're gonna get hit. And then I tell them, and we're gonna lose guys. So be ready for that. You know, CASEVAC procedures. Get right with the Lord. Get right with the guy to your left and right, because that's all we're going to have when we're in the middle of a firefight. You know, the guy to your left and your right. So if you're not right yet with the guy to your left and your right, get right now and get right with the Lord, you know, and be trained. And then, and then you pump them up. And we were— I said, we're ready for this. An M1 tank is decisive, and we're in Humvees, but we're going to be with M1 tanks, you know, that kind of thing.

They cannot stand up to an M1 tank. And as you probably know, there's a cultural thing in the Army, especially when I first came in, between like light infantry and Rangers and armor guys, and, and thinking that armor guys are kind of soft and, and like to hang out in the motor pool. I, I can say I was so pleasantly surprised that an armored brigade in combat is really a devastating weapon. I mean, and led by warriors. I mean, the guys— we were just blessed that most of the company commanders we had, absolute warriors. I mean, their goal in life was to take their tanks downtown and crush things, and they did. But we learned these lessons from H.R. McMaster on how to win. And so we knew we were going to have a Stalingrad fight on our hands, but we also went down there intellectually saying, we're going to make this counterinsurgency thing happen. And that's exactly how we approached it. And it really turned the tide of the war. There was other positive things going on, but for Ramadi to be the enemy center of gravity and for us to turn that thing within 12 months, really amazing.

And lots of stories associated with that.

Let's get into your time in Ramadi.

So again, we did about 3 months up north in Tal Afar before we transferred down the brigade. The brigade had the armor brigade, and we had to transfer down in phases. So I took the last element to come out of the north and drive down to Ramadi. And I'll never forget, there was this— I almost saw no USO in Iraq, very little for me, just my experience. But we had this Miami Dolphins cheerleader. Uh, come up and, and we're getting ready to pack our stuff and they had put up some posters and, uh, you know, and it was black, bad black and white. We couldn't see, we didn't know who it was. We didn't know it was a Miami Dolphin cheerleader.

Well, it—

I said, hey, we gotta support this even though we're rolling out in the morning. So we took about 300 people down to watch this show. Like I said, it turned out to be this, this Miami Dolphins cheerleader and she was just incredible, you know, beautiful girl. Sang heavy metal and just a great band. And as soon as she walked out there, the guys just, I mean, attacked this— not attacked the stage, but right on her, just the gravity of it. Well, before that, before she come out, I was talking to her and I said, you know, we are getting ready to go to Ramadi. She goes, I heard something about— I said, yeah, it is— I laid it out for her. And I said, you know, a lot of these guys are not going to go home. And it really affected her. And she just put everything she could into that performance. And we'll never forget it. I've talked to her, uh, I've, I've messaged her today and told her, you know, and really, it was a huge event in her life. But she gave those guys a send-off, and, and a lot of them didn't, didn't come home.

So that was just— that, that just struck me. It was an event. The energy of that and the energy of the guys, you know, getting to enjoy that show before we literally saddled up and rolled into Samana— into, uh, Ramadi. So we got down there, In the spring, the late spring, summer, a Pennsylvania National Guard brigade had been given that sector. And, you know, God bless those guys, but it was just, it was, it was more than they could, they could handle for a variety of reasons. And so we immediately looked at, you know, a couple of things that you got to professionally assess something. You know, what do we need? Do we— what combat power do we need? Where can we gain some efficiencies? There have been some static positions. that just weren't worth it. And so we, we were able to kind of consolidate that, take a more efficient approach. And then we said, we're going to take an aggressive approach because, again, this is the place where they said, well, we can't go in there. So, yeah, you watch, we're going to line up M1 tanks and we're going to take that neighborhood.

And we did. And it wasn't just us. You know, the Marines had a battalion down there. They were ready for aggressive leadership and some help. We had a battalion from the 101st that was very good. And then we also had a task unit from the Navy SEALs. And I'm a soft guy, and so I kind of get it. This was a tank brigade from Germany. So Colonel McFarland said, hey, I need you to deal with the soft guys. And we had had some negative experiences with some Army guys up north, just unprofessional, unskilled, um, you know, just wouldn't salute, you know. And that's not a big deal for me, but you may want to salute the brigade commander, you know, on post in Geras. Those kind of things just rubbed the Germany Army the wrong way. And again, they had very poor performance. So a bad experience with SOF, but I tried to keep that, you know, I tried to keep that contained. We got down to Ramadi, and I'll be honest with you, I thought, oh, Navy SEALs, we'll see how this goes, you know. And you know, it's personality-based. Well, thank the Lord, uh, Jocko was the absolute right person at the right time.

And Jocko came down and introduced himself as, as an Army SEAL and said, you know, I, I knew exactly what he was doing. It was exactly the right thing, but it was marketing. And he wanted to reverse that negative image that, that any that may exist. And he absolutely did. Hey, we're Army SEALs. We're here to, we're here to work for you. Even though, you know, on paper they didn't really work for us. But that's what he said. What do you need? We'll do what you need. And they just absolutely tore into it. Um, Chris Kyle, American Sniper, was part of that element. A number of other guys. The first, uh, living SEAL Medal of Honor, Michael Manzoor. Um, you know, Mark Lee was killed in the fighting down there. But they, they immediately, as we said, hey, we're going into these places with a tank battalion and take it back, Jocko's guys plugged right in for the fight. I mean, for the fight. And so they, they went in and did that and lost Mark Lee. Lots of sniping issues down there. The enemy had a lot of snipers. They had Chechen snipers supporting them, taking a toll on our guys.

And so Jocko and his guys said, I got, I got a good number of snipers in my task unit. We're willing to go in. So they went in. And again, from my past experiences, it wasn't like, well, we'll be over here and you stay over there. It was, we'll integrate in with you and we'll go in this building, but put some guys with us. And so it was such great teamwork, uh, breaking down those, those soft conventional Army barriers. And so we did that, and, and the devastation, you know, that those snipers and our guys also wrought on the enemy was just fantastic. Um, later on, when we pushed into the final parts of the city, a couple months later, there was a city park. All we could see on the maps. And I was with the unit as they were pushing in. I got to go on the ground with them at night, and we, we pulled— We pushed into this park, pretty good-sized park, a couple blocks. And as we came in there with our night vision, we looked across this park and the entire park was headstones. And it was all guys killed in the last 12 to 16 months.

Shoot.

We had filled that park with the enemy. And so, I mean, yeah, Jocko's guys, our efforts, the Marine battalion that was there, Uh, everybody just got on board and rode. And I, and I've said it before, you know, we didn't have room for people to have— bring attitude to the table. I mean, it was, it was going to take everybody pulling an oar for this thing to work. There was so much fighting to be done in that city. Um, and, and at the same time, as I mentioned before, guys had the counterinsurgency thing in mind too, because what my job was, was to build the police force. We had some Army there and, and they were okay, but what we really needed was the police force. And so in a large city like that, we had about 200 cops. Um, Baghdad had given us a plan saying, hey, here's where you need to build police stations. Well, it was in those areas where we're fighting like Stalingrad, so it's not feasible.

Mhm.

And, and they, on the last unit before us and on us, whenever we would try to do something Suicide bombers would come in, vest bombers come to our recruiting stations, blow everybody away. My counterpart from the previous brigade killed by a suicide vest attack at a recruiting station. So we had that threat. So we couldn't, we couldn't follow this Baghdad plan. And it goes back to what I said before, it's, it's people up in the headquarters trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, you know, and we're like, this isn't going to work. So a number of the guys down at the ground level with myself, some of my police advisors. I had actual U.S. policemen assigned to us that were helping us. We all got together and we said, you know, it's not going to work putting a police station downtown. It's not going to work a standard recruiting policy. But at the same time that we were looking at this, wrestling with this, one of the battalion commanders, Tony Dean, doing the counterinsurgency thing, started going around visiting the Iraqis in his area, and he came across a sheik. a low-level sheik that said, I want to fight al-Qaeda.

I've had people in my family killed by al-Qaeda. I'm here to help you. So Tony started having cigarettes with this guy and chai. And next thing you know, what do you— you know, what do you need? We said, we need policemen. He goes, well, I got a tribe. Will you take 400 of my tribesmen and enlist them in the police department? And we said, yeah, we'll do that. What do you need? He goes, but I want the police station. Next to my house to secure me. Okay, well, that wasn't downtown where we couldn't go anyway, but our thought was better to have a police station than none. And let's do an ink spot. Let's start with his place and build it out from there. And oh, by the way, what's your business? Well, I'm in construction. Oh, okay. Well, we have these neighborhoods that we just destroyed and we need them rebuilt. So would you be interested in the contract? Certainly. So we started, we started working that synergy. Uh, first time we had a recruiting event down there, I— we had about 27 recruits show up from the, the usual way we did business.

First time we coordinated a recruiting event with Sheik Sattara, we had 400 slots. We had 450 guys show up.

Yeah.

And, and it just went like that for the next 6 months. So we went from 200 cops to 5,000. We went from 2 stations to over 20 stations.

Holy shit.

And what our method was, tanks and SEALs and Marines would go in and destroy a neighborhood or clear a neighborhood, and we would do whatever we had to do to clear it and then secure it and then put a police station in. And then we didn't just leave them. Then the cops would be on patrol with us. And as we moved down through the neighborhood— and I can't tell you how many times I watched this happen— The people would start coming out of the rubble or out of their houses, and the cops would start talking to them. And I'm like, well, what did they say? And they'd say, well, that guy next to me, that's my neighbor. That guy across the street, I went to high school with him. That guy at the end of the street, I don't know who he is, but he's got a Saudi Arabian accent.

Oh, okay.

And, and then everybody got to see what the power of using local police, indigenous native troops is in counterinsurgency. And it just became that easy. And it was an ink spot. And we would have about a week of fighting as they tried to push back against a police station. We'd weather that storm. Took a lot of casualties among the police and the Americans, but then we would push on to the next neighborhood. And within 6 months, we had that city turned around. By the time we left, there wasn't a section of the city that we couldn't go into. And as I mentioned, all the stats, 5,000 police on the streets.

Oh my God.

We turned it over to the next brigade. I actually got to come back and drive around with the next brigade, and they ran a 10K race through the city. How weird is that? And I can't tell you that experience because, because it came at a huge cost. Yeah. I mentioned the Stalingrad fighting. I lost— of the 15 or so people that worked directly for me, I lost half of them killed in action. We were taking so many casualties. It was brutal. The brigade overall took between 80 and 100 KIA in that 6 to 8 month period. And again, it was all focused— most was focused right inside that city. So there was a huge cost to it. But there was a route that went down the main street of Ramadi, and we called it Route Irish. And that was one of the main routes. But the main road that went down through— I mean, the Marines literally had Ford Apaches on there. You're inside your concrete bunker, you know, trying to hold your FOB. And we would run patrols up and down there, but they would every time get hit. And I lost, you know, killed in action, a number of guys running up and down that route.

And when I went back later on after we turned it, that's where they ran the 10K. down that route.

Shit.

That's really an amazing experience.

That's impressive. What do you mean you say— when you— what do you mean when you say you can't kill your way out of an insurgency?

Yeah, it's an insurgency in my view, and the historical, uh, context of an insurgency is it's not force on force. It's not a battalion of enemy against a battalion of Americans and, and we win. You are trying to deal with the population. And this is where a lot of people don't, don't get it. If the population, if that culture, if those people united— and I've experienced this time and again— if they feel like they're in opposition to you and they have the endurance, like many of our enemy has had the endurance to absorb the punishment we're going to put on them. then they're just going to continually repopulate the military forces. So if you focus on destroying the military forces that they put against you, you're never going to win. You're cutting grass. It'll be a continuous process of 1-year tours. And we've seen this over and over again. So you have to destroy that enemy. And I'm all about that. But you have to— but what you really have to do is figure out how to turn that population from resupplying those military forces. And that's what we did in Ramadi. And it wasn't the State Department template.

The State Department did not like the fact that a local sheik became one of the most powerful people in Iraq. They would rather have had the governor or the mayor, the political, you know, elected person be it. I got that. I understand that. But we're going to win the war is what we're going to do, because I'm tired of sending US guys home in body bags. And so we empowered that sheik. Does that fit American Jeffersonian democracy? Maybe not exactly, but we're going to win and positive things are going to come from that. And we put control measures on them. So what I'm saying is, in counterinsurgency especially, you have to think beyond the tactical fight of I'm going to destroy that enemy. How do I prevent that enemy from just reconstituting, which is exactly what they do? year after year after year. And so we got at that. We turned that population. And in some cases, that meant guys that had shot at us before are going to come in and be on our side. And you got to accept that. Where our red line was al-Qaeda, our red line was, uh, Islamic extremists that were not going to subscribe to the basic aspects of our program, which was going to be democracy and, and, you know, Human rights.

But if you're not going to subscribe to that, that's a red line. But if you were a young militia guy that took a couple shots at us and now you demonstrate that you will kill al-Qaeda, we can move forward with that. And we did.

Man, that's smart how you guys did that.

Well, we learned from H.R. McMaster, and, and we had nowhere to go but up.

How did you get involved in CIA?

So after Ramadi, I, I, uh, finished that tour, and then my next assignment was a Special Operations Command, get on the staff. And there was an opportunity there. Uh, the CIA and the U.S. military Special Operations Command were forming a task force in Washington, D.C. to try to deal with the foreign fighter threat, and that's in Iraq. And so that's why I talk about the al-Qaeda threat. You're not just talking about a local guy who's in some way, shape, or form, right or wrong, thinks he's fighting for his village. You're talking about a radicalized Islamic extremist from Libya or Morocco, and he's going to come into the country. There's only one way to deal with him. And so we felt we, we had this foreign fighter task force to try to mitigate that. And at that time, it come— the foreign fighter problem had come down to Syria. All of the networks for foreign fighters across the Middle East were flowing through Syria. And really a fascinating situation there. Pretty smart on the Syrians' part, actually, because they controlled it to their own benefit. But we were, we were going to form this, this task force in Washington, D.C. So I worked on that.

I was an operations officer helping run the task force. I was a representative from SOCOM, but, um, but I was treated just like a regular CIA employee. And I did that for about a year and helped coordinate some of those efforts. And some really, really cool, uh, excellent missions got to go down. And it gave me my education beyond just the Army, beyond just the military, on how the U.S. government conducts military and paramilitary and clandestine secret so that nobody knows about it. operations. So it gave me great insight into that. But again, at the policy level in D.C., you know, doing that, but a great education.

And from there you retired?

Well, I had a couple more years in SOCOM, but I did that year up there with the agency. And one of the things I want to mention about that, another fantastic opportunity, one of my friends from Ramadi, John Tien, one of the battalion commanders, brilliant guy. He— his next assignment was at the White House on the National Security Council, running the Afghan-Iraq desk. And so at this time in history, we're talking 2007, '08, things are going pretty well in Iraq. Now we're shifting focus to Afghanistan, which we can't seem to solve. And so President Bush asks for a plan to surge into Afghanistan and fix that. So I was doing my day job, but then completely separate from that, John, who's a tank guy, said, hey, I need some help on this counterinsurgency thing. Can you come down to the White House and help me? So at night, I'd go down and spend a couple hours with him. And for me, it was a fantastic experience because he'd be asking me all these questions about SEAL teams and about special operations and counterinsurgency. And I'd say, well, this is what this does. And he goes, what do you think ought to happen?

And I'd say, here's what I think ought to happen. And he'd say, hold on, I'm typing. I'm like, what are you typing? He said, I'm typing a white paper that goes to the president tomorrow. Well, let me rephrase some of these things, you know, make sure I got my i's dotted. But really a powerful— for me, a powerful, uh, experience. And, and so we did that. And so he, he proposed— the National Security Council with the president, you know, proposed the surge into Afghanistan. And a little bit of disillusionment there. I was very impressed with the National Security Council. I was Very much less impressed with the Pentagon and their ability to plan and respond to the National Command Authority. They did not respond in a very— in my view, my very limited view, they did not respond in an effective way. And this is where I get into a lot of criticism of our senior military leaders. I know a lot of people want to criticize the political leadership, and I do too, but I really hold the senior military leaders at fault for a lot of what went on in Iraq and Afghanistan later on.

So I got some disillusionment of that because we would develop a plan that the president of the United States said execute, and the Pentagon would say, ah, we're still looking at this. Like, that's not any kind of military I was ever raised in. When the commander-in-chief says to do something and you're— you haven't quite got out of the assessment phase yet. So a little bit of disillusionment on, on that, continuing disillusionment on that. But I I was impressed with the effort that was going to go on in Afghanistan. And again, fantastic experience for me to contribute to that a little bit. But as I finished up in Washington, D.C., you know, back home to SOCOM after my year to my normal assignment, and then I started volunteering for Afghanistan. I hadn't been to Afghanistan by this point. And so I started volunteering to go to Afghanistan. I went over as part of the special operations staff. That was over there. And I got assigned to a program called Village Stability Operations. And what that was, it wasn't my idea, but myself and a PhD named Seth Jones ran it. It was the old Special Forces in Vietnam.

Send a 10-man team of Special Forces into the village, integrate with the villagers, recruit them as a strike force, bring in aid, and build an ink spot. And I thought, I can get on board with this. And so that's what they put into place. It was one of General McChrystal's 3 key points that he wanted to do to win the war in Afghanistan. This is before we declared that we were going to get out. And it got a lot of traction. So I was able to do that for about 6 months. Again, observe some of the disappointing things going on at the strategic level between the ambassador and the commanders over there. But, you know, still, we had a good plan and a good plan. And started to execute on it and make some— get some traction. And after I did that for about 6 months, I got offered, uh, to command a place called Camp Moorhead, and that's where they built the Afghan Commandos, so the Afghan version of a Ranger battalion. And I really liked those guys, really liked that program. It had been built by Special Forces guys, did a fantastic job of it.

I came in really at the tail end, and I was really just like the camp mayor. I didn't have direct responsibility for the training of the battalion. I was helping with some of the staff, but I was really the mayor. And so I was supporting that camp, life support, logistics, helping them build some new things, but got to be close enough that I could touch some of the stuff going out the door. And it was— we were graduating Afghan commando battalions about one every 3 months, and they would go out and get in the fight. And one of the things that really impressed me is the U.S. Special Forces guys didn't just do a good job training, they trained the Afghans to train. So by the time I got there, the Afghans were running the training program.

Wow.

And I'll never forget, you know, you're at 7,000 feet in Afghanistan, it's cold, we got this rainy rain going on, and we got a course going on, and I hear all this shooting. And I knew there had been some training at 2 AM, and I'm like, What's going on at 2 AM? They said, no, that, that's the ambush, the, uh, training. It was a training event. The Afghans were out there with the Afghans in the icy rain doing the training at 2 in the morning. So I was pretty impressed by that.

Wow.

So, uh, and doing it on their own. It wasn't us pushing them out there. They were doing it. So they, they impressed me on a number of things like that. Um, but great experience. I had French commandos. I had, uh, UAE commandos, members of the royal family were in the teams that came through, you know, enjoyed that, had a great time. There was a good bit of threat. The Afghans were starting to ramp up their terrorist attacks in Kabul. So we had some VBIDs go on. Fortunately, the base itself was never attacked. But, you know, really good experience to push those commandos out the door and see them get in the fight and then deal with international soft, which I always enjoy, and then, then have command of that base is kind of my final, my final tour in, in uniform.

How did it feel to retire?

I, I was ready. One of my, one of my NCOs told me that, uh, it's always good to go to a bad unit as your last unit because it makes the divorce easier. He'd been divorced 5 times. And so, uh, when I left SOCOM, I had to pick My wife and I knew we wanted to get our kids into a stable place to do high school and all that. I had 3 young girls getting ready to go into high school, so we wanted to go back to South Carolina where I went to school. My wife's from Georgia, so it was a good fit. And so we picked a, you know, regular Army headquarters there, and it was, you know, it was all, all that I could have hoped for as far as that went. So I did my final 9 or 10 months there, just, just kind of on a staff. 3-star level staff, uh, and was able to transition out. But, you know, the whole time I was, I was gearing things up and setting the conditions to go contract. And so my official retirement date, I think, was the 1st of September of '11, and 2 weeks later I was in Afghanistan as a counterinsurgency advisor, uh, in the eastern region working for the, uh, the 4-star.

And so again, One of the best jobs I've ever had.

That's one of the best jobs you've ever had?

Again, yeah, it was one of the best jobs because in that I could bring my perspective. You know, I have a lot of opinions, and, and, but I think I have a lot of background and history and experience. I could bring my strategic opinions to the table, and I could write them up in reports, and I could provide them to the, to the 4-star and hopefully influence the strategy. But then my job was to go down with the units, down to the lowest level, And so I could be briefing the 4-star one day and in a firefight the next day. And so to me, that was just— it couldn't get any better than that for me. And I got to go to almost every single outpost in the east, um, all over the place, and got to go out with the units. Some of them were in like Fort Apache situations getting hit. Some of them were out patrolling. And then I, I'd get to sit down with a company commander after and say, hey, you may want to think about this. You may, you may, you know, and, and I also got to assess the problems, got them to give me the problems they were having, and get to take that to the 4-star level.

The old directed telescope piece. And it, it made a lot of people mad in between. But, you know, when those people were doing things that I thought were negligent and costing the guys on the ground, you know, I, I have no problem providing that feedback.

At what point did you realize we might be winning the fight in Afghanistan, but we're not winning the war?

Uh, probably towards the end of that tour. Um, and as I was doing that tour, uh, the administration's changed. Uh, you know, as you remember, the first in that time period— so we're talking 2011, '12, uh, 2010— while I was in command of Camp Moorhead, the first commander of ISAF was fired. the 4-star, and they brought General McChrystal in. And then you remember General McChrystal got fired, and I'll never forget watching that on TV because I'd served— he'd been my commander 3 different times. Um, yeah, I saw, I saw the approaches that were being taken, and while I thought we were making a lot of traction on the right track in some ways, we were badly, badly off track in others. And part of that was we weren't We weren't— we didn't have a strategy in place that would be successful with Afghans. And what I mean by that is they might recognize Afghanistan on a map, but they have no concept and no desire to have an Afghan nation, and certainly not a democratic Afghan nation. And there's a lot of things about extreme Islam that we don't like. But again, if your choice is wasting 20 years of American blood and not winning, or let's win and make some advancement and maybe deal with the things we don't like later on, like social issues.

I would much rather have the latter. But the US government refused to do that.

Mm-hmm.

You know, we had to promote women's rights. We had to promote homosexual rights. We had, you know, whatever the flavor of the month was, we had to ram that down the Afghans' throat. And while you can force people in Kabul to do that, when you're out fighting in the valley where it matters, you're not going to force anybody to do that. And all you're going to do is build the enemy's ranks. And that's exactly what we did. And, you know, I'm very harsh in my criticism of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but I, you know, the U.S. military fought as well as it's ever fought. I mean, you look at the lists of Medal of— Medals of Honor, um, lots of mistakes, lots of bad things like any war, but The US military absolutely did its job. The, the approach to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was disastrous. And, you know, I teach college, and Vietnam is one of my areas that I teach, and the problems in Vietnam— I mean, everybody would acknowledge that. But I, but I'm like, yeah, Vietnam compared to Afghanistan, it looks like it was run by a military genius like Clausewitz. The way Afghanistan was run just defies your imagination.

And, and what I'm talking about, like, our rules of engagement.

Yeah.

Some of the stupidest, most criminally negligent things I've ever experienced. And so to your question, I started to see that towards the end of my, my tour as a counterinsurgency advisor. I would talk to units and I'm like, why didn't you pursue the enemy into that village? Just making this up. Well, we're not allowed to cross that line. Why aren't you allowed to? Well, because the mayor there doesn't want us to, so we can't. But those guys just shot at you. You know, things like that. I, I'll never forget one of the best company commanders I ever dealt with in the field was relieved a week later, and they had been in a firefight, and he saw an Afghan militiaman shooting at him, and the Afghan militiaman ran down like a hedge, and the company commander pursued him with his weapon. And as the Afghan was running, He threw his rifle away. Company commander dropped him, was relieved of command.

I remember when those ROEs came out.

Disgusting. And I, I, I really think the American people should know that the level of negligence, uh, that the senior leadership put in place or allowed to be put in place. Um, I'll never forget when the French were leaving out of a FOB, and this was the French military, but Their convoy leaving was attacked. They had a gunship in place. The gunship engaged. The pilot was immediately grounded and charged because he had somehow violated the ROE for engaging the enemy who were shooting at Frenchmen. And, and that kind of thing happened in the U.S. side too, and it got worse. So I saw that happening, uh, in late '12 as I was, as I was a counterinsurgency advisor. And then as I went to the agency later for further service as a contractor, this is where it got to the level of couldn't accept it.

You know, I mean, we're going to do a segment on this later, but I'm just, you know, it sounds like you're kind of against isolationism.

Yeah.

Again, when you have fought a war like that, Yeah. Yeah.

Well, so there are a couple— to me, a couple different nuances to that, to that issue. Um, I absolutely am opposed to us going into a military conflict without the proper strategy in place. I, I— it's absolutely a waste to expend any American blood or even treasure if we don't have a viable plan for winning. The incredible incompetence I saw from our senior military leadership on We're just going to do year after year of mowing the grass. I mean, nothing sickens me worse than that. But on the other hand, on the isolation side and on the military side, if the conditions are properly met with strategic objectives and it's attainable and it's going to be done right, I disagree with people that say war never solves anything. War has solved a lot of things. And I think if you do it right and it's a democracy trying to have some fidelity and virtue, I think it is a very viable foreign policy tool, last resort, but tool. And then the other aspect of that for me is that we've tried isolationism twice, and both of them, at least in part, resulted in the World Wars.

We went into isolationism under Wilson and got pulled into World War I. We went right back to isolationism, and that encouraged the Japanese to attack in the Pacific to a degree. So I don't think that we can just pull back behind the border and rely on the Navy and the Air Force. And the other aspect of that is the threat, the Marxist threat that exists in the world right now, not just from Islamism. To me, Islamism is a tool of the Marxist threat, but the Marxist threat from China and then resurgent now in the former Soviet republics and Russia, that threat is not going to allow us just to live in peace. So I don't think we have a choice. It's do we take an active role in defending the nation and do it by projecting power, or do we just fall back behind the Navy and the Air Force inside our borders, and then they cut off the rest of the world? And I don't think the way the world is set up now that we can do that with information, financial networks, economic— the oil. You know, we see the vulnerabilities of oil from the Middle East.

We got to accept that. But again, turning that coin over, I absolutely am opposed to military action putting any of our soldiers in harm's way unless we're going to do it correctly. And we've demonstrated over the last at least 20 years that, that we're not quite sure we know how to do it correctly. And I blame that on the senior— most of the senior leadership of the, of the Army and the military.

What do you think about Ukraine? Well, I mean, I know you have a lot to say here, but—

Yeah, I do have a lot of strong feelings about Ukraine. And obviously, so I served over there after I got out after Afghanistan, all that was over. I served over there pretty much continuously for 2 years, in and out. And then I've been back and forth. I do not think US soldiers should be in there. I do not think American soldiers should shed their blood in there. I do not. But partly is because the Ukrainians are willing to step up and fight for themselves. And I think we should support them as strongly as we can. Now, there's a lot of caveats to that. And I think President Trump has been brilliant in his application of— but it shouldn't be U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Well, it is. It is. It's certain.

You know, it sure is. But I think he's improved that a lot because In my view, Europe has just grown fat off us for the last 50 to 75 years. They're just fat off us. I love Germany, but Germany is the worst culprit. They are fat on the economic and financial gain and control, but they've grown fat off our— the security that we provide them.

Uh-huh.

So Europe should be paying this. This is their responsibility. They're in a position to do it. And I think the way President Trump has has engineered this now is a very good way to do it. I mean, you know, NATO is paying for it now. I'm sure obviously U.S. tax dollars are still involved, but the onus primarily is on NATO and on Europe to pay the cost of this war. So I think we should support Ukraine. I don't think it's a limited conflict just between Russia and Ukraine. I think, you know, they're a democratic nation standing up to the Red Army. To me, it's individually, it's a dream come true. I mean, I, I can't tell you the multi-levels how much I am— get satisfaction from being part of that con— that conflict. But as an American, I do not think U.S. troops should be committed there. I think the amount of U.S. responsibility for that should be absolutely limited. But I think we should support them as best we can.

Why do you say this is a dream come true?

So as an individual, right, my, my focus, my, uh, favorite area of history is World War II and the Eastern Front. And even though I had pretty good familiarity with that— my undergraduate degree is in that— even though I had pretty good familiarity, I didn't, I didn't quite realize till I got on the ground. I mean, as a military historian, my favorite battles— I mean, I got to fight in a conventional war on those battlefields. I'm literally sometimes in the same positions as the Germans were in. So as a historian, as a soldier, I just— it was incredibly fascinating to me. Terrible too, because it's a conventional war and, you know, it's devastating. People, lots of people getting killed. But as a historian, it was just fascinating to be on the same— you know, I, I lived in the assembly areas that the, that the Germans launched the Kursk offensive out of into Kursk. And then the Ukrainians go up and take, you know, some similar areas. And I fought in some of the same areas. outside of Kramatorsk. So for me, really fascinating. And again, from a historical perspective, you know, fighting the Red Army is one of my historical focus areas.

And it turns out they're the same as they were in many ways as in World War II, you know, same, same army, different day. So I got a lot of satisfaction from, from fighting against them as well in defense of a democracy. Now we can talk about it. Ukrainians certainly not perfect. I've had a lot of bad experiences with Ukrainians, but overall, as a nation, I am very dedicated to their cause. And I personally, individually, am willing to sacrifice for their cause. But I don't think our children and our grandchildren should be committed to that either. So there's a duality to there, if that makes sense.

Do you think our children and grandchildren should be involved in any of the wars going on right now?

I think, for example, Venezuela was a, was a pretty good example of using US power. Iran, of course, has not gone— I mean, by all accounts, has not gone as we want it to go. I think the strategic objectives in Iran are, are correct. Having a nuclear power in Iran is unacceptable. But the way the war has been conducted, it has, in my view, in my opinion as a professional soldier, has not been effective. And here we are months into it. And I think, unfortunately, the president hasn't been advised very well. I think similar to Ukraine, the last administration, absolute disaster in every way. And I can, I can quantify that. This administration, President Trump, I think they're trying to take some of the right steps in Ukraine. but he has not been well advised, similar to Iran. I don't think that, that this military operation has gone as some of the people in the Pentagon pitched that it would. So, you know, that's— that war is a difficult one.

What have you seen over in Ukraine?

What have I seen?

Yeah. You know, one thing I saw that you— that We just talked to this woman, Katerina Schultz, who was talking about cartels sending people over to Ukraine to learn new tactics, specifically drone warfare.

Sure.

Come back, bring it back there. You saw that too?

I saw it. Yeah. Yeah. So fascinating situation. Serving in Ukraine, I call it— it's like a pirate ship. Um, very little organization and a whole spectrum of characters showing up. Um, I was blessed to be on one team that were almost all Rangers from 3rd Ranger Battalion, former guys, but that's not usually the case. And a lot of the guys that come in, you kind of dig down on what their experience is and, well, they play Call of Duty. So it's a whole spectrum of crazy stuff. And so the Ukrainians try to sort that out, and the way they do that and it's changed a little bit over the years, is you had to go serve in a thing called the International Legion. And it's all the foreigners. They have a whole battalion of guys from the country of Georgia, a whole battalion of guys from the country of Belarus. They have Russians, believe it or not. They have Chechens. And then they have a lot of Westerners— Brits, Americans, Canadians, French. And then they also have some guys from Latin America. So So we had about, in one of the battalions of the International Legion, we had about 2 companies worth, so a couple hundred maybe, guys from Latin America.

And of course, the Ukrainians said they were all Mexicans. Oh, it's the 2 companies of Mexicans. Well, you start talking to them, you find out they're from all over Latin America and a significant proportion of Colombians. And at the very first, I didn't think much of that because I knew that, you know, as the insurgency in Colombia kind of wound down, Colombian Army guys who were going around the world trying to find work. But now that I've come back and involved in some other things and involved in some things in South America and Colombia trying to help them, some of those guys, those Colombians that were International Legion with us fighting at the front, experiencing drone warfare at the cutting edge of drone warfare, were FARC guys, cartel guys. And they have now gone back to Colombia And they're using those skills against— excuse me— against the Colombian government.

Is there active drone warfare going on in Colombia?

The Colombian government and intelligence services are getting targeted and hit by armed FPVs. No shit.

I did not know that. When did that start happening?

I don't know when it started, but I do know for a fact that it's occurring, and I've been involved on the periphery from the United States trying to assist for the last 6 to 8 months. And Colombia, of course, is under the US security assistance. So we're trying to help them. But yeah, they're getting, they're getting targeted by armed FPV micro drones, Group 1 drones that are attacking them in their vehicles as the government officials and intelligence guys are rolling around.

Shit.

I did not know that.

What are they using? Are they using explosives in the drones?

Yeah, they're, they're using, uh, whatever that— whatever level of armament they can provide, be it, uh, improvised explosives on the— that the drone's capable of carrying, or, uh, yeah, so improvised explosives on the drones. But, but rigging a micro drone like a Mavic-type little quadcopter that has enough juice to carry a couple of pounds or whatever it may be of ordnance. And then they fly that. They use the techniques that they learned in Ukraine, and they fly that FPV right into the vehicle and attack Colombian government guys. Wow.

Second person I've talked to that's reported that. I haven't heard that anywhere else. Nobody else is talking about this. I don't know why. But how do you think the war in Ukraine will end? How many people have been lost?

Yeah, that's both of those relatively complex questions. And when I first got there, probably like every time, I thought, oh, this will be 6 months. Now here we are going into the 5th year, close to the 5th year. So I've been wrong quite a bit on trying to predict what President Putin's going to do. But I do think it distills down to that there are some set things that he's put out there and seems to be trying to accomplish. And the first is secure the Donbas region. So if people aren't familiar with it, there's the southeastern portion of Ukraine. It's called the Donbas. It's very industrial heavy. He's secured about 90% of it. And it's taken them, you know, almost 5 years to do it. The Russians are not stupid. They do some things tactically at the ground level very poorly. They understand academically what they should do, but they have a hard time executing. But what they do very well is their strategy is very good, and they learn from their mistakes. And I've watched them— we've all watched them evolve from frontal human wave attacks like World War I to now they're doing A little more sophisticated.

They, they don't have the sophistication to run combined arms teams with tanks like we do, or like the Germans did in World War II. They don't, and they know that. But they do know they got plenty of manpower to throw at it, and they gradually try to encircle cities, cut the highways in, cut the lines of communication, and then that city will eventually fall. And they just keep throwing manpower at it, and they keep moving forward 100 meters at a time. Um, so they have about 95% secured the Donbas. I, I can't see— and again, I have no great insight with the Russians, and my predictions have been wrong— but I can't see them thinking they can do much more than that.

Hmm.

The 3rd largest city, Dnipro, is just to the west, about 60 kilometers. It's taken them 5 years to get where they're at. I can't see them trying to go farther. But who knows? I don't know. I think, though, what they'll do is they'll secure the Donbas, secure those strategic areas that they want, and then try to force the West. I think they're getting some bad signals right now diplomatically, people wanting to make a deal with them and say, hey, how can we make some money together? Let's just call a ceasefire and go make money. I think that's very encouraging to them. I don't agree with that approach, but I think that that's what they're hoping is that they can get what they want on the ground. They're almost there, and then they'll see what kind of deal they can get. Because 2 years ago, or even a year ago, my hope was that this administration was going to take an extremely hard line with them and punish them economically because the Ukrainians are not going to get their territory back. They're not. And I even saw a proposal now that the Russians want them to withdraw even farther.

So it kind of shows you where the Russians think they are from a position of strength. But a year ago, my hope was that we were going to punish Russia to the degree that it made it economically— they couldn't continue. They had enough what they want, and economically we can't continue. But I'm not— I haven't really seen that play out over the last 12 months. And so that's what it's going to take. It's going to take unified economic, pressure from Europe and the United States. I firmly believe President Trump is the only person that can do it. Nobody else will be able to get the unified effort against Putin that it's going to take. He's the only one. But he's got to focus on it. He's got to get his team focused on a hardline economic position on Russia. And they have a lot of vulnerabilities, um, but that's the only way that it's going to happen. And there also has to be stick. We have to be more involved militarily. And that doesn't mean US troops putting their lives on the line, but we have to be more proactively and more effectively involved supporting their military.

And up to this point, we have not done it. The last administration did one of the worst jobs I've ever seen of military support, just throwing money and throwing our stuff at a problem, not effectively supporting the Ukrainians. So more effective support. But I, I think there's a lot of very viable ways to do that without getting U.S. guys killed.

Why do you think Trump will be able to unify a front?

Well, I actually think that— I think as he's demonstrated with like Greenland, I mean, that wasn't a pretty picture, but we got what we wanted strategically. And so after 20 years of listening to all these polished politicians and polished generals brief off their PowerPoint slides and accomplishing nothing. I'd rather have kind of a, kind of a not so pretty picture, but we've achieved our strategic objective. And we have. We've secured Greenland militarily, which is what we wanted. And I firmly believe he's the best negotiator in the world. I mean, it's not always a pretty picture, but he's the best negotiator in the world. There's been some mistakes, there's been some problems, but he is the leader that can force Europe to unify and say, hey, country X, you're not going to buy natural gas from Russia this year. We're all going to work together. If you do, we're going to punish you economically. And he's demonstrated he'll do that. And that's the only way that Putin is going to come to the table. If he finds a loophole and can buy natural gas from somebody, he will. And, and Russia Contrary to popular opinion, the Putin administration, they're very comfortable with this war.

He takes this almost messianic or almost— it's kind of the same view that I take in fighting the Red Army. To him, this is the greatest role he could ever be in, to be in a Stalin-type role fighting against the Nazis in Ukraine. To him, this is a fantasy.

Where will Europe buy their energy from?

Well, according to that economist, they can buy it from the United States. They can do things more efficiently, uh, in Europe. So there's— there are some— there are some ways to do that.

But our gas prices are through the roof.

Yeah, it's— it's horrible. And, and, you know, if you talk to economic economists—

Punish Canada for buying energy from China, right? And they can't buy it from Russia, and they can't really get it through the Strait of Hormuz, where would they get it?

Yeah, there's definitely some problems and some issues connected with that. And, you know, you talked— we talked about the Saudis had built a new pipeline. Well, now the Houthis are interdicting that, so that's off the table. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of problems. But if you want the war in Ukraine to end in any kind of justified way, then it's going to have to be all-in economic pressure on Putin. We're not going to win militarily. And I tell Ukrainians this all the time.

It's—

they hate to hear it. You're not going to win militarily. You're not going to get your territory back. You can probably fight in a static way and keep grinding up generations for years and years. But if you can't win militarily, let's end this thing. Let's end the bloodshed. But the only way to do it is to punish Russia economically, not go in there and get some trillion-dollar business deal. That's— they're going to laugh at that and exploit that. But yeah, there are obviously huge complexities with that. I think Venezuela has been a huge gateway to energy efficiency, to energy independence. We just got access to their oil pipeline, so their oil reserves. So some things have obviously got to be juxtaposed across the world stage to make this work. But economically is the only way we're going to do it.

Well, Jim, what's next for you?

Uh, so I, you know, my wife's getting tired of these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that take me away for, for years and years. I've had about 8 of them now. Um, I actually tried to get her to move to Ukraine and she wouldn't, she wouldn't, she wouldn't buy that.

She wasn't into it.

Yeah, she's always smarter than me on the, on these types of things. And we have grandkids and, uh, just got my last daughter married.

You asked your wife to move to Ukraine?

I wanted her to teach English in Lviv. Yeah, it's It's, you know, and it is funny, but it's safer than here. And again, I pitched this to her 2 years ago when the cities were really bad.

Mm-hmm.

I would rather suck up the threat of cruise missiles and drones than the crime that we have in the streets. I mean, I can't let my daughters and wife walk down American streets, but— and you could do that. I'd let them walk down the streets in Lviv at 2 a.m. It's so safe, Ukraine is. So I would rather have that and soak up you know, the cruise missile threat. But yeah, no, it is, it is kind of funny. And she's smarter than me, so she, she vetoed that. And we're here with our grandkids and kids, so I, you know, that's kind of my focus and trying to support them and keep things going. But I, I'm still involved in Ukraine. Um, Eastern Europe now has generated kind of a unified pushback to Russia, and there's the East European rearmament. And so I'm trying to be involved in that and try to help them. I, I love Europe. I love Eastern Europe, and I love being involved in that and trying to use the experience that I have both prior to Ukraine but also in Ukraine to help, to help with that. And I would love to continue to help Ukraine, you know, fight against Russia.

Well, Jim, it was an honor to interview you, and thank you for coming.

Thanks. I'm honored to be here. Fantastic experience. God bless, bro.

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