Transcript of 24th STS Operator | Chad McCoy (throwback episode) New

Special Operations, Covert Ops, Espionage, The Team House, with your hosts Jack Murphy and David Park.

Hey everyone, welcome to episode 173 of The TeamHouse. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. Our guest tonight on the show is Chad McCoy. Chad spent his entire career really in Air Force Special Operations with 24th Special Tactics Squadron, served as a PJ, pararescueman, and we're really excited and happy to have you here in our studio tonight, man, flying out here. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks. I didn't get stabbed today, so I'm healthy and happy.

It's the rocks out here that'll get you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean, where to begin? I mean, we kind of like shot the shit a little bit before we started the show. And I mean, your biography and career, I suspect, is too extensive to even fit in one interview. But we'll try to hit some of the highlights.

Some of the highlights.

Yeah. And talk, hit some of the things you'd really like to get into. I'd really like to hear first off, you know, sort of what your path was, you know, growing up as a kid and what like sort of took you towards the Air Force.

What was your origin story that made you the superhero you are today?

You know, so you talk to a lot of kids of our generation, right? And we grew up playing in the woods, you know, sticks as guns, wearing camouflage, going to Army surplus stores and buying whatever we could, you know, canteens. Oh, yeah. Waste. That was the culture. That was what we were enamored by. I was exactly the same way. You know, my brother and I were in the woods making forts and throwing pinecone grenades, you know. And so you're also enamored by movies, you know. And so, you know, the movies that were kind of formative for me were, you know, the same as everyone else. You look at like I want to be Rambo, right? And, and probably a lot of Navy SEALs became Navy SEALs because of the movie. You know, it was awesome. And so we kind of had a culture there for a while that was kind of glamorizing the military experience and specifically the special operations experience. And so all I wanted in my life was to wear a balaclava, have an MP5 in a flight suit. That's all I wanted.

Rappel through skylights.

That's all I wanted in life. And once I got the balaclava, it wasn't very comfortable. And the MP5 wasn't very effective.

The Nomex is hot as hell.

Yeah, yeah. But that was what I was aspiring to be as a young man. And I had a normal, semi-normal childhood. But as I grew up, I knew I wanted to join the military. I was probably, you know, 17 years old. I was in Hawaii. I was a surfer. I was, you know, you know, some punk kid in Hawaii, skateboarder, surfer. And, um, I was enamored by Special Operations. This is before the war, right? This is before 9/11. So I had no context what war was. I didn't know what, how real it could be. I just knew it was kind of sexy, right? And so, um, and pararescue was one of the few jobs in the military that was always kind of employed, right? You know, regardless of, of war or not, they were rescuing people outside of mountains. They were jumping in the middle of the ocean. They were badasses to begin with. And, you know, icing on the cake was maybe if a war kicks off, I can go do that stuff too. But, um, but it was, this is late '90s, right? And so, um, you know, that was kind of leading up into me going to the military.

So not to get ahead of it, but, you that was kind of the genesis of it was I wanted to do something exciting and cool. And recruiters that are listening to this is the things I was enamored by was guys putting their kit out there and showing me scuba tanks and guns and motorcycles. I was like, that's the life I want. And you can get it a number of different ways. You can go be a Ranger and do all the same things. You can go be a SEAL. You can be a Green Beret. No one has really cornered the market on the coolness. They all have it. It's just how accessible is it? And pararescue was the quickest way, just to be candid with you, was the quickest way to get all those things right off the bat. And it sounds like cheating, but it was truly— I can go to scuba school. I went to Key West Special Forces Combat Dive School. As an 18-year-old. You don't get that in the Army, right? You're a senior guy, you've cut your teeth, you proved yourself, and you actually want to do that crap. And I knew I could get those things off the bat.

Went to freefall school as a, you know, 18, I turned 19 at freefall school. And so that's not normal. Maybe it's normal today. You know, it's more accessible today, but back in the day it wasn't. And so that was the path I chose.

Yeah, that was one of the big things, especially pre-GWAT, is that CCT and para rescue, they had that pipeline. It was stacked, it was lined up, and it was the envy of schools. It was the envy of every other special operations unit.

It was still contentious when I went through around 2008 or 2009 because you guys have a pipeline right in there. I mean, to have an entire Special Forces team, MFF team qualified Pretty difficult to do. It's not easy to get those slots, but yeah, I can definitely see why it's appealing to hit.

No. So I felt that. I felt that as a young guy going through scuba school with zero badges on my chest, right? I was maybe I was an E-2 and I was dive team number 2 in scuba school. It's a big deal, right? And 1 and 2 and 3. And the guy that I was, my partner was a crusty, like, special forces E-7. And I'm enamored by this guy, right? I'm like, he's legit. I am nothing. I'm a punk that was in high school last year, and here I am going to Special Forces scuba school, and I don't deserve to be there. And they reminded us that every day, Air Force pukes. And Air Force got a bad rap because we'd go in there and we'd smoke these things, but it was because our selection was good. And so you have really talented guys at the top of the food chain going through these courses. And they crushed them. But we were a bunch of pricks. We were young guys. We were arrogant. But yeah, for sure, we probably deserved everything we had.

So you were basically SEALs, but with the ability to back it up.

No, no, man.

That's a joke.

It's a joke. I went through the 18 Delta course, the true 18 Delta course at SOCOM with a bunch of SEALs and a bunch of 18 Deltas. And that was a bunch of PJs back when we were going through there. And you had the SEALs around the periphery and they're like, screw these guys. And the 18 DELs were like, screw all these guys. And here's the Air Force guys going, we just want to get through this, man. We want the next step. This is just a thing for us.

So what year did you go through selection?

So 1998, back when it was hard. I did the last hardcore.

The last hardcore.

Yeah, last hardcore. I was thinking about the other day, we say that about stuff and I think we kind of believe it, right? Because I kind of believe that it was harder back then. I don't know if that's true or not. We'll kind of go through the progression of my career, but I ended up running selection training at the unit and the guys we were bringing on were better than us. They were. Was it harder? Maybe not. But were they better?

Yes.

Because we were better at selection. We were better at selecting the right people. And so it's kind of funny to look back and think, like, back in the day, it was like, who was the hardest and who could just get through hard things? But does that make the best operator? No, it doesn't. It makes a guy that's really good at carrying heavy things.

Right.

And here I was trying to blend in with those hardcore guys and fake it till I make it. But yeah, so a lot of growth through the process.

So for the people who don't know anything about Air Force Special Operations, can you sort of give us the lay— and it's changed over time too, I guess, but can you give us the layout of what it was when you were there and what it's become now?

I'll give you a better history lesson. I'll try to, you know, someone will fact-check me on it, but, you know, so PJs grew out of kind of necessity in Korea, jumping in, jumping in docks behind enemy lines and and moving people out kind of like the hard way, right? And so there were, I guess, kind of a crude way to put it, just guys with big balls that would jump out of airplanes and do hard stuff and so willing to risk their lives for others. And so that was kind of the genesis of this. And so Vietnam kind of was the galvanizing kind of environment for PJs. And they just did hard stuff all the time, man. You guys are in a TIC, a bunch of SF dudes or conventional Army guys, the guys are going to go down the hoist under fire and try to take out their casualties. And Vietnam was a good kind of litmus test for being a spec ops guy. The SEALs, Green Berets, they all cut their teeth there, right? And so here PJs were, they were one-offs. There's these guys that just were kind of the rebels of the Air Force for sure.

But their job morphed into protecting aircrew. And so it became this kind of safety net for aviators. So I'm an F-15 pilot, I'm flying. And here's a really good example is the Gulf War. You punch out, a PJ is coming to get you, right? And he's going to come with an armada, not only helicopters, A-10s flying with them. And so it's a legit package come with them. So PJs morphed over the years and then the GWAT happened and then it was a chance for the PJs to say, hey, man, what do we want to be when we grow up? Because this is no kidding the test. And so that's good to have the conversation.

Oh, it's great.

Yeah. Did I read somewhere that a lot of the PJs, the pararescuemen in Vietnam, were they former? Did they draw on the smokejumpers? Is that, or am I just making that up?

Yeah, I never heard that before.

Okay.

I mean, I think that the CIA drew on some of those guys for some of their ops in like Laos during the Vietnam conflict.

But I think a lot of them kind of just floated back and forth. There was a lot of that going on. Yeah. It was like, hey man, you can do weird stuff. Okay, let's go do weird stuff.

Yeah, a lot of like sheep dipping back then.

Yeah.

And the, but the larger picture of Air Force Special Operations also includes there's JTACs, There's CCTs. Can you tell folks out there a little bit about how that works?

Everyone knows I got a lot of love for the CCTs. And so at the 24th STS, you have CCTs and PJs. The Air Force is terrible at branding, so we have a lot of acronyms. You also have TACP, right? And so as Rangers, you guys know TACP. Conventional forces get TACP, but there's also soft TACP. And so we have those. They're great. They're excellent JTACs. But CCTs were initially designed to do kind of austere ATC, so air traffic control, basically stand up a remote site and bring aircraft in.

Like out of their rucksack on a remote airfield somewhere.

Well, you look at Desert One, right? They were the guys bringing in those aircraft. And that was kind of the genesis of it. But then it became, okay, well, there's a necessity to have these guys call close air support. And can they do it really well at a high level? Absolutely they can. And so they kind of repurposed them. And so over the past, you know, over the past 20 years, they repurposed them to be excellent JTACs. And, you know, they're just badass dudes that could get the job done. They could bring in, you know, your, your infill, exfil, but also call CAS, you know, manage ISR. And so kind of jack of all trades as well, you know. And so, and then you got PJs who traditionally come from the rescue side. So you have rescue in the Air Force and their, their job is to rescue pilots. That's it. And so they do it and they're the best at it. They come in helicopters, they jump out of airplanes, they do the NASA mission. I mean, they do the rescues off McKinley. I mean, they're everything, right? But then within SOF, you take those PJs and you say, how do we purpose these guys to support ground forces more effectively?

And so in the early days, Desert One is a good example. When you start building up JSOC, they realize that, hey man, we can use PJs and be these kind of, these, this enabling force that protects our guys and provides confidence to ground force commanders to say, man, like if anything happens, you guys are going to do it. And a good example is Black Hawk Down. You know, we had PJs there that went down and guys, I had the, the man, it's hard to put this into words, but like when I was a young man, I looked at, you know, these magazines and I saw guys like Tim Wilkinson and Scotty Fails, and I was enamored by them. And then I got to meet them in person and then become, have a relationship with them. That's so cool. Which was amazing to me. And it probably wasn't amazing to them because I'm a nobody, right? But like for me, it was a big deal. And so, but those are the guys that put themselves in harm's way. They're kind of the lesser known portion of Black Hawk Down in the story of Gothic Serpent. They, um, you know, they risked their lives to save others and cut those guys out of those helicopters.

And so, uh, you know, then the, the assault force understood, holy crap, these guys are really good at this. We can use them on the maritime missions. We can use them on these helo assault forces. And so they became kind of, uh, a necessity, you know, over time. Yeah.

And correct me if I'm wrong anytime I say something dumb here, but, uh, 24th STS is the unit that encompasses some of these different personnel and capabilities. Unlike, you know, maybe some of the other SOF units, does this— do they act as like the force provider and they shoot off these attachments to SEALs, Rangers, or are there missions they do?

Yeah, yes and no. So they do both, right? So in the early days of Iraq and Afghanistan, we were basically running combat search and rescue for the task force. And so, like, I was the team leader for those, you know, those, those task forces. And my job was to protect a certain region of Iraq. And so, you know, when you had HAFs going all night, you know, a lot of, a lot of helos flying back in the day. And, and the 160th was very, very busy. They were getting it on more than anybody. And my job was to protect those guys, not only the aircrew, but everyone else is on those, you know, those, you know, those infill and exfil, you know, birds. And so that was a primary mission of our unit. And then on top of that, we would basically dole PJs and controllers out to the Army and Navy. And that's where it gets kind of exciting, right? Because everyone wants to be part of that. You touch that magic and there's a lot of magic there, right? And so PJs, controllers, it sounds like pejorative, but they were commodities for a while.

And that's not a bad thing to me. Because you're on the best missions and you're with the best operators. And so my job is to be the best PJ with them and protect them and save their lives and think ahead of problems as they happen. And the combat controller is running. I mean, he's the busiest guy on the target. Yeah. You know what I mean? He's got multiple radios going, multiple aircraft. Maybe he's calling CAS, maybe he's calling a Black HLC to bring casualties out. And the PJ has a cool job because if no one gets hurt, you got a pretty sweet gig, man, because you're running and gunning with the best of them. And then when someone gets hurt, yeah, you refocus, man. And that's your primary task. And so, yeah, it's a different gig, man.

So with the Air Force, we'll talk about pararescue because I don't know about CCT, but it has sort of that SEAL structure, right? There's the white side, pararescue, who before GWAT were, were the busiest special operations folks. They were, they're doing mountain rescue, dudes in Alaska. Yeah, they're doing the mountain rescue. They're doing incredibly heroic stuff out at sea. Um, like they had a real job all the time. Even the guard bums.

Yeah, the perfect storm, man. I mean, Long Island, you know, guys, the guys in Alaska are, are the biggest badass PJs, right? Because they're the guys that are going to jump through remote DZ and rescue somebody and like overland for 3 days and, and, you know, probably kill bears with their bare hands. I don't know.

A couple, a couple of them, I think just last year, did a freefall jump in Alaska to go rescue some— a dude that was stranded out there. Jumped right out into the snowdrifts.

They do a lot. They do a lot. And, um, the guys here in Long Island, um, do a lot of jump missions out, out to sea. Um, you know, a lot of the, uh, you know, merchant vessels that they call for help. These guys will hang— they literally risk their lives for others. And so when I joined, that's what I joined to do. And I was hoping that the combat side of it would come eventually.

Sure.

And so I was first stationed— I think you guys want to talk about selection a little bit, but I was first stationed in Las Vegas, and we went out to Northern Watch, which is— you had Northern Watch and Southern Watch, and basically it was a bracket around Iraq for no-fly zone. And so our job, Northern Watch in Turkey, was to protect those fighters that were enforcing that. And so in my mind, I was in combat, right? I'm in full kit. I got all these magazines. I had so many magazines. I probably had 500 rounds on me. I don't know, man. But I'm kidding. But I thought I was John Rambo and I was going to go save anyone who needed me. Right. But the fact is that you're just a safety net. And we hadn't really started yet. And so it's kind of an interesting kind of transition to what the GWAT became because I didn't have any experience. I was a nobody. And so, yeah, it's interesting, man.

So with— and I don't mean any sort of disparagement when I call everybody not in the 24th, like the vanilla side or vanilla PJs, but what is their wartime mission as opposed to the 24th?

Yeah. So they've got a great mission, man. So they're, you know, they have dedicated assets. So you have HH-60s, HH being the Air Force variant of rescue, right? You have dedicated C-130s, HC-130s. You have basically these task forces that deploy to become standup turnkey rescue and recovery. And so for the past 20 years, they've been everywhere. They've been co-located with us. And so my job would be to protect task force assets. Theirs would be to protect everybody. Right. And so if it didn't fall under our purview, they would be the ones that take care of it. And so it's not necessarily like I'm better than you. It's a different mission. And so we use the term white side for kind of conventional SOF, where SOF is not conventional, but that's the term we use. But they did a lot of great things, and especially in Afghanistan, they did a lot of rescues, a lot of notoriety with special forces teams that they came in and saved. But when you talk about kind of the tip of the spear, when you kind of neck it down to mission, it becomes a little bit more exclusive.

Right.

And so it's a smaller club of people. And that's by design. There's a different selection process, which I'm sure we'll talk about, different training, and also different understanding of assets available. And that's usually the differentiator between Whiteside and Tier 1, right? It's assets. Operators, you can teach a guy to shoot really well and do all these things, but what assets do you have available to you? And so when you have dedicated CAS every target, when you have AC-130 over it every single night, which people don't have. And I'm used to that. I'm like, we don't have AC-130. How are we going to go out? Right. How do we do this? Because what happens if we get a tick? Right. And white side guys are like, yeah, man, we'll just fight through it. And tier 1 guys are like, well, we got to just drop it and we'll move on. Right. But yeah, that's—

everybody back off and call in the strike.

Exactly.

So tell us about, like, did you— did anybody warn you what selection was going to be? Did you work up? Did you train for it? And what did you think when you got there?

Yeah. So it's kind of funny. I'm my own worst enemy. Everybody knows me knows that. And when 9/11 happened, I was in Okinawa. I was actually with a good buddy of mine. We were having a typhoon party. It's what you do in Okinawa when you have typhoons. And my buddy Nick McCaskill was a good friend of mine. He was like an E-5 at the time, and I was an E-4. His family was on the mainland, and he invited me over. We were going to have a typhoon party. And so we're drinking these things called white dogs. It's like Korean yogurt and soju, and we're tearing it up, man. Just the two of us. No purpose. Just that's what you do, right? And we watched the World Trade Center happen. Wow. And together. And I remember sitting on the couch watching it, and I'm like, and I'm trying to rationalize it. I'm like, oh, it must be beacons and the towers. And I'm like, trying to make sense of it. And then you start seeing more and more, like, holy crap. And then he starts getting all these phone calls, and I didn't. So I was at a rescue squadron, and he was at a special tactics squadron in Okinawa.

And I'm like, you're getting calls. I'm not getting calls. You guys don't want me. And here I was, this I thought I was this pipe-hitting guy. And when 9/11 happened, I assumed I'd be a part of whatever the response was. And I was in the Pacific and I wasn't. And we started doing OEF Philippines, which was a thing. Okay. And we had a 47 out there that crashed.

Yes, I remember it was a 160th bird that went down.

I had a couple of friends on there. Juan Riddell and Bill McDaniel. Bill McDaniel was a teammate of mine in Vegas, and it was a big moment for us, right? Because I was the young guy. I never dealt with tragedy, right? And I was like, holy shit, these guys are dead. And then they said, hey, we need you guys to go to the Philippines. I'm like, I'm in, and I'm going to war again. Probably 600 mags. I don't know, whatever I had on me. And we go out there and we think we're going to war. And it was this kind of like posture. And it was like, okay, there's things going on here, but we don't know what you guys can do. How do you contribute to that? And so it was really frustrating for me as a young guy because I started reading Stars and Stripes when 9/11 happened. And I started reading about these SF guys. They're going with like shooting 40mm over the mountains and getting these ticks and pulling back. And I'm like, that's what I signed up to do. And I'm in the Pacific. And so I was stuck out there.

I was stuck. I was PCS'd out there. I had a commitment for another year and I was miserable and ended up getting an ulcer. Like, I ended up getting an ulcer as a 20-year-old or 20, whatever I was.

Did you think you were going to miss it?

I just want to be a part of it. And I was like, this is the war. And war is romantic to a young guy who was playing war in the woods. I wanted to test my mettle. I wanted to see what I was worth. And, um, so there was only one way to get there, right? I could roll the dice and PCS and hopefully go to a unit that was deploying, or I could get out and go contract to Blackwater, right? Because Blackwater was a thing back then. Yeah. Or I could go to the 24th STS, which I knew was going to deploy. You knew you're going to war if you went there. The problem was I I was a nobody. I had no experience. I was a young guy. I had nothing to give them. And traditionally, the 24th STS was taking guys in their 30s. They were the best of the best. And here I was. I was barely 21. I was like 22, I think, at the time. And so I put in a package and they're at war already. And I put in this package and I was up in Alaska, actually.

I was doing some rescue stuff with the Alaska guys for a month. It was great. And I flew from Alaska to Fort Bragg to do selection by myself as a nobody. And you do a PT test. Actually, a funny story. PT test. So I'm super nervous. I got no shot at coming up here. They're not going to pick me. And so I wake up at 3 in the morning. Got a PT test, I think, at 5. Wake up at 3. I'm stretching, like, doing random stretches before HP was a thing. I'm like, touching my toes. And I'm like, I need to take some multivitamins because that'll make me run faster, right? So I pop some of those, drink some Gatorade. I'm doing everything wrong. And I show up at 5:00 and this multivitamin in my stomach is just churning. I have no food in my stomach. And I know better now, but you have to do this 3-mile run and it's like, show what you got. And so the chief that was there was this runner. He was like a marathon guy. He's like, do you mind if I run with you? What am I going to say, no?

So of course, so he's running with me and I'm running, he's talking to me the whole time. I'm like, I'm trying to run a 6-minute mile, which is hard for me. And he's talking to me and my stomach's churning and I gotta vomit, but I'm not gonna stop. So I keep running, I'm starting vomiting on myself and I'm puking on myself. He keeps talking to me, I'm like talking to him, puking. And I puke 3 times on this run and I run, I get a good time and he's just like, this kid's crazy, right? And so I go to the other events, do all this other stuff. And then I go through this board, and the board just gets you in the door to go to the further kind of next selection. And they used to call them murder boards back in the day, and they were not friendly. It was everybody. It was all— everyone's in uniform. I'm in uniform, and they just trash you. They rip you apart. And again, I'm a nobody, right? I'm a 20-something kid who's never done anything in my life. And I come in there and they're like, first of all, we never seen anybody vomit on themselves on this run the whole time.

That's kind of weird. Like, I get it, kid. Like, you want to be here? I'm like, yeah, I do. And I told them, I was very honest with them, and I said, listen, guys, and there's no ego attached to it. There's no bravado.

And it's the Air Force, so you can say guys.

No, you can't. No, you can't. No. So I'm smoking a cigar. I'm like, so I said to him, I said, if you guys don't take me, I'm probably going to get out of the military because I'm getting out. My service commitment was up in like 8 months. I was like, I'm getting out of the military and I'll go fight somehow. I'll figure it out. and they knew I was serious. And I said, I just want to be busy. I just want to fight. I want to go to war. And they selected me. And so I came, so I ended up going back to Okinawa, and I had to do one more deployment. I went to Korea. It was a short deployment, like 35 days, 45 days. And this is what I was telling you about the U-2 crash. Yeah. And so I'm out there. I wasn't on alert. We didn't fly alert for the U-2s because they're like high, high stuff, very low probability of getting shot down. And so we're not alert for them. And it's like, I forget what time it was in the morning. It was like 7, 8, maybe I'm hungover, maybe I'm not.

I don't know. Don't hold me to it. And they knock on my door like, Chad, hey, U-2 just punched. You got to go rescue this guy.

Oh, man.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, cool. Yeah, let's go. And so we went out there And the U-2, it's a funny story because I actually met the pilot recently. He lives in my town.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Awesome story. But he basically limped his U-2 across the border, ejected in a spacesuit.

So he took ADA fire or something?

No, no. He had a malfunction. Okay. One of the engines went out. And he punches. He played it cool. And I talked to him in person about it just recently. He's like, yeah, I knew how to get it over. It was on fire, whatever. Real cool pilot. Old school Air Force pilot. Like the kind of guys from World War II, right? And he limps it over, crashes plane to a gas station. There's fire. It's a mess. He's in a spacesuit, breaks his back. We go down to him in this mud field, litter him out, or put him in Stokes litter, raise him out, rescue him. And then I stayed behind and I'm going to go secure this crash site. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. No one taught me how to do this stuff. And I end up finding this black box, this recorder, this giant reel recorder that these two Koreans are pulling out of this apartment complex. And I got a gun on me, right? And I'm like— and Chad now knows I could have locked these dudes up and zip tied them and probably took them away because they're probably North Korean classified piece of gear.

Right, exactly.

There was a van out waiting for it out front. Yeah. Holy And so I didn't know how good the gravity of this at the time. I'm like a 20-something kid.

I'm surprised that the Air Force didn't send like a force to like the Ravens or—

They sent some cops eventually. But yeah, so we do this and then I'm like, I high five myself. I'm like, that was kind of cool. Wait, wait, wait.

So did you get the box?

Yeah. Okay. So everything's secure.

Did you negotiate? Did you draw down on them?

What happened? I'm like, I'm an American. You're not. This is ours. And they probably all both knew karate. Probably could have kicked my ass and zip tied me, but thank God they didn't. So if you're watching, thank you for not beating me up. But yeah, so we recovered everything. He comes out fine. It was a big deal, but I was thinking about the war. All I wanted to be was in Afghanistan.

Did you get recognition for that? Did you get a medal for securing the black box from Korean?

Wow. Well, there's more to that. It's just kind of my career, but it's fine. It's not about awards, right? But it just kind of stabs you a little bit. Yeah.

We see you go back to 24th STS and be like, I did something, guys.

I did a good thing. Yeah. So you fast forward a few months and I fly out to Fort Bragg. And the unit's gone. There's no one there. It's a ghost town. And it's a really eerie feeling. Like, thinking about it now, it was crazy to see. There was no one there. There were some admin folks there, but everyone was forward. And they said, hey, we don't have enough people to man this CSAR position in Afghanistan with the Navy supporting a specific squadron. Will you deploy in a week? I'm like, hell yes. That's all I want to do. I had no training. So you're supposed to go through training, right? You have a year of training. You got to go through. They're like, we want you to go now. I'm like, yeah, man, I'm in. I have no gear. I have nothing. They're like, we got you. So I go to the armory and they got this little shorty M4 and I'd never seen one. Now it's normal, right? Everyone's like, yeah, whatever. It's 10-inch. I'd never seen one before. I was like, that's the coolest thing ever. And they had painted it for me. I'm like, dude, I am big race.

I am varsity.

I am now Rambo.

Yeah. I can kill anything. I am the man. This is tier 1 right now.

Right.

And we got the range, we sight in, and I'm like, dude, this is everything. It's a culmination of everything I wanted in my life.

Was it suppressed? Did you have it?

Oh, yeah. I never seen a suppressor. How does this thing go on? So I get that uniforms had all kitted out for me, and I'm like, dude, this is insane. You felt like a professional athlete coming to a team, and here's your uniform, right? All brand new kit, which is not cool in retrospect. It's not cool to have brand new kit downrange, but I was that guy, price tags on and everything, trying to not get it dirty. It's like the hat with the sticker on the front. Yeah. So I go downrange to Afghanistan and I do nothing. I mean, we support all these ops. I was a part of the task force. I was learning. I didn't do anything sexy. I didn't do anything hard. But I was exposed to kind of a new world, and I was really impressed by the guys I was with. They were extreme professionals. They were very capable, and I was a nobody. And it was very humbling, right? It was like, holy, you know, I thought I was the man before, and now I know I'm not, and I know I need to grow to this. And so, um, you know, that was a pretty, uh, formative experience for me.

And so I come back home from that deployment and I start Green Team. Right. So Green Team is our selection.

So before we go into Green Team, because that was the training that you should have done, right? The training selection that you should have done if you hadn't deployed immediately. Para Rescue already has just off the get-go. Is it about a 2-year?

Yeah, it is.

I was about to say the same thing.

I guess I kind of glossed over that, didn't I?

Yeah. So no, that's okay. So when you go to Para Rescue, it really is maybe outside of like an 18 Delta.

Well, I mean, do you guys have the longest pipeline? You might.

I don't know. I'm not into competition with other tiers.

I get it. But like you said, you're getting so many things front loaded.

You're getting so many schools that are all front loaded. So you do 2 years of training just to get on the job.

Yes. And you don't know anything when you graduate 2 years. That's the sad thing is that even now you go through all this training and you're not capable to go deploy. You have top-up training when you get to your unit. And so there's a breakdown there, but the pipeline basically is all these employment schools and basically foundational schools to put it all together at PJ school to make you a PJ. Right. But before that, you go to selection. And I guess I kind of super glossed over this. It's pretty important. So our selection used to be— it's not the same now. It's a completely different—

and we're talking about just Selection to get into pararescue.

So you speak PJs and controllers together.

Okay.

Would go through selection together. And so you go through basic training, and if you were a guy who had, you know, basically done a PAS test, which is like a physical assessment to go, hey, you want to go here, okay, you met the basic criteria to go there. Um, you start with a lot of guys. So we started, I mean, just for easy math, let's say 100 people. Maybe it was like 90, I don't know, whatever. So 100 people out of basic training come there and they're all eager to be PJs because it's sexy, right? You see this guy, he's got blouse boots, cool beret, he's jacked. He's probably taking a ton of roids and he's briefing you guys and you're like, I want to be that guy, right? And here I am, scrawny, like 145 pounds going, yeah, that's me, man. So I came in the Air Force to be that guy. I'd already made up my mind. So I had already done the passes before I came in Hawaii, in Honolulu. I did it with a prior controller. I was committed. And so the stakes are high, right? Because you come in and a lot of guys don't make it.

Most of them don't make it. And so you come to be a PJ, you're probably going to be whatever, a loadmaster or a cop or something. My motivation was to not be that. My motivation was to be what I wanted to be. And so I came in to do that. I finished basic training, which got—

which Air Force basic training, everybody knows, gets you ready for Yeah, it's the hardest basic training.

No, I learned how to fold shirts and do, um, and make my bed really well, which has not paid off in my later life. I don't make my bed. Um, no, Air Force basic training is a joke. I mean, no offense, but it is. Um, you know, and it was, you know, you atrophy through the process. You're doing the slow runs. I should have been doing, you know, hard stuff, right? And they changed it now. So now they break guys out and they actually build them up to go pre-selection.

Okay. So they have like cohorts for selection.

Yeah, they fix it.

Okay.

Back in the day, it was like, hey, man, you better be ready from go. And so you go to the selection there at San Antonio and it's a lot of running, swimming, and beating your ass in the pool. Okay. A lot of calisthenics and that's it. Not a lot of weightlifting. It wasn't a lot of any of that. Really scary instructors. They were a pain in the ass. You know, there's a funny story about one of them I'll tell you later, but, but yeah, so I'm enamored by these guys. I'm scared of them. I was a young kid. I didn't— never done anything hard in my life. You know, I was a kid from Hawaii. I was a surfer. I was good in the water. I was comfortable being, you know, uncomfortable in the water. That was my saving grace. I wasn't super fast. You think being that skinny, you'd be fast. I wasn't fast. I wasn't strong, but I would go through every day knowing that I had to get to the end of the day. And I wasn't thinking about the end of the week or the end of the month. I was thinking about the end of the day.

And that was the only thing that saved me through the process was that I took it very incrementally. And so I'm like, I'm going to get through this run. And then I know I'm going to go to a water confidence session. I'm going to get through that. And I'll get to the end. And I'll get to eat dinner. And I'll go to sleep. And I'll do it again. And it got me through the whole process. And I was unassuming. If you had a lineup of guys, you would never have picked me to get through it. You're— there's no way. Because the guys are big buff guys, they all quit. They all quit. And they quit from runs, they quit from swims, they quit from water confidence. And the water is a great equalizer, right? The Navy knows that. The SEALs know this, is that when you get in the water and you're uncomfortable and you can't breathe, you're going to quit, right? Unless you can reprogram your brain to say, man, listen, I got this. And so one of the things we do is buddy breathing. Buddy breathing is really hard. You you pass a snorkel back between your buddy and you have an instructor who beats the crap out of you the whole time.

And the guy you're with can screw you because if he's a spaz and he wants to do breathing, you're not getting a breath. Yeah. And then when he gives back the breath, they cover your snorkel. You're not getting a breath either. And so you got to mentally prepare for not breathing. And so I was pretty comfortable. I was like, man, if you surf the North Shore of Hawaii, that's worse than any water con session you ever have in the military. Right. Like, getting held down at sunset is a big deal. And when you get held down for 2 waves, you are going to die. Right. If you survive it, man, life is good. Yeah. So I came straight from surfing big waves to going to INDOC, and they would do drownproofing, which sounds really dangerous, but I would pretend like I was a dolphin. I'd make noises and go down and take a little piss on the bottom, come back up, breathe. It was comfortable. I was like, this is like meditation. It was early, right? It was before mindfulness was a thing, right? It's like an immersion tank. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, yeah.

So you do that incrementally. Gets harder and harder every week. You do a 6-mile run at the end, a ton of push-ups, ton of pull-ups, all that crap. And then you graduate. And so once you graduate that, you're in the pipeline. And so then you do that 2 years you're describing. And so you usually start off at scuba school. We used to go back, go to Key West. We have our own scuba school now. We go to Key West with all the SF guys and we would crush it because we were so comfortable in the water. Like, you couldn't beat us, man. You couldn't crush us. And these open water swims were easy. We'd crush everything, man. The runs were hard for me because I wasn't that good of a runner, but we were studs. And you go from that, you get a scuba bubble, which means nothing to anybody except guys have been to scuba school. And you go to airborne school and people are like, what is that? It looks like a little astronaut.

Are you a welder?

Yeah, well, it looks like an astronaut. Then you get your airborne wings.

Door gunner on the space shuttle.

Exactly. Some stupid stuff like that. But yeah, you go through all these schools, right? So it's just really basic schools, basic airborne, free fall, survival. The hard one for PJs was going through the 18 Delta course. So going through SOCOM, that's hard for anybody.

Yeah, dude.

We had a lot of guys that wanted to be PJs end up not staying with it. They're like, screw this, can't do it.

Now, at that time, were you guys doing the full 18 Delta or were you just doing the SOCOM part of it?

No, we just did the SOCOM. The 18 Delta portion the backside maybe would have been more of a gentleman's course on the backside, more long-term care, stuff like that. But they didn't like us there. And the SF guys that were there, old crusty dudes, and they did not want us there. And so they made our lives hell. They'd fail us on stupid stuff. I mean, it's like memory now. It's like BSI, seen safe, is what you used to say, is like body service isolation. If you didn't say all these things, they would fail you. And it wasn't a part of your ability to treat somebody. It was all about your ability to recite things. And even anatomy physiology was like super stressful because it was like, how can you memorize these things right now? I didn't understand medicine when I left there. I was clueless. Like, if you were shot in front of me after the soccer, I'm gonna be like, BSI, scene safe. You're like, what do you keep saying that for? I'm like, I got my gloves on. Yeah. You know, pharmacology was foreign to me. And it never made sense to me until someone explained it to me in a way that I could understand it.

And the process is so much better now, man. Like, and, um, so everything's improved after the war. Everything improved.

So for our viewers and listeners, the entire 18 Delta, which is a Special Forces medic course, has the trauma portion, which is the SOCM, and you come out of there basically with skills equal to or exceeding a paramedic, right? Or that's the idea. And then for 18 Deltas, there's the long-term care because it's based also around like being in a village isolated, treating villagers.

As I recall, they learn stuff about like animal husbandry. They learn things about like what if there's a viral outbreak in the village.

How do we sterilize the well?

Yeah, that kind of stuff.

They're excellent medics. And I have a lot of love for 18 Deltas. They're awesome medics. They understand pharmacology. They understand wound care.

They're great.

I mean, I think they're better than a lot of the nurses. And so I was not that. Okay, so just full transparency, I was not. I was good enough to get by. I passed the course first try, and I was like, thank God, get me out of this place. And no, truly it was. And so I go through all these courses, and then I get to PJ school, and they put it all together. They teach you climbing and some high-angle rescue stuff. But it's real basic because it's hard to make someone an expert at high angle rescue in a few months. It takes years, right? Because that alone is a specialty skill. Right. But to be a good medic, to be a good parachutist, to be able to do— we do rams jumps, which is basically folding a Zodiac up and pushing on the back of a plane, getting to the ground, get to the ocean, pop it, a scuba cylinder, inflate it. All these things and you're supposed to be good at all of them, right? You're not good at any of them, right? You're competent, but you're not an expert. And so medicine is make or break.

All these other things are like, they're all make or break, right? Because they're all dangerous. But medicine is what you're—

it's your bread and butter.

It's what you're asked to do.

Right.

And if you don't rock it at it, someone's going to die in your arms. And so when you go to the 24th, they know you need a top off. And so they start, you know, kind of finessing those technical or tactical skills of medicine and make you a really good medic.

So yeah, tell us then about, was it Green Platoon? And I mean, you've had all this, you're already dragging around Draeger systems and MC6 parachutes and all this other crap that you've been trained on. What is this additional training, you know, tacking on that?

Yeah. So Green Team is really cool. So again, so I ran Green Team later on in my career, and it was a way better process than what I went through. What I went through was a bunch of courses. It was like really high-end courses, right? The best of the best. I mean, millions of dollars of training, but there was never an FMP to like all put it together, right? And so it was like, hey, they send me to swift water rescue courses in like West Virginia, and I would become an expert swift water rescue. But what does that mean, right? And, you know, they send me to these mountain rescue courses and I would do all this high-end, like, you know, very complicated technical rescue. What does it mean? Um, you know, our jump trip. Yeah, you're, you're getting very proficient at jumping. Um, but how do you put it all together tactically? And so it's crazy to think my green team vice the green team today, those guys that graduate green team today are freaking studs like they are. And I can say it's not about me, it's about them. They are studs because they get the training.

So what I went through is I go through advanced freefall. We learn how to jump all kinds of equipment. I don't actually know, maybe we were jumping NODs at the time, which is a big deal to jump NODs. People weren't doing it. Not everyone was doing it, right? I'm trying to think. Really crazy dive trip where we do 3 weeks of just getting back into draggers and doing line dives, which suck, and FMPs doing CQB, which CQB for every other service is very foundational. For us, it wasn't. And so I'd never done CQB when I came up there. I was a good shot, but CQB is very difficult. It's a different game, right? It's a different way of thinking and processing information very quickly. And so you're learning all this stuff within a year. And so you pop out of there and you're a tier 1 operator now, right? Well, not really, because I'd never been to combat, right? So I've been to combat, you know, quotations, but I never fired my weapon with your finger. Yeah, man. And so when I popped it on the backside, they send me to a tier 1 unit, and here I am with the best of the best, and I'm a nobody.

Now, what year is this that you get to the 24th? When you finish your Green Team?

I finished in 2003.

So to be fair, at that point in time, very few people had— like, because obviously it started in 2001, so people had combat experience.

Yeah, some guys did.

But combat experience was not something that was like— nobody had combat experience.

Probably not. Like, guys that went to Panama.

Yeah, you'd see like Grenada Raiders or dudes with Panama scroll and you'd be like, oh, badass. Yeah, he's seen legend. Yeah.

But so the guys that did the initial push into Iraq, I've been in these TICs and I was on green team with them. They're telling me stories. I'm like, dude, that's insane. And I'm enamored by it. I'm like, dude, how would I handle this? And the irony is that everyone thinks that training prepares you for combat. To a certain extent it does. But there's a next step and it's under fire when the stakes are really high and that's when things get real. Right. So my first big op, I was with the Navy and full compromise gunfight and I'm like, oh man, are we fighting? We're fighting now.

Is somebody shooting at us?

We're shooting. I can shoot back. Right. And you're looking at other people and they're shooting. I'm like, oh, I can shoot. It gets on. And people think it's— you're like, oh, I've got all this training. It doesn't matter unless you're with guys that have been there, done that, and watch what they do. There's some guys that just naturally, they're that, right? We call them Wayne Groves, right? They just want to get it on. But for most of us, it's like it's a process. And you're like, okay, this is normal. This is how you react to this. Okay, this is when you escalate force and it's not as intuitive as you think. And so thank God I was with the best of the best, right? They were the best of the best. And there were guys that had been on 2 rotations before of combat. They've been there, done that. And here I was, a new guy going enamored. I'm like, holy shit. Yeah, I want to hang with you guys.

Yeah, I think a good way to frame that, at least for me, is like you have a lifetime of cultural conditioning. Of not killing people that, you know, that are in front of you. And so when it first goes down, you— yeah, you might react, but there's also potentially that thought process. Am I really going to kill this human, this person in front of me?

Am I allowed to?

Yeah, right. Am I making the right— am I making the right decision? Yeah.

Yeah.

It sounds silly, but yeah, it's true, man. Like, and the guys that don't have that that limitation in their psyche. Other guys are liabilities too. You know, like if a guy just is weapons free from the start, you're like, dude, what's going on in your brain? Right, right, right. Yeah. It should be a measured approach. And I mean, my job is to save lives, right? And so, you know, it's also, you know, to take lives in that respect, but also it's my job is to save lives. And so there's a humanitarian aspect to my, my role and you have to be both. Yeah, you do.

Steely-eyed killer, but also a guy who can hold someone's hand while they're maybe dying.

And I take that very seriously, man. And so later on in my career, when I would get into other operations that were not necessarily PJ-focused, I never took it for granted. I was like, man, humanity is important and it's important in combat. And the guys that I saw that could balance that very effectively were guys I respected. And, um, you know, Kenley, it is kind of easy to be a killer, man. Like, to be that guy, to have, um, to be measured in your approach is a very mature reaction. And they're the guys that respect the most. And I saw it. I saw it live. And I'm like, holy crap, you didn't do that because this. And so you start processing this information. And so when I would talk to young guys that were like, you know, we said white side, And you're like, well, what's the difference? I'm like, there's a difference because I am seeing things that are very high level where people are making very good decisions and bad decisions, but I'm learning from it. And now I'm competent and capable to make decisions on my own. And so I said this before to some other folks is that being the first person to shoot is something I never wanted to do because you never know if you're right or wrong.

But as I got more mature, I'm like, Okay, I know this is right. This is the right thing to do because we are compromised and that guy is a problem. I'm going to shoot that guy. But that is not an intuitive thing. It's something that's learned. And so the high-level soft forces, Army and Navy, the guys that are very senior, they're wired that way. They understand it. Right. They're the guys that I want to be next to because they're going to make very good decisions. They're not going to make erratic decisions, aren't going to make emotional decisions. They're going to make very deliberate decisions. And that's a very high-level skill. And that's what separates Whiteside from Tier 1.

It's interesting because both in— because both the fields that you were in, combat and medicine, both of those fields, I think the easy route is to dehumanize the person in front of you, to compartmentalize and to become jaded about it.

Right.

That's the easy route. To be like you mentioned mindfulness earlier, to remain mindful in those situations, to whether you're in a medical situation and don't just shut it off because here's another human being who's suffering and it's easier to just live in a black and white world, right? And just shut off the emotion to it. And same with combat. It's easier just to shut off the emotion to it, as you know, than to— I'm in front of a human being who's suffering. I'm in front of a human being who's trying to kill me. So I'm going to kill them first without necessarily taking away their humanity or just—

Here's an example of humanity. I was at a really remote outstation in Afghanistan. Really remote. I mean, we ran out of food and water, kind of remote, right? You guys have probably been there before. 4. And we had a couple of prisoners. We call them pucks. We had them off target and they were in our makeshift prison. And we would basically, we'd wake up and it was like, okay, it's my turn to watch the prisoners. So I'd go in there and I'd feed them and I'd treat them humanely. We're not on target. There's no violence here. There's no emotion. You're in captivity. I'm taking care of you. I'm not going to I'm gonna treat you humanely. You wanna go to the bathroom? I'll take you to the bathroom.

Yeah, it's business.

It's not personal. If you wanna get crazy, like, we can deal with that. But like, at the end of the day, like, if you're respectful, I'm respectful.

Right.

And we had this guy who was there for 2 days. And I remember he was like really appreciative that I would give him food. I wasn't giving him benefits. I was like feeding him. I was doing what I should do, right? He's a human being. And it turned out he was just a legit farmer.

Yeah.

And me and the Master Chief took him down to the gate. We gave him a bunch of money, you know, because he blew his door off.

He pulled your beard?

No, he cried. Did he? And he thanked us and he got on his knees. And wow. And I'm like, man, you know, this could have turned out totally differently if I treated him, you know, like if I had been a prick. Right. Because there's groupthink that goes along in the military. Right. And but I knew better. I was like, man, this is a human being. And even if he is a terrorist, he's going to face his punishment. Right. There's no punishment I'm going to put on him now. Right. My job is to be ethical with him. Right. And to watch that reaction when it turned out it was a mistaken identity. Like, thank God. Thank God that we treated him well. Right. And there's a lot of mistakes that happened in the early days of Iraq. I mean, we saw Abu Ghraib and all those things that were for guys that have been around for a while, like, that's disgusting. Right. You know? Right. Those were nobodies. Right. Who did that crap. Right. Right.

And they weren't even— like, they can't even stand behind enhanced interrogation. They were just fucking around.

There were nobody there.

There was guards.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it was terrible because look at the repercussions from that, things that we face on the battlefield because of that. And so humanity exists despite combat. As I got older and as I retired, as I got more senior, I was like, you start to understand life in a different way. But when you're young, and again, group thing is really important because that's what happens. You think that's what you should be doing, the behaviors you should be doing. If you're with a group of people that behaves that way, you're going to behave that way because you want to fit in. Animal behaviors, right? And so, you know, for my saving grace was I was a mature guys that had been around for a long time and that were, uh, you know, I saw bad things in my career, but like for the most part, very professional guys. And, uh, you know, it helped me become the professional that I became, um, and helped me lead effectively later on in my career.

So how did you maintain, or how did Para Rescue maintain especially the 24th, the other skills that, like you mentioned before, you guys had a plethora of skills that you had to— the hangar rescue, the swimming, the scuba, all that stuff. Were you able to maintain that or did it all— it became a combat unit at that point?

Well, it's kind of like the Navy. I mean, the Navy kind of blew off diving for a long time, right? They were fighting in the desert. Right. And so PJs, it's funny because PJs are— we have so many skills that we do. And so a lot of guys gravitate to a skill.

Right.

And so you have guys that are really good at climbing and they're awesome climbers. I hate climbing personally. I hate it. It's scary to me. I hate being 100 feet off the ground and being off one freaking piece of pro and looking down like, this is going to— not only am I going to die, but I'm going to fall along the way and fall.

I'm going to be aware though. Yeah.

And, but I like jumping, right? So there's skydivers that really like jumping, and there's guys that really like medicine, guys who like shooting. And so you gravitate to, to a certain kind of, uh, discipline. You have to be good at all of them, kind of, but you're going to be good at one really well, right? And so, you know, we have the guy, hey, you're the jump guy, right? You're the guy that loves jumping tan, you know, bundles. Um, you're the guy that loves medicine, right? And so you're the guy who knows all the knots and, and yeah, yeah. And so PJs, it's really hard for PJs to— you can't be good at everything. There's not enough time in the day. And also there's people that have propensity to certain things. And so for me, I appreciated medicine because I knew how important it was. I didn't like it, but I knew how important it was, so I had to be good at it. Right. I love jumping. Right. So I was a big skydiver, a couple of thousand jumps, tandem masters, AFFI, all those things. I also love shooting, right? But how do you put all those things in to become a good operator?

And so what does the customer need you to be? If we're commodities, what does the Navy ask me to be? They're asking me to be really good at medicine. They're asking me to be really good at rescue and not be a liability on everything else, right? And so to not be a liability, you have to be good at those other things too.

Were teams put together with that sort of aspect that, hey, this guy, like, he's got high rent, high angle. This guy's good.

In the early days, we were so busy. We had Afghanistan, Iraq. I did back-to-back deployments. I would go from Iraq to Afghanistan. Wow. We were so busy. It was just like, hey, man, can you go?

Yes.

And you fake it till you make it, right? And you show up and you're like, holy crap. And so I remember I went to an outstation one time. This is like my 6th, 7th deployment. I don't know. And this OGA guy had a cyst in his armpit. This is like day 2. I'm in this outstation, real remote outstation. He's like, hey, man. Hey, Chad, will you cut this out of my armpit? I'm like, you want me to cut it out of your armpit? He's like, yeah. How hard can that be? I understand I got to do minor surgery.

There are no nerves or anything that go bad in the arm.

I used to carry all these books with me, all these books. And I looked at the book. I'm like, I could do that. Just do deep sutures. Okay. Yeah, ligatures. I'm like, got it. And so I put him down on this table. I put chuck, which is like basically a drape. I cut it out his armpit and clean it off real good. Iodine, clean it. He's got a big old dip in. He's like spitting in the cup. He was ex Ranger too, by the way. Of course. And so he's like, yeah, man, do your thing. So I numb it up real good. And I slice it open, just pus comes everywhere. It's just like so much. It's like an ice cream cone.

Like, and, uh, yeah, you're supposed to remove the sac, right?

Well, I did, but I'm like, I'm like clean everything, breeding it. I'm like, like, maybe I shouldn't be doing this. This is above my pay grade, right? Right. I'm like, yeah, I got it. And so, um, you know, I clean it real well. I sew them up, great stitches, great. I mean, my my saving grace is I did good sutures. And I'm like, hey, dude, you have to keep this clean. And we didn't have great showers there. And so hygiene was an issue. I'm like, dude, if you get infected, I'm screwed because I probably shouldn't be doing this. And he's like, yeah, that's good. I catch him out the next day playing basketball, sweating. And I'm like, what are you doing, man? I was like, this is on me. This is my credibility. But yeah, that's just how it was, man, in the early days. It was a free-for-all in the early days. It was wild. You could do whatever you wanted. It became more regimented, more disciplined later on into the war. But in the early days, anything went. That's just—

did you feel like a champ though? Like, like taking out a sys? You'd never done that.

No, I felt very nervous. Yeah.

Did you ever get an opportunity to do it again? Like, and you're like, I got—

oh, I did a lot of stuff later, but I, I was very confident, like You know, I feel like I could take out your appendix anyway. How hard could it be? I was like, right, I got a book.

Yeah, I love that self-confidence.

Yeah, dude.

So as time goes on, you're going— you did 17 combat rotations, serving in the squadron from age 22 to 41, ending up the senior enlisted guy. And super impressive career. I'd like to talk about some of the activities and things you were involved in during that time. One of the things you had mentioned, a C-130 crash in Baghdad.

Yeah, so like I said, we would do, back in the day, we had to do CSAR and then also the assault rotations with the Army and Navy. And so I would go from one to the other. And so I was in Balad, which was kind of like our hub. We had the helos and daytime, I get a call that a British C-130 got shot down north of Baghdad. And the 160th guys are like, we're not flying daytime over Baghdad. Like, not happening. And I'm like, well, I need a ride. Like, someone needs to take care of this. It's bad. And they asked me to do it. I took responsibility for it. It's mine now. It's my project. And I'm trying to find a ride. I can't get to where I'm going. And so there were some British, called Super Pumas, I believe. And so we jumped on those and they had M60s in the door, daytime flight. And we flew down. This is when Baghdad was kind of gnarly, you know? And so we dropped on the ground, had my Ranger, we call them SSTs or SAR security teams. And they're basically my security perimeter.

And I had my team, my PJ team, and had a combat controller. And so we get down there, I'm the team leader. I had long hair at the time, long beard. I was wearing real tree cammies, which was cool because back in the day it was cool to look different. And so I wanted to be as different as I could look. And so I was doing that. So stupid to think about now, right? But I get on the ground and this wreckage is like strewn for as far as you can see and on fire. There's fire in this river, in this ditch. It's a mess. And so I'm like, okay, guys, here's what we're doing. And half my Rangers, we were talking about radios. Half my Rangers had radios, half didn't. I'm like, okay, so I need radios in every BP. So we're going to split, get heavy weapon here because that's where most of the city is and we're going to do this. Okay. It don't matter. We don't have security. We're going to do this. We didn't have CAS. So the controller is trying to get on-call CAS.

You guys were the first on the ground?

Yeah, first on the ground. And in my mind, I knew the city was going to start waking up to what was going on and potentially opportunists like terrorists, because this is back when there's a lot of different terrorist cells. They were going to come and and they were trying to punch at us. So we get on the ground and my team was— I had a great team of guys. My controller, he's got Falcon View up. Back in the day, we had Falcon on top of the truck. He's sitting there plotting. We had no security and they're bringing back bodies. Right. But it's not bodies like you think. It's not bodies, it's pieces. And be super respectful to kind of because these are all British. There were some SAS folks and some British aviators, and we're bringing back these bodies. And I told the team, I said, listen, we're going to start putting bodies together based on, like, okay, right hand, left hand is a body. You have a torso, it's a body. And so we'll get accountability eventually. And I want you guys to get the weapons, all those things, and we'll get this done and we'll get out of here.

And it turned into a huge event. And it was massive. And so, excuse me. So guys are bringing back stuff and we talk about compartmentalizing information. I did very well. It didn't mean anything to me. I was very professional. It was very process. Like, here's what we have to do, we're going to do it. And so we're about 6, 7 hours into this. The guys are doing great. My Rangers are holding their positions. No one's pushed on us yet. And they bring another Super Puma down, maybe it was a Lynx. I forget which bird it was with some SAS guys, some 2/2 guys. And they're like, hey, mate, what do you want us? And I'm like, hey, we have some vulnerable positions over here. There's some apartments or some buildings. I was like, if you guys could go do some soft knocks, it'd be great. And they're like, yeah, absolutely. And they're guys, right? They're like, yeah, we're in. And so, you know, it didn't, they didn't ask any questions. Like, we got it. And so they went out there in the city and they started doing their things. They all spoke Arabic. They were doing their thing.

And, you know, sun goes down, you know, my guys hadn't eaten, you know, in a day. And I, I knew there was bodies in the ditch. So there was like a basic, you know, in Iraq, there was all these like irrigation ditches and it was on fire. It was diesel burning or JP-8, whatever. And, I'm like, you guys got to get your dry suits on. It was wintertime in Iraq. I was like, you got to go in the ditch and dig for bodies. So I was like, put a line on them, put a rope on them and go down there and do it. And so we had all our gear. And so guy puts his dry suit on, young PJ, other PJ goes on top to tether him, fire, pulling bodies and weapons out of the ditch. And sun goes down. We're alone, you know, and at the same time there was an accident in Mosul where a teammate of mine was in a PANDUR with the Army and a Ranger Striker hit.

That was right before I got there.

They collided and my buddy Chad Giesege was in there and his head got rocked pretty hard and he really needed to get his head drilled to relieve the pressure and Chad is still— he's quadriplegic still to this day, the accident. But it happened right when we're in the field. And so everyone kind of turned their attention to supporting that exfil and they forgot about us in the field. So we're just north of Baghdad. We're doing our thing. And it was the right call. I mean, they needed more help than we did. We were self-sufficient for the most part. It could have gone really bad for us, but it didn't. But I was like, why is there no comms? But the entire task force kind of went to lean on Mosul. And so here I was on the ground. The Brits had a kit bag delivered, and I'm like, oh, thank God, what is this? And we pull up and it's these flasks of tea. And I'm like, cool, man. I might want some tea. I'm like, yes, I'm drinking tea. It's like creamer in it. It's a delicious tea. And I'm like, it's not my thing, but yeah, Let's do some tea.

So we drink some tea and this is where it gets funny. So we survived that night and we're still cleaning this crash site. It's a mess. So day 2 goes in and these Marines come out, LAVs come out to me and I'm the team leader. I'm running the crash site. It's my crash site. And this Marine major shows up and again, I look like I'm like a hobo, right? Which is what you want to look in SOF back in the day. It was like you want to look as weird as you can look, and I look pretty weird. And he comes up to me, he's like, you're in charge. I'm like, yeah, look, here's where I want you guys. Show my Falcon View. Push your vehicles out there, heavy weapons, and basically telling him where to go. And so he listens, he puts his folks out there. So about 10 hours into the next day, we're still working. He starts to figure out that I'm an enlisted guy because the way the Rangers are talking to me. Hey, bro. And he loses his mind. Marine Corps major is a big deal, right?

Yeah.

And they don't take orders from enlisted guys. And he finds out I'm enlisted and he goes ballistic on me. And I stand my ground, of course. I'm like, listen, this is my crash site. You're in support of me. I was like, if you want to fight over rank, you can do that. But here's what I need you to do. And it was hard for him to process. And I'm like, listen, man, like, I'm being respectful to you. I'm not, I'm not being a dickhead. Right. I was like, I need you to help me and here's what I need you to do. And, um, it was, it was like, it was an inflection point for the operation. Like, it was like the mood changed, right? It was like, do we want to help you guys at that point? And, um, we ended up spending 3 days out there on the ground. We ended up, you know, coming back and, uh, it was a, you know, it was one of those ops. It was like, It was really strange. We came back and we didn't support the task force. Task force stood down ops because we're out there, we couldn't support them.

And you talk about compartmentalizing things, and I shared this with somebody else recently, is that I did a really good job of compressing or compartmentalizing my— whatever I was seeing, I just did a great job of packaging it really well. Taped it up and put it in the corner. Right. It didn't exist. It did not exist in my life. Right. Didn't exist in my mind. Nothing. And so we came back to the B-Huts. We were refitting. We just needed some sleep. We had to go basically support the task force in 6 hours. So we're getting like 5 hours of sleep, get some chow. And the chaplain and the psych doc came to my B-Hut. This is before you could talk to chaplains and psych docs. Right. You're like knocking on the door. I'm like, what? And they're like, do you That was my reaction, right? And I was the team leader, and I should have been more cognizant of my guys maybe were suffering. My guys maybe were dealing with stuff that I wasn't because I was maybe the problem, right? I was the guy that could just figure this stuff out in a negative way.

And I said no, I turned them away because I said, if I'm good, they're good. And years later, I reached out to one of the guys on that mission with me, and I said, I apologize to him. I said, I'm sorry, man. I messed up as a leader. That wasn't how leaders supposed to behave. I should have been cognizant of where you were at in your life, and I didn't. And it's one of my regrets as a leader. I learned from it, but I also continue to compartmentalize things through my career. And so you say 17 combat deployments. There's a lot of compartmentalization in that, right? And when you get really good at it, it becomes your process. It becomes natural to you. And it's not healthy. So it's healthy for the unit because you're still on the line, you're still deployed.

Right.

And it keeps you on the line doing your job.

Right. The day you get your—

Yeah, don't slow down though.

You leave the military, you're like, oh wow, that happened. What's all this? What are these boxes? Yeah, there's a lot of shit there. Oh wow, what's happening?

Yeah.

I need a U-Haul for all this.

Yeah. But yeah, so that was the C-130. Thing in Iraq. It was, I think that was 2005. But life just got crazier from there, man.

There was another operation where you guys, another element you were with may or may not have crossed into another place we may not mention. You said a pretty big firefight where you guys went and took on some bad guys in a hostile area. I was wondering if you could tell us what you can tell us about that.

Yeah. So I'd been in a few, like, on a few missions. I wasn't like the guy. I wasn't like the cool guy yet, and I didn't feel like it yet. That was the first one where I was like, holy crap, this is insane. And we got compromised. We were at ORP, we were setting up ladders and compromised. Dogs barking, gunfire from every compound. And it was like, it was on. And like I said, being around competent people, they all push forward. And I pushed forward because they were doing it, not because I was the man, not because I had big balls. I was like, we're going forward, we're going forward. And we push up there and it was the first time I'd been in a big firefight. It was the first time I fired my weapon at another human being. But then we had a bunch of casualties and they're like, PJ. And I'm like, oh, crap. I'm like, not only is this target chaos, now we got people shot, right? And so I go over there under fire and I'm like, oh, crap. So guys are shot, 2 guys shot, and the target is supposed to be secure.

Guy comes out of the door, starts shooting from one of the compounds that's supposed to be already cleared. I'm like, holy crap, this is insane, right? So I'm pulling guys across compound under fire. It's insanity. It's chaos. Other compounds are just stuff blown up all around us. We have no clue what's going on. And we're in a hostile kind of region and the city is waking up, right? And we had one asset overhead and they were working it, man. And the CCT was working it. And he's a stud. He actually lives close to me in my neighborhood now. He's a stud. And he managed that chaos very well. But I started getting more casualties. Guys were like, I had a guy come up to me. He's like, I'm shot in the head. I'm like, huh? I'm like, where? And so I pull off his helmet and the round struck the front of his head, bounced, stuck in the back of his helmet. And I'm like, holy crap. I'm like, check his helmet. His skull is not broken. I'm like, dude, keep clearing, man. Yeah, we were so thin. It was like, keep clearing. He ended up spraining his ankle and he was complaining about spraining ankle more than getting shot in the head.

Another guy shot the legs and it's just chaos. So, you know, it probably was only maybe an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours of kind of conflict. It felt like all night.

Yeah.

And we end up pulling this guy out. I had a— I went super light because we end up pumping like 8 hours to this target. So I was like super light. And this is back when none of the SEALs would carry any gear for me, right? They wouldn't carry a Skedco. They wouldn't carry nothing. I mean, they wouldn't even carry blowout kits on their own kit. It was like, hey, Chad, you got it, right? I'm like, not for everybody. And it got better through the years, right? It got better. But we were so lean and mean, it was like we were pulling him out on a puller slitter. If you've ever carried someone on a puller slitter, it's pretty difficult. You talk about CrossFit workouts, that's the workout of the day. And we humped him down to this road. The city was waking up. They're coming out like hunchback, Notre Dame kind of style. And the 47 almost crashed on top of us because they were so hyped up. And I could have touched the bottom of the 47 when they landed. And so I'm covered in blood. My uniform is covered in blood. And we get back and when you get back from debriefs from big ops like that, it's kind of like everyone's kind of chipping away at how many people they killed.

And if you do the number, you're like, that's like 4,000 people. Right. There wasn't that many people there. But, and then here I was dealing with what could I have done better? And I could have done a lot of things better. And I have a lot of remorse from that operation for the things that I didn't do well, and I learned from it. And so I committed myself to being way better than I was on that op, and I became obsessive about it, honestly, as an operator.

What were the things that you became obsessive about?

Medicine. Um, I wasn't super good at it. You know, I wasn't good at pharmacology. I wasn't good at pain management. Um, wasn't good at all the basics. And so I committed myself to being great at it. And, uh, and I, and I think I became that, but that was like a really formative experience for me. And then you only get a couple, you know, in your career. And, um, You know, some guys have had a lot, and I'm sure you guys have talked to a lot of studs that have had a lot of crazy experiences. But for me, that was one that I could have proved myself on, and I failed. And it was, you know, failure to me, I'm hypercritical. I'm like, okay, I could have done this, this, and this. But I committed myself to never making mistakes again. And, you know, maybe one day walking on the street in New York, maybe I'll get the chance. There's a—

Hang out long enough. Another operation you were involved in. I mean, you can say whatever you'd like to or not talk about on this one, but the Captain Phillips rescue.

Yeah. So there was a few Air Force guys in that op. I was with a small team of guys that jumped in early. I was a jump master, jumped in a bunch of, you know, a mixed bag of nuts into the water. And our job was to basically turn the lifeboat around before it hits Somalia, because if it hits Somalia, they would be gone. Right. And we knew that the squadron was going to blow out and they're going to do the no kidding hostage rescue. We're just going to like, we're going to fix it. Right. If they get the hinterland, they're gone. Right. And what happens with hostages in Somalia is they basically hold them for a year. They go black and they pop up on the net, make their demands, but it's really hard to find them. And so we had very little guidance. And we went down. I was in an apartment complex. I can't tell you what country, but like, hey guys, we want you guys to go. Like, all right, we got parachutes? No, we found some parachutes in ISU-90 that were expired by a couple of years. And I'm like, parachutes don't turn into toxic waste every 2 years.

They're probably fine. and this is pretty important. Let's just jump them. And so when you talk about ORM in the military, it's a non-starter. I'm like, screw it, man. I'm the jump master. I'm, I don't know if I'm allowed to make that decision, but we're gonna do it. And we jumped, it was all fine. We got there, um, you know, and we were part of the solution. And so, um, the squadron sent up a really small contingent of folks to where we were already. Um, and then it resolved itself the way it did. Uh, I can promise you it didn't go the way the movie went or the TV said it did. It was much more kind of low-key operator stuff. There were some heroics that happened that night. There were some guys that did some pretty awesome stuff. But at the end of the day, it was kind of potshots from very, very close distance, pulling him out. And then what people don't realize is that when we pulled him out, I flew back to the main aircraft with him, and Discovery Channel basically blurred my face and said I was a Navy SEAL, which is the highest praise I've ever got in my career to be called a Navy SEAL.

My wife saw it and she's like, that's you walking. But when we did that, we came back, the pirates attacked another ship. This never made the news, is that they attacked another ship in retaliation, and they just so happened to drop off their cargo. So they're sitting very high in the water and they couldn't get on the ship. And so they called us and were like, hey, there was like 6 of us, like, can you guys come help us? Like, mayday. And so the destroyer we're on, like, can you guys go? And so the regular squadron was going back and high-fiving each other, cocktails, whatever. We're on this ship and Phillips is with us, so he's with us on the smaller ship and we're like, yeah, we'll go. And so we went and basically did hook and climb on the ship.

Did you take Phillips with you or no?

No, he's chilling on the captain's mast. I was like, yeah. So we went out to this ship and we thought there was pirates on it because there was RPGs that went low order in the side of it. I mean, it was bad. It was like, holy crap, this is legit. And maybe it was a little bit of hubris. We're like, yeah, we got it. And so me and one other SEAL, we cleared the front of the supertanker, which is like conex boxes, like multiple football fields. They're insanely big. I didn't know how big these things were. And we're clearing this, the two of us, piling off conex boxes, just one after the other, thinking we're going to take— no body armor, catcher's mask, NODs. And we had 416s. We didn't have MP7s. We had 416s. And the rest of the team went to go to the superstructure, which they thought everyone was locked down in. And so we're assuming we're getting in a gunfight and there's no one on the ship. And it was the eeriest thing.

And so it was just out there floating.

No, they attacked this thing. They couldn't hook onto it because it's so high and we didn't know this. And so the crew had locked themselves in the superstructure thinking they were under duress and they called Mayday. And so here we are to save the day and there's no one there. So we have to ride back with this ship for like 2 days and they're like merchant marines on this thing. Yeah. And I don't know if you guys know what these people are. They're like full on criminals, man.

They're like the old foreign legion.

They're making shanks. And I'm sleeping in this bed. I'm more scared of them than Somali pirates. And I'm like, these guys are going to kill me and they're going to eat me. No, it was an interesting dynamic, but there was so much more to the story. Eventually it will come out. I'm assuming somebody will talk about it. But yeah, it was cool. It was cool to be there. I didn't know it was a big deal. It was during Easter. And so I would call from the fantail of the ship on my Iridium phone. I had an Iridium phone because I'm a bougie guy, right? So I got an Iridium.

Too good for a Thuraya.

Yeah. And so my wife's like, she's like, what's going on out there? I'm like, nothing. What do you hear? She's like, it's a big deal back in the States. Yeah.

Oh, the Thuraya was the radio, right?

Yeah. Thuraya is in a different network. Yeah. But I had both. Yeah. That's how you know you really made it when you have a Thuraya radio.

So when you guys were on this, like, 2-day pleasure cruise, was the command— was there anybody going, where are you guys?

No, because I think they were— so people give special operations, like, a lot of credibility, but they're hyperfocused on getting the the assault force back home. And so we were kind of like extra.

What was the port of call? Where did you guys get off?

I can't tell you. Okay. Yeah. But when we came back, I'd tell you that the team and I—

I'm going to pretend it's Bali and you guys got off.

I wish. Well, it'd be the wrong part of the world, but I don't care. In this— Yeah, no, that part of the world is not very nice. But we went back there, had some cocktails, and it was funny because It was like nothing happened. It was like, it was just another thing. And so we went back, had some drinks. Actually, we went and partied that night and had a good time. And it's just funny to think how, you know, things appear in the news, how sensationalized they are. But to us, it was like, yeah, it was cool, man. We did, we went and did the thing. We went and do another thing, you know?

Yeah.

So you're constantly looking for the next thing, right?

To kind kind of fill your bucket and, and the next thing has to be cooler than—

has to be cooler, right? Has to be more sensational, more violent or whatever you want it to be. Right.

So, um, what was the next thing for you then on that rotation?

Um, you know, not a lot. It was a lot of, uh, prep. And so my job was to kind of this is before you can imagine what part of the world it was. It was before things were built up. So we were building things up. We were building partner forces and those things, doing really like the grunt work of it. You know, kind of the non-sexy stuff, living in safe houses, true safe houses where, you know, you're eating, you're truly eating what you got, local food. You can't go outside because you have to be, if you see a white guy there, it's a big deal. So people say they're living in a safe house. You're like, dude, when you're living in a safe house, you don't walk outside. Right. So a lot of that grunt work on that deployment.

You said that you also spent about 7 years doing some of the more like clandestine operations.

Yeah. So I was doing that when the Captain Phillips thing happened. We would do low-vis ops. OPE is a term that gets thrown around. It's operational prep of the environment, or OPB prep of the battlefield, or AFO, which is advanced force operations. Just sexy ways of saying, you know, you're doing things that aren't necessarily tied to, you know, big constructs of military. And you can do OPE, OPB anywhere, right? You could do it in Indonesia, you could do it in East Africa, you can do it in Europe, but there's not a lot of people who do it. There's people that say they do it because they go into country and they're like, hey, I have a passport and I'm wearing a suit. That's not OPE. When you're actually doing tasks and saying, hey, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna fix this problem for you. You know, those are the problem sets that are more difficult and it takes a more refined, you know, kind of team. And so it takes guys that are smarter. It takes guys that are able to work on their own. And so I did that for a while.

And OPE can envelop a number of different things from intelligence gathering to identifying landing zones to all these sorts of things.

Yeah, it's not one thing. I think that traditionally it's been in one vein of like, I'm going to do caches in Eastern Europe. Right. Okay, that's traditional, right? But yeah, that's an element. But what my experience was is that when you have really talented guys, you can do anything, right? And you say, hey, Chad, can you guys go do X? Yes. The answer is yes. And if I'm a PJ, can I go do an LZ survey? Yes, I can. If you're a really high-end competent— because there's different types of SEALs, right? The SEALs that we're with are very high-functioning guys that can solve problems. Can you go do X? Yes, we can. Can you go work with this partner for us? Can you build up this safe house? Yes. And so it's not sexy stuff all the time, but a lot of times it devolves into very dangerous activities. And especially if you're in environments that are very nascent and there's no footprint.

Semi-permissive to non-permissive.

Non-permissive. Yeah. Yeah. So truly non-permissive. And not a lot of military, even soft guys have experienced this, right? Where you're like, oh, I was in Afghanistan. I was in a remote, Okay, that's cool. What about when you're in a completely behind enemy lines? When you're in a country that you're not at war with and they want to kill you, and when they do, no one's coming to get you. When you're a TIG, there's no QRF and there's no CASVAC.

Right.

And so my job would always be to figure it out. Like, Chad, well, if this happens, what do you do? I'm like, and so I would work commercial assets trying to get international SOS to go in and pull us out of remote regions. And it became a thinking man's game, which was really good for me because I was intellectually stimulated. Right. And I was like, holy crap, this is fun.

So let's talk a little bit about OPE and OPB real quick. We're talking about operational preparation of the environment and operational preparation of the battlefield. Sometimes we'll talk about like advanced AFO, advanced force operations. And really it's the guys who are going in where we might have interest, but we're not sure if we have interest.

And we might be at war there one day.

One day. And really setting up the plumbing, setting up the environment.

Yeah. You know who the rock stars are? It's not the operators. It's the SIG guys. It's the tech guys, guys that can look at infrastructure and logistics. Those are the rock stars. And despite how cool we think we are, without them, we wouldn't do those jobs. And so a lot of OPE and AFO is SIGINT EW related. And so you being able to contribute to that mission set is important. And so if you're a knuckle dragger, we don't need you. We don't need another gun. We need guys that can do the gun work but also do the tech stuff. And so a lot of operators became kind of dual purpose where they had a basic understanding. I'm not going to overinflate my worth, but a basic understanding of how SIGINT works. How networks work, and then how to get after those things and how to employ tactics and techniques to set conditions for other folks to come in and be successful.

Right.

And so you look at the theater right now for Europe and even PACOM, there's a lot of prep work that has to go on to make those theaters successful.

Now, there are Army special mission units that that's sort of their bailiwick, their bread and butter. But of course, everybody does everything now. How did SEALs get into that?

That's definitely not their one specialty. Right.

I mean, and everybody did.

So you had intelligence collection units that are really good at it. But basically within JSOC, like, if you read the book Team of Teams, that was the early days of Iraq. Very basic construct. It grew very fast and then everyone wanted the mission, so everyone built capabilities, right? And so everyone had the same capabilities, right? And so when you had the Army and Navy, they had all the same, like, you know, EW, like they had everything, right? They were all, you know, it wasn't joint anymore. It was like, this is a behemoth task force that can do everything, right? And this one was too. And so it became kind of a dogfight for mission. And so everyone could do it. And so those very bespoke capabilities you're talking about, they were important and they would definitely be involved if it was very high level. Otherwise they're like, we got it. Right. And so it was a really interesting dynamic to watch develop over the years. Like I said, I came in 2002 to selection in 2003. And then watched the whole transformation of the command and it became a monster. Right.

Right. And for you, I mean, because it's interesting that you were there because the SEALs do have their corpsmen.

No. Well, they do and they don't.

Okay.

If you're a SEAL and you go through Green Team, you're an assaulter. I see. You're not a corpsman anymore.

Interesting.

Okay.

I didn't know that.

You don't carry a medrag. You know, there's some guys that were still interested in medicine and they would help, but they're not carrying a med rock. They're carrying, you know, door charges. They're carrying, you know, MP7s. They're carrying thermobarricades because the M4s are too heavy. Yeah, they are. No, they are. And so it basically relieves them from having to do that job. They're assaulters. Yeah. With the Army, you have 18 Deltas, and they are 18 Deltas, and they are the primary medic for that squadron. And PJs will help them, But the PJs are to rescue and recovery.

Right.

And so that's the differentiation.

And for you sort of focusing on this mission for a few years, were you afforded training opportunities to go learn skills, train up with these teams before you deploy?

Yeah. Oh, 100%. So you're basically attached to that team. I mean, you live with them, you train with them, do workups with them. And then to get specialized training, you have to be very specific on what you wanna do because you only have a finite amount of time. Right. And so if you're a guy who needs to top off on, on medicine, like you, you got 2 weeks, what are you gonna do with it? Right. And so you're gonna spend a ton of money and get the best medical training you can get. Um, and, and that's the differentiator too between Whiteside and, and Tier 1 is that like, if I want to go, you know, to the, the best burn center in the world, like I can go there. And top off on burn injuries.

Right.

And that's the thing when you talk about going into remote medicine and some of the safe house stuff is that you have to specialize then because I would have to do pharmacology stuff in these safe houses where it wasn't expected to me on the assault side. Right. I don't care. Just do good pain management. It's all we care about.

Right.

If I'm living in a safe house and guy gets sick, I got to take care of them, right? And so I would have to top off on those skills. And so guys like 18 Deltas, it's very intuitive to them. They would know how to do it. But here I was, the guy that could integrate with the assault mission, go back and forth to the AFO mission. But then I just need to top off on the medicine right here, and I can get there fast, right? And so I think that's the biggest— one of the best attributes of PJs within that world is that they're very quick to react to needs. And so if you look at a tech company, the successful tech companies are the ones that can react to the needs of the customers very quickly and build a thing. PJs within tier 1 units are that. And they can say, oh, you want me to be a ropes expert? Gotcha. Let me go to Montana real quick or get topped off and I'll become an elite climber, AMGA certified. It's like that.

And with medicine, you guys have access to some of the best hospitals in the United States.

Yeah.

All the best trauma hospitals in the United States are very good with working with the military.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of folks that work habitually with them. When you work at big cities, like, there's the shock traumas. And any big city that has a lot of violent— I think New Orleans is one of them. New York's one of them. Where you have a lot of stabbings and shootings, you're getting reps, right? And I dote on the Rangers a lot, but the Ranger medics, their medics became the best in the tiers. I feel like they had so much trauma, whether it be internal to the regiment, also host nation. They were doing so much stuff and their PAs and doctors were training them nonstop. So when they come off the missions, when everyone else is playing video games, they were doing classes. And that's why they became so good at what they did. And so you had to do refreshers every 2 years to keep your currencies up. And every 2 years I would go through SOFMS, which is at Fort Bragg. And I could have gone to the Gucci ones and gone skiing and done some medicine, get refreshed. Right. I knew it was so important that I had to go with the best guys that were doing no kidding military medicine.

So I did every single time, every single refresher I did at SOCMAS, every single one of them. I never went to New Hampshire and went skiing. I never did in my whole career. And guys are like, dude, why don't you want— I'm like, I want to, but I have to be good at this. And what I realized was when I go to Ranger medics, these guys would teach me a ton, and then they started becoming instructors at SOCMAS. And I was so impressed by these guys because they were so switched on and they'd seen so much and they were able to instruct very well. I was very impressed by the Ranger medics, man. And so I championed us getting back into that program because we kind of got pushed out of it and we got pushed back in. But I have a ton of respect for them, man.

And they never, like, asked you bis—

what was it?

BISM? BISMIS? The acronym that you used, the basic system or the systems.

Oh, BSI.

Yeah. No, they never hammered you on that?

No, man. I mean, these guys were, like, doing buddy transfusions. They'd done them in the field, and they were doing high-end, like, just very creative medicine. And they were so good at what they did. I knew that if you want to be a good combat medic, you have to talk to the best combat medics, guys who've seen it. And so, like I said, in that first mission that I messed up, that was my chance. And so if these guys were getting chances every night, man, they are going to be the best very fast. And so when you're working with very high-end soft guys, they're not getting shot all the time. You know what I mean? You shouldn't be getting shot all the time, right? So the Rangers were getting shot a lot, no offense, but they were getting shot a lot because they're going on some dangerous And the Rangers took over Afghanistan and they were basically a tier 1 force in Afghanistan and they were killing it, man. Yeah, they were doing so many ops and they were kicking ass because everyone else is so focused on everything else in the world. They're like, we got this.

And so they got a lot of reps. And so that's why I am— that's why I love what they did and I respect the hell out of them.

So you also mentioned there's some OTB ops that you were on.

So in everyone's career, you want to do an OTB, right? So you want to over the beach op. It sounds cool. I went to a theater and there was a team back in the States that were training for a mission, and I was already in theater and I was doing my thing. I was drinking cocktails and going to parties, and they're like, well, there's a PJ controller in theater. Like, yeah. Like, okay, well, we could just use them, right? And so these guys came out, it was like, I forget, 5 or 6 guys. And they're like, hey, you guys go to this OTB? I'm like, how hard is it? It's a swim into the beach, right? It's not rocket science. And so we did one shakeout swim. They'd done like weeks of workup. We had done zero. Me and the controller, like, how hard is this going to be? It's like, it's a swim. And so we go into a destroyer. We go into a RHIB. No, HX, I forget if it was HX or RHIBs, but then we go to the zodes and the zodes kick us off and we swim in and we swim in to the hinterland in this remote region.

We walk in and I'm not on a night schedule, so I was really tired and they were doing something. There was an activity, there was like a terrorist camp right next to us and it's like a recce. We were doing something. I can't tell you what we're doing. We're doing something. And I'm like bored out of my mind. It was the most boring— I mean, there was like 100 guys sleeping down a ridgeline. You could see them and we couldn't do anything about them. But we do our thing, whatever we're doing, and then we pull out to patrol out. And so I'm in the back of the formation. And if there's any Navy guys watching this, they'll know Navy guys are not really good at patrolling the basic fundamentals of line formations or passing signals back and forth. They just kind of wing it, right? So they're patrolling, everyone's got their heads down, all on MP7s. And I'm walking in the back. I'm the second man. There's rear security. These guys go over this ridgeline and there's this, uh, there's like this animal pen. So in, in this region they have like these— they built these walls with sticks to keep the lions out, and they have one entrance, and so they know when the lion's coming or whatever.

And so, um, and these guys rustle because these birds kick up, and they come out, and I see my nods. I'm like, holy crap. So I put my laser on them and I stop, and I, I'm like And I was like, no, no one's going to look at this. I'm like, I'm doing this thing. And no one stops. They keep going. I'm like, okay, so it's me and him and we're about to get in a tick. And so my laser's on them. These guys get up, they got weapons, and I'm like, oh my gosh, of course this is going to happen right now. And the guy behind me sees it, puts his laser on it. So the two of us, and we stop. We're holding. These guys know something's going on outside. And people in movies, you're like, oh, it's 2 or 3 guys. It's easy to clean up. No, it could be very nasty, right? But our entire force has gone over the beach to get their fins on to go swim back out. And we're standing there. I'm like, okay. And so we just stop and we wait. We're there for 5 minutes.

Which is an eternity on an op. Those guys never came back. They didn't even notice we weren't even there. And so these guys finally chill out. They turn back around with their weapons and go back down. And you can see they have a little candle in there. And we patrol back out, go back to the beach. I'm like, dude, what the hell? Are they gone? No, they're still there. They're still there. I'm like, where you guys at? Dude, there was two. And we swim back out, but there's so much comedy within operations, within soft, that we just get lucky so much. And we swim back out. And it was funny when we swim back out to the destroyer, they had a dip tank on the back of the fantail. We're like dipping our weapons in fresh water and all our gear and all these Navy folks, like conventional Navy folks on the back. And this chick's in the back. She's like, I know y'all out there killing black folks. And we're like, huh? Like, we didn't kill anybody. She's like going off on us. And one of the Master Chiefs there just rips her a new one.

And I'm like, do people really say that kind of stuff? Like, we come off an op, like, that's fucking crazy. No one has no idea what we're doing. Yeah. And to make that comment is like, dude, like, no, we're actually really civilized people. We're doing some very gentlemanly stuff in the hinterlands.

Yeah, I mean, She's in the same military you are.

Oh, well, that's the other thing is the military is like, uh, there's, there's this cognitive dissonance of what the military is. Like, the military is designed to fight and kill, right? That's what it is, right? It's not there to win hearts and minds. It's not there to be show of force. It's there to kill. And if you don't process that information and come to terms with it, you're not a part of the solution. And so, um, I think a lot of military folks, because within the past 20 years, there's only a handful of people that went to combat. Right. A lot of people deployed.

Right.

Within the people that deployed, there's only a handful of people that actually went outside the wire and fought. Right. But to the civilian, they look at it like, oh, you were in the military. Thank you for your service. You're like, oh, you went to Afghanistan. No, you were in Bagram and you were a logistics person and you never left the wire. And you had coffee every day, you had good chow hall. And there were certain people that went and fought, and it's a very small group of people. And that's hard for people to understand. Like, it's a small group, man. Yeah.

And now, as you're going on all of these clandestine operations, you've done more conventional operations, rescue operations, like, you're becoming pretty, like, salty senior guy in the unit at this point.

And then you accidentally make rank, right?

Right. And the Air Force, I mean, I know it used to be, but the Air Force used to be very hard. It was probably the hardest service to make rank in.

It is. And so if you've seen the movie, like, Pure Luck, like, dumb luck fall into things. And so I made E-8, and I was like, oh my gosh. And the Air Force is a big deal. You're like, oh, your career is over. And I was like, if I can just hide as an E-8, maybe they'll still deploy me. I can just hang out here for a while. And so I deployed a couple of times in E-8, which is a big deal in the Air Force. And then finally they're like, hey, dude, because you're supposed to be managing people. You're supposed to be going to ops, right? You got to go to ops, man. You got to pay your penance. And I'm like, I want to go to ops. And so I went out and did a thing as an EA, and it was like a big deal. They're like, you can't be doing that stuff anymore. This is all I want to do in my life, right? This is what I'm designed to do. This is what I trained to do. This is what I want to do. And they threw me in ops.

And this is funny. I mean, it's not combat related, it's not sexy, but I went to ops and I'm like, it's like Superbad or what's the movie when there's like FML? It's like, this is my life now. And so I did that for 6 months and they're like, hey, Green Team selection opened up. Then we need a senior guy to go there. Do you wanna go do that? I'm like, yes, yes, absolutely. Get me outta ops. And so I went there and And that, that was really formative for me as a leader. Um, I learned how to lead in a different way. I, I had been leading in the past, leading the way I saw other people lead.

Mm-hmm.

And I thought that was the right way to do it, and it was not authentic for me.

Mm-hmm.

And so, um, I got a chance to kind of reset for myself and say, listen, um, I'm not a hard ass. I'm, I'm not, I wanna be, but I'm not, I'm never gonna be. I'm a nice guy. I can connect with people. And so that's what I need to do. And so when I ran selection training, I got to kind of cut my teeth doing that. And then from selection training, I went to the 24th STS and became the chief there as the senior enlisted.

So this is kind of putting you on the spot and take your time in answering this, but if you had to pick like a fictional or a real character, Chuck Norris.

There you go. Okay.

No, but based on how you thought you were supposed to lead and then how you actually became a leader.

Well, you see hard asses in TV, and I grew up with hard asses, right, as leaders. And candidly, they were great, man. I was like, those guys are bigger than life. And in the Ranger Battalion, you guys know if you're a senior guy in the Ranger Battalion, you're a hard ass, right? But What I realized was that my superpower was connecting with folks and being empathetic and having high EQ with folks. And so I could still be just as effective and not have to be that guy. But it took me a while to figure it out because I was immature, you know? And so as I became more mature and became more self-aware and comfortable in my own skin, I realized that I could lead a different way. And, you know, Is that a kinder, gentler military? Maybe. I mean, I still have a temper. I can still get mad.

I think you put your thumb on it pretty well, that the screaming and the yelling, that's a lot of trying to throw up a smokescreen to compensate for an inability of leadership.

I think there's also a time for that, maybe like when molding people. But even Ranger Battalion changed dramatically from the time I got there, when I was there, which was pre-GWAT. And when, as from what I understand, as, you know, through the GWAT, as it became more professionalized, that, you know, people started treating— leaders started treating it— it was a professional organization. You know, it was very capable when I was there.

I remember the stories of Ranger Battalion where they like throw fire extinguishers at you guys. You guys are walking back and forth and they throw extinguishers. I mean, I heard the stories from—

but that was just Ranger games.

Yeah, but you understand the dynamic. It's like it's doggy dog. Right. And if you're the tier 1 operator, you're supposed to be a little bit mature.

Right.

And so here I was leading these guys who are very capable and they're all extremely competent. They were all combat hardened guys.

Right.

They didn't need me to be badass. Right. Like, I had my reps. Right. But candidly, it didn't matter. My job was to support them where they were at and be a good leader for them and be the leader that I never received. And so, you know, it's easy to say that. I can be very honest with you and tell you that I did the best I could to be that guy. And I think I did a decent job at doing it. But it was an inflection point for me personally. And it was a big growth moment for me.

Just to clarify a point, when you talked about going to ops, that sounds really sexy, but for people who don't know, ops is like operational planning.

It's the worst.

It's not sexy.

Yeah. Doing sit reps and sending gear to guys overseas. It's terrible.

Yeah.

I mean, someone's got to do it. It's an important job. I just felt like I was the pony in the paddock that was dancing around, kicking, and I wasn't ready to go into the stable. I was like, I want to keep dancing. And that's probably the best analogy I could think of. Right. But for me personally, I just wasn't ready to hang it up. But in the Air Force, when you get to that point, you get senior, you're done. And in the Army, especially within the tier 1 unit, you can be an E-9 and run and gun. Right, until the day you retire, right? And I think that's awesome. In the Navy, you can do it to a certain extent, but they're not the same as the Army because there are a lot of E-9s in the Army. In the Air Force, there's not a lot of E-9s. And so if you're an E-9, it's like, holy crap, we need you to go here and we need you to manage this program or this unit. And it's not sexy. It's grunt work. We need guys to do it. We need good guys to do it.

And so I wasn't one of those guys who was really excited about going to the 24th to be the chief. I never aspired to be that. A lot of guys did. I never did. But when they asked me to do it, I was like, yeah, I'll do it for them. And my wife knows this. She was like, I was like, I don't know how I can do all this stuff. Right. And I was like, I want to be a good leader for them. And so I really tried. I tried really hard to be what I should have been in that unit. But it was not prestigious for me. There was no, like, it wasn't like beating my chest. It was like, I made it. I was like, I was like, oh crap, I got this job and it's going to be hard. And I have to deal with all these people issues. And all these guys are in harm's way. And we were nonstop deployed and we never stopped deploying. Our unit, just like a lot of these units, were deployed since 9/11 into perpetuity. And so until just recently, they stopped deploying. Right. Afghanistan, Iraq drawdown, Syria, they're home.

And that's when the real problems come in, right? That's when guys are like, now you're getting DUIs. Now you're getting the guys with domestic issues. I didn't have those issues. I just had a bunch of pipe hitters. They're doing great things and they were very mature and they were capable. I had the best situation.

So what year did you take over? Like the Green Team?

Was it maybe 2017?

So, and you went in 2003, 2002, 2003?

Yeah.

Oh, not to Green Team. Yeah, Green Team, right? Yeah, 2002, 2003.

How had—

by the time you got there, how had it changed over those 14 years?

So much. So here's the biggest thing that changed, how we selected folks. And so if you guys came to us, in the unit, you put your package in. You know, we're like, okay, you had a DUI here. It was 5 years ago. Have you learned from it? Okay. You keep your nose clean. Okay. Maybe we'll talk to you. Okay. You get through the front door just from your package, you know, interview, come to selection. And then we do this process where we, we really get to know the person, the individual, their psyche. We understand how they make decisions. Um, we put them in situations, ethical dilemmas. We do all these things that really break down the individual and how they think, which is way more important than how much you lift.

Right.

Do we still want you to be a stud? Absolutely. You got to. Right. You got to do the long ruck.

Right.

You got to run fast. You got to carry heavy things.

You got to keep up with the SEALs. You got to keep up with the Rangers.

That's an expectation.

Yeah.

But here's what we're asking you to do. We're asking you to have a very clear ethical compass. We're asking you to make good decisions under stress. We're asking you to have a high EQ and IQ. We're looking at those things. Okay? We're not taking dummies. We have very smart guys within the Air Force Special Operations side. They're very competent dudes, and we test them, and we test them amongst their peers. And so one of the questions— it's funny, I was thinking about talking to you guys about this— is that one of the questions is, would you want to be in a car with this guy for, I I think it was like an 8-hour car ride. And that's a good question, right? Do I want to ride in a car with you for 8 hours? What does that mean? Does it mean I like you? Does it mean I can get along with you? Can you blend into a team room? Can you deal with other folks? Can you do that and also keep your moral compass? Because that's another ethical dilemma that exists going with other tiers. And so our guys have done a really good job of staying above the fray, and I'm really proud of them.

Wasn't that a question that Beckwith had was, do I want to paddle upstream with the guy, with this guy?

Could have been.

Yeah. Yeah. When we talked to Danny Colson. Yeah.

Beckwith, that's a whole other story.

Yeah.

But that's important, right? In the sense of outside of this person being a high performer, like, if it's just he and I, out there for 3 days.

I don't care how fast you run. I don't, I don't care how much weight you can lift. I want you to be able to carry your own weight, but I also want you to make good decisions under stress. And so that's not very, it's a hard thing to tease out. And so we would have psychologists in there nonstop with us looking at our bias, right? It's because I have bias. And so if I'm hiring somebody, I want some probably to look like me, right? I mean, And you probably do the same thing. You're like, yeah, man, he's a puss. Like, he's not like me. And so you're going to basically dismiss that guy. Or if you're an extrovert, he's an introvert. You're like, ah, he can't be like me. Yeah. And what we realized was, is that when we talk about diversity in the military and people roll their eyes at it because it's been miscategorized, it's diversity of thought. And we want people to think differently and can solve problems differently, differently than me, because it makes me stronger. Right. And so if we can do that as an organization, you can be successful.

And all of the units are kind of changing their selection models to tease these things out. Back in the '80s and '90s, it was like, how fast can you run? How good can you shoot? We need more than that now. And we need guys that can operate on their own. And so I think the soft operators of today are far superior than of my generation. And I think it's fair to say because I am that, I think we were pretty good and we're pretty damn hardy because we did a lot of combat. But were we prepared? I don't think we were. I wasn't prepared. We prepared these guys because we looked at all the gaps in our lives and our careers and we said, we're going to fill those in with training or fill those in with experience. And so, you know, when guys get selected to be Green Team instructors, they're guys that are combat-hardened dudes that can come in there and sit down with you and go, listen, dude, this is why you're messing up, and this is what you need to change. If you're a combat controller, here's what you need to think about when you run a stack, and here's why you have to think about it this way.

If you're a PJ, this is why you can't do medicine this way. This is why you're going to get someone killed. And we finally, finally have the experience to sit there and say that very, uh, you know, emphatically and, and with a position of authority, which we didn't have in the '90s. So when I went through SOC-COM, it was a bunch of guys never went to combat, right? They're telling me about how to treat a casualty they never treated casually, right? Now when I go through SOFMS with a Ranger medic and he's saying, hey Chad, you're messing this up, I'm like, holy crap, this guy knows what he's talking about, right?

Right.

I'm gonna listen to him, right? And so, um, I, I think that's a pretty important distinction. But here's the but, is that we're losing it, and we're losing it today because all the senior guys are getting out and leaving because they're pissed off, right? And you're going to have an atrophy of experience, and the next fight is going to be way harder than the GWAT, right? It's going to be 10 times harder than what we did in Afghanistan, Iraq. When you're talking about great power competition, guys fight with NODs and lasers and aircraft overhead. Dude, you have to be the best. And technology will tip the scale to a certain extent. We still have to be a very competent operator that knows how to make good decisions under stress.

Is there any way, in your opinion, to not lose it? Because we lost it after World War II. It's gone. We lost it.

We lost it.

It's already been lost. And so every service will tell you that. I talk to SEALs all the time that say the same thing, and we're losing it. And we're pushing people out because we want people to comply, right? I know we're not getting political in this, but there is, there's an element of like, hey, you need to play ball or you need to leave. And so a lot of people are leaving. They don't want to play ball. Like, it's incongruent with their values. And so you have this, you know, in, in industry they call it what, the Great Resignation? And people just, you know, yeah, or, uh, people silently quitting. You have that in soft too. People are leaving. And so who stays behind? Who stays in the senior positions? It's the people that really want to be senior guys to beat their chest. And not all of them. That's not an absolute.

Sure. But it's the people who enjoy or who don't mind the political game that happens at that senior level.

I never wanted to be an E-9.

Yeah.

When I got it, I was like, oh, crap. I make a little bit more money. Not a lot. But I got to be a good E-9. But if your motivation is to have more stripes or medals, all those things, you're the wrong guy. And so how do you suss that out? That's a hard question to answer. I don't have the answer.

You got questions for Chad?

Yeah, we do. And just out of curiosity, before we get to the questions, you had this real sort of breadth of experience because Taking somebody that's a shooter and a medic and then all the ancillary skills, but also putting them into more of an intel-oriented, like the, you know, like the OPE and OPB, which requires tradecraft and is more of a thinking man's game, as opposed as— that's very fluid in a lot of ways. Can you select people that or do you try to select people that encompass all that? Or do you recognize that some people are going to be good at certain things for that mission?

Yes.

I mean, like in Green Team.

Well, yeah, we have. We've found guys who are like, holy crap, that's the guy for this job. Yeah. Okay. And we've pulled guys straight from Green Team. They've never done the assault side. They went straight to the other side because they're just that. They're super cerebral, super talented. But, you know, maybe they went to a school and got an engineering degree and they might be too smart for the job they're about to go do.

Right.

And we're like, yeah, guy, listen, I get it. You want to go run a gun. You probably need to go do this.

Right.

And so that exists. Yeah.

That's cool that they're recognizing that so early on.

Yeah.

Because, yeah, I mean, as you alluded to, I mean, when I left the military in 2010, the guys who had engineering degrees, who had, I mean, everyone was, they were all getting out, you know, guys who had opportunities to get a full ride to med school, guys who had putting in flight packets, I mean, all kinds of stuff happening.

So innovation is a big topic that's brought up in the military all the time. And the folks that are like innovators and the folks that think that way usually get out after their first enlistment because they're so frustrated. Right. And that's the folks that we need to stay in for two enlistments to change the world. Right. So it's the weird dichotomy of the military.

And it's interesting too, because the military resists innovation so hard.

Well, they don't like failure. They like innovation because it sells, but failure is incongruent with the model of success. And so you have to accept failure to have innovation. You can't have one without the other. Yeah. You can't have, oh, we're going to innovate, but we always have to be successful. Like you never get it right.

The zero fail or risk aversion that comes along with that.

And so I understand that now on the outside, now that I'm in industry, that all the successful tech companies are taking a lot of risk and failing, and they're going to find success because they're failing so much. They're learning from it.

Right. Yeah. They'll start out with a product and find out that it doesn't do what they thought it was going to do, but it appeals to a different market that they never even imagined. Yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting. Okay, let's get to these questions here. Um, uh, Anthony, thank you very much. What has been your experiences working with, uh, SoftTac-P? Uh, what's your take on the restructuring for Tac-P moving forward? Strike teams, recon teams? And if you can also lead off with telling us what Tac-P is.

So Tac-P is Terminal Air Control Party, and they're basically the old school guys used to call, you know, naval gunfire and also, you know, basically serve, you know, uh, the mission that CCTs do, TACPs did for a long time, right? I love TACP. Um, I love TACP, you know, some of my favorite JTACs are TACP. Um, we had a lot of TACP at the unit. We started bringing them on and they were super, super capable guys. They were studs. Um, So the AFSOC is going through kind of a reshuffle. They're trying to figure out their mission. I think all SOF is, but specifically AFSOC. And I think a lot of the legacy missions that we know are going away. And so who will survive this kind of change? I don't know. That's above my pay grade. I don't have a pay grade, but PFC.

So are you saying that TAC that they're potentially like on the cutting board?

No, I'm not saying that, but I will say that the GWAT model of like, you know, calling CAS is probably going to go away for the great power competition because it's not going to be guys in the trenches, you know, on SATCOM, you know, calling in strikes. It's going to be technology empowering, you know, missions deeper in targets and illuminating them and then making decisions with semi-autonomy and autonomy. And so if SOF doesn't embrace that, they're going to lose the next fight. That's— I mean, that's just the reality. Like, autonomy is a thing, and, you know, China is doing it very well. Um, the US is doing it, and the, the military is trying to embrace it. But autonomy is scary.

Yeah, it's the opposite of what we've experienced, where, you know, the golden hour is going to be a thing of the past in a lot of ways. You're going to have to maintain a casualty out in the field. There's going to be contested airspace. Comms are going to be unreliable.

GPS denied. I mean, are you talking about fighting near peer? We say it all the time. What does that mean? That means the guy that you're fighting has the same tech that you do. Right. We fought cavemen and got our asses kicked half the time. Right. And so we always have to have a competitive advantage when we go into fighting. And so our competitive advantage in the in the past has been aircraft. It has been.

Yeah.

And every service will tell you that it has tipped the scale. Every single engagement has been aircraft. Right. When things get too bad, guess what? We're calling the Air Force and they're going to slam this compound.

Right.

Well, if we can't do that because those guys are in air-to-air fight, how do you push through? Right. And that's a really— I don't know how to answer that.

And particularly if we're looking at China, because not only do they have close to the technology. They have all the technology we have because their industrial espionage is so great.

Yeah, they stole it.

Jackson, thank you very much. What do you make of AFSOC trying to become a more unilateral force? Are you optimistic or hesitant on the transition and why?

It depends. I mean, it depends who's in charge. Depends on what they want to do with it. And so what we shouldn't do is become a better mousetrap, you know, so AFSOC should basically play off their strengths. You know, we are very capable and technical forces that can, you know, kind of multiply the battlefield. And so if they, you know, if they focus on those strengths and they flip that into the next fight, they can be very successful as a unilateral force. If they try to be a better assault force, I mean, cool, man.

Like, and this sort of goes back to the question about like the SEALs out there doing, you know, the FO work, the, you know, the OPREP is that every mission was sexy.

Yeah. Right.

And everybody wants the money. So when it was, when it was the war on drugs, everybody got into counter-narcotics. When it was the GWAT, everybody became a strike force and then everybody started moving into the intel, the tradecraft, you know, everybody developed, even though there are units specified for that, everybody became a ma— became the master of all. And is this sort of what they're talking about with AFSOC, that there are people who think that, okay, well, shooting CQB, shooting, like we can do that too. We can have our own teams that do this. Or is it going a different direction?

So I personally don't think that we're going into that kind of conflict. I don't think that's the thing. And I think the Navy has been a pretty good kind of, I guess, weather vane for where they're going. They're going away from some of those traditional missions. And so is SF. The SF teams are going back to FID and going back to their core skills, right? The things that are the differentiators that they're really good at. And for a long time, direct action was sexy, like you just described. And everyone would do direct action because that was kind of the bar to pass to be the guy, the cool guy. And so now that we're transitioning, SF is saying, holy crap, we need to go back to our core skills. And they are. The Navy is going back to diving and going back to maritime missions.

I've heard they have one of the— NSW has one of the probably the best drone program in special ops now?

Like water drones or air drones?

Both.

Both.

Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, tech is empowering those things and there's a lot of autonomous underwater vehicles that are doing great things. Tech is a differentiator. And so whoever can adopt early tech is going to be successful, in my opinion. And it's not just because the position I'm in now, which hopefully we talk about. Yeah, we will.

We absolutely will.

But I think that you know, for AFSOC, they have to find their way as to find what's unique to them. You know, what aircraft do they have that are very unique that they can employ? They're getting rid of a lot of assets right now in AFSOC. They're getting rid of a lot of CV-22s, AC-130s. And so, you know, some of it's a forcing function to get to the next fight. You know, so I don't know. I mean, that's probably a better question to ask the senior leaders of AFSOC.

I hate to see the AC-130 go away.

Me too.

Just makes me sad.

And A-10s too.

And A-10s.

Oh, I mean, a lot of love for the A-10s. If you're a ground force, you know how good the A-10s are and how important they are.

Yeah. Jackson, thanks again. As for Tier 1, how would you characterize the difference between the Army and the Navy side? Did you have a preference with working with one?

I think they're both amazing, right? You know, they're different. They're super, you know, in the early days, the Navy was really good at making things happen and the Army was very, very process-driven. I think the Army adopted a lot of the Navy's kind of nuances and they became just as adaptive. I got to be honest, in the later years, it it was really hard to differentiate the two. They had specific capabilities they did really well.

Yeah.

If it was a maritime mission, obviously the Navy. But the Army, dude, they are— I mean, that unit at Fort Bragg, they can do any mission under the sun. Yeah. And they could probably do the maritime mission too if they wanted to. But no, there's no favorite.

So you're saying that if the Navy learned basic patrolling that they would be right there.

They could work up to if they cared about it. It was just priorities, right? But a lot of the Army guys, so the guys from that unit were either former Rangers or SF. So they had a very fundamental, like, infantry background. They're all Rangers. And so they understood that it was very intuitive to them. Right. Navy's not, man. Navy's like, huck it. They're like the football players are going to throw Hail Mary.

Yeah.

Where the Army is like, okay, we can get a first down by doing this, right? And he's like, nah, we're going for touchdown.

Ian, thank you very much. Oh, Dave, now is your chance to ask about the only basic training you didn't go through. What questions do you have about it?

I don't have any questions. I'm really good at that. Yeah. Did you guys use exercise bikes in the Air Force? Yeah, in the Air Force. No, I wish they had them. It would have been great.

That was the only thing I missed, and apparently I didn't miss it.

So exercise bikes, no.

Um, Defendu, Defendu CQB. So somebody with the Fairbairns, Sykes, Kelly McCann, Carl Sestari Heritage. Um, thank you very much for the donation. Um, Brendan G, great guest, Great stories. Best wishes to you all.

B.

Thanks, Brennan. Graham, thank you very much. Thanks for the great conversation. Thoughts on SWT, now Special Reconnaissance, and what role they play.

Yeah. So this was formerly like the weather career field we had, which is the combat weather guys. Yeah. So they rebranded them as special reconnaissance, which I think is really cool.

That sounds sexier.

It sounds better. Way better. The mission initially was like all over the map. It was like, we're going to do all these things. You have to be specialized at a couple of things, right? You have to be good at a couple of things. And so it has unlimited potential to be a really great career field. And we need it now because reconnaissance is more important now than ever. And especially if you can overlay technology into reconnaissance. Sense. And so I think it's potentially, it's a great pathway. Obviously, I'm biased because I'm a PJ. So, yeah, I want more PJs.

Let me just check.

Was that a diplomatic answer?

Yes, it was great. Isaac, the Air Force is said to have the best tech. So does Spec Ops have more advanced tech than other units?

The Spec Ops or Air Force?

The Air Force Special Operations, man.

No, I don't think they do. I think the Navy has been really early adopters of technology. The Army is really keen on UAS, and so they're really ahead on that. And the Air Force, again, is going through this kind of like the teenage years of who am I? And they're looking in the mirror like, what do I want to be? Do I need this or do I need this? And so the Navy knows, hey, I need these, these, uh, technologies to empower our maritime platform. So they're gonna do it. And the Army's the same way. Um, if you look at some of the, the drone racing stuff they're doing, um, the Army's taking advantage of that big time and they're bringing industry in. Navy's doing the same thing. The Air Force is kind of like, you know, you have, you have airplanes, right? So here, here's a dichotomy with the Air Force. When you look at the Army, and Special Forces, it's all about Special Forces, right? With AFSOC, it's not. It's about aircraft. And they have really small cutout, which is special warfare, which is Air Force.

Air Force is all about, like, strategic bombers and fighter jets, right?

But within AFSOC, it's CV-22s and, like, doing infil exfil. But then you have these guys over here. They're like, hey, we want to change the world. And they're like, got it, guys. But the money goes over here, right? And so NSW, is paying to SEALs, and they have these maritime programs that have a lot of money, but it's to empower the SEALs, right? And so AFSOC is the only one that's like, well, we do all this for the other services, and then we have this small component of folks that do really special stuff, but we also want to help these people. And so it will never reach their potential because they're always looking outwards instead of going, how do we empower this, right? And so the first question, how do you unilateral? Well, you have to stop being a service provider and start saying, what do we want to do? And if you don't want to do anything, that's fine too. But if you do, you have to do an all stop and say, listen, these CV-22s exist for these guys and whatever their mission set is going to dictate. And it's going to take having some special tactics guys in senior positions, which we do.

The A3 of AFSOC right now is a former combat control or it's a combat controller general. And that's a big deal for us, you know, it's never happened before.

So, um, and so that, I mean, that makes total sense because you guys have been force multipliers, you've been adjuncts in a way to the other, you know, to the other services. And without that identity of we're, we're the, the tip of the spear, right? Not we're part of the tip of the Spear.

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be— they're going to have to decide what they want to be, who they are. It's not my decision. I can tell you my experiences, and my experience was empowering those other tiers, right? Do I think that I was capable to do other things? Absolutely. But it wasn't my job.

If you could wave a magic wand and make STS what you wanted it to be, I don't know.

Yeah, that's a tough one. That's a tough thing to answer right now because I have, again, bias is included here in my experience. And that's fair.

I mean, I'm asking you with your bias and your experience.

It's a numbers game, right? Yeah. So Special Forces, I was doing the numbers. I think it's like 8,000.

It's a lot.

Yeah. I mean, you look at the 82nd has less folks and they're specialized and the Ranger Battalion. So the question I always had was, what makes you special? And I asked folks, I asked this when I was going through the, what is it called? JSOF-C, which is the Joint Special Operations Senior Enlisted thing. And I said, what makes special operations special? Is it numbers? Is it technology? Is it mission? And no one could really answer the question because when Special Operations or SOF has a lot of people. And then within the Green Beret community, there's thousands of them and not all of them are doing everything right. There's like guys are specialists in this and this. Within NSW, it's a little bit smaller, but still thousands of them. In our career field, there's maybe hundreds. And so does that make you special? I don't know. I don't know if it does. It's just a numbers game. It sounds cooler, but how do you get to that point? I don't think you do it without numbers. So if you have a Green Beret community, you want to go and do X mission, you can reorient all those people to go do that with the training and money.

That's a tough question.

So let's hear about your transition. You finally, after running and gunning and suffering through administration and then getting to be senior enlisted in the Squadron, I mean, you kind of had the career, you know, from a career.

Yeah.

I mean, you had the career. You went from 21 to 41 or 22 to 41 from—

and you did it all. I mean, you did it all.

You did a lot. Yeah. You didn't do it all.

You talked about, you know, the compartmentalization and driving on and all of this. And then you finally hit that moment of retirement. I mean, what was that like for you transitioning?

It sucked. I took a job. I was a director of an innovation institute for a year, and I learned about hiring and firing, learned about dealing with, you know, people that weren't like me. It was a transition, and I was super depressed. You know, we talked about before we started this is that purpose is really important, and you have it inherently when you're in the military, and you don't have it when you get out. And it's a reality. So just brace yourself for that. And I did that job for a year. What I did do was I got a call and there was an opportunity to go help some orphans from Ukraine to Poland.

Oh, wow.

And I was like, I'm in. And so I went to my boss and I was like, hey man, I was like, I need to take some unpaid leave. I'm going to do this. And they were good enough to say, Yeah, okay. I think they knew I was probably gonna quit if they didn't let me do it. Um, but I thought it was gonna fill my bucket, you know, in my bucket and, and give me a sense of purpose. And I went out there and did it and it didn't fill anything. And I came back home and I ended up resigning after a month. I was like, I can't do this anymore. And I told my wife, I was like, I, I just need to maybe go fishing every day and just be retired. And, um, I was retired for. 6 hours, a buddy of mine from a big company called me. He's like, Chad, he goes, you need to talk to these guys from California. And I'm like, okay. I was on my back porch. I think I was probably drinking bourbon. And I talked to these guys and they're like, hey man, you know, just bros from California.

And like, we're going to build a low-cost cruise missile. I'm like, okay. Like, didn't expect that. I was like, all right. So what does that mean? How do you do low cost? They told me their design was like modular, like Lego set for a cruise missile at a manufacturer. And I'm like, I'm in. And so I joined this team and it was 3 of us and it was the closest thing I felt. This is called Team House. It was the closest thing I felt to being back into a team post-military because it was guys that I identify with, that I get along with. And that we're oriented towards a purpose with. And we started this company, Firestorm Labs, and we've been doing it for 6, 7 months now, building a modular UAS. And it's the closest thing I've found to getting to what we've been describing this whole time. And I needed it, man, because we talk about purpose. Purpose is really hard to find on the backside. And so the guys that get out, you know, I think this is a good opportunity to talk about is that, um, it's not the same and you will be isolated.

You're on your own. It's, it's never going to be cool again. And you have to mourn that career. And so once you move on from it, you can like grow and be better. But, um, for me, you know, join the team that I'm on now with Firestorm, which is the company. Um, it's been awesome. And so I've taken a lot of other jobs. I've got a lot of companies that I work with. One is Lifeline Rescue Tools, which is basically— it's a— think about glass break times 1,000. It cuts through laminated glass. First responder stuff. I'm like, that's great. I can get behind that product development.

Let's do it.

And the other one's Foxtrot 3 is a company we started with a bunch of operators. Faith, Family, Freedom. And so that's, uh, basically family values, getting back to making that cool again in America. And so things I can wrap my brain around and orient and, uh, and really push hard is, is all I need. And so, because you're not part of a team anymore when you get out, um, no one gets— no one cares, you know, like you're on your own. Yeah, you guys know that. I mean, yeah, yeah, I've— you're forgotten very quickly.

So I've tried, I've tried to describe describe to people that you could be the Sergeant Major of Delta Force, you total badass dude. You get out, you retire, walking around the streets out here. It's not that people don't like you, that they're anti-military or something, but you say, "I was a Command Sergeant Major of this JSOC unit," they're gonna look at you and say, "What is JSOC?

What is Command Sergeant Major?" And it's not that the experiences aren't meaningful. Certainly. Right. And they're meaningful in your brotherhood. Right. And so if we sit around and we drink bourbon together, we can have shared experiences and we have the kind of common bona fides. Right. But you have to get over it and you have to mourn it and move past it. Big time.

Yeah.

And if you don't, you're not going to be successful in the next life.

You're stuck in that rut.

But if you say, listen, I had a great run, it was a cool experience, I did some cool stuff, and now I'm moving on. And I do these conversations because I think they're cathartic. I think they're healthy. But at the end of the day, that's my old life, man. Exactly. It has nothing to do with me now.

And that moving on, though, also, like you mentioned with the startup, there's also the issue of finding purpose. Like, if you try to move on and you're just doing some menial job somewhere, that doesn't fill you with that same purpose. And, you know, we talk about post-traumatic stress.

Yeah.

And then we talk about this idea of transitioning, which is this nebulous— okay, I, I was doing something meaningful. I had people to my left and right that I trusted with my life, even if I couldn't stand them. Yeah. And now I'm out in this world where there really is no meaning.

So, so here's the best way I can define it for folks that are preparing to transition, or perhaps have transitioned, is that I felt like life was black and white. It was kind of a gray, and there was no color to it, and there was no excitement. And it was a really heavy thing to deal with because you're like, holy crap, man, like, life is boring. Yeah. And, you know, some people like, oh, you should get back into skydiving or something. Like, well, so you go buy a fast car and go test myself.

Right. That's chasing the dragon, right?

Right. And that's dangerous behavior. Yeah. So I struggle with it for the past year, and I was like, man, how do I get back to normal? And what I realized was, talking to some really smart people and people I trust, is that it will never be that normal. It's different. And so once you embrace that and you accept it and you say that, hey, listen, that was a part of my life. It's exciting. It was fun. There's cool stories we can talk about. It will never be that again, ever. And you have to mourn that process.

Yeah.

And so that's what I'm going through right now. And, uh, and it's difficult, man. And like, some guys are better at it than I am. Some guys are more mature than I am and can find success. Maybe it's financially they want it, maybe it's, you know, purpose in a, in a career. But, um, for me, I, I found the best kind of segue is I have a small team of people that I trust. We're oriented around a task and a purpose, and I can make it successful because I know how to do that.

Right.

And so I think that's the most important aspect to me. It's healthy for me. But I will tell you, going back to the compartmentalization, is that guys like us have been very good at doing that. And we can walk down the street and no one will notice any difference. The fact is, is that we're, we're keeping these things wrapped and we're doing it at our own detriment, right? And so until we let those things go and process them, um, they'll continue to be kind of the millstone around our neck. And so I've been using conversations like this as, as the catharsis of letting them go, right? I mean, I'm going to tell you guys some cool stories. Cool, man. Like, I'm not going to tell you classified stuff, but let's let it out, right? And failures and successes, they're here, man. Right. But this next life is mine. It's what I make it. Right.

I absolutely agree with you. And we've had, you know, I feel like I've been— first off, I'll say that, like, I feel like Jack is one of those people that has dealt really well with that transition.

I mean, he's very well adjusted. He's wearing a sweater now.

Yeah, yeah. He's autumn. He's autumn, man. I mean, he has a saltwater tank he's building on there.

He's a premature saltwater tank.

Like he knows who he is.

Yeah.

You know, but, you know, through the interview—

I've also been out for 12 years, I should say.

Probably helps.

So yeah, there was— there's— I appreciate you saying that. I would also point out though, like I had that period of adjustment as well that was like quite difficult to— even though I wasn't in as long as you were, I didn't— operate on the same level that you did, but just being in the military 8 years as a young man and coming out, there's definitely a period of time where I had to figure things out.

Well, it was 8 years, but it was— it was intense. It was— it was your— it was the formative year.

Yeah, exactly. Hard years are coming.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, and we've had a number of people on the show that have talked about whether it's post-traumatic stress or whether it's just the adaptation of life after the military. Because one of the things that a wartime military does for you, like you said, is it gives you purpose. Like, combat is pure, right? There's—

you're not worrying about taxes.

It's fun. It, it is what you dreamt of when you were, when you were a kid.

Playing with grenades. Yes. It turns into real grenades. Yeah. And it is satisfying.

The only difference is now you you don't have to argue over who shot who first.

Right.

But it's a very pure endeavor. And then to move into a world that's very ambiguous where the answers—

so I'd be remiss not to say this, and we talked about this before we started, is that I have a really deep respect for conventional forces. right? And here's what I'll say is that SOF gets all the fanfare. We also get a lot of the support.

Yeah.

So, you know, when I, I tore both ACLs and I got, you know, all this great care, I had great physical therapists and people surrounding me and helping me. You know, when you're a conventional troop and you're doing hard yards in Baghdad or even Afghanistan, like, there's not a whole hell of a lot there for those guys. And so I would tell the guys that are listening, because there's probably guys that are, is that I have a deep respect for those dudes, and their service is no less than mine. We are prima donnas in SOF. And so getting on black helicopters with the best pilots in the world, right? Not good pilots, the best pilots in the world that take us to the X. And put one wheel down and you jump off on the rooftop and you go slam a target and you get out in 30 minutes and you're hitting when you know everybody's asleep. You know what you come back and do? You come back and drinking beers and playing Xbox.

Right.

That's what people don't get is that you're spoiled. Right. And do you want to do another op? Hell yeah. You want to do another op because you're going to have every resource available. Those kids, those kids, men and women did it with no resources. And, um, I think there's a lot to be said about that. And I think it gets lost in the kind of the, the nostalgia and the romance of SOF, in that, um, you know, SOF isn't any better than those guys or gals.

It, it, like you say, SOF is sexy, and you— and, and they have the budget, they get the training. But we've had like Louis Fernandez, Raymond Patton, like we've had people on that, and we, we want more conventional, you you know, we want more conventional soldiers and Marines on because they were living it every day. Their deployments were longer.

With not a lot of care on the backside. Right.

Right. They didn't have the support. They couldn't— they didn't have, you know, an AC-130 hovering above.

Which is a pacifier for operators. Right. It is.

Absolutely. You know, when you hear that lawnmower, the great lawnmower in the sky, like, the bad guys hear that too.

Yeah, man. I think it's pretty important to recognize. And if you don't, maybe you're tone deaf. But I think SOF guys in general realize that we've been spoiled for a long time and for a good reason. We've had really hard missions. We've done most of the combat. SOF has done almost all the combat in the past 20 years. Actually, that's not true. Towards the end years. Yeah, for sure. But I don't take it for granted that those kids were walking the streets and basically completely vulnerable when I was sitting in a safe MSS drinking beers when I wasn't supposed to. Right. General order number one.

But you weren't doing anything that any major and above wasn't doing.

Whatever.

I can say now that's factual information.

Yeah.

We have just, I think, uh, I need to get back to the video. We have, uh, uh, a couple more questions real quick that just popped up. Um, so I just want to go over real quick while I'm pulling this up. Uh, we know about, um, launchfirestorm.com, right? That's, that's Firestorm Labs. There's also Firestorm Labs that does games. That's not them. Um, and then you said Foxtrot 3.

Yeah.

Uh, and then what was the other, uh, Lifeline Rescue Tool? Lifeline Rescue.

Yeah.

So, uh, they're all down in the link. Um, and then we had one question that was, uh, or one— we had like two more. Um, Graham, uh, more importantly, plans for retirement. I thank you for the donation, and we got that. And then Jerry. Oh, we have two more. Jerry, what would you choose, Warthog or AC-130 over your head?

For what mission? Yeah, it depends. I mean, here's a story I'll tell you about AC-130s and A-10s. So we were doing an op and we patrolled into this wheat field and we're completely surrounded by compounds. And it was bad. We knew it was about to pop off. We knew it was about to pop off. It was coming. It was just when. And our AC-130 got pulled for an HVI for the other task force. They're like, hey, we got an HVI. We need the AC-130. They pulled our AC-130 and we're like, holy crap. So we had an MQ-9 and we're like, we're screwed. And we're about to get in a tick. We knew it. I mean, it was coming any second. and it popped off and we were pinned down. We were fighting our way out of there. The main assault force was way back behind us. We were a recce team and we were just getting our— we're like, holy crap, we're going to die. And the controller was back with the main assault force and knew we were in a tick and we're calling back like, holy shit, we're like, this is bad. And he got on-call A-10s.

These guys came in. Literally, I'm not exaggerating, 100 feet off the ground. Two, two ships, 100 feet off the ground, and they strafed this compound. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, I was like, I was on NODs. I had to pull NODs because there's so much fire. Like, after they came in, two came in, I'm like, why don't we use these every night? I'm like, this is amazing. Yeah, like, just have these loitering overhead. They destroyed everything. Thing. There was nothing left. I'll be honest, there was nothing left. I'm like, who's AC-130? What is that? Is that thing we like? And A-10s, man, there's a time and place for them. But those guys, here's what I'll tell you. A-10 pilots are the closest thing to operators that you will ever find in the aviation community. They are, man. They are guys that will, like, want to go out drinking and gals.

We had Casey. Yeah, that's right.

They'll outdrink you and they will put that thing in the dirt to help you.

They're amazing. And I love A-10, and they do fly low. They're at risk too. But those A-10s, it's— Yeah.

Yep. We have a PJ or a guy went through basic training with, became a PJ, and then he became an A-10 pilot. Oh, wow. You guys should have him on the podcast.

Would love to.

Jason Attaker.

Yeah, we're definitely down for it.

But he is the best of both worlds, man, because he understands the ground component and then he's big balls on the A-10 side.

And this also speaks to combat controllers, JTACs, TACPs, that when those dudes are on, like, the world can be exploding around you and they're just on their radio controlling their stacks. Like doing—

oblivious is what you want to say. Yeah.

Like they're just—

they're oblivious to the world around them.

They are just doing—

that's why they get so many Silver Stars, because they're standing there under gunfights and they don't hear the rounds snapping around them because they have two, you know, two Peltors on. Yeah. And, and I would be like, somebody kill these people, please.

And they're just like, yeah.

And, and calling the troops, everyone else is taking cover, and they're like up there like, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, no, amazing people. Andrew, thank you very much. And that's it for the questions.

Fellas, on Tuesday, we're going to have Andrew Milburn back in the studio. We're going to need to buy another bottle of scotch for that one or two. He's coming back from Ukraine, where he's been. His organization, the Mozart Group, has been doing a lot of work. And then on Friday, we're going to have Darrell Blocker on the show, who who's a career CIA, um, amazing career, super interesting guy. I'm excited to have him on the show. So that'll be this coming Friday. Andrew will be on Tuesday.

Excellent. Um, and so we told where people can find you. Just one quick thing for veterans out there, or anybody who might like be going through this, but particularly veterans, um, What's the step for them if they're feeling, if they're starting to isolate, if they're feeling bored, disaffected, done?

Yeah, that's a loaded question, man. I mean, it's not, it's, it's different for everyone too, right? It's person specific.

Yeah.

So, uh, the VA sucks. That's the first thing. Um, and you guys will learn that very quickly. Um, so you have to find your network. Um, I think asking for help's important. Um, people say they're gonna help you. There's only a few that will, and so you gotta find those folks. Um, and I think that, uh, you know, letting the, letting the stuff out is important. Um, personally. Um, and yeah, I don't know, man. There's a lot of people that wanna help you. It's just you gotta ask. And so I have a Rolodex of folks that I contact all the time. Um, because I know that, uh, potentially, well, I know, I, I think that they need it. And I hope that they'll reach out to me when I need it. But, you know, there's a network there. So it's different for every community. There's been a lot of suicides. We haven't had a lot of suicides within our group, thank God. But the community at large has. And so there's a lot of different factors. Some of it's financial, some of it's personal, some of it's, you know, TBI, some of it's PTSD. There's a ton of cool treatments out there.

Some of the Navy guys I was talking to have been really, you know, keyed up on hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is HBOT. Mm-hmm. I'm seeing it save a lot of lives, kind of reconnecting some of the connective tissue in the brain and really mending.

That's interesting.

Yeah, really mending some of the damage that's been done. And then the other one, which is a bit controversial, but like, you know, there's vets organizations doing a lot of psychedelic stuff that's having a lot of good effects. I've talked to some folks that I know and trust that have done it, and it's saved their lives. And so, um, I respect the process. I've, you know, I've never done it personally, but, um, you know, I think that's important to kind of suss out whatever is good for you.

It is working for quite people. I mean, we've had a few on the show in the past that— from the Fed.

And yes, Sam.

Yeah, I've spoken to quite a few people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know if I'm ready to do the ayahuasca, you know.

You might, you might get there. There's also the DMT thing that people do down south of the border, and it's— I mean, not to scare the squares, I mean, it's like monitored by doctors.

Yeah, it's a very professional—

it's a legit process.

I mean, they're doing mushrooms, they're doing the MDMA, they're like— there are a lot of a lot of different, um, yeah.

And you know, the VA will hand you a lot of pills.

Yeah.

And they'll do it very, you know, very easily and very quickly. And, uh, there's other solutions, I guess would be my, my bottom line, is that, you know, do your research and figure it out. Yeah.

Be nice if the VA were like the DARPA of military medicine, right? If they were out there on the cutting edge.

They're not the DARPA.

No, they, they are the most conservative medical—

they are the Jiffy Lube of, uh, yeah, right, right.

Even DARPA isn't DARPA.

Yeah, man.

Um, well, Chad, I really appreciate you coming out here, man, and joining us and smoking some cigars and drinking some whiskey and telling us a little bit about your, you know, your story.

Yeah.

And what you went through. I mean, this has been like really informative and interesting, and, you know, I hope people get something out of it.

Right on. Yeah, I appreciate you having me.

So absolutely, I hope you'll hit us up next time you come through the city.

For sure. Yeah.

All right guys, we will see you Tuesday and then Friday. So take care everyone.