Transcript of Army Special Mission Unit Operator | Erick Miyares (throwback ep)

Tonight we are here with a special guest, Eric Millaris. He served as an Army Special Mission Unit operator. Just as a way of introduction, I'm just going to tell a little bit of a funny anecdote myself about when I was a young Ranger and we went out to the border of Pakistan in 2004. And when we got out there, there was already an American where we were there to set up camp up on a hilltop. Out there by himself, one American with an Afghan interpreter. And they're looking down at the border control point with Pakistan. And when we'd go up there to bring him some food and water, this dude had a big beard. He was wearing, I think, blue jeans and maybe a camo top, had all these hemp necklaces on and everything. And we were just, as young Rangers, we're looking at this guy like, who is this dude and what in the world is he doing up here? And he was like— Super chill, like oh, hang loose, my dude. And but it was clear that he'd been left out in the sun a little bit too long. Like hey, maybe this guy needs to be brought back to chill out in the FOB and watch some DVDs like like a normal soldier deployed to Afghanistan.

But I always tell that funny little anecdote there to allude to the fact that JSOC has these operators who are deployed sometimes in singleton missions in highly compartmentalized operations. And even within the military, even in the special operations community, oftentimes very little, if anything, is known about those guys or what they do. So I'm very pleased to have Eric on the show tonight and just pull back the curtain just a little bit and tell Americans about what it is that some of these guys in these programs do. So Eric, thank you for joining us tonight.

Absolutely. Hey, it's fun. I'm excited to be here. Uh, you guys are great. Um, I love watching your shows. I love getting into the Spec Ops and the intel side of the, of this world. So thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, absolutely, man. And could you start off, uh, with telling us, as we ask all of our guests about their origin story, about your, your origins growing up in Miami as a kid and kind of the path that eventually took you, well, first into the Marine Corps, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I came to America, if you would, in my mom's belly. My mom is pregnant, and her, my grandmother, grandfather, and her siblings left in— I want to say it was May of 1971. They were able to catch essentially the last flight, or one of the last flights that was leaving Cuba into the U.S. So very fortunate that we got that plane and that we got welcomed to the United States with open arms. Since essentially, like, you know, most Cubans, they either go to Hialeah, Miami, they head up north. I want to say it's like New Jersey somewhere, but we ended up obviously in the Hialeah area. So born and raised there until I was 18, essentially. You know, I went to private school, which was a bilingual Cuban-American school. So my upbringing was always sort of that dual US-Cuban heritage, you know, speaking Spanglish in the streets of Hialeah. Um, and then, um, you know, just to mention, raised, uh, who, um, by essentially was like my, my stepdad. Uh, my mom never married, but, uh, you know, for our intents and purposes, we'll call him Mr. Clean. He kind of raised me, um, and instilled sort of this level of patriotism and this, uh, this vision of wanting to do this unique sort of, um, cloak-and-dagger type work, to keep it simple, with what he had done in sort of the Bay of Pigs, uh, aspects of it.

And so in 1991, a year earlier, I joined the Marine Corps. Originally was supposed to be active duty to go into infantry. I think I also had seen that, you know, Force Recon video, and that's what I wanted to do. But I wanted to leave Hialeah, or I would have ended up either, you know, in jail and trouble. And so I went off, I went off into the Marine Corps to do infantry. Uh, so I'll go ahead and stop there.

Well, you spent quite a bit of time in the Marines too, didn't you? Um, and served as a scout sniper, if I recall correctly.

Yeah. So I, um, ended up doing, uh, just shy of 6 years, which I'll cover why I didn't finish that full contract later on as we talked to the reasons going into, into the Army. Um, so, you know, I got finagled by, by my recruiter, which, you know, 29 years later, I've learned from other you know, folks that I've talked to that they also got hosed by their recruiters. And so my, my, my contract ended up being in the reserves, um, with the promise that once I came back from basic training or from, you know, School of Infantry or my trade, that I would then go on active duty. And so for those 5 and a half years, I spent just about every day trying to get back, get onto active duty or do as much active duty, um, schools or, or floats or whatever I can be part of. in order to kind of earn a spot, uh, to be able to— for the Marine Corps to bring me back on. And so essentially I was a, a tow gunner in Miami, which I didn't even know we had that capability. Uh, interestingly, those guys had just came back from the Gulf War.

So my first checking in was, you know, to being a tow gunner, uh, which the highlight was I did get to shoot, you know, a Hialeah kid who got to shoot a tow missile. Uh, that was really cool. Uh, did that for a little bit, and then I found out, um, as I was trying to continue that process, that there was an ability to go to airborne in an organization in West Palm Beach, um, that was an ANGLICO, Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company. And so that's where I first went to airborne school as a Marine. And actually, ironically enough, I got to go to, um, Pathfinder as a Marine, uh, because of that organization. So I did forward observer naval gunfire for a little bit. And then really found, um, what I, what I really enjoyed, uh, in my time in the Marine Corps. Uh, I went to a state platoon, Surveillance Target Acquisition, uh, up in the New Orleans area. So I, I was with them in and out for about, uh, 3 or 4 years. And that's actually where, where I, I worked as a regular spotter. And then I became a scout sniper, um, and then spent the time doing, um, work with the, um, JTF-6 doing counter-narcotics missions.

That's pretty cool. So yeah, we've had a few people on that did JTF-6 ops.

Yeah. That was big money before 9/11.

That was like the cool thing to do before 9/11.

Yeah. That was where all the action was.

Yep.

And then how did you make that transition over to the Army? What was that kind of point and what kind of led you to that decision?

Yeah. So when I was in State Platoon as a Marine, I was young, dumb. not focused in college. So, you know, just, I want to preface that, that a lot of the reason and sense of urgency to get back on active duty is I ultimately wanted to kind of cut my teeth into the Marine. And I had aspirations when I was in high school, and I knew I wanted to join the military, in particular the Marine Corps, that ultimately I wanted to either go to the CIA or I wanted to go into the FBI. I think the FBI was more because one of my uncles was just scared that I'd be killed for some reason. So I, I threw in the hat, I'd go to the FBI, right? But I knew where I wanted, what I wanted to go do. And so I, the path was, you know, go to the Marine Corps, do your college, and then, and then go apply. Because I, I didn't see, I didn't think I was going to be in the Marine Corps that long. And so when I was in New Orleans, there was a whole lot of partying, a whole lot of, you know, and I almost got to a point where I was like, man, I'm gonna lose my liver or whatever else that's back there.

So I'm like, I'm gonna come back to Miami so I can at least get back school because you don't have all the great influences that you did in New Orleans. And so when I came back to Miami, um, I think I was going back to the Anglican unit, then I, I met my, my first wife. And then, uh, it was kind of a relationship of friendship. Uh, and at that point she was, uh, looking to go into the National Guard as most people did in that timeframe. This is '97 for college money. And so she's like, I'm going to be this linguist in the Army and do this intel stuff. I'm like, okay, that's cool. Where, where are we going? Monterey, California. And I was like, okay, that'd be cool. So I went as a military spouse to, uh, essentially to Monterey, Fort Ord. Um, and then I was like, are you kidding me? Is this what the Army does? Right? So I saw DLI from a spouse perspective. Um, and then I started to do my research again. And as I'm over there, there wasn't, I think the only closest unit was like a reserve force recon unit.

up in Nevada. I'm like, man, I don't want to travel over there. Um, and then I just, I did some, some thinking, some soul searching really. And I was like, well, okay, well maybe how about going to the Army as an option? Let's do this military intelligence. Because I thought that that would align best at that point with going to the CIA, right? Or, or going to go do intel work. Um, as I had planned, and that I would ultimately focus, focus on, on school. And so I, I, I made a mistake. joined the National Guard for a month. Same thing, horrible contract aspects. And then just the next day after, I joined active duty and then signed in some fort somewhere with a bunch of other poor former Marines that were learning how to be in the Army.

And you went into the Army on— what was your MOS? I mean, it was an intel job this time, right?

Yeah, it's 98 Golf. So that was the SIGINT electronic warfare interceptor.

And that, I'm, do you want to talk a little bit about, you know, what that job entailed and where you got assigned?

Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. So when I came in, just because it'll probably come up later on, you know, I was a proud E-5 in the Marine Corps. And part of this whole negotiation too was like, hey, you're going to be an E-4. I'm like, oh, get to be a corporal, right? Now you get to be a specialist. I'm like, I'm a specialist of what? Right? So I started off my Army career with a bunch of other Marines, get a sea bag full of clothing that they didn't even teach me how to wear. Uh, and then, and then, and then, uh, you know, flew back, did DLI, which was, by the way, phenomenal. I learned so much, uh, because I was a careerist, so I didn't have to apply to all of those rules that were there. And actually, interestingly, I met what would later on would be 3 other former unit members that I would then go through selection with. I think it was the conversations we had earlier that just kind of jarred that memory. So that was pretty neat. It was an amazing time. And so I, at DLI, from timing with my former spouse who was still learning, I finished Spanish.

And then went to Goodfellow Air Force Base to go learn at that time to be a 98 Golf. Um, and then that started my career really with, ironically, Russian, Russian warfare. That's what we learned. Uh, and then I want to say that they sprinkled on initially some of the counterinsurgency and maybe some of the counternarcotics was part of that intel school. And so I just loved it, right? Coming. Um, as a Marine who had been, you know, a sniper, had done some stuff in JTF-6, but just that combination of infantry and jumping out of planes and everything that I had done. And then I got to focus kind of back into— I've always liked academia. And so I really loved being an intel guy, right? Like it was just so, I guess, just because I was fortunate to have that hard skill, young hard skill background, and then learn to be an intel guy, I think it's a really deadly conversation, uh, or a combination, excuse me. Um, and as I was finishing School of Infantry, or not, excuse me, I was finishing Goodfellow. Um, I got kind of got hooked up and someone came up to me and said, hey, you know, what are your plans?

I'm like, I got no idea how this Army thing works. I don't know where I'm going to go. And they're like, hey, we're, there's this thing called 7th Special Forces. Would you like to go? I'm like, okay, sounds good. Sounds good. It's got the word special in it. So far, you know, this looks good.

I was going to ask you that because I didn't know if when, you know, when you went in, if you were going in active and DLI was basically your AIT and Goodfellow, you know, the follow-on, because you had an infantry background, these hard skills, I imagine you would have been plucked out for like a SOD-A team because they're desperate for people like you.

Yeah, and you know, it's interesting that you did say that because I remember it may have been DLI or maybe in that transition of both it may have started. I remember doing, and I still think I have the resume, it was horrible writing, horrible. I don't even know how I went to 7th Group. You know, God bless that they did take me, but I had to put in there, hey, I was an 11 Bravo and 11, I think, Hotel also. And then I had some of these hard skills, you know, airborne, Right. So as an E-4, I guess it all aligned Spanish, um, you know, uh, all the G, the scores you gotta have. Um, it just aligned perfect. And then there was also that, that, that buddy hookup, right? Somebody called somewhere and say you to, to branch or whatever that was. Uh, hey, you may want to pull this guy. So I had direct orders from there straight to group. So ended up spending 2 years in 7th Group, which, you know, for you guys knowing that now, now this is not the conventional Army. So. Um, I'd never spent one day in the conventional Army, good, bad, or indifferent.

Uh, that was literally my world is, you know, leaving the Marines, coming through the training 7th Group, and that was fast and furious. And then straight to where I ended up at.

So just for our viewers who might not know, so you went to a SAD team, right? So, yeah. So, uh, SADs are a Special Operations Team Alpha. They are sort of the SIGINT side of Special Forces. They don't go through the Q course. They're their own element. How was that for you being in group? Like, how was that being with Green Beret? How did they treat you? How was the reception?

I want to say that I, you know, and I only just because I saw in a photo the other day, I had my Gold Wings on, right? So I was on my Gold Wings.

Right.

I think I stood on E4, E5. And, you know, I may have been a little bit cocky because I'm a native. I was excited. I was probably more gold lucky than anything. Right. And I want to say, you know, I had a really good relationship with the ODAs. Never really had— and I looked at it in retrospect as I went back time as I was retiring, I was looking at all the awards and the write-ups, and they were all written by— and I'm like, man, I gotta find this guy, Captain So-and-So and Master Sergeant So-and-So. And, you know, as I wrote, you know, posted just the other day, the dude who shot the guy who shot me, I'm like, man, I gotta go thank these guys. Like, I'm an asshole. Like, you know, they were really good. Now, when I was in the SAD/ACE, it was an interesting time because it was pre-G1.

Right.

So a lot of the— I don't think any of those guys were former anything else but Army. And so when they were in Assad A, unfortunately, what I perceived is that a lot of those guys wanted to be ODAs. They wanted to be Green Berets.

Right.

I'm like, I don't, I, you know, no disrespect to anyone, but I'm like, I, I didn't want to be a Green Beret. If not, I would have, I think I'd gone down that route, but I kind of had planned, uh, my future. And at that point it, I had greater ambitions. Right. So I was Very happy to be in, in a SOD-A. Um, and, you know, I got exposed that 7th Special Forces Group at that time had some really good connections with the IC. So we were very fortunate. We were across the street from USASOC, you know, Army Special Operations Command. So we got all the capabilities. My first mission was Panama. I learned and cut my teeth, uh, with one of our, um, SOD-A, you know, the detachment sergeant. He taught me some ropes, you know, going in and out of the roads of Panama. If you guys have been there, you know, you go the wrong way, Skipper, you better find your way back. And that, that's how I grew up. And then the next couple of missions were integrated with Green Berets, um, and I brought the languages, I brought my hard skills, so they didn't have to worry about me necessarily shoot, move, and communicate.

I already knew how to do that. But I brought my— I think I brought my technical proficiency, um, and, and I, I was just happy to do my job. So yeah.

How many people at DLI were confused and further on in your Army career were confused by your gold wings?

Oh, a lot.

A lot.

You know, they were, they, you know, so it was funny because I did see someone else at some point. I remember it was somebody that had, you know, maybe 2 or 3 rockers, right? So it looked more like than my little 3 wings on my my sergeant, and they were wearing it. They were prior service. And it was that same whole long thing. If you put a 4187 and you put it in, but anybody who's ever read an Army or military regulations, there's like 50 ways to read it.

Right. Right.

And at the end, you're just like, it doesn't say you can't because there's no equivalent on it. And for a while, somebody I think told me something and it, and it wasn't the, the military, the MI guys. It might've been. And just to keep a lower profile, when we started to go travel and sanitize for training, then we took it off anyway. So then for the longest time, I just didn't even wear anything on the uniform because we were training or going forward to do, you know, the FID missions and stuff like that. But yeah, it was at the beginning, it was kind of a— yeah, I was like, oh crap, I shouldn't do that. And then after I left group, it just really didn't matter because, yeah, I stopped doing any of that. So that's funny.

Tell us about this operation down on the Ecuador-Colombia border where you guys ran into ELN.

Yeah, so that, well, that, that was a, that was interesting. And that was kind of the start of a lot of things for me. And I want to say that was my second mission in 7th Group. It was your typical FID mission flying into Quito, and from Quito we were going to do this, it's to the Putumayo area. So it was probably, I don't know, like a 12-hour, 11-hour drive with an entire uh, company of, you know, everything that we can take to support, uh, the police over there in that training. And so my mission, um, was to do force protection of the SOD-A. So I was in the lead vehicle with the commander, the sergeant major, and I think like a commo guy. It was, it was a commo SF guy. And then it was, you know, token me. Um, and my responsibility was, you know, essentially do the intel guy, do the SIGINT stuff. Um, obviously I had a pre-brief prior to leaving of what potentially could be threat. And I think it was like the 18 Fox kind of working with him. And, and, uh, so yeah, it was your typical, it was a really good mission because at that point it wasn't just flying in somewhere and then just training the guys like you had to do a movement and through, you know, it isn't, it isn't, it wasn't Afghanistan at the time, but it's still, you're in the, you're at that, you're at that border area.

And you're a bunch of gringos transporting, you know, million dollars worth of capability. So you are a moving target. Um, and so I'm in the lead vehicle and we're going town to town to town. Uh, and I think I've mentioned it before, like, I knew my, my, my trade. I was pretty decent at it. Uh, but obviously I relied on the skills of a lot of the Green Berets that were there, right? These guys had been long, long-tooth guys in 7th Group, had traveled in and out of Latin America more than I did. So they really understood. So I kind of, uh, I want to say the commo guy, the commo SF guy that was next to me kind of helped me in that perspective bounce what I was interpreting from an intel side and what he did from, from just his skills and his experience. Um, and so we were kind of bounce that off as we would go town by town, people stopping to take piss breaks. Uh, but then, you know, here's where in that convoy, a lot of the, my skills now in the streets of Miami. Help me, right? Like, that definitely had— I've, I've always listened to that little voice for, for the longest time throughout my entire career.

And so 2 or 3 towns, 2 little, 3 little towns prior to where we got hit, uh, where the ambush, uh, that was already something, uh, an engagement going on. It was just desolate, right? Like you kind of see in the movies, you pull in and you're like, where the hell is everybody at? Like, it's not supposed to be Right? I can see that there's cell tower, it's the oil pipeline. There's all of these METT type stuff. You're like, okay, this is not right. And so you kind of give that indication. And then as you get to the next one, there's a little bit of traffic sort of on the SIGINT world. And SIGINT's pretty easy, right? It either belongs there, it doesn't belong there. You either listen to it and you can tell. I think at that point that a lot of that comms in there is which they will later serve on. They can say like, hey, there's 3 blue cows in the truck. Well, that's not what that means, right?

Right.

It's just nefarious talking where generally a regular, uh, you know, a person who learns Spanish may not understand that. Someone who's from the streets is going to understand, you know, some of that. And so that's really what I was cueing on, uh, because this wasn't like, you know, Cuban, you know, order of battle or Russian order of battle. This was more thug level or whatever can happen in there. And so as we get to the The last town, as we're leaving and it's starting to get, you know, get dark, it's kind of the whole thing. The road goes along, um, to our right, if you would. As we were moving to the Putumayo area, uh, there's the oil pipeline that just runs all the way across, right? And as we're coming around a bend and we turn left, it's kind of a huge blind spot. And as we come, come around, and then now we can see forward down the road, and then it S-turns. Uh, it's a little— it's a— it's like a bridge, a wooden bridge, and there's a bus. Oh my God. a school bus there. And that was like your atypical, the dudes are robbing them.

They were really kidnapping, uh, um, a politician that was there. And I guess they didn't know we were coming, or they may have known we were coming. As I'm coming around, I get that, that unique break of squelch, right, that follows, um, with some, some spoken language. But as we come around, I give an indicator, and as soon as we come around, we start getting shots fired. And there was that big, oh crap, this is not supposed to be happening, which was part of it. So I'll stop there for a second.

Yeah, no, this is a pretty big deal too. Prior to 9/11 that you have Americans on, I don't want to say clandestine, but kind of low visibility. You're not trying to make your presence known and then you run into the enemy and start taking fire.

Yeah, you take fire. I mean, you stumble across their activities. And to go forward, originally they were declared to be bandidos, but that was really also because of the host nation. As you know, the Americans are coming with FID money. There's lots of money. They don't want the US to pull out. because it wasn't assessed that there's bad guys, right? So you're going to downplay as if you're in any of these, you know, I don't want to say third world countries, if you're any of these other countries and you're supporting that nation and something happens, you know, they can look bad. They don't want the US to pull out, you know, and then ultimately I get shot or, you know, and so that means now somebody's down and this is going to go up to essentially go up the flagpole, right? Um, so yeah, so initially it was, it was bandidos. Later on, as they're processing everything, from the intel side and as, you know, the heroic actions from the Green Berets and everything that happened. And then, you know, they're, uh, the MI side and this, uh, USASOC side is looking, hey, do we give this guy a Purple Heart or we not give this guy a Purple Heart?

Do we give this guy, you know, what awards are we going to give for these actions? Because it did happen.

Right.

Then the information surfaced and USASOC was amazing. I mean, I got a lot of the General officer notes, and everybody was very supportive because they're like, "Hey, it did happen. People did get shot at. We killed people. You know, they saved lives of guys that were about to get taken as hostages." And then they found out, yeah, hey, these are dudes that were ELN or FARC. They're training down there, and they're doing this as part of money. And then it goes back to the order. You know, the information that we knew about the way that they operate. But that was a. for me personally, well, I'd imagine I left group shortly after that. So I don't know what, how, you know, SF Group or at least 7th Group changed in time because I was gone shortly after that.

I mean, that was a problem, uh, the 7th Group was having a lot, I think, during like the '80s and, and like, uh, the early '90s, right? Is they weren't getting recognized. They weren't getting combat infantry badges. They weren't getting Purple Hearts. They, Because they weren't in an official war or whatever.

We talked about that with Greg.

Yeah.

Greg Walker.

That they were being kind of left out to dry.

Yeah. I mean, the threat was there. I can tell you that because I would then go to Colombia the next mission and then we ramped up force protection. Force protection was kind of one of those things like, yeah, okay. A lot of the old timers in the team were like, no, man. Hey, there, there are people that are going to want to rug us. We're Americans. We bring nice, fancy stuff. You're out there and you're also training the police or the military who are going to come after them. You can see where that cycle goes. It doesn't need to be war. Essentially, it is a war, right? War on drugs or war on, on, on their neighborhood, if you were like a turf war. So yeah, I remember, uh, and again, at this point I was younger. I learned a lot from the, you know, the, uh, the team sergeants there. And, you know, we were carrying the fanny packs and we would go to the gym and we would. protect each other. Where's your gun? Where did you keep your gun? Because there was that threat level. It wasn't, it wasn't like it is like if you would go to Afghanistan, but it was there.

How did that go down though, where on that operation where you got shot and had to be evacuated?

Yeah, so as the vehicle came around, we took, I want to say, maybe the first 2 shots, they, the driver went forward a little bit, and then the determination was to To pull back because there was nowhere to go forward, right? So we needed to get some, some distance between the bridge, the hard bridge, because it was dark at that point. And then I, I want to say they can see or acknowledge because of the beams of light from the vehicle, they can see the first 2 guys. And then there were some guys on, on the, on the hilltop or along the hilltop. And so we backed up. And for you guys that have been in those little crappy one-way roads, you know, luckily the guy who's driving, no, don't go too far back because then it's a cliff down or you're going to hit the pipe. So we got enough, you know, lucky, just pulled back enough, um, that when the 2, the commander and the sergeant major opened the doors to start engaging, we were then in the back. And I think the combo guy had his radio up, his, was able to get to his weapon faster.

I had all of this crap on me, right? Uh, lesson learned for the rest of my career, how to keep everything tidy. Uh, and so as we open up now, there's only again, it's a one-way road, you know, hill on the left and then a drop, a dark drop down, which you would potentially hit the oil pipe that was there. And so we could not, we could not engage because we had the other 2 guys in front of us. And so my thing was to come out. I came out the back rear door, was essentially I knew to, to jump over and try to get into sort of the ditch. I just didn't know how, how deep the ditch was. So as I'm untangling getting ready to move and to jump. As I'm jumping over, you know, I get nicked in the inner thigh and it goes out the exterior, uh, of my right thigh and then just kind of come crashing down. And then, you know, I was like, oh crap. Right. You know, I feel the heatness in my leg. There's a lot going on. This is my first engagement in, in, in combat.

Uh, and I think I've mentioned it before, like it was, it was Interesting for me to mentally go from, okay, I'm going to do my job as the, the SOD-A guy, right? Yeah. I'm going to do some, some typical be a team member, but that's what these guys are here for. But once I got shot, now it's kind of like, okay, this is personal.

Yeah.

And that adrenaline kind of kicks in. And so that, that Marine in you comes out and he's like, okay, got it. Now I'm going to be part of this team, part of this, this, this aspect of it. As I hit the ground, as I do that quick quick combat lifesaver check, if you would.

Like, all right, I'm okay.

Go for my— I think it was like a 9mm at the time, a Beretta.

Make sure the boys are still there.

What's that?

Make sure the boys are still there.

Yeah, right.

Well, yeah, you're just like, okay, you shot my brand new North Face pants, or REI, I think they were North Face pants. I'm like, fuck, I'm still paying for those things. And then I go look up and then now this ditch is really high and I'm like, okay, this is now I'm gonna have to either crawl up and then, you know, obviously you alert your team and say, hey, I'm hit, or whatever I said. Uh, and then it appeared within, within seconds, a minute, that, that then either the medic or maybe one of the guys that was in the back vehicle actually came, came to see me, kind of double-check. And he had the comms to be able to relate back, uh, hey, you know, he'd been, he'd been hit.

How far— if that was your inner thigh, how far was it from your femoral artery? That's a really dangerous place to get shot.

Really, really, really close. I'm very lucky. I don't think I even looked at the x-rays or even cared when I got back to Womack. Is it Womack? Whatever it is.

At Bragg.

Yeah, at Bragg. I never looked at it, only till I was retiring that now you're making the case to the VA, I got shot. How many percentage can I get? They looked at all of that stuff and they're like, hey man, you were that was really close. I was like, yeah, I never really went back but I mean, as I feel it, it's really right. It's got to be centimeters that it went through it. I do know that the medic wanted to try to put some rod. He's like, I've got to, first combat, he's like, I got to do all these procedures for you. I'm like, yeah, you're not doing that, dude.

Of course you got a CIB out of all of this and a combat patch.

Uh, I didn't get anything out of that. Yeah, I get, I get, uh, yeah, they, they all got their, I mean, they're all, you know, they, they got their awards. They were, they were world techy and it was both documented. They, they did their part. Uh, I think I left out of there, obviously my purple, the first Purple Heart. Um, which again, lots of respect for, for the professionals. I saw all the paperwork that they had to do to get that, to get that filed in that time.

Yeah.

And forever, I took 2 things out of that. It is take care of your people when it comes time to award, because I saw from captains to E-6s all the way to 3 stars pushing this paperwork forward. So I believe in the process. Sorry to kind of hijack that a little bit, but that's okay.

No, no, it's your show, so you're not hijacking it.

Oh, you're good.

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Oh really?

Yeah.

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You're Irish. What do you mean even hot for me?

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I've not, but I will.

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So boykies.com, use TEAM10 to get 10% off your order. Uh, the pro— that's the promo code, TEAM10, for 10% off, off your order at boykies.com. So back to you, Eric. Um, you Obviously, thank God, survived this encounter down on the Colombian border. You said you had another FID mission down to Colombia with 7th Group. When does this idea, or when do you even first hear that there's this secretive JSOC intelligence unit? I mean, I think especially at that time in the late 1990s, no one even knew these guys existed really. When did this idea, or when did knowledge of this unit's existence even creep into your awareness? And what made you make that decision to kind of take the jump over?

You know, there's something you just said that just jarred my memory. And I'm going to make a joke here probably to you is when I got hogtied by a bunch of Rangers on an abandoned airfield on a JSOC exercise. So true story. So how I actually even came to understand what JSOC was, and even, I didn't even know what the tiers would be. I didn't know any of that while, while, while in group. I think the only thing I participated in was at the SERE school, right? So they need, they needed bodies. I think they, I don't, maybe they needed a little brown guy to play a part. I did go be like an extra at SERE school. Uh, there at Fort Bragg. And so I kind of saw a world that I wasn't, I, I wasn't aware of when I was a Marine, um, and definitely not while I was in MI or, or ASAD or in group. Um, and then there's a couple of guys that came in, you know, typical, came in the little blue blazers with gold buttons. Um, and, you know, my dead sergeant tells me, hey man, you need to go report over here because they're doing a casting call, uh, interviews for an exercise.

I'm like, oh, okay, cool. And then he's a Spanish speaker. So there was something that they said that then I felt, all right, cool, I can be, I can be of use. And so I went through this interview process and they make me talk, they want to know, made me read these lines. And essentially, ironically, I then end up playing a park— a commander for a, uh, you know, Latin American terrorist group for an exercise. So it's the first time I get to grow my beard. I get to, you know, and as an intel guy, it was interesting because I could then go to the SCIF, if you wouldn't, and look this up. So I got to really rehearse rather than just being like somebody random that they got a group to play a character in one of these JRX exercises. And so I then, during that, um, the, you know, backside of being a target, so I was essentially the number one target or the number two target. For this exercise. So JSOC brought everything to bear, and I got to see it from that perspective, right? I got— and I got to see it because I had my lines, and then I, I got to go to like the little talk where they're orchestrating.

And then I remember this one guy, um, just kind of to your story of the hippie, you know, in the mountains. He just looked different, right? This guy just carried himself different. Long hair. That blue coat, it seems like he wore that everywhere, right? And he was just authoritative, just telling everybody, knew everything what he was doing and capabilities and assets and the boys. And I'm like, oh man, that guy's pretty cool. But then I get told to go off and then they're gonna capture me and have this little piece of paper on you. Don't say anything and talk on the radio. And subsequently, I didn't know what a direct action hit would be or a hostage, you know, I didn't know what that would be. But I felt the fucking concussion grenades, right? And I then quickly learned backwards. Uh, I knew that they were assets, uh, because I was, as a, as a, as at that time as just a SOD-A, there were capabilities at hand that didn't make sense to what I knew, right?

Uh-huh.

As an, as a, as an E-5 and a SOD-A, um, you know, with, with, uh, SIGINT gear or capabilities. I knew so much, but when this exercise was unfolding, I'm like, how the hell are these guys going to do that? Who the hell are these dudes? How are they—

right?

Like, I was really inquisitive of how they were going to find me. And there was things being brought to bear that I had no idea. And obviously a guy with the blue blazer wouldn't tell me till, you know, at the dead of night they found me. It happened to be in this one with the Rangers, and all due respect, Those dudes came in, they stormed in, hogtied the crap out of me. I was still with the concussion, whatever they, they threw in there, and I'm hogtied. Uh, and finally one guy finally found that little piece of paper. I'm like, dude, if you, if you did all that to me, you better have found that SSC, right? You better have found that fucking thing. Other lesson learned. And so from that, when I went back and went through the debriefing, I, I talked to that one guy. It was, he was a sergeant major at the time. He was a sergeant major. And then all I know was to the effect of, hey, guys are going to be coming, um, in the months to be, to show up for the, uh, the pitch, the recruiting pitch.

And so I then went back and told somebody that was in charge of me, I was like, hey, I'm interested to do this, um, between training and stuff like that. And I went, and then it was 2 guys that ended up being forever, uh, 2 of my greatest mentors, right? That, you know, just really quick, hopefully a lot of organizations, when they send folks to do the recruiting, you send your best of the best because that impression lasts forever. And it was, in fact, it lasted forever. A, the guy that ran the exercise or that aspect of the exercise, I would then work for him or know who he was. And then the 2 guys that came for recruiting, I don't remember much, but I, whatever they pitched, I wanted to do it because I just remember being hogtied and, and all of that. So that mystique again, I knew there was no videos, there was nothing. Um, and then I applied. Um, and they would basically said, here's a card, we'll call you, don't contact us. And then that's it. And then, and I, and then I went and that's when I got shot and came back and I was like, oh crap, I know I got to go through some selection process.

And then at that point, I had heard bits and pieces, but there was nothing being talked about at group, nothing.

Right.

Um, I, I want to say that there was one guy that was a former guy that, hey, came back. There were some incidents, uh, unfortunately, uh, fatal, uh, that I didn't know that this guy did come from somewhere, but he was pretty dinged up mentally. And I filed that later on, which is what, what I do now for a lot of the veteran suicide. Um, after I got shot, came back, uh, and then I knew I just needed to train and then did, did end up getting that magical phone call. Hey, here's some information, show up and you're going to go through your selection process.

What can you tell us about the selection process? Because I've had some conversations with people who actually, actually said they had a good time at the selection course and thought it was a very challenging experience where they were kind of asked to think outside the box.

Yeah, for simplicity, that, that is, you know, and I'll— Eric will just speak on his personal, which is going to probably quantify a lot of that. Um, I went— every time I went through something, I knew more and more that that's where I wanted to be. Again, I never saw it in the Marine Corps. I never saw it at group. I didn't even read about it in a book, right? During that time, I didn't— maybe I could have correlated it to a movie or something. It was every time something was done, I was just enamored by it. I was enamored by the preciseness, the timeliness, the exactness, the no feedback, right? The no feedback aspect of it. I don't know, it might have been something from my childhood. It's just the way it was, right? Like, it— and so it just, it was hard. It was physically, it was physically hard, mentally hard. I think it was the good piece.

Very individual.

aspects of it, which I enjoyed. And then there was always that mystique, right? You know, you start with so many and then one day so many are gone and you keep on going down and you're— and what that told you is if you're going through all of this, you want to be part of an organization that has high standards, right? And so I remember that and all, and it's just the way things ran, the littleness. I was just, I was just attracted to that compartmentalization, to that mind-challenging, to that you're not gonna figure it out, right? Like, you— nobody, nobody talked about it, nobody knew. And the people that said some stuff, I remember in my class, you're just like, okay, you need to get chaptered out of the Army because you're just talking wacky shit, right? Like, we're not here looking for aliens. Like, um, so, so it, uh, it, it forever. I was, you know, obviously really proud to have been selected. But many times in my career, and I think we talked about this earlier as we transitioned into GWAT, and then as certain organizations changed in time, I would always revert back to selection as the core of why they select people.

And that, in essence, is your selection is an indicator of what you may have to do and the possibility, because in those selections, you're going to be tested across the spectrum. And that spectrum is tied back to obviously, an organization's requirements for the people that they need to do certain missions.

What do you think that core is that they're selecting for? Like, well, I guess I'm, I guess I'm kind of asking that question of like, what is the quintessential operator, which I know is kind of a broad and maybe unfair question in some ways. But what do you think that those qualities are?

You know, the ability for ambiguity, right? The ability, and it's been said many times, to live and think in the gray is very difficult. That ability, again, you know, all due respect to everyone, but every Marine, every rifleman, every SEAL, every other operator, every— you may not have the mindset to take off and do what is needed right there. And Dave, you can relate to it, which is that, you know, at the— in the IC world, in the tradecraft world, is, hey, come back and fight another day, right? And they always, depending your, you know, the old instructors from the old Cold War will tell you, you know, don't be that Ranger who has to take that hill.

Right.

You might have to make that determination. You evaluated and you said, I will come back tomorrow. And a lot of, by DNA, if you would, you know, the infantry people, the, the more of the special operations, you know, uh, uh, dragger knuckles, knuckle draggers, um, are gonna want to use that adrenaline. And so the type of people you need is that person who's able to think emotional intelligence, right? It, it's critical.

Mm-hmm.

That ability to go, nope, Uh, that compartmentalization, intelligence, you know, to be smart, to think, uh, thinking out of the box. Yes. You know, those things, those are, those are key. Um, and then there's things you're just not going to be comfortable, right? That a lot of people are going to be like, hey, I didn't join the military for that. Well, that's great. Thank you for your, you know, we saw that a lot. Thank you for your patriotism. Continue. You're going to leave here and you're going to do great things, but this may not be for you. And because this world We're actually not going to tell you about it. And so there aren't very many people that are going to go do something not being told, because you knew when you guys went to Ranger School what Ranger School was about. You knew about SF, you knew about probably the agency might be a little bit different, but everything in the military. But this world, no, because that's the type of world you're going to operate in.

Right.

Right. And so Singleton 2, 3, 4 ambiguity. So that ability really, it's simple. to operate and be trusted. And so there's, uh, integrity is huge.

Yeah.

Your word, your word is it. And, and then so your analytical process to process the information, not only as an individual, because you work in team and you, you're able to talk to each other, and then an analyst is gonna take it. But it all starts with that trust that that guy really go do— did he, did he self-assess? How many people really know to self-assess? Hey, man, I'm hurt. Yeah, it was one thing to muscle through a long walk than to go, I may need to stop. It's okay for me to stop because the mission I gotta do tomorrow is gonna take me 18 more hours to do. And then I don't know what's gonna happen, so I need to have some reserves, right? So that hopefully that answers the mindset of it. And then, and then the last one, and if I would, is, I mean, you, you, you gotta be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Right? Like, you've seen some of the pictures. And there's, there's, I mean, I'm not the only one that's done this, right? This can relate to guys doing other sort of intel, intel work, which requires more of that mindset.

But is, hey, you don't know what you're going to need to be tomorrow. And that can be in a variety of ways, which I think you'll probably cover on later on. But it starts there.

And I, you know, it's interesting, because one of the things you said is, is you know, the ability to do what it takes. And I think a lot of people think when they think of that, they think of like from a shooter perspective to kill a bad guy or to, you know, take the shot. But sometimes it more like in a DEA scenario, it's like not taking down the bad guy, knowing they're doing harm, but waiting to collect on the bigger picture. Like that type of thing is hard for people to walk away from. You know, it's like—

Tactical patience.

Yeah, yeah. It's, um, so sometimes doing what it takes isn't, isn't like the, the, the gung-ho, yeah, I'm gonna sua sponte, or, you know, just charge in here and blast this person. I'm okay with killing bad guys.

Leroy Jenkins.

It's living— yeah, yeah, exactly. It's living in a, in a much more, um, you know, kind of obscure world of, I know this person is actively hurting people, but it's not my job at this this point to stop them from hurting these people because there's a larger picture that's being taken in.

Yeah, you guys both said something, and again, now I'm fortunate that post-processing, and when I went to NICoE, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence for Traumatic Brain Injuries, it's generally here in Walter Reed area. We get a lot of special operators that come that are know, 15, 20 years into career and these guys are burnt out. And, and so the command sent them to this 1-month program. And so one of the key things, uh, about NICoE and traumatic brain injuries and PTS, if you would, is based on triggers, right? And so when we did this exercise really quick on triggers, I was— it's gonna kind of almost be like a joke. Like, I was there with the SEAL, I was there with a, a guy from Fort Bragg, and I think it was another SF guy, and then there's me. And interestingly, and, and, and the SEAL came from, from the higher tier level. Um, and their triggers and the mentality, again, nothing, nothing wrong with any of them, but it's just that, that, uh, by default, by default, they're going to, their triggers are different than our triggers. Our triggers are very suppressed.

Uh-huh.

You know, if you bump into me, I am just gonna go away. If you hit my car downtown, you know, the streets of Patienceville, Haiti, I'm just gonna keep on because the mission is more important. You have to be able to control that adrenaline. And yes, I can pull out my gun and I can shoot them. And yes, I can pull out my knife, we can do all of that. But it is that emotional ability in those triggers. So when we did this exercise, all my triggers were different than theirs.

That's interesting.

My requirement was to be— for us to be gray. And gray is not, you know, that only cloak and dagger, but it's those emotions.

Right.

Right. Like you're, I'm not going to, if you, you know, as you know this from a FIS perspective, Foreign Intelligence Service, someone is going to probe you. Well, a lot of these Marines, you know, these wound up guys, they're going to, they're going to, you're going to fail that test. They're going to show that you're an aggressor where you have to be able to be able to control that and just go, okay, I got, something else that I got to protect.

So, Eric, you did get selected, of course. And I was wondering if we could take a moment here because I know you're a bit of a student of the history behind it. If you could tell us a little bit about the unit history now that, you know, you're getting read onto the mission and onto the unit. And I know there's plenty of things you're not able to speak about, but are you able to talk to us a little bit about the unit history, why it came about, why it exists, how it developed over time?

Yeah, I'll do my best to navigate. And so obviously there was a unique requirement a long time ago when a lot of these other organizations came, right? And so there's a— from my background, and just to keep it simple, obviously, you know, special operations and intelligence and the importance of intelligence at a tactical operation and strategic requirement, and in particular strategic, right? That very hard on-the-ground intelligence with certainty, you know, to be enablers for people who have another job, right? Another, another tier organization who has something to do. And so that's a, that's a kind of an origin story of the requirement, right, for unique special operations intelligence that keeps it simple. And then the history. So I always found history in, in that regards, A, as a childhood growing up because of my stepdad and sort of Uh, the Cuban background and, and what, um, why Paya Pig, you know, the, the Bay of Pigs. I didn't understand it in high school, but I did ironically when I went to Goodfellow to be in military intelligence. That was something that I learned. I learned the insides and out from the intel of the Bay of Pigs and, and the requirement for intelligence.

And so when I, when I start getting to the unit, you know, these things start to kind of combine kind of my, my life at being at, at, at 7th Group, which is Special operations and then being an intel guy. And then some of the things from my childhood, uh, with my stepfather at that kind of Bay of Pigs world. And so getting into the unit and, um, I was a young guy. So as in any of these organizations, they skip and go to the corner and draw, right? Like you got to earn your keep, right? Like it's, and so, you know, that because that's kind of part of selection, that's part of the course. And so when you step in the first day, you know your place. Right? Uh, and then they bring you in with open arms, but then you just, there's just so many things going on and things that you won't, you won't be exposed to in training. Uh, obviously, because if you're not selected, then, then just like anything should be compartmentalized. And then when you get in there and depending where you go and you do kind of like the, uh, a unit history, they're very good at, at, at, uh, at, at a corporate level, if you would, at an organization.

Uh, sharing its history, where we come from. So now you understand because you're inside, excuse me, you're inside the fold, right? So you get some of that. And then I happened to be that the teams that I went into were full of history, full of the guys that did stuff, some of the, the, the, you know, the, the ninjas as we call them. These are the skills-wise. And so when I think I mentioned it to you, when, when you're sitting in there and you're having some of your briefings or you're, you're, you're getting in there or you're having some of your team talk. right at the team room and you're, you're having a drink, these stories come on and you're like, you fucking kidding me? Like, we did that?

You did that?

And everybody's just humble. Yeah, we did this and we did that and we were part of this. You know, a lot of it wasn't the, hey, my, you know, my, my, my sock is bigger than yours. It is, hey man, start learning because you got to get into those shoes quick and you've got to be able to understand the spectrum because they don't teach you this in the schoolhouse. You gotta be ready for the spectrum of what the, the possible is.

Right.

And so, yeah, you're seeing, you know, and I think that time we didn't have, we didn't have computers. So I remember part of my day was come in, work out, go do combatives, go do some technical stuff. And then as if I was getting ready to go, I'd have to read on paper the daily sit reps. And so you're reading these sit reps and it's gotta be like reading a, you know, a Jack Carr book. You're just like, Are you serious? Like, these dudes are out there? Like, you didn't even meet these guys and you're like, oh my God. And then you read the other folder of some, you know, there's 10 things going on in the world. And then all of a sudden, then there's this drawer of all of the other stuff. So I got to read them, right? And then there was a lot of history. So I learned early on of people. I mean, we, we would celebrate what individuals did because they became myths and it was okay. It's kind of, I think I mentioned it once, it's kind of like being like on a the Indians who sit around the campfire and talk about how they slayed, I don't know, whatever, and how they did something.

And then that instilled in me— I, I don't think the 20 years I was there I learned all the history. I was fortunate, a lot of the graybeards brought me in and, and talked to me about these stories, and there was kind of a passing on of the history, um, which is an honor to be sort of bestowed just this information, which unfortunately it's got to stay in your head till you talk to others. But yeah, that was my— go ahead.

I was just wondering, how was that for you from going from the Marine Corps, which is very focused on esprit de corps, very focused on history? I mean, you get history classes during boot camp, you know, and then going someplace where The history is so fragmented and threaded that you really have to track it down on your own if you want to know it.

Yeah, that's a good point. I don't, uh, that kind of probably, you know, answers, answers some folks' questions like, hey, why does it seem that you're so much more passionate, uh, about being a Marine, right? That whole once a Marine, always a Marine. But that's where I started, and, and that's how when I left the streets of Hialeah and I went into the Marine Corps, I got indoctrinated into Marine Corps history. And so in and out was Marine Corps history forever. And then my time in the Army in the 7th Group was too quick, right? It was fast and furious. I was in and I was out. And then when I came to the unit, it was all based about history, right? Because of its origins. It's about— there's also this piece of, hey, buddy, this is for real, right? your actions, home, forward, back, left, in between, what you say, who you marry, who you talk to, what you purchase, what you wear affects the organization.

Right.

And so that ties back into the history and into the why and it, and in simple places into the level of what you're operating at. And it sinks in sometimes. It really does sink in, right? When you start Going up the ranks, I think by the time guys are E-8s, E-9s, you know, you start understanding more of the inner workings of money, of, um, of, uh, charter. You start understanding, uh, authorities.

Right.

And once you look at these authorities, you're looking across, right? And I always studied also, uh, intelligence, um, as the intelligence community. So I knew, oh, wow.

Okay.

This organization, not only in the hallways, But in documents, like, you're for real, right? You're giving a lot of money. You have a lot of, uh, your requirements are, are at that level. Uh, and then I experienced it, you know, and we'll get into it where I did the typical tactical mission, you know, running around the mountains of Afghanistan to a strategic mission, which is there's zero chance, you know, there's, hey, there's no wiggle room for compromise. And which is different than being shot in the leg or getting hit by an RPG. compromise, in essence, is really not an option. So history was important to understand.

When you say the spectrum of the possible, I mean, it sounds like a lot of the guys at the unit had really everything thrown at them as far as mission profiles, types of missions. You mentioned the title authorities. In one sense, it sounds like the dream job that you can kind of Do whatever it is you need to do. That's maybe the wrong term to use, but I mean, you have different means to accomplish your missions, and probably you guys have wider left and right limits to do that than probably some of the other units. But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the difficulties, or maybe not, of straddling that world between special operations and the intelligence community and sort of existing in that gray area.

Yeah, absolutely. So by definition, if you were, there isn't, and maybe it's changed since I've been out. I always reference, you know, hey, I got out 2 years ago and the world could have changed since then. Nor do you see a lot of special operations as we relate it to, you know, and we talked about this earlier, you know, the direct action, HALO, SCUBA, SEALs. Deals, you know, what was the old terminology, fixed finish or whatever, prime fixed finish world to this, which has always been more on sort of the agency side, go collect intelligence, espionage, right, world. And then when you get to put that potentially on one plate, to something you said earlier, it is very unique, right, to be able to, um, and I want to probably go back because I got a little bit lost here on, on the, on the mentality side of it. Um, I was fortunate just to, for my groundwork when I first got there, I did the atypical, um, mission that was going on. So that was good for me and my peer group when we came in. Um, I got to go into that real mission.

Um, and that was, you know, everything that I trained for. everything that we had done, every preparation we were doing it, uh, even to have, you know, the, the subsequent risk levels that came with it and exiting, exiting out. So had that under my belt. And then, and then the Global War on Terrorism kicked. And then we, you know, everybody's going off and doing Afghanistan AFO work. You're going out looking on the mountains, you're doing all of this type of work. Um, but when you got back, you may or may not go back on that rotation. You may have skills that you've developed. You may have certain characteristics, languages, technical, other hard skills that you may have, or plain and simple, what happens in our world is you're by name. Hey, I want, I want, you know, Joe or Dan to come on this mission because of whatever reason. And so then you're going off and you're doing that. And so for me, 20 years later, and you're probably going to know, pull, pull the strings on it a little bit. That was a lot of jumping around. I mean, that literally is a lot of jumping around between all of those different skill sets, the things you had to go learn to do, and then all of the crap that I call Pandora's box that is part of it, which you have to put away because you're not bringing that stuff home to mama, because mama and the family really don't know what you're doing.

Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna rely on like some clichés and some Hollywood to try to I hope paint this picture, and you can tell me if you agree or disagree, but it sounds like people like you were bouncing very much between being a character in, let's say, American Sniper or one of those types of films, and then jumping into the next mission, which is more like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Yeah.

And you're having to kind of jump in between these 2 very different worlds. And I can only imagine the amount of stress that that puts you under.

Yeah.

You know, the neat thing is the sanity part is we had really good mentors, right? And so I hope that I was a good mentor. I think I was, you know, and so I had really good mentors that guide you, right? And so when you step in for you guys, you step into a team room and that team room functions a certain way, then it becomes normal. And so that, that became quick, quickly became normal. And in particular, after the Global War on Terrorism, organizations still struggle. We're like, oh my God, this is not what we're supposed to be doing. You know, that typical stuff. But after a while, these units are resilient and they adapt. And then, you know, I think we mentioned it before, you have NCOs. NCOs are the backbone. of a lot of these, uh, special operations units. And the NCO, that, that graybeard's gonna go, nope, got it, suck it up. This is what you're gonna go do. Go put your, you know, go put your dry suit back in your cage, go get your suit, uh, go freshen up, uh, you know, literally go freshen up your language, go do this tradecraft, go get your shots, um, and study up on the mission and get out completely to the different side of the atmosphere.

And by the way, the protocol for this one is, you know, tell Mama you're, you're not gonna talk to her for 3 months, right? And then, by the way, Skippy, have your shit in order and don't fuck up. 'Cause, you know, no pressure. You know, that, that was the— well, the pressure really was like, you can go do really good, but if you fuck up on the day you came back, like, that's it, you fucked up that day. And you're just like, that's not fair. But, uh, you know, there's unique cultural things. Um, Yeah, hopefully that answers.

I'd like to get into, well, of course, 9/11 happens, the War on Terror kicks off. It changes the unit you're in, changes a lot of these units and how they operate. I'd like to kind of get into that and start getting into some of your time getting deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. And do you want to lead us into that before we kind of— I'd like to ask you about Ramadi.

Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, it took me a little bit to remind me. So the first one I, I did was, again, as I mentioned, that, that typical mission. Um, was a good mission, came back. Yeah, I think that one, you know, same thing, long hair, beard. Uh, and shortly after that one is when I met my wife. So my, my poor wife— and it is a, you know, gotta bring in the family because without my family, I don't, I don't know if I would have been able to do this, uh, this long. So especially my spouse, my current spouse of 19 years. And so that's when she met me. She was a foreigner, met her on the streets of DC. And Dave, you can relate to it. Like, hey, crap, this is a foreigner. I'm in a special unit, right? Like, oh God, this is just— why couldn't you just meet an American? So much easier to date. And, you know, and I'm like, all right, you know, love at first sight. I fell in love. And then, you know, and so she was a the corner, didn't really know anything about the military. She was from Brazil, came into the US, probably been in the US not even a year.

Her parents had been here for a while. That's where she met me. And then I was off to do training at Fort Bragg or something like that. And then went into GWOT. The first thing I did for GWOT, I was fortunate again, my mentors, one that is now one of my lifelong mentors and, and good friends, is a lot about Uh, and selecting by names, uh, they select me to go. We set up essentially like an FO cell, um, overseas somewhere. I think we were like, uh, Dubai or Qatar, one of these places, right, where the task forces were setting up, uh, points, points. And so we was an officer, senior guy, and then I went in there. And so from there, that was me. Then I think I posted somewhere, I went to like 5 different countries. I went from an embassy to transporting money to transporting prisoners on helicopters that the task force had just gotten to landing in these dusty AFOs somewhere to meet my buddies and hand them crap that we bought them at REI. Right. And so that was my like, holy crap, I came from, you know, somewhere, you know, completely different focus.

to the— I finally got into the Global War on Terrorism. I got into the Global War on Terrorism probably like a year, year later, um, because we sent all our guys out. And, and as Jeremy and some of the guys that, that you had out in there, they got burned out, right? Like, they, they were doing stuff that they weren't designed to do. And those guys have, uh, that, you know, the— those elements, those other SMUs have the ass behind them to do that, and they were—

Right. Tiring out.

So we were in smaller numbers.

This unit was never created to like produce at that kind of tactical level in support of so many ongoing tactical operations.

Now, I want to say it again, and this is only me putting my GA CDD Sergeant Major hat, you know, 19 years later, it's because of our creativity, right? And it is because of our problem-solving abilities from the lowest You know, E5 operator, you know, at where Jeremy came from to wherever I came from. And then just the missions that these units have. If people present the problem and a solution, you're going to get the resources. And so anyway, that was the first thing I did, that mission, which again took me onto the ground. I went and grabbed prisoners, but it was that atypical. I think we talked about it, Jack, is like, you know, a commander's looking at you going, hey, we need one of you guys, it's either from your element or a Delta op, you know, another operator. We got this sensitive thing, go pick up this prisoner or go take this gear or go take this money. And so you're doing stuff. You are that trusted entity that can take care of whatever. And so when we traveled—

go ahead.

I was just gonna say the problem, I mean, the problem with your ability to be flexible and to get it done and not just yours, but the unit in general, Is that that just generates more work, right?

Having a can-do attitude, right?

Right, right.

Well, it became that we're like, well, I'm glad they think we can do it. Okay, how the hell are we gonna do it, right? Like, I live my life, and a lot of the guys that were my bosses were like, all right, buddy, we're gonna go to the whiteboard. So we would go to the whiteboard with markers and figure out how to do this. Um, so anyway, so I did, I did that, and then My, my real first time into sort of the, the, the hard skills side of it was doing— I joined the SEALs in Kabul for a PSD-type AFO work. So that was just being another enabler in sort of that joint world, right? I think that's key for folks to understand that in the joint world, Uh, you know, one element's in charge, but there are other many people that make that capability, right? Uh, everybody's got a key job regardless of what you were, especially at these levels. Uh, but someone always has the primary responsibility. So I was, I was embedded, um, for about a month in, in Kabul, uh, which was good. However, then I get that magical phone call as we always do, uh, because we pack everything we can possibly pack for contingencies.

Right.

Like, okay, you're gonna go into the mountains of Asadabad, and now you're gonna go do AFO work and you're gonna replace your buddy over there because he has to come home because he's gonna have his first child. Which, by the way, then we end up knowing, you know, our friend's children, right? So like they leave off to high school. So anyway, so I'm gonna go replace this guy, and probably, you know, the guy you met in the mountains might have been there before. Uh, so I'm now dumped in, you know, whatever Asadabad was at, joint base, with the Rangers, OGA, SF Group, and our guys and doing stuff along the border. And that was literally, um, you know, operator slash human technical, right? For, for the intel special operations world, it's not really an INT. You're just a person who can get stuff done. And I think that's very key to articulate the difference that folks want to go, well, a keyboard monkey, that's all you do. Well, no, we get things done. It's just, you know, like an ODA team, you may have a specific skill, but at the end, you're still a Green Beret or you're still a SEAL, you're still, right?

You're the problem solver.

Hopefully that answers that. Yeah. Yeah. Problem, essentially a problem solver. So that took me to like 2002, '03, but let me know how you want to—

Yeah, Eric, real quick, just for the people who, you know, listen and may not be following along that well. Can you tell us what AFO means and then what you do when you're AFO? Because, you know, like you said, that your first job was, you know, was outside of theater, was outside of the combat area, but then you went into the combat theater and did PSD and AFO. So can you tell us about AFO?

Yeah, so like Advanced Force Operations, in essence, it's in the beginning of, at least for GWOT and in this particular case, right, there was other elements that you know, have written books or guys have written books in, in how they were down in the mountains doing advanced force operations. But there's also this, uh, administrative side that has to get done, right? Like special operations doesn't have bases all over the place. We're a very, very small little tick in the beginning that we have to find land. We have to find resources. We have to do, um, administrative stuff and, and in some instances be able to get into the fight. Beyond what we were tasked for. So that aspect of it from a liaison perspective was going, setting up, uh, from an advanced force was we were helping, uh, all kinds of stuff from vehicles to how to bring planes, how to get houses, how to get weapons in, how to get, you know, all, all of that aspect of it. Which when you're, you know, it doesn't matter how special you are when you're going to someone's base. You, it's at the, that's a relationship.

Like, hey man, I'm gonna have to go, you know, I need those barracks, right? And here's all I can tell you. Right. And so that's a lot of legwork to facilitate people coming in and, or the other one is providing options. So we have to sometimes provide multiple options. So it's just not like you went to go do one thing. Sometimes we're doing that thing 1, 2 times and 3 times. Because option number 1 and number 2 went to shit, and now you got to go do number 3. And that's really what you're running around with the flexibility to just jump on a C-130 and fly and go to this country and then go to that other country. Right. And that's at the admin in the non-combat area. And then in the combat area, it is just these enabling all of these other activities that the regular conventional mechanism can't do fast enough.

Right.

Like, hey, these guys went in there, they took out this hit, but those prisoners need to quickly go. from this little shitty, not even a FOB, to this interrogation, because now they're doing it at this new place because someone set up a capability, but they, you can only go, you know, entrusted. That's a lot of that work. And then the typical stuff is, then you're out operating out of FOB X and, you know, this entity is assigned to do special reconnaissance, is assigned to do AFO work up in the mountains looking. Right, that's different than doing more of the major combat operations. You're doing 3, 5, you know, small elements with other IC partners, with other indigenous at that level. And, and, and just really quick, I mean, a lot of that was really possible because we were able to thank God there was a lot of you know really cool you know the Rangers and the Marines and. National Guard that helped us accomplish a lot of the work. Because when you're doing a lot of the CFO work, you're not taking a full package. Like, you're taking whatever you can put in trucks.

And then when you get there, as many of your other guests say, you're like, oh, I guess these trucks aren't going to work. Crap. All right, can you buy those Jenga trucks? All right, we're going to buy these Jenga trucks. No authorities needed, right? Give or take. Now we're buying these Jenga trucks, and now you're, you're continuing forward, right?

Right. Yeah, it's, uh, You know, I think that it's interesting that, you know, when, when we watch movies, you know, somebody, a team shows up and, you know, there are all these weapons waiting for them, or there's a safe house waiting for them. And people don't understand that doesn't just happen. Like, like the US military and the CIA and, and these other organizations don't have hit teams staged everywhere and safe houses staged everywhere. And, you know, all these things.

And that kind of gets left out of the books and the movies because like, are you gonna make a movie about logistics?

Right.

But the thing is, is the logistics can be very, very spicy. Like you say, when it's just you and 3 other guys or 2 other guys and 5 indig in the, you know, out, out, you know, out in the mountains outside of, you know, Orgoon or whatever, you know, and it's like, okay, well, you know, How do we get trucks to navigate these? I just can't go to the local Toyota dealership and buy a bunch of Hiluxes.

And that operation, like a lot of people don't understand, including the operators, dare I say Rangers, SEALs, et cetera, don't understand that like, yeah, you went on this operation, kicked some ass, got HVT number 1, but there is like a whole cluster of enablers around that shit that made that operation actually happen. I mean, we were just kind of like the guys that kicked in the door the last 30 seconds of it.

Yeah, you got— I mean, you guys bring us a point. It's something you had said. I mean, we, and it was somebody that you knew, Dave, that we know in common. And so that peer group was out forward, right? And so one of the things that we were doing back at home station was monitoring because they were out first with who, you know, organically with the guys that they went out to go do, like you've had the guy on your show before. And those dudes were, you know, the point that I'm gonna get, they were freezing their ass off.

Yeah.

Because we didn't have that gear.

Right.

Right.

We had gear for— those guys had their gear for their specific missions. And yeah, they were able to get up. I think they were doing a training mission somewhere, take that package and get to Afghanistan. But there's— that terrain was different. There's a lot of unknowns. And so when they're getting ready to do, they're buying a lot of crap. on the economy, but they had that reachback power, right? And so they had— that's the uniqueness that these organizations do have is you're picking up the phone and you're sending an email and it gets prioritized. But that takes time to buy this stuff.

Right.

And then get it in. And, and if, you know, and nobody really is going to wear gear that you haven't trained with because that's pretty dangerous, right? To just take, especially some of the more critical kind of capabilities. But we had guys that, you know, took certain gear that we had on the shelf. We had a pretty wide range of gear from across all the other SMUs or, or, or entities. We would get similar of their capabilities and then we would have ours so we can be interoperable, uh, for lack of better words. But then those guys are like, dude, I didn't think I was gonna go from here to 10,000 feet and I'm fucking freezing my ass off because, so we would literally, you know, and you hear maybe sometimes these things in movies or books. Guys are going to REI Hudson Trail and we're buying and we don't know we're going to, you know, this 18-year-old, we're like, hey man, if you had all the money in the world, what would you buy for your buddy who's stuck in the mountains of a really high mountain freezing his ass off and needs to be really light because he's carrying a lot of vital stuff?

And they're like, well, you know, not— here's this Arc'teryx $800 jacket, right? And people are like, well, you guys are overspending. Well, that's the only thing that was available. in 2001. Right. And so we quickly had to get that gear because that's time. Right. That's time that those guys on the ground are like, hey man, I know how much, you know, how far I can hump, how much gear I can take. I know how cold that can be. But after a while, you're just going to be, I don't care how badass you are, those mountains of Afghanistan in that time will eat you up. Yeah. Right. Your boots. That's why quickly on SOF went and ditched whatever boots we had and we were buying, you know, whatever high-speed boots were available. But these elements were able to get that done. To your point, that was critical to be able to get this gear and this stuff to these guys' hands.

I was thinking that those, uh, REI co-op rebates on those big purchases must have been nice for the guy going and making the purchases.

Yeah, the government impact card. Uh, yeah.

Yeah, but if it's on his account, it doesn't matter what credit card he's using.

So let's jump then over to Iraq and Ramadi. I think we were talking a little bit about this mission before we started the episode, before we started streaming here tonight. I think it was really interesting, some of the details and how you accomplished what the job you were assigned to do out there. Can you kind of walk us through that?

Yeah, absolutely. So that was when I got there, it was probably November of 2006. And so my, my, a good friend of mine was taking lead on, on that requirement. He had been hand-selected to, to lead certain aspects of it. And so that target set had been in the works for about a year prior. So from about 2005, it was essentially one of the number one target sets that, you know, the top 10 that we were looking for. And I mean, the greater, um, you know, enterprise was, was looking for, uh, in Iraq. And so they had gotten closer, they were narrowing down. I mean, this was going after, you know, a very elusive— so, uh, one-off from, you know, uh, senior, um, al-Qaeda. Um, you're, you're trying to get to them by their communications, their facilitators, key folks. And so this person happened to have an extreme amount of level of tradecraft training. And just what they were doing was very, very key. It had a lot of the agencies allude to how they were essentially communicating. And then the way that they were doing things, it just, I mean, again, we, we can throw everything at it.

We just couldn't figure out, to the simple terms, where the hell this person was. and who they were, right? And so by the time I got there, I had been hand-chosen. I was operating somewhere else, came back. Uh, I think my kid was like a year old. Uh, and then I'm back out the door. I, I go to replace and then now I'm taking on this other capability. And so we end up working for the task force commander, um, as a unique capability for him, right? He's got his elements of of, at that point, was the SEALs there. That, that team is there, they're doing their work. And it was a joint effort. And so essentially my task was to lead some efforts leveraging IC capabilities, you know, intelligence community capabilities, and just kind of pulling together how to get to this entity. And so we had done several, you know, operating into Ramadi, as you guys know, in November Of 2006 was extremely dangerous. I think there was a huge flurry of activity going on in the in the summer of 2006. I mean, I think there's like movies and books written about it.

But by the time I got there, I knew that it was a hostile environment. And so I had ran a couple of operations going in essentially from the task force in and out of Rabati looking. For my whole mission was just find this individual and then give the task force commander and the, um, overarching special operations commander on the ground options, right? That's what, that's essentially what we do is just provide those options. And, um, the one really big mission was there was going to be, um, a cordon sweep by the Marines and sort of the Army going from one, you know, one side of Ramadi all the way across. And we provided to the task force commander, we're like, hey, we believe this entity, which has a very unique high level of tradecraft, like this enemy is employing high levels of tradecraft. And it's just, you're just not going to, you know, send Rangers in there and find them. It's just not going to work that way.

Eric, if I can interrupt for a moment, I mean, tradecraft implies Training, professional intelligence service training. Was there any indication or any idea of where the bad guys picked this up from?

There is. And I'm probably going to refrain a little bit, but it's definitely at the state-sponsored level.

Holy shit.

Okay. It was good. And it was stuff that, I'll preface it, I ended up having to go into the interrogation room with the Gators at that point, because of the dynamics and the relationship. Ultimately, I'll get to this point. Uh, but when they started to peel the onion, it was just like, oh crap. Okay. That, this is at another layer, which made sense. But when you're starting to see technical, you know, and, and, uh, it's kind of shit you see in movies, right?

Mm-hmm.

This person wasn't who they were. Yeah.

So we're up at, we're up, it's kind of like you're, you're up against a state-sponsored terrorist organization.

You're state-sponsored. This is state-sponsored running around in the open, you know, in the open in Ramadi amongst the other crap that's going on. Right. So you've got the regular task force going across, you know, and that includes the Brits and everybody else going against high-level targets. And you've got the Marines or the regular SEAL, you know, everybody else Uh, but then you have this other little spots that were state-sponsored. There's always another layer of stuff going on all the time. It's just, if that's your responsibility, you're aware that in the other building, there's something at the strategic level where you're looking at it at the tactical level. Right. And again, this, this has been—

On the other side of that, that onion and that other little spot, you were the adversary that pops onto that battle space to find that one guy.

Yeah.

And you know, it, I, you know, it's like we talked about this earlier. The harder part is navigating the political piece.

Right.

Right. Like it's somebody else's space. Right. So people think it's like, oh, the Marines just went in there or the SEALs went in there and they, they tore down this door and got the bad guy. Before that even happened, there are layers of, for good reason sometimes, that that house, that building can't be taken down. Right.

Right.

Because there are other things at play, right? So that ability to also understand, hey, wait a minute, what is actually also going on here, a block away, 2 blocks away, right? So we got the approvals, you know, I presented the opportunity, the option to be embedded. There was a code orange sweep that was going to happen. So that means then when these things happen, The populace knows that the Marines and the military are going to come through, so they're going to hunker down, right? And activities are going to go down and we're going to do all of this PR kind of stuff. So quickly grabbed my kit, flew over, um, embedded a— I want to say they were the 2nd ID, their scout platoon, right? Because, um, then this is the colonel that was in charge of them knew somebody from the task force, which again, it's usually who you know. Uh, these friendships that go a long way that help facilitate these operations. So, you know, I got my, my little rucksack full of kit, my guns and stuff and my uniforms. Um, and actually on that one, that's the one that I took, uh, 2 uniforms.

I took an Army uniform and a Marine uniform. Um, understanding what, you know, possible courses of actions, what some, um, you know, lines of operations could be. So I flew over there. Um, at that point, only the colonel knew, and then he brought on the senior staff sergeant that was in charge. of the scout team. So essentially, I, I became, uh, one of their team members. So we went in, in the darkness, just like the scout team would do, providing overwatch for the greater Cordon Bleu, which gave me then the opportunity to sneak and peek in and out of the houses as they were going, um, in Ramadi. So we weren't the official working party of the cordon sweep. We were more of the overwatch, but that gave me more of the ability. to look for what I was looking. So all they knew is, you know, Eric, you know, that your hippie is going to be tag teaming with them, right? And so the neat, odd conversation there was, hey, do you want to be with us when we go and do the, you know, we find your guy or direct action? Like, no, dude, that's, that's your job.

Yeah.

But, but, but, you know, and I'm like, no, no, dude, like, you do your job. I got my job. If shit goes bad, I'll step in. But this is your primary job because I've got 2 or 3 other things that if something happens, I gotta be able to do. So anyway, we went in the COVID of darkness in and out of these houses till we found— so we found one of the houses where then there was indicators that, uh, clued me in that that was the spot. My overall mission was, you know, obviously this person, we've been looking for them for about a year, was leave that person in place, right? This is the greater, that's how that operates. You found them, you've confirmed it visually, right? And the whole goal was not, not let that person realize that he had actually been targeted, that we were looking for him. So success in that mission was leaving this HVT, this high-level guy, believe that he had skirted us while at the same time there were culverts, there were covert. stuff that was done, right? Uh, to, to activity, to, you know, certain things that were done, confirmation, leaving them in there.

Uh, and then we moved on. However, because there were, then we were there, the Marines were around, the Rangers around, we hit a nerve, right? You hit a nerve, not only for him, maybe the cell that was around him didn't even really know who that, who he was.

Right.

But they were, you know, they were just other simple terms, other bad dudes. They reacted to us. And as I was coming out, I was literally about to put my Peltors on, uh, cause I was sending a note back, you know, a quick note to confirm, uh, kind of like a jackpot, if you would. And as soon as I come out of those metal gates, we get hit by an RPG. And it was a real shock because you weren't expecting it. We weren't hearing gunfire. Again, like I said, you hit that kind of nerve. And as we were coming out of that one house, that RPG hit, you know, the other side of the block, which is, I don't know, meters. And I went from putting on my, you know, checking back on the team, being the first guy that gets out, uh, and then just being slammed by the concussion onto that blue gate. And then the next 5 hours was just a gunfight. Just movement back and forth, shouldn't I say?

So, and this is sort of behind the main advance or within that main advance?

Yeah.

Yeah. We were just one little small piece, again, hidden within that greater cordon sweep that was going on. Um, and, you know, interesting then by the time we secured, I think it was like 2 hours into it, not even that long. We had secured a rooftop and then I had helped the JTAC, um, with supporting fire, calling in CAS. some other activities at the same time. He had the radio. So I reported back to the task force. I'm like, hey, I found, we found the guy. What do you want me to do? And I love the commander at the time. He posed like, hey dude, do you think you want to bring him back? I'm like, uh, okay, sir. Like we, we can, this is what just happened in the task force. The JOC had seen the explosion. So they, we had all eyes, right, on, on, on my little team had all eyes, uh, to protect this, this movement. And so, um, that, that was, you know, at that point he said, hey, just leave them there. Um, and to some of the mental health kind of stuff that we talked about, I just remember finalizing that comms with the commander because that was my priority, not the gunfight, not the, because all of that kicked in instinctively, if you would, but it was providing that message, getting that commander to say, all right, man, I'll see you when you get back.

Go back, do all your hot wash, and then just only remembering waking up at the jock at my little, you know, little cot at the, at where the task force is at what felt like 2 days later. Uh, because I had just, I did not remember. Um, and again, I would only come to find this out, you know, whatever, 20 years or not even that, 15 years later when I retire.

When you're working in somebody's battlespace like that, I'm sure you have sort of a cover for action for the troops that you're around, but are the battlespace commanders, are the battlespace owners generally clued in to what your actual mission is, or does it even bypass them?

You're gonna love— I mean, you know the answer. It depends. Uh, I think at the level where, um, you know, calculated risk— if somebody's gonna get hurt, you're gonna, you're gonna break something, you're gonna potentially do something— if you can do it underneath the radar, right? And obviously higher moral ground, not violate anything ethically, right?

Right.

And not put— uh, because my authorities, my authorities may be different than the people that, uh, we're catching a ride or they're using us. Um, at the reality where you, you know, the individual guy, operator, whatever team, any other team who's doing a similar activity will assess, am I putting somebody into risk? Because hey man, you know, you don't look like them. I've taken a lot of measures. We've taken a lot of measures to look just like them in that particular operation. Uh, just really quick, like I went in wearing, uh, Army, regular Army uniform, which I don't even know why I even took them. I think I took them so I can get out of country if I had to go to Qatar.

Right.

Like I never wore them, but I wore them to go be like the scouts because that's what they wore. So I had their, I had everything that they wore except I had a big beard. But then the whole story was I was like, I look like a terp. So you can play that for those, those 10 minutes. You got that, that gray area of 10 minutes. Um, but you would tell the guy, hey man, you know, you would trust somebody. Hey, this is, here's what here's what's going on within left and right limits. Because you don't want to put somebody to put their ass on the line. And in particular, where you're, you're reaching that scout team leader, and now what happens is they're like, oh my God, this guy, this task force guy. No, dude, like, don't worry about me. Worry about your team because I'm gonna be gone.

Right.

And I don't want— you got to keep that rotation. You got to keep on going. And then also you want people to feel part of a greater something, right? So I thanked them. I would bring them in. You know, you're like, hey, that's the guy. And they're, you know, they're like, they don't know there's so much shit going on. And then a month later to this story, there's 15 hits across 2 major cities. So the dudes are probably like, okay, I was part of that.

Right.

Right. And hopefully their commander went back and said, you were part of it. And I've seen that to be with a lot of my other former friends that they had built these relationships with these commanders or these sergeant majors or these people that helped us.

So you're alluding to sort of the aftermath of this operation that they're down the line, there was an action taken against the high-value target that you were after that night.

Yeah.

So that night, by the time I got back, I think I got back like a day later or when I woke up and I got back, we then went to work for about another month. And this was just intense, uh, you know, development of, of a target, uh, at the, at, you know, at, at the levels that you, you know, you kind of read about where all capabilities are brought in. It was just, it's just amazing. Like the teams of teams, right? Like just, we brought in all kinds of experts. We brought them in into this joint effort and just develop, develop, develop, provided a variety of options. Um, and then the target sets grew and grew and grew. So when it's done, you know, it isn't just going, as you guys know, and going just take out that bad guy just because it's the time is right. You, you leave it up to other echelons to figure out what the best way to do it and when to do it. And then there's all kinds of authorities and stuff that happens. So there's some patience. So a month, essentially a month later than, uh, the Rangers, um, you know, I went and then at this point I went in with Specifically to go get that guy with a Ranger element that was with us there.

And those guys were amazing. Uh, the funny, funny story is I went to the team leader, uh, and I briefed him. I'm like, all right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to be one of, you know, 15 other hits. All right. When you go in here, I'm going to go confirm. And then I need you to pull everything out of there. And he's like, hey, Eric, uh, you do know that these are Rangers. And if like you tell them to pull everything off of that hit. They're gonna pull the fucking microwaves, they're gonna pull the lamps, they're gonna pull the shades.

Right.

Okay, thank you. Like, only take anything that's electronic. Anything that's electronic? I'm like, take anything that's electronic. So if someone can draw a picture of Rangers hitting, you know, these 2-story house, taking these bad guys out, which is one thing, but literally carrying microwaves, carrying computers, carrying lamps— because again, as you mentioned, you looted, Jack, at that level. They're, you know, you're taking everything because you're looking at it at a state level, right? It is so important. That was a huge SSC effort. Like it hadn't been done in a long time, but the Rangers were just, they were just so happy to go do that. Right? Like they went in there, dude. And they were so happy. Like I got the microwave, boy. I got the lamp. They didn't know, you know?

Uh, we got 5 guys, like we own the fridge out.

I'm having flashbacks to an operation we did in Balad for some reason, even though we were Task Force North. And then the same kind of thing, they wanted us to pull all the electronics off of that mission. And we pulled everything. And then when we walked, because the target was right next to the FOB, we walked back onto the FOB. And then, but there weren't trucks to meet us and drive us to the airfield to get on the 160th birds. and the sun's coming up and 160th doesn't fly during daylight. So the whole platoon of Rangers, and we're holding like computer CPUs and shit like that, like full tower computers, like running full sprint, like a mile down the road to the airfield so we can get on the birds and go back to our base. And really, I think the whole reason is just because we don't want to be stuck in Balad for a day. We want to go back to the chow hall and get some Red Bulls and whatever else. But Yeah, that's, that's really funny.

It, it was a great mission. I mean, all of that stuff came back and then I'm like, all right, mission complete. Right. And this kind of goes to something that we were talking about earlier. I'm like, they captured all of these people. Now it is the next level of, you know, of folks that are working this mission set. They're going to start the interrogations. They're going to start gathering the intelligence and they're going to do all of that. But I got to get home, right? Like, it's not, you know, like my time is up, but that was my mission. And I'm already getting indicators that I got to train up for, uh, other, other things to go do, which I did. I ended up deploying literally 3 weeks later in a completely different hemisphere for a hostage rescue type thing, uh, which had been going on for a long time, which I was very happy that I got to go do. But when I got back, I, it then came to the higher powers and go, hey, you build a relationship with this person and the entity, and you know them so well. I had psychiatrists that actually worked for us that were just understanding how these people think, breathe, and the— in with that, that whole was fusing on a whiteboard, right?

We had this whiteboard of depth and everything was being put in there, and they're like, yeah, the boss wants you to go and you're gonna go and hang out with the Gators for a week because you have built a relationship with this individual, uh, because ultimately you guys have figured out. That's really simply how you can get a little bit more cooperation.

Oh, so you actually had that scene like in the movie The Battle of Algiers where they're sitting in the back of the car like, I feel like I know you because I've tracked you for so long.

Yeah, I had to go back in there and so I got to sit and watch a day of the process going, and then the next day I was in the booth for about 2 or 3 days in that cycle.

How did this gentleman respond to having you there?

It was kind of checkmate.

Yeah, we got you.

It was that sense of checkmate at the level of, if you would, Dave, the the IC officer to the IC officer, right? At that tradecraft, at that level, you're like, okay, you got me. That's actually been later on, we used it in, again, to talk about at the schoolhouse of what's— hey man, we didn't know this was going to happen, but this is what we can do. This is what people can do. These are the ideas we bring out. And because you're trusted at this level, well, you're gonna move forward with it. And again, I, I was packing to go home and, and, but then we went and we did it and then it, it was successful. And it's not, obviously I, I was a small fraction of it. There are just so many other professionals and mechanisms that helped us facilitate, but we're just those out-of-the-box thinkers that say, how about this? And they, they're going, okay, well, you know, if this, this dude thinks we can do it, then let's give it a try.

Mm-hmm.

And it, And that's awesome.

That's wild, man. And I mean, that's just an incredible and kind of rare story, I think, of espionage taking place inside a war zone.

Yeah.

Could you tell us a little bit— you alluded to being next sent on a completely different mission in a completely different AO to locate American hostages. I was wondering, you know, what can you tell us about that? What was it like kind of bouncing from Ramadi to a totally different AI.

Because you had been working on this all prior too, right?

Yeah. I'm going to try to keep that one simple. And so there had been, like I said, a few of them. There's probably one that's a little bit more noticeable and a lot closer to home for folks, right? And I, we, the greater SOFT community was one part of it. But when you've got, um, Americans captured hostage. I've seen the energy that goes behind taking bad, you know, bad people off the streets. Um, I have seen a different level of dedication and passion, um, to go rescue our Americans, right? It's just a completely different world. And so probably, I don't want to, I'm going to kind of speculate maybe 2 years prior to that in and out. Uh, and it was just as opportunities were seen. Again, you were doing something else, studying, learning, whatever. You were going to go do that, and then you can come back and do another one. So that one, I, I still hadn't even, again, known that what a traumatic brain injury was. I had no idea what that was. But there was, as everything happens, new information, new developments. New equals new opportunities. And then you're, you're sent to the fight.

Uh, I had nothing to do with, in that aspect, part of the planning. It was just, again, one of the folks that by name said, all right, Skippy, here's what we're going to go do. And then it went from leave Ramadi, and I've talked about it before, is putting everything that went on from a year prosecuting that target, uh, and all the combat trauma, all of that, and even also acknowledging, um, and I, I'm remiss if I don't say it. All the, all the service members that were killed in that time in Iraq, in Ramadi, that weighs heavily. And unfortunately you see it, but you've got to put it away. If not, it's hard to operate sometimes at those levels. Uh, but I put Ramadi into that manila folder and I put it at the safe at my team room and locked it up and prepared for the other one. And that literally was get back into the mission, understand where it's going. you know, you're gonna go and dress completely different. You're gonna go do completely— it's all literally a different world, right? And there's higher, there's higher level of, I don't wanna say it's risk or compromise, but sensitivities, right, that are in play with this.

So you gotta check your mind, you gotta check where you're at, and then went off and did it. And I wanna say that that point was, it wasn't successful, which a lot of times in our world, there's a lot of things are They don't lead to success at that moment, but they do later on. And so you're kind of used to, hey, I move that football just a little bit more forward for the next option. And so we did, we did go down integrated. I think we went down for maybe 2 or 3 weeks. Um, and then, hey, there's nothing else to do because of other things have to come into play. And it takes that world to rescue folks.

Mm-hmm.

It, it isn't black and white. It's not like dropping a JDAM. This is a, this is a chess game, right? And there's things that have to be put in place and sometimes they'll take weeks. So, okay, back you go and, and then you're doing something else. Ultimately, that did culminate into a success. I wanna say I was probably in the Horn of Africa or somewhere when that you know, those American hostages were rescued. And I can tell you, everybody, anybody that was involved in it just easily shed tears, just joy to know that our folks came back. Um, and that we had a part of it, a part in it. Um, yeah, that was, those are some of the greater highlights.

I'm not gonna, I won't drop any dimes here, Eric. I'll just say I think it's Fascinating that officially the role that you and many others played in recovering those American citizens is completely unacknowledged. People have no freaking idea.

Okay.

Eric, you know, we, when we talk to a lot of service members and intelligence professionals, you know, one of the challenges they have, which gets mixed in, I think, with post-traumatic stress. Like, it all joins together, and including the TBIs. But, but it's also the shifting of gears, right? Going from, you know, 100 miles an hour in a combat zone with, with no decompression, no like sort of venting function from the government, to back to civilian life. And that, that's very hard to go to to do this ramping. And even that creates its own sort of low-grade post-traumatic stress in a while, with one foot on the brake, one foot on the gas all the time.

Yeah.

But for you and others like you, it wasn't just shifting gears from going from operational at 100 miles an hour, killing what's in front of you or whatever, to back at home trying to fit in with people at TGIF or whatever, TGIF Fridays or whatever, or Outback or whatever.

Yeah.

But you were actually also going on operationally, still in a high-stress environment, but with a completely different focus and a completely different— So, how hard was that for you? Did you Because this is— this, I'm gonna make this a bigger question because one of the things you mentioned when you talked about sort of your, um, uh, expression of post-traumatic stress or, or these things being different than like a DevGuru guy or a CAG guy, do you feel that guys in your world compartmentalize and detach a lot more? Because that's sort of part of the job. And then so you almost have this sort of anhedonia, you know, this lack of feeling that becomes your survival mechanism.

Yes. And, you know, not— and those guys, I'm, you know, I'm not an assaulter. I don't come from those organizations. I've worked really close with those organizations. I've made friendships with a lot of them early on when I started my career in 2000 in this unit and across the timeframe. And I've seen a lot of them suffer from post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries. The, what I will say is then, you know, and each organization protects their activities differently. Um, you know, and I'll say this simply, but, you know, a SEAL is a SEAL. So a SEAL does SEAL stuff. Okay, so I'm assuming the spouses and the children of a SEAL and every SEAL know that those dudes are going to be constantly in danger because that's what they do. That's what they're really good at doing. Special Forces, same thing. The Rangers, the Marines, and then, um, however guys from CAG, uh, and however that world, um, But their cycles and the way that they train and the way that they deploy, you know, in, and again, I'm just generalizing here, in 3 to 4 month rotations, that kind of stays in par with what, you know, the special operations is doing for deployments.

Now, in the world of sort of intelligence special operations and in a unique world for a lot of unique small organizations is that then we don't have those same cycles. And what happens at work literally stays at work because at a, you know, and it's nothing because it's super sexy and, you know, James Bond crap, but because it's classified work. Right. And so anybody that works in the IC, in the intelligence community, they leave their work there and they can't talk about it. And so we have a large aspect of that. And I would say this in general, in sort of military intelligence, and then mix that with special operations. So So we tend to compartmentalize a lot, and I've mentioned this before on a personal level, and I will say that I did wrong. I probably had a lot of opportunities to tell my family that I got hit by an RPG, that I almost feared getting imprisoned, that I, you know, stomped my head and passed whatever all of these really bad things that happened, as well as even share. accomplishments. Hey man, I just came back from a rotation and something really good happened.

Why you—

my son went to the hospital when I left and you had to deal with the bills. There's a good outcome, but we didn't even share good, bad, or indifferent, right? Because you compartmentalize. And a lot of that in a selfish perspective. I didn't want, you know, my wife to take away my kitchen pass, right? And go, you're done. Or I'm going to divorce you because we have high rates of divorce. And a lot of the divorces were, I don't know what you're doing, but I know it's not good for the family. And so we tend to compartmentalize. Hopefully it's getting better. That, that it has to get better where folks that are doing this level of work or any level of work in the military learn to deal with PTS and TBIs upfront when you get back from rotation. And so we tend to compartmentalize more Because of the type of work that we do. And again, it doesn't come home. For me personally, the way I always conditioned myself, the ways my mentors taught me, I never took anything home. There was nothing home. There was no souvenirs when you came home from a trip.

You know, there's just set rules. You leave it in your, in your, in your wall locker, and maybe you bring it home 5 years later because Joe went to Africa and he brought you that elephant. It's just the way it is because at the end you're protecting not only the organization, and as we've all talked about it, you're really protecting that person to the left and to the right of you by these little things. Because in this level where there's less room for error, you got to check that ego, right? You got to check it at the door. And so there is a lot more compartmentalization. Now, the mental aspect of it is I don't think anybody when GWAT started thought that getting hit by grenades and RPGs and being shot at or being compromised or being singleton stopped or going in and out. Um, moral injury is another one that people think, well, maybe only assaulters have moral injury because they killed a bunch of people.

Right.

Moral injury extends to, you know, I told my wife all the time, I said, I didn't, for all intents and purposes, I never lied to you. But I didn't tell you the truth. Right, right. There's a lot of moral injury that today I don't remember.

Right.

Really what I suppressed, when I suppressed it, where I was at till I'm looking at photographs going, oh, fuck, I was, I couldn't sleep. I was talking. I was overdrinking. I was an asshole. Right. Or something happened and I left it in the team room in that safe because that's how I learned. to deal with it. So I'll stop there just in case you kind of wanted to pull it a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a cliché, but I can imagine here how your mind becomes a labyrinth over time and just the psychological pressure, it must be so immense. And I want to get into the kind of toll that doing this line of work takes on people in a bit. But I did also want to hit up some of these other stories that we had talked about.

Yeah.

You had mentioned one where you had to initiate the emergency destruction plan of your equipment. And I was wondering if you could tell us as much as you can about that operation and why you had to go down that— I mean, maybe you can also explain what the emergency destruction plan is for people who don't get it.

Yeah. And, you know, it was Man, I think it went over almost against every fiber in my body to even acknowledge that, or even again, now I'm realizing that if I didn't say anything to my family, that's kind of my litmus test, right? And then again, there was other people involved in these things. And then there's other folks that have had similar scenarios that I hope they're listening. And I hope that they figure out that you need to work through it.

Mm-hmm.

The things that we've Or anybody else has gone through. So in particular, this one, I actually did put it in my PTSD paperwork at the VA. Took a little bit because of the sensitivities involved around it, but I did get help figuring out that, oh yeah, I had to do, which is write classified, classified for the 5 W's of it, except the how or why or whatever, you know, what actually transpired. And so it was Um, you know, it was an operation, um, doing, uh, intelligence work. Um, and what an emergency destruction plan is, is kind of like an oh shit plan, right? And so if you're gonna get compromised, 1 man, 5 men, 10 men, an airplane, wherever you're at, uh, you, you, you gotta send it, guys. In a tactical world, I remember at least formatively as a SAD/A, that would be take a Thermite grenade, you put it in your backpack. Right? You would hope that that thermite grenade would go down. Right? I think I pretended to do that one time in a JRX, and I kind of passed that one. Well, sometimes you don't get to carry thermite grenades. Right?

So the level of some of these operations, you got to be way more creative. And at least in my experience, in the experience of the folks that were involved. In this insertion of this mission line and guys that have taught me. I don't think anybody else had, had done one. Later on, I did come to find out that maybe somebody did something similar because you're always going to have these hairy scenarios. But, uh, I'm so glad I didn't have to pay the bill because I destroyed a lot of stuff. I think I was like, what is it, a 15-6 or whatever it was? I, I got back and I thought I, I'd done good, and then like, you're getting investigated. I'm like, Where the fuck does that work out? Anyway, so there I am. Uh, you know, we're, we're, we're working in an environment that has very little room for, for error. Um, and it meets, meets the threshold. Something, uh, an activity meets the threshold with, uh, 2, 2 guys that I, I, um, I think the world of, uh, for their actions and then funny stories later on. I have to kind of process how I say them, but I get the phone call, right?

There's that dreaded phone call with, you know, you see this in the movies with, you know, hey, the, the red cow is about to take a poop. Well, that means you need to go do A, B, C, D, E, and, and, and, and go. And that means that then turns into muscle memory. There's no thinking that has to be planned. That's methodical, that's timing. And so I get the phone call, uh, and I go through the process. I think at that point we hadn't thought about only doing it with one person. There was this little, you know, a gray area there. It was manageable, but there was a lot of things to break, sanitize, right? And then, and then you, in part of the destruction emergency destruction plan, there's also an escape and evade aspect of it. So part of that is twofold. It was destroy and get the hell out of there.

And go.

And then go means there's a plan. And I think my plan on paper was like 2 days. And later on I'm like, I don't know, I could have walked that far, right? Like it was one of these elaborate, like, go downhill, get on a boat, go across this river, you're in another country, and now you're just gonna go that way. I think that I, I just did the, uh-huh, uh-huh, I know what to do. Like it's never gonna happen, but it happened. However, in this aspect, Um, I'm then halfway, I get the bag, I destroy everything, do everything I need to do within protocols. Um, one part of it that we didn't know is, um, it's really hard sometimes to destroy things when you don't have thermite and you've got to take your hands to it. And now you've got this adrenaline, right? We know what adrenaline is. We know how your eyes are going to go down and you start ripping, but now your hands start getting bloody, right? And because you're breaking plastic and plastic starts to cut. And after a while, you've got your, your body's and your heart rate's going, but now blood in your hands is really slippery, right?

And not only is it making a mess at that point, I'm like, I'm not even worried about DNA. I'm not even thinking about it. I'm just thinking about I can't hold crap in my hands and there's blood everywhere. So I'm destroying stuff. My hands are getting bloody. I wash up as best as I could. I sanitize as best as I could. And then I start moving out and then I get a phone call.

Him.

You got to come back. Wasn't thought about. In order to make everything go back to green, right? If you would, simple is green, yellow is you're kind of in danger, red is you're in danger. So to get back to green, you need to get back. And so that's not quite anything I ever thought about. So I literally have to come back and just accommodate things in order to get back to green. And so that took a lot of creativity of why at the end, you know, just like you see in the— what is it— the ID channel, you know, why did the murderer have blood on his hand? Well, why the hell do you have blood on your hand? Because you say you're doing X, but you're really doing Y. And so that ended up being good. I had some creativity on the spot to explain why I have blood in my hand, why they were scrapped. But I had to reenact and put kind of things back in place. And then, you know, my, my, my, uh, essentially, you know, everything got back to green. Uh, and then, but a couple of days later, we wrap up, we get out of there and go kind of back to what we were talking about.

And we didn't get to go home. Then subsequently there's that, you know, that fraggo, hey man, I know you, you kind of destroyed everything, but you guys need to stay here for another month because we need you for something else. The answer is, okay, let us figure it out. So that's that story.

That's crazy.

That is.

That is.

You know, it's interesting because on the show before, we've talked about the weight of decisions you make that you have to make, right? Like when you're on patrol and you see a guy with a cell phone, do you shoot him or do you not? If he's triggering an IED and you haven't shot him, you, you just failed your team, if you shoot him and he's an innocent, then you just committed a horrific act. I mean, we saw— was it in 2001 when the EP-3 went down? Or, uh, right in China, the Chinese one, right?

Yeah.

And they didn't—

At the same time. Oh, right.

And they didn't destroy the equipment because— and people go, how could they not do that? They had procedures in place.

That's a lot of weight.

on them if they destroy that equipment and then our government turns around and tells them, why did you destroy that equipment? Like, you know, whatever. Like, that's a lot of weight. Those are heavy decisions because you, like you said, you're glad they didn't make you pay for it, right?

Or— Yeah, I mean, I try to make it kind of funny even though it is a true story, you know, and later on into the future, I would always think about that and then I'm like, okay, that's kind of silly.

Right?

Like, I need to make sure when I do a mission back brief, if we got to do this, you're not fucking going to go and go chase these people because they did what you just agreed we're going to do.

Right.

Check. Right? Lessons learned. Because sometimes we get so procedurally used to what's going to go wrong till things go wrong. And then unfortunately, it always ends up in an investigation. Good organizations, good companies learn from that and change everything so it doesn't happen again. So then the folks are going to do it. They're not like, hey man, you remember what happened to Eric or what happened to these guys? Yeah, fuck that. And what happens is you compromise the system, right? You compromise the integrity of how you're supposed to work, right? So continue to, A, take care of your freaking people all the way to the end because they're going to give you— they're going to give their lives for you. They're going to go to jail. They're going to freaking, you know, sit in a cell somewhere. And, you know, but be there to back them up because, you know, those, you know, being an American hostage and there's been very many of them, dude, that's a world I never wanted to be in. Like, I'd rather have, and I've never told my wife, like, I'd rather have been shot, blown up, killed, but to be captured.

Right.

I still had, I still have nightmares about that.

Like, right.

It still goes into that hypervigilance that folks that have been— and it doesn't matter what you did in the military or if you were even an undercover police officer, you don't want to get ratted. You don't want to get found. Like, Eric, you're just not gonna—

I was wondering if you could tell us about some of those times where you were afraid of being captured, because I know, you know, you had mentioned doing singleton operations on a few occasions. And again, I mean, back to the amount of psychological stress you're under, I mean, that's a very different scenario than being part of a Delta squadron or a Ranger platoon or a conventional infantry company. What were some of those instances that really stick with you?

Yeah.

And I mean, I'll say I'm not the only one that's ever done that. A lot of folks have been tasked to do things in what essentially is a singleton. By yourself there, but in the shadows— and if you would, that's a bad word— in the background, there's people helping you, right? Like, there's no— you're just gonna go to yourself generally in this country and do stuff by yourself. You're gonna have an element, but it is your ass on the line by yourself. You don't have a buddy to your left and to your right, right? It's just you and what— and what you're doing. And so, um, I, I did have one in sort of mid 2000s, post-Ramadi, post some of the other stuff that I did. And at that point, I was already kind of worn down a little bit. And so one of the— in that rotation, I essentially found and entrusted to do some placement and access, if you would. So the ability to develop, gain access, and kind of work my way closer. Um, while in the, you know, while in the back, I knew the same elements you just mentioned would be there to take care of me.

Uh, um, but there was an instance going in and out, uh, of a facility that I worked at was, was that high level of stress, right? Just getting bags in, developing the relationships to have people not blink an eye, right? That took weeks to develop. And then you're going in and out and essentially you're sleeping there by yourself. You're living your life every day as you need to. And then you're operating when it's the right time to do things, kind of that wave of the hand, if you would, to keep it simple. And so I had been doing this several days, about a week, and there were, like always, there's always something going on around you. And this was citywide. So citywide, the, the, and this was a hostile, this is literally a hostile environment. It was in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so there wasn't a lot of US entities just running around. It's very select folks running around. And so in that one and working, I had not only a weapon, but I had some other capabilities and things that I was doing across the spectrum of the INTs. And then There was one time that the lights in the city went off, right?

And before that, I was getting— I would do a comms check with sort of another operator that was back in an area. I would do my comms checks, if you would, communicate, get my instructions. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's my updated emergency plan if something goes on. Here's my schedule for the day. I'm out, right? And that's how you kind of work. Then it was apparent that, hey, hey man, by the way, here's the threat level. It's going up, right? We're going from, we're going to red. And what really matters is they're targeting Americans, right? Still an American. Uh, however little brown guy that you look like, you're still, you're not from there. Sorry, you're not from there. And so at the same time, I was getting closer and closer and kind of creating some, uh, some, um, avenues into what I needed to facilitate. So when I come back, then you're always, you know, you get tired, you start to do your checks and balances. Okay. I don't remember that person. I don't remember this. This person's new. I've never seen that person at my car, right? Like all of this starts to build up, which there are always multiple things going on around you.

It is just identifying which one is focused on you, right? Like there's criminals, there's other intel work. there's always a multitude of things going on. It's just having that clear mind. And so one night I'm at the site where I was living, and at that point I had a big toll. So unfortunately I had probably been drinking a little bit more than I needed to, and I was exhausting myself to go to sleep in order to continue to operate day to day. I was reaching that really bad threshold and the entire lights in that city go off, like all of it. There's no power. And so the critical lifeline that I had was commo. And as you guys know, when commo's done, I don't care how many guns you got. I don't care how fast you can run. I don't care what, what indigenous clothes you're wearing. You got no commo, man. That's when you feel, that's when that gut feeling. And so the power had gone down and I was essentially probably within minutes of Packing up and making a run for it, right? Because I would have met certain time windows, and then there was luckily elements that they were doing their own stuff around that that knew, hey, if this happened, you're gonna go help this one knucklehead doing his own thing.

So that ended up being to get to a point in a variety of ways one of a major PTSD for me because I I I. I slept with my pistol at my pillow for various nights, you know, in a nice soft bed. But I had a pistol. I had all the measures to know if the door was open. I shouldn't have been doing that, right? Like, that pistol should have been a tertiary thing to get to. It should have been kind of more concealed. Everything else would have been more of my protection. My gun was the last, but the gun was the first thing. And so when those lights went off and at the level that I was at, that, that was really hard, um, to be in that scenario. And so till today, uh, not to today, I think, you know, it took, it took probably going back a couple of months and even recent, the SGB, cyclic lavabock, to kind of take that fight flight because that ramped me up really, really high. And there was no one coming down. There was no one coming down because I really didn't talk about it when I got back home.

Never talked about it to our docs, never talked about it to my spouse. It went back in that envelope, and that was mid, mid, you know, 2000s. Um, and then it just kept on, kept on working.

Eric, can I, I, I mean, I hopefully we'll talk, uh, more in a broader spectrum about post-traumatic stress after this because it's, it's a big deal, and we try to talk it on the show, talk about it on the show. But can you tell us a little bit about the, um, about the, uh, what is it, the stellate ganglion block, right?

Yeah, yeah. So it's like a block, um, you know, and again, I'm not a doctor and I, yeah, don't, don't know anything, you know. So this is my, my 4th one. I just did, uh, 2 of them, uh, the last week, um, with, uh, Doc Mulvaney, former Navy SEAL turned, uh, Army doc extraordinaire. Um, and so the SGB I wanna say it, I'm gonna throw a number out there, probably about 10 years ago, 10, 13 years ago, became something that was then being used in, in at least the special operations community to help with post-traumatic stress. Essentially what it does is they put, uh, I wanna say it's lidocaine on the sympathetic nerve going obviously up to the brain, and essentially it just numbs it. Well, what does that do for us? who've been in these fight or flight syndromes, these high stress levels. And again, it's not only veterans, it's not only military. It can be, unfortunately, you know, a, a someone who got raped or had a really bad stressful environment. They got, they got stuck and they couldn't make the loop of coming off the fight or flight. And what it does is essentially, for me, from my higher understanding, just, it's stopping it, right?

Mm-hmm. It's allowing you to reset. And what it did for me that first time where this is 2019. So again, I got shot in 1999, came into the unit, had all, you know, just about, it seems like every trip I had an incident or something was going on till 2019. So that's a lot of fight or flight syndrome. And so what that did to me was take off what felt, you know, like an 80-pound ruck. Just your body feels alleviated. And your emotions just, you know, what do we do with most of our emotions? You just start to cry. You just start to release. Um, and, and you start to feel. I know most guys who have PTS, or girls, um, at least in this line of work, stop feeling. You stop being able to be sympathetic on the stuff that you're going through. So the SCB has been, and hopefully this answers it, uh, just an amazing therapy or procedure to help alleviate and grow post-traumatic stress.

And like, how long after you receive a shot does it last for you?

They say it's typically 6 months, and I would say that that's about right. So my first one was right after the 2 guys, 2 friends of mine that committed suicide in 2019. So I got that one. And then 6 months later, almost to the T, when I was really getting into the medical aspect of retiring, which is now I'm understanding all the shit that's broken, I did my second one. And that was about 6, 7 months ago, or 6 months prior to the first one. And so they typically say it's about 6 months past the first one. Um, and then I went long on this last The first 2, it was probably about a year and something because the first 2 were on active duty. And unfortunately, the VA and civilian healthcare isn't paying for it. So it took me a little while. And so the last ones I just did a week ago were on the— typically they do it on the right side and now they're also doing it on the left side. That is also helping for traumatic brain injuries.

So, So the VA is not covering this?

They won't cover out of pocket. In other words, they won't send you— from my research and the research that has been done with a nonprofit that I'm working with, the VA won't say, okay, go to, go to the Stegla, you know, this institute to get it done. There are certain VA hospitals that will do it. From my understanding, from folks that have tried, it has just been It's been very difficult for them to get an appointment in a timely manner to go get an SGB.

Yeah.

And so, right.

Yeah. Not to say anything about the doctors and the medical staff at the VA, because I generally think they're good, but the administration, I think their plan is to wait out vets, like let them die before we have to pay for anything. Let's delay stuff as much as possible.

The hardest part, just really quick on this, is if we do it on active duty, why are we not doing that at the VA side?

Right.

Like, if a soldier, Marine, or service member, that was part of their get-well plan on active duty a year prior to getting out, and they're diagnosed with PTS, a traumatic brain injury, and all of a sudden you literally are spitting them out of the active duty TRICARE system, there's a gap. You know, into the veteran system, and then you're not following up with that care, right? I think you're, you're, you're— that's, you know, you're causing more issues, uh, and that can probably hurt that person.

Do you want to plug the nonprofit that you mentioned that you're working with?

I can if you don't, you know. Thank you. Uh, so right now I'm, uh, I got brought in as a team member to the Military Special Operations Family Collaborative.

Okay.

Essentially what they do is they, they focus on research, education, and connection, right? And so what, um, and there's a huge, uh, team or a huge, uh, grouping of other nonprofits, uh, AllSecure, uh, Foundation, uh, Warrior's Heart and Healing. And there's a couple of other ones, really key ones right now. Unfortunately, it's evading me. Um, but what they'll— they— what they're focusing on is taking research from these institutes or these other nonprofits and these things that are working, going, okay, this is proven medically, this is proven peer-wise, this is proven across, you know, various other institutes. And then we, uh, they provide education. They're providing education at certain commands at Special Operations, which is good. So these Special Operations commands are, are bringing in these entities to allow us to share what we've learned from those outside of active duty, right? Because there's, there's, you know, a different aspect to that. And then they connect, and there's a lot of connecting of just like what I did with, with SGB. And in particular, they just had a couple of soft, soft team room health events that we had online, and there's another one coming on May.

where we had, uh, Dr. Lynch, Dr. Teedy, and, uh, 2 other doctors, um, um, talking about SGB and psychedelics. So again, the reason we're sharing this is because they've done the research at, at a high level to go, okay, this is, this is being proven at multiple commands, right? The SEALs, the Rangers, whatever. And so that's essentially, um, who I'm, I'm teaming up with. with a lot of these fronts.

Yeah, we've had a couple vets on that, Sam Wan and a couple others, who have talked about the benefits of like psychedelic treatments, uh, down at like UT Austin where they—

there's a couple different places.

Yeah, but, but where like people are having great effects from it. This— what, what you're talking about, the, uh, uh, the, uh, the basal— or what is it, the GBSGB? SGB. I've heard about that before and I've heard that people have had really good effects, at least like short-term relief from it.

Yeah, there's no— I mean, I'll tell you, besides the funkiness, and you guys come from an environment where like, okay, we put a needle in your neck. Okay, well, that's about it. They're not removing anything. They're not putting anything in. I've yet to, in the research piece of it, go somebody grew something out of their forehead. It hasn't happened. The most is in the quick test within minutes is that eye. So on my right side, your right eye literally freaks out. And so that's the test to go, okay, it worked.

Yeah. Yeah. So for those of you who are listening and watching, the organization that he mentioned is you can find it at MS I'd never even heard of that one. Yeah, I haven't either. It's a Military Special Operations Family Collaborative, msfofc.org, if you guys want to check that out.

And so, Eric, there's a whole bunch of other stuff you did in the military that we're not— I don't think we're going to have time to get to tonight. Oh, we'll have to, we'll have to, we'll have to do this again sometime.

No.

Yeah.

Damn you for having such an amazing career.

Yeah, I mean, I know you spent a lot of time doing force modification work, developing the new generation of technologies for the special operations community. I would like to take some time to talk about getting out of the unit, getting out of this clandestine world. And I had mentioned to you previously that we interviewed Sarah Carlson on the show once, who was a CIA analyst, and she really talked to us about how an analyst can have PTSD. I mean, and I think the public thinks like, how can somebody who sits behind a computer all day have PTSD? And they don't understand the type of pressure this person is under to get it right 100% of the time, which of course is impossible, right? I think that the public understands at this point that we have these soldiers. We have these hardcore dudes who we send into combat overseas. They shoot and kill bad guys. Sometimes there's collateral damage. Sometimes they see their teammates killed. And this leads to this phenomenon that we call post-traumatic stress disorder. But I think the public has a harder time understanding people like Sarah Carlson, the analyst side, or people like yourself, Eric, who are on sort of the technical intelligence side, not necessarily pointing a gun and shooting people.

I think that there's— I'd like to take a little bit of time to kind of unpack your experience for people. I think this entire interview has done that a little bit, but to further go into your path getting out of the military and sort of some of the issues and the unique aspects of your job that lead to a different type of post-traumatic stress?

Okay. Yeah, so a lot of it was acknowledgement, right? So there's the— what, again, as I mentioned, kind of putting it in Pandora's box, just so I can, I can go out to another trip. And I can pass the test with the doc or the psych who says, okay, Eric's clear to go out. Right? That was literally the— that was literally my you know, 5-meter night fight for 20 years or whatever. Uh, and most guys, uh, and girls in a variety of things that they went through a lot of and they saw a lot of stuff that you just lose sleep. It's just not normal, right?

Mm-hmm.

And, and then you can't talk about it. There's no, there's also this stigma. So I think part of it, maybe what you didn't mention is there's a huge stigma about a vulnerability that, uh, you know, bombs dropping on people and people getting killed or you know, we're saving stuff, then you should be able to— no, we're still freaking human beings. This isn't a video game, right? And, and the GWOT has been going on for a long time, and it's been nonstop, right? And so that's another key aspect of it. And so for me personally, reaching 2019, there were several key aspects of it, and, and hopefully, uh, it relates to others who are in similar physicians getting ready to retire or ETS or have gotten out and now can look back and go, man, maybe that's a good idea, is if you have a family, and that can be a significant other or your children or even your mom and your dad, you want to give back to them. You want to be able to say, here's what I was doing for all these years because I know you suffered. You saw me.

Right.

Here's the key thing, uh, perspectives. Like, I can tell myself I was okay till I'm starting to look back at those pictures going, dude, you look like shit. Like, you were beat down.

Yeah.

You were having issues medically, marital, family, friendships. Once you start to retire, you're, you're really coming to a— hopefully most people come to, coming to Jesus and go, I need to close this chapter. And I need to go to the next one. Because if you've learned anything from reading or watching some of these podcasts is I don't care how bad of an ass you were or how tough you were, you're gonna have some remnants of what you went through. Right.

Mm-hmm.

And so for me it was, all right, I, because of the suicides, that was literally what tripped me and I fell flat on my face. I went into a dark corner and said, I went back to the, those skills that I did have of self-assessment. An ability to self-adjust and go, all right, the right thing to do right now, Eric, is ask for help. And I asked for help. And so part of asking for that help as I was getting ready to retire was, hey, you, you need to open those Pandora's boxes and figure out all of these things that you went through and how did it really affect you? Like the PTS, TBIs, moral injuries.

Oh yeah.

Aho, you weren't around when your wife needed you, your children needed you, your family needed you. And for me personally, one of the aspects of it was I cut away from a lot of my family 29 years ago when I came into the military. Again, you know, for simple terms, they were Cubans and I didn't want any of that to hinder my family or hinder my ability to serve this nation. So I cut ties with my family. So there was a lot of guilt associated with that.

Mm-hmm.

So when I started to look at my transition, There is a selfish aspect, which I hope some folks take to it, which is, hey man, you've done a lot to serve this country. If you're entitled to VA benefits, then take the time and focus on that because going through that VA process will also help you find care and help because you're going to acknowledge you're broken somewhere and then you're going to get treatment. So as I started to open that box, identified that I had issues, um, and started to document it, then I would start working on that aspect of it. And importantly was, okay, what kind of person am I going to be post-military? Doesn't matter how cool, you know, all the cool stuff you do. How am I going to provide for my family post? Because literally when you get out, I got out 30 September, 1 October, I'm a civilian. I'm no longer Sergeant Major Miatas. I am now Eric Miatas, and that's it. There's nothing else that matters, but I'm now Eric Miatas, who's responsible for a family, and I got to get my— I now have to really get my head straight because I got to be a civilian and take care of them to what they want, because they weren't— they didn't sign up to serve this country.

So there's a lot of aspects of transition, especially if you're married, if you're married. that now that weight, um, and you got to work through a marriage and you got to, you got to fix a marriage, heal a marriage post that service. And, and what you've heard, you know, in the last 2, 3 hours is that in all of that, who really suffered are the family members, right, that have to endure all of this, right? Hopefully that kind of answers, Jack and Dave, what you—

It's an overview for sure. Yeah, scratching the surface.

And we've, you know, we've talked about this before where You know, there, there's this big, you know, thank you for your service culture, which is appreciated. But at the end of the day, especially for people in special operations, we, we were doing it because we wanted to. Like, there was no draft, right? There was no— we were all in it for our own reasons that were ultimately selfish in some ways. And the people who who really— and I'm not like, you know, we all have our demons and, and post-traumatic stress is real— but also the people who really suffered were, were the wives and the kids and, and the husbands in some cases. But the, but the families that were left behind that weren't out there living their dream, you know, weren't out there doing the cool guy stuff that they—

They're living with the uncertainty, you know.

You know, yeah, you know. at any, any moment, you know, somebody could kick in your door and, you know, when, when you're in some, you know, non-permissive environment and take you hostage. But you signed up for that. You want— like, that's the life you wanted on some level. And we suffer from that. But, but the families didn't sign up for that. And, and we forget sometimes— and the divorce rates in special operations, and, and I'm sure in your unit are astronomical. And you cannot blame spouses for feeling left behind when we just go do our thing.

Yeah. I mean, that can be an entire conversation on it. I would say that, I mean, we took advantage of knowing that our family would be there for us, right? Like, uh, there was one, there's a few things that I told my wife, you know, one thing I, I, I would say I promised because I had awful intent literally was to walk home because walking in special operations is a core of what we do, right? That mindset that I can walk back. It's a carbate. So I would always promise I will walk back if at any case, and that against me being compromised. And if I've got a fight my way, chew my way out of somewhere. I'm going to walk back home. But what does that mean to them?

Right. That's not something a spouse wants to hear.

They don't want to hear that. They want to be able to hear like, hey, as soon as you leave, your kid's going to get sick and the mortgage is going to come in and that bill's going to— because here's— I know what we were doing, right? And I mentioned this, and I think I hadn't said this, is I was always— I came home to be on TDY, and I went home To deploy, right? I lived 20 years, at least more so till I figured it out, forward, either in missions, training, embedded in some agency doing something. And then I came home to TDY hoping to hurry up and get, and get out of here.

Right.

Now the reality, and it's, it is probably the hardest thing I had to deal with because again, I, a lot of my friends have gone everywhere. for good, bad reasons, because you're just like, hey, man, I gotta leave you guys alone. I gotta— I have my family. So I don't have the team room anymore. I don't— I have some really close friends that we maintain. But now it's just you and that family to, you know, to work through it. And I think there was something that you had asked as part of that transition is, how do I want to unfold my story? How do I want to say what I did? How do I want to do it? Right? I know what to say. I got my master's degrees. I can be a technician. I can be an executive. I can go freaking build log cabins. But there's a process that then I have to worry about. What am I going to disclose and what I did? You know, it was really hard to get to this point.

Right.

That was a lot of thinking in retrospect. But my purpose is twofold, really quick. It's I want— I don't want another suicide.

Right.

I don't care if I served with them, I didn't serve with them, law enforcement, military, family member, first responder. I don't care, not for having to go through things like this. And because people aren't talking, I will share that I went through this as much as I can share of the really cool missions that I went through. Um, you know, and that was important. And really, I'm giving back my family and, and my close friends their life.

Right.

Because I took away their lives. Unfortunately, because I, we, what we had to protect, organizations always have to protect OPSEC, just in basic OPSEC. Every military person has to do OPSEC. The family is who takes the brunt of the OPSEC because they don't understand it. They don't do that freaking every yearly OPSEC class. Their OPSEC class is you telling them not to put anything on social media. And they're like, but why? Right. So anyway, right.

Eric, something you told me once that really stuck with me, um, there's something you told me about the unique issue that people in your line of work have, um, and it reminded me, I just juxtapositioned this. I have had the nightmares in the past where, uh, you're doing a HALO jump and you pull your ripcord and nothing happens and you go through all the performance measures to try to fix it, and, and none of, none of it works. Or where you're in a firefight, you're shooting your M4, and the gun goes down, and you go through sports, you know, do all the corrective measures, the gun still will not go off. And I remember my dream, literally breaking down the gun and field stripping it and trying to fix it, and it still would not go off. I think that's the dream every, every ground guy goes through. Every Ranger, every SEAL probably has those same kinds of dreams. You told me once that a nightmare you would have is that you would wake up in the morning and you would not know who you were, that you would not know what your identity was because you had been traveling and all over the world doing these different missions under different aliases, living as different people.

And then you come home and you're going to wake up in the morning and you're not going to remember who you actually are. And that's something that really stuck with me.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the complexity of just in special operations, it's, uh, for good reasons, it has to be very protective, uh, the element of surprise, right? And protect the organizations that do special operations. And then, uh, and then there's aspects when you're doing intelligence work, obviously more so. and then you mix both of them in that. And, and then if you're a, a military service member versus an intelligence officer, that's different because they have, uh, you know, different authorities and different protective measures. I'm still an E-9, uh, but I'm traveling this world. And so at least from 2000 to maybe 2018, uh, at least traveling and doing stuff, um, There was so much stuff to be involved in. Not to sound cliché, but so many secrets that have secrets, right? You know, things you know it's funny things that happen in Vegas stay in Vegas. Well, they similar, right? Things that happen forward stay forward, and then that's protecting the mission itself. And then there you have your moral injuries, and then you have you know what aspects. Um, one mechanism, um, facilitated my ability to conduct the missions I did, or we did, at a turn— at a certain time and place, right?

And they were key to the success, uh, to keep it simple. And so those things weigh on you, um, extensively. Right? Uh, it's one thing to constantly say, I'm an infantryman, I'm an infantryman, and that's what I do. However, when you start getting into the grayer areas of where, you know, and, and hopefully for the audience, I know you guys kind of reflect to your audiences, you know, this, this shit isn't a video game. Uh, but there are pieces that are in some of these, you know, these books and these movies that, that draw from reality. Um, and some of the things that, that The guys and girls in various echelons have had to conduct— standby. Can you hear me?

Yes, we got you.

Hold on.

That's how hardcore, how hardcore this dude is. He has his pace plan for the podcast.

Of course you do, bro. You gotta have a baseline. And so, sorry, man, it's second nature, you know. There's actually a pair of hardwired— Uh, and so in this world of having to do all of these things, and they're just not all black and white, man. You wake up sometimes, you go to sleep, and you— and nightmares are nightmares for a reason. You're like, what did I do? Why can't I talk about it? Who the fuck am I? And sometimes who the fuck am I isn't like this James Bond shit, is what was my mindset at that time, right? Was I hunting people, right? Was I lying to people? Was I just— did I go on this trip because I wanted to avoid my family? That's a fucking nightmare. That's a nightmare that now you gotta think about, at least for me, when you're retiring, going, hey, asshole, Did you really get hurt on that mission because someone sent you or because you volunteered? That's still a nightmare that I've got to— in this, I have a spreadsheet because I had to figure out a way to do it. And I'm like, okay, lying 101.

Hey, asshole, you volunteered. Because your spouses at some point are like, all right, dude, I'm gonna make up a name. Did Andy say you needed to come, or did you volunteer? Because I heard the other spouse say that Joey volunteered for that mission, right? So, and hopefully that kind of ties back to it, but there's a lot of that, who was I, and in that personal aspect of it.

Eric, can you just change the microphone on Zoom? I think maybe it's using the microphone on your headphones. If you can change it to the one back in your computer like before. And I'm going to go ahead and use the opportunity to jump up on my soapbox for a moment here, if you'll permit me, because I do want to address something else that I think is unique about the position that folks like you have, where in the Central Intelligence Agency, we've interviewed a lot of these folks here on this podcast. There is a process for their cover to be lifted and for them to reintegrate back into the civilian world. So that alias, that cover persona, whatever that was, there is a process for it to be lifted. And then that person can come forward and say, hey, I was in the CIA. And maybe they can't reveal all the details. That's frequently the case. They may not be able to say what country they were in. Of course, they can't say who the sources were that they developed, but they can tell a lot of their stories. And if you look back at a lot of the interviews we've done with Douglas London, Mark Polymeropoulos, I mean, many people that we've interviewed, they're able to tell quite a bit of their story and say, I was a CIA officer, this is what I did.

But for people who are, for lack of a better term, are Army spies that work in this kind of clandestine world, it sounds as though you folks are kind of just expected to maintain your silence. Forever in perpetuity. And I think that's kind of unfair in a number of different ways, including the pressure that we put on the soldiers themselves, the veterans themselves, and their— again, as you mentioned, their families, that we're just expecting this guy to just hold it all inside, all of it. And I'm not saying that they all need or should or want to come on a podcast like this, but I think It's an unrealistic and unfair expectation to expect them to just not talk about any of it with, you know, their, their immediate circle, if nothing else.

Yeah. Um, call check really quick. Can you hear me better?

Not really.

Can you hear me now?

Yeah, that sounds better.

All right, let's do this.

Okay, um, so no, we don't have a mechanism to do that, uh, unfortunately. You good? Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Good, good.

Priorities have to be priorities. And so, uh, with regards to that, um, you know, not— and I won't focus on anything from an organizational perspective. But I will tell you that, Dan, there is a sense of difficulty at the humanistic level when someone is, hey man, I got hurt. Oh, I've got PTS. I've got PTS for an explosion and then the other. I will share that out of my PTS claims, there's 8 of them, I want to say, or 10. 8 of them, 8 or 7 of them were classified. Okay, Eric, well, why were they classified? And now I am out of the military. How do I incorporate my family into my great get-well plan? Well, part of my get-well plan is, why the hell are you scared of sleeping in a hotel room? Why do you have to have a gun? Why can't you fly in an airplane and you think it's going to fall out of the sky? Because all you say is if it isn't one of your pilots and you don't have a parachute on your back, you're not trusting that aircraft, right? And it isn't just anecdotally because that airplane is going to fly.

It's because we've been in some shitty airplanes that have literally— if they would have fallen, you would have been eaten by sharks or you would have been held hostage. And so then there's the administrative aspect of it, right? Okay, where are all these certifications for all this training for all of these things that you did? And then if I choose to articulate in LinkedIn, which has become a staple for— right, your network is your whatever, worth your net worth. Well, if you don't know what to put on LinkedIn because it's all hush-hush.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, 20 years as a sergeant major. Any, you know, 29 years or anybody else, yeah, you're gonna get only certain jobs, contract work, right? Or you're gonna get something that maybe when you came into military— and I think you mentioned this earlier, Dave, you know, you might have wanted to be on, I don't know, you had other ambitions in life, but you came into military for patriotism to serve this nation.

In particular, guys who came in and girls right at September 11th.

But now in this world, when you're trying to articulate and you don't have, for lack of better words, as we always get, an SOP, right? Because we look at SOPs for MFF jumps or whatever we do.

There's a checklist. There isn't a checklist.

That to me, and again, and it's not pointing finger, pointing finger at this point as a veteran, I don't need to bring that, nor do I need to make any excuses anymore for my family.

Right.

I need my life back. Right, right.

And that's the tough thing is that when you have that 22-year or 20-year or 14-year or 10-year or whatever it is, blank spot on your resume that looks like a generic military resume or whatever, how do you go to Google for a head of security, head of whatever?

Right.

whatever kind of job it is, for an executive-level position, which you've been doing, and say, I have this skill set, when you can't back it up with anything.

Well, and again, I'm going to get on my soapbox a little bit, probably because I've had like 3 or 4 scotches, but there's that off-ramp, I feel like, for the officers, for the Blue Badgers and the CIA, for the military officers in the Army, that they have that sort of off-ramp and it's all set up for their career progression. But for the NCOs, for the contractors, they get fucked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, you know, and we've kind of briefly talked about it, you know, the intel world in the military and then depending what you did, it just doesn't translate easily. Right? And that's not even saying, hey, you were a, for lack of a better word, an assaulter, a Ranger, a SEAL, a recon guy. Those are things that at least you can put in your resume. And but really what— and I've been on the corporate side where I'm looking for people that I need to hire, and I'm like, okay, what skills did you get? Where did you apply that training? What level of leadership did you do?

And what were the outcomes?

But a lot of young folks are like, Oh my God, I did all of this stuff. I don't know how to translate. And I can tell you, TAPS, that program has, again, my experience, very little knowledge of how to translate soft experience, which is very ambiguous. The stuff that the Green Beret, SEAL has had to do in the last 20 years isn't part of the standard recruiting checklist of what, of what you're going to do.

And then in, in where I come from, in some of this intel and activities, right? There's a lot of programs, for lack of better words, that have been created in the last 20 years that guys have—

guys and girls have gone to do that don't have an exit plan, right?

Mm-hmm.

Some folks, hopefully they're smart, and this is what I learned from some of my mentors, is like, all right, man, take that training course and find the equivalent in, in English civilian speak, right? I think we talked about it. Like, I went and did, uh, computer network operations, so I got trained To do computer network operations at the IC and high levels. While I was in the organization taking some of that advanced training, I used that to translate to civilian speak because I had learned from people prior to that. They're like, hey man, I don't know what, how to say that I did this 6-month course in whatever training, even though it is marketable, but it doesn't have a code to train into.

Right.

So yeah, it's a burden. And I'm sorry, I'll just take the second that there's a lot of folks that are— I don't want to say suffering— that don't quite know how to go back and share or articulate what they've been part of for multiple reasons.

Eric, we've taken up a ton of your time. I'm going to try to run through some user questions here really quick.

Yeah.

Um, Brad says, any big difference between what you did and a CIA, uh, paramilitary officer? Also, ever work with any body-centered therapy or know anyone who did?

Okay, so the first one, um, uh, different capacity. I'm a DOD guy. That's a CIA intelligence officer, even though— and, and Dave can help me out, right? We're 2 different things. I'm an enlisted inside the military. However, when you start deploying, there are authorities that certain military intelligence organizations have access to, to be able to conduct intelligence operations. So at the end, doing operations potentially similar, in the back as roles different entities, but there's some overlaps.

And then have you ever done any body-centered therapy or know anybody like Havening maybe, or EMDR, or—

I've done a whole bunch of acupuncture. So we had some of our former 18 Series Deltas that came on as PAs were pioneering a lot of really cool acupuncture for us. I think the Hoffman cocktail they were doing on us, which really, really helped. And then on my way on, as I was transitioning out, there was some EMDR, some stuff with the eyes.

Yeah.

That was really good for, for sort of therapy on the PTSD side. I am, full disclosure, looking at some of the psychedelics.

Yeah.

So, well, I mean, honestly, like I said, I mean, we should connect you with Sam, uh, with Sam, because like she's done, uh, a ton of research into it and it's, it, she, it's helped her out tremendously.

Yeah, I'm open to it.

Um, uh, yeah, and then, uh, EFT is also another sort of, I guess, more body-centered therapy that, uh, people have had success with. Um, uh, Joe's Gotcha, thank you very much for the donation. Semper Fi EDC Guy, thank you very much. Jean-Pierre, thank you. All you guys, BPA Izzy, thank you for your donations. Uh, Hillbilly Lives Matter, um, hey, we're not going to ask this question about the, uh, SAPS, uh, so if you want to ask another question in chat, please ask it. We'll, we'll credit your, your donation to another question. Um, Hillbilly Lives Matter, you Is it better to do the job as a single man? Because I hear it as a single man's game all the time, but sometimes I wonder if it's better not to be.

It depends. So there are times that, again, as I mentioned earlier, you're really never by yourself. You always have a network of people behind you from communications to emergencies, to, um, actually the largest part that ever helps a singleton or folks committing or conducting an act what appears by themselves is a support infrastructure. Without those support infrastructures, you're not going to be able to do it. So there are times that sometimes doing things as an individual, doing things as a couple, um, it's what makes sense at that level to be able to accomplish that, that mission Um, some of them obviously have to do 6-man or, or squads or teams.

Uh, hopefully that answers it.

I, I, I also think that Hillbilly is asking about relationship status. Do the single guys fare better?

Oh, got it.

I'm so sorry.

No, that's okay. But do the single guys fare better, or—

You know, I, I, I would say I've seen, again, in the 20 years, at least in in this, I, I've seen a lot of guys come in single, a lot of guys married, um, and those that had a stronger foundation was the married guys.

Yeah.

Because, you know, you can be as tough as a badass as you are, when you come home, you're like a little wimp and you are going to Mama to help you.

Yeah.

Right? Because at least in my world, for my family, it was a circle of trust. And that circle of trust, that first onion, or that, you know, lowest part of that onion ring, was me, my wife, my son, and my dogs. That was it. And so when I came from whatever, they were my support network. And what we noticed a lot with the singles, um, we worried about them because they would go back to their apartments, or they're going, and we, we would have to pull them in. And so ultimately No one can endure. I don't think I know very many people that stayed singled and did this line of work.

Yeah.

If not, you start broaching very risky behavior.

Yeah.

Because you don't have somebody to check you.

Right.

I mean, and really the guys who have like this sort of the stronger wives who will call them out. Oh, yeah.

And yeah, no, you're right.

Yeah, they, they are your foundation. They're your reality. Even though, again, everything I mentioned that you may not share, you may not, but they know you inside and out.

Yeah.

And you've got something to come home. So, you know, that's my hope. And, you know, whenever you go to SERE school and you think about getting interrogated or captured, you've got to have something that you put in your mind. And mine was always, if I'm gonna break out of here, I'm gonna figure a way to walk, right?

Yeah.

I maybe didn't have a tangible.

But I knew I was going to walk home to my wife and to my son. And one hard thing to take away from anybody is hope.

Yeah. And, and the hope that I would get back to my family.

So unless you have something that powerful, as a, as a, as a single person, it's very difficult.

Yeah, I— it's interesting because most guys—

sorry— are, are older in life anyway. Most of our, our guys are 30 and above, right?

So we're, we're You know, there are no young, young folks in these units doing this.

Yeah.

I—

in Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote about that in the concentration camps, that the people who had something to live for were the ones who would make it.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Jackie, thank you very much. Love what you guys are doing and keep it up. By the way, go Navy. T-Bar, thank you. Uh, what's harder, blending into a civilian population or navigating all the politics of a war zone when running a strategic mission?

The navigating the strategic, because you would think it would make sense. You would think that everybody's on the same sheet of music for the greater good of the mission. And unfortunately, the greatest heartbreaks and disappointments that I've ever had have been home. Have been going back, you know, at work or going, you know, to downtown to some entity where, for lack of better words, we had to get mother may I, can I go operate, or can we get the go, uh, or the funding, and then just be shot down for stupidity. Uh, and, you know, you kind of figure it out. You're like, hey man, I got it. Listen, I'm gonna— you will get promoted. Right? You got to do that reverse kind of intelligence work and go, you will get promoted, let us do our mission. So though, to the answer, blending in is hard, but you, you, you figure out there's— it's just you in that environment. The political has been, I think, in my perspective, the hardest thing to navigate, um, is just getting after it sometimes.

How, how did your unit, uh, deal with officers who were very protective of their careers and wanted sort of the no-failure options?

Ooh.

Uh, so there's a lot of briefs. There's a lot of, uh, you know, there's a lot of, um, like Jedi— I know it's—

I'm like, I don't have the right word—

like Jedi mind tricks, but there's a lot of NLP. Well, there's a lot of like guerrilla warfare, right? Like, I'm gonna get this guy and I'm gonna get this person to believe the cause, and then that person tells somebody else and that person gets to someone else. Again, as enlisted people, the enlisted folks that stay there for a long time, we don't ever— and this goes across a lot of organizations— you're like, oh God, I know what this person unfortunately is in their mind. They're worried about their career. They're gonna ride this pony to the end. Hopefully they listen to us. And what we're going to need to do as professionals is provide it in a way for them to make the right decision-making process, right? We're going to provide it in a way we take out the— hopefully we take out the emotions and we get to the facts and we're able to present the case for them to do the right thing. And when they unfortunately they don't, there are times that they're like, hey bro, I told you so, right?

Yeah.

And then, and, and if you're young in the career in the unit, in any of these units, you are ultimately going to come back when you decide to go from a, you know, I don't know, a captain or a major. And now you're gonna, you know, like, we will see you again.

Yeah.

I will probably be here, that guy will be here, and that person that was your teammate and enlisted will probably still be in this unit. So please make the right decision, because at the end, we're all trying to get to the We're trying to get to the same end state.

Because, I mean, I mean, you guys have these guys coming in from INSCOM. Like, where are these guys?

We'd have them come back to us in SF as like battalion commanders. And some of them are like, yeah, you don't really know anything about SF at all. Why are you here?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we, we, we, we get them from, from all over the places. It's not intel guys. I mean, you know, you get all breeds of people that come in at the officer level. And I really don't care where they come from at the end because of the selection processes and all of that. At the end, you start, you should start with a clean slate, right?

Right.

And then once we start creating those conversations and just like, you know, just like me or anybody else, it's, you're only as good as your last, your last mission and what success you had. And so as you start, you know, you don't want to build that hallway file, right?

You have that hallway file.

Yeah.

Connor, thank you very much. He said, thanks for the content, gents. Semper Fi, EDC. Semper Fi, Eric. Hassan116, thank you. Have you run across any other Cuban Americans in SOF/JSOC? Great episode.

Hey, go check out a previous Team House episode with Ruben Garcia. Yeah, served in Vietnam, Cuban immigrant, and then was a involved in SOT. Yeah, amazing interview.

Oh, I haven't even seen that. Actually, ironically enough, I have not.

Really?

I think, yeah, not just anyone that I've had to work with, right? Like either on a mission forward, anybody from another tier or anything that I build a relationship or even I did Google, when I Google in the IC Google, You know, at the whatever, the search, I've like Googled my last name to see if there was anybody else. I think I popped up like 2 people, so I stopped searching my last name to see if there was any other Miatases. I never found anybody.

I know another Eric. He'd be mad if I mentioned his name here, but I'd be happy to introduce you guys.

Eric, so there was a lot of them. Miatases I hadn't found. Cubans, I hadn't. I have been blessed with a whole bunch of Puerto Rican, Mexican, all kinds of other— I've got Egyptian brothers, all of the other dudes that we get, but no, not Cubans.

Did Hilby ask another question? Do you see him?

I don't think so. I think that was the last one. And listen, we're almost like 3 hours in at this point. Eric, I really appreciate your time on a Friday. I know you're out doing family stuff right now. This has been an awesome interview. I hope that we can have you back at some point. This is like a really unique perspective to have.

Yeah, we really appreciate it.

And—

Yep, sorry.

Well, go ahead, Eric. I'm sorry.

No, I just wanted to thank you, but openly also, I do appreciate Um, you know, this, this isn't about me. Like, I've never— I didn't come from a world where, um, Eric, um, really mattered.

It was great, the greater mission.

Um, you know, and this isn't about the organization I came from. And we, we both have talked about it, is the folks that do this line of work. Um, and I think you guys are getting at it. You're getting at sharing these stories. Uh, some of them are cool. I wish, you know, I'd love to come back and share aspects of other things that I've been involved with and been involved in or even have knowledge of without compromising anything. And again, it isn't, it isn't about the unit. And hopefully people don't worry about where you came from, but they worry about the individual. And for you guys as a podcast, you're doing just an amazing job at sharing that history and capturing it and formulating it in a way that is fun. And hopefully new generations of people who want to do this line of work And just as importantly, family members and children or friends that have had someone involved in in anything that you guys cover glean something because I think you guys have done an amazing job at at getting at it and providing that information. So I thank you.

I know my family thanks you for being able to share my ability to share the stories, answer these questions, and and obviously not compromise anything.

Well, we appreciate it. And for a lot of our viewers, I don't know if they understand, like, the amount of pressure that a per— like, a person like you— like, that, that we have on ourselves, you have on yourself, you know. And, and, you know, you, you want to be loyal to your, your people. You don't want to, um, you don't want to be the person who, who talks out of school. But there are, there are also stories that deserve deserve to be told, need to be told.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and these communities have had a horrible, horrible rate of, you know, uh, suicide, self-harm, alcoholism. And, and we really appreciate you, like, making yourself vulnerable and, and, and, and letting other guys who might be in your position know that it's okay to come out and talk about this and America, you know, about, about what we're going through.

The American public can't support a capability that they don't know we even have. So to talk to the public, to talk to the taxpayers out there and let them know that, yeah, we do have these guys and we should support them and make sure that they're taken care of. It's an important and it's a healthy conversation.

And make sure they're taken care of, you know, like It can't be so absolutely 100% secret that you can't even talk to the VA and get the support that you need.

Yeah. And I think that's the key, you know, and that's the silver lining. And again, it doesn't matter what level or the individual's perception of what they can and can't talk about. And sometimes we are our worst enemies, right? Like, right, we will drown ourselves in a freaking shallow pool Because we weren't well informed. However, what we can do, those that are now veterans, uh, is illuminate the path, not compromise anything. But we're smart about this, right? Folks that come from our community, we're smart people, we can get at it. And I think the way we're, we're addressing these topics and we're illustrating it at the end here— hey, I'm not, I'm not talking about any TTPs, I'm literally telling you what the life, right, is.

Right.

Of people who've done this work across the spectrum, what their families are. And hopefully someone's listening who works at the VA, who works somewhere, and just we, we move this forward to take care so we can at the end actually really become a stronger nation and take care of our people. Because the next generation is coming, and in this world of, you know, uh, I don't want to say Google, but Facebook and all of this crap, we've got less people who want to really serve this nation.

Right.

We need them to be prepared to do it.

Right. And we kind of need to adjust a little bit our biases and help them move forward.

So yeah. So check out Military Special Operations Family Collaborative. That's mssofcharlie.org. You know, they're doing great work.

Eric, where can people find you?

Yeah, so the key one is on Instagram. So Echo 9 Axiom, um, is the primary, um, one you can find me on Instagram. It's on Facebook, uh, and if you Google, uh, now Eric Miyata on Google, you can find me, uh, but really on Instagram is the first one. On Facebook there's Echo 9, uh, echo9.axiom, and then from there it really— there's a Linktree that'll To—

and a lot of these videos, a lot of that, all that information is also going to be down in the description of this video. Um, also down in the description you'll find, uh, links to our Patreon if you guys want to support this live stream. We really appreciate it. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't already. Leave us a review on iTunes. All that stuff helps and we really appreciate that. Uh, next Friday we're gonna have Ben Milligan. He should be here in the studio. Um, And he wrote By Water Beneath the Walls. I'm reading this book right now. It's complicated, but it's a history of amphibious warfare and amphibious commando operations and what led to the creation of the Navy SEALs. There's some heresies in here about William Darby. We'll talk about that.

Uh-oh.

Yeah, Ben Miller is a—

This is gonna get spicy.

Special ops apostate, you know, and Ben is a former SEAL, so we're gonna break balls a little bit about hair product and things like that. But no, he— this honest, honest to God, this is a really good book. And like, I'm learning things in here that I didn't know anything about. So I, I highly, uh, suggest people go out and get a copy of this and give it a read. Really good stuff.

Also get some boykies.

And I'm excited. We're excited to talk to Ben next week. And Eric, again, man, thank you so much, um, taking some time out of your Friday evening.

Yeah, we really appreciate it, Eric.

Gentlemen, thank you so much.

And I want to do it again. I want to have you on again sometime because we have to talk more.

We want you in studio next time where we can tip a few back.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, we will. Sweet.

All right, see you next Friday.

I don't know how this works, but I'm gonna say cheers, darling. I'll see you next time.