#27 Rob O'Neill - The Man Who Killed Bin Laden 03:23:31

Hey everybody, welcome back. I hope you're having a fantastic week, even though it's only Monday. But hey, if you're not and it's off to a rough start, it's about to get better because I have a phenomenal interview lined up for you guys. Rob has been a long time coming on this show and we finally got it done.

And I think you guys are really going to enjoy it. We talk about his entire career and we get into some philosophical type stuff that I think you all are going to find extremely interesting as well. And I want to tell you all about the Vigilance Elite newsletter that we're kicking off. All kinds of good stuff coming through that, especially the exclusive content that's only for newsletter people.

and all kinds of other stuff, when the gummy bears are going to release, new products, all that stuff. It's all coming out on the newsletter. It's our only way to get directly to you without any algorithms in the way. So anyways, it's free. Sign up. Link's in the description. And on another note, I just want to personally thank all of you for being here. I love you all. Thank you, and enjoy the show.

You guys are here because this is not a drill. This is real. We found a thing and this thing is in a house. And this house is in a bowl and this bowl is in a country. And you guys are gonna, you're gonna go get this thing and you're gonna bring it back to us and show it to us. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world. The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda.

and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. I said, you guys realize this is a one-way mission. We're not coming back from this one. We're targeting al-Qaeda in places where they've never seen guys like us. The reason you guys are here is this is as close as we've ever been to Osama bin Laden.

Good evening, the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead, killed by American special forces who raided his hideout in Pakistan in the early hours of the morning. And I remember putting my... My first foot came out and I'm looking at bin Laden's house and I remember thinking, "Fuck it, I guess we'll start the war from here." These remarkable pictures from right inside his compound show us exactly where Osama bin Laden was finally killed. The woman that found bin Laden said, "I don't know what it looks like inside,

There will be a stairwell going to the second floor and you will run into Khalid bin Laden. And he's 20 years old, that's bin Laden's son, and that is his last line of defense. He will be armed on the stairwell. The blood you can see on the floor, evidence of how he was shot in the head through his left eye. Simply because he went this way, I turned this way. And standing three feet in front of me is Osama bin Laden. And he's got his hands on Amal, his wife's shoulders. I turn around and I kind of froze. And I'm like, okay, we got...

Other Navy SEALs are now coming in the room. A lot of guys are in there and one of my guys came up to me and he said, "Are you good?" And I said, "No." "No, what are we supposed to do now?" Rob O'Neill, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. It's great. Been a long time coming. It has, yeah. I think we've been promising to do this for a while. Yeah, shit. I just never got around to it. I even lived near here for a couple years and I don't know how I didn't make it here. Yeah, well...

Life gets in the way, right? Yeah, it does. Life happens around you. But, well, we had a great conversation about the upcoming alien invasion that's going to happen. I'm at a point right now where nothing would surprise me. Right? And even if aliens showed up, I would question, are those really aliens or is just the government just the final push? That's what I'm saying. And I don't know what to believe. I mean, I've seen enough stuff to believe. I believe a lot of things now, and there's other stuff that I'm not sure if I believe it.

So it's just a crazy world. It's to the point where no matter what happens, I'm not going to be surprised. I mean, consider a few years ago that a lockdown was just something you see in a movie. There's no way this would really happen. And it did. And we fell for it. Yeah, hook, line, and sinker. All of us. Even if you're the anti-masker, you still stay in your house. It's not like you're...

you're not going to fly without it yeah you're not traveling without it so yeah well actually i got everybody i get everybody a gift and i was going to get you a delta sky miles oh thank you but um can i open it now yeah go ahead what do we got here these are gummy bears those are gummy bears well thank you go good with uh your beer company that's great it's your beer that's right

You're awesome. I need to get some of that beard. Okay. Yeah, I'll definitely get some Brewing company will send you out as soon as we get done with this. Yeah, I'll put it right there on the bar Very cool, you know, we'll drink it during the show. Yeah, we have we have a beer for every branch. We have jarhead Soldier beer cat shot for pilots special hops, which I thought was pretty special hot special hops in IPA It's really good. We just came out with Neptune's beer. Oh

to sort of commemorate Neptune's spear, which is commonly mispronounced. It's Neptune's spear, as in King Neptune's spear. Interesting. People say Neptune's spear, but that's the two S's in a row. Yeah.

what you got any what's your favorite flavor ipa special hops yeah this is my favorite special hops but but the the um when when neptune's beer is available it's going to be i think 12 so that might be my new favorite nice yeah nice you gonna get into hard stuff at all or uh not just yet but if it if the opportunity arises um probably well i'm sure that's gonna come

But, well hey, I just want to start, you got a hell of a career. Let's go through your entire career, you know, hit the high points. Obviously the Bin Laden raid, but I want to start with, you know, where you grew up, Montana. What was your childhood like? Well, it was kind of living in a bubble that you, you know, there's nothing on the other side of that mountain. Butte, Montana is the center of the universe and people from anywhere else are probably going to be better than you. Kind of a weird situation, a fear of success, I guess.

So, you know, I grew up hunting. That was a normal thing. It was normal to hunt elk. It was normal to go mule deer, white tail hunting, fishing. And I played a lot of basketball. That was going to be my plan. I was going to get so good at basketball that I would get college paid for.

and then I was going to stay in Butte, Montana and be a stockbroker or something like that. Get an MBA maybe from Montana Tech, where I did go for a year. Nice. Were you pretty tired with your old man? Yeah, yeah. We kind of did everything together. We started hunting basically the same reason I joined the Navy, because he got dumped. He got a second divorce and we just had to do something, so we started hunting. I think the first time we went hunting, it was in a two-door Datsun car. My Uncle Jack's. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know how to sight in a weapon.

Kind of went out we got we got a doe tag for an antelope now and we went on all we knew how to do was get the the cooler stocked Yeah, you know like sodas and Twinkies and sandwiches and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, we used to call it the buffet and that was kind of it It was there was basketball season. There was hunting season. There was fishing and then Hanging out in Butte Montana, which I thought was a big city at the time because I didn't you know We didn't really go anywhere. Do you miss it there? I do I love to go back and

I sometimes get jealous of people that have a normal job and a normal life. Nine to five, you know, wake up in the morning, kiss your kids, go to work, have lunch, come home, be with your kids. I totally understand that. Yeah. Just a normal life. I mean, yeah, it's kind of cool. You don't have really shit to worry about. Yeah. But yeah. So what did your old man do? He was a stockbroker. Oh, he was a stockbroker? Now he does weird shit. Like he bought a really fast Harley and he's 73. And I think it scares him.

But he bought it, and he's actually taking his road test soon, the cone thing. Oh, shit. He's like brand new on a bike. Yeah. He had one before. He had a Honda Shadow, I remember, growing up, but I don't think he ever rode it. I think he just had it. Yeah. But he's good now. He's still a fly fisherman. He just put a basketball court in his backyard. Oh, nice. He plays in the winter in Montana. He'll go out and shovel it and shoot free throws. He's still really good. He's got a good shot.

So when did you, if that was the plan, what, how the hell did the SEAL teams and the Navy even come up? Well, the SEAL teams was an accident. Um, cause it was, it wasn't necessarily getting dumped by a girl, but it was a situation that, you know, I started to, well, once I joined the Navy, I realized most people are similar. You get to an age where I just got to get out of here. And that was where I was at. I, bad relationship, um, basketball wasn't, I was playing, but it wasn't fun anymore. And it's, I need to go on an adventure. Um,

And I had two friends that always wanted to be Marines. I grew up with them. Jim McBride and Ben Walaszewski. And they all... I'm talking high and tights growing up. Marine Corps stickers on their first trucks. They were Marines. And then I would see them come up. They were two years older than me. I would see them come back to Butte, Montana. And it was like watching someone from Full Metal Jacket walk into... I was at the Vue Villa. And Ben walked in. I'm like...

Holy shit. I mean, that's a Marine. Like that guy, I still wasn't going to join. I was still playing basketball. And I was like, that's a fucking Marine though. I'm going to watch this guy kick someone's ass in here. And then when it was time to leave, like, cause as a young man, you, you can go out and see the world for free by joining the military. Yeah. And I, again, full metal jacket. I like everyone else. I watched that a thousand times.

And I was like, you know what? I'm going to do that because I guarantee boot camp is going to suck, but I want to meet that drill instructor. You know, just how funny he is, but brutal. And I want to be tough like a Marine. So I went to join the Marine Corps. Just went down there and there was a... My wife calls me the luckiest unlucky man in the world. She's... I think one of her sayings, like through life, I think one of her sayings is, you could trip over your dick, but you're going to land in a pot of gold. Yeah.

So I went I went in to join the Marine Corps and his luck would have it the Marine wasn't there He was literally out to lunch and the Navy guy was the Navy guy was no and I went over to him because my two friends and I'm Everyone's heard this joke before but my two friends Ben and Jim said the Marine Corps is actually part of the Department of the Navy It's just the men's department and that's why I went in there because what they're part of the department He'll know where he is and then he'll you know, and I I said, um

"Hey, where's the Marine? When's he gonna be back?" So he's sitting there, he's a Navy Chief, khakis, anchors, I didn't know what the shit that meant, but he's a Chief, so he's clever. And he said, "Why do you want the Marine?" I said, "I wanna be a sniper." And I grew up hunting, Marines have the best snipers in the world. I read Carlos Hathcock's book, like I wanna do that, and he goes, "Look no further, my friend, we have snipers in the Navy."

All you have to do is become a Navy SEAL first, no big deal. We'll send you right to sniper training. And I didn't know what that was, right? I'm from Montana, and I didn't know how to swim. And me being a naive young man, I thought, you know, I don't know what a SEAL is, but this guy here is a professional recruiter. Why would he lie to me? Right?

And I signed it and I signed the contract to go. The only thing I did right was I learned early in life to get it in writing. Whatever you're doing, fine. We can do business on a handshake, but sign this first. Yeah. So I got in writing. It was called the Dive Farer Program.

The Divefarer? The Divefarer program, which meant you get like a $2,500 bonus. You are guaranteed a chance to go to Bud's, basically on a water demolition seal training. You're guaranteed a chance. And I didn't know all that meant is you can go and fail, and then you're going to the fleet. Yeah. And so I signed that, and yeah, that was it. And then he started showing me videos of Bud's. I didn't know what that was. The only thing I knew about Navy SEALs was...

Watching Charlie Sheen's character jump off the bridge in the movie Navy SEALs Eddie Braun is his name He's still it's his stuntman, which is awesome. Very good guy. Very good stuntman. I guess during that scene - I'm kind of jumping around Eddie Braun said alright I'm gonna do this you get one take and he then the famous jumping up. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I that's what I thought it was and then I knew something about Sit ups with 2,000 pound logs my buddies that I grew up with that I thought knew a lot about

The military said there's no fucking way in hell you're gonna make it through see what did you just do? I took my mom to the recruiting station to have her watch videos and she didn't tell me to my face, but she's like There's no fucking way you can make it through this training And uh, the only person that says that I think really believed in me was my father um, just because I um because of our attitudes with uh free throws and master the basics um free throws

That's if I could describe life it would be how to be successful in life free throws because it's master the basics Do your thing shoot here? Muscle memory you want to be great do it a thousand times you want to be really great do it ten thousand times Do everything like you do anything we would do drills my father and me we would play every single day and Anything from an hour of one-on-one to three hours of five on five but we were not allowed to leave the gym until one of us made at least 20 free throws in a row and

So that's start with a make and then you keep shooting. And that's something else too about like stances with shooting and all that stuff. When you make your first free throw, you don't move. You're in the position. I hate watching basketball players now. They make a free throw and they got to go give everyone five. Fuck you. It's your job. You made a free throw. Make the second one and then talk about how awesome you are. But we couldn't leave the gym until one of us made 20 in a row.

And that could take five minutes, that could take three hours. But we got so good at it that we made ourselves... There's a steakhouse in Butte, Montana called The Derby. And like Montanans, like I said, we don't know how good it is because we're just there. Don't realize how great the steaks are at The Derby in Butte, Montana. We would start our season off 20 in a row to leave the gym, 20 for a steak.

Now it stays at 20 to leave the gym, but now it goes up by five, 25 for a steak, 30 for a steak, 35 for a steak, 20 to leave the gym, 50 for a steak. And we got to the point, my father made 91 in a row. And that was the family record for a week. Cause the next week I made 105 in a row. In a row? In a row. And you know, what's funny is like a lot, well, a lot of things in life, only two of us saw it. So you can take my word for it or tell me all this shit. But yeah, so he believed in me.

And so being lucky instead of good, I had my student ID to Montana Tech. They had a pool. So that meant I could still get into the pool like at five in the morning. And I went up there and I'm like, OK, the breaststroke is one of the strokes. It can't be that hard. It's 25 meters down, 25 meters back. I'll swim.

a thousand meters and gauge it from there. And like anything, everything was going fine until I entered the water and that's when the problem started. I made it to the deep end, I almost didn't make it back and I was like, "I'm fucked." I just signed a contract with the government to be a Navy SEAL and I don't know how to swim.

Holy shit. So I was trying and I'm busting my ass doing whatever and my friend, so I'm in there for just dying. I'm trying to get out and my friend Mike Driscoll, I went to high school with him, one of the few people in Montana who did swim and I believe he did go on to swim at Notre Dame. And he said, Rob, don't take this the wrong way. It's great to see you.

I've just literally never seen you in the pool before. What gives? And I said, I just joined the Navy. I'm going to be a SEAL. And he goes, oh, no, not like that. And then he showed me how to do the breaststroke, how to do the side stroke. And so with repetition, I would go there every day. And I still have my...

There's a little packet you get when you join the Navy, that folder. And even like there's the Bud's warning order and all that shit. I still have that with my... I would write my times down for the 500-yard swim that you had to do. No shit? You still have that? I still have it. I found it in one of the kit bags that we all keep because I might need this sleeping bag someday. Yeah.

But then I was up there, I was getting pretty decent and then Jim McBride, the Marine, he was enlisted, I think he just retired as a Lieutenant Colonel, which is awesome. Semper Fi, that's what he was gonna do. He was going to be a Marine. He went to air crew school in the Marine Corps and they taught him how to really do the combat recovery stroke and he goes, "Just do this a couple times." And just like when I saw Ben in the Vuvilla,

I was watching Jim swim and I'm like, okay, this is next level shit. Now I got to get this. And so I just, you know, I got proficient, I thought. Yeah. And then I did get to boot camp and, you know, I actually failed the screening test the first time because I took it like an asshole after you get those 90 shots and you're just sick as a dog, cotton mouth or whatever.

And I remember sitting there. How many people try out in boot camp? At the time, there must have been 400 people. What year is this? 1996. 96. And looking at these bleachers, and I still had that small town mentality. I remember looking at the Navy SEAL flag, the unofficial Navy SEAL flag. I'm watching this arrogant team guy. I didn't know what to think of Navy SEAL. He came out there and did this perfect dive that Greg Louganis would have loved for a number of reasons. Oh, my God.

But uh, and then he got out and kind of just gave us the stink eye and and I remember looking thinking There's no fucking way why look at all these guys trying out and then uh, but then I started talking to other guys that were from Brooklyn some some dudes that joined the navy to get out of compton guys from south florida and I started to realize that okay Everyone's scared. Everyone's kind of the same. We're all the same

And then it started to sink in. I mean, later on in life, I realized that I don't give a shit if you're the CEO of a major company, you're the guy in Bin Laden's bedroom. We've all had our first day. Yeah. And we've all been scared. Admit it. I mean...

We'll talk about the one percenters later, which exist, that aren't scared. It will pass. But the rest of us get scared. The rest of us have been nervous. But if you can just take it at increments at a time. And so the next time I got there, I lost the intimidation. I gave up the bullshit with, I just got shots. No, fuck that. Do the swim, do the pull-up, do the sit-up, do the push-up, do the damn run and get on with your life. And that was it. I mean, just being in boot camp. And I kind of, I'm a big believer in wherever you are, be there.

So I got into the classes we were taking. Okay, I'm going to be a Navy SEAL, but I want to learn about Naval customs and courtesies, traditions. I want to learn what the horn, like I paid attention. I was interested in this. I was interested in how to make a bed, how to fold your shirts. I still do it. And I got into it and then I did, you know, I got the contract in there with the, you know, now you're with a Navy SEAL chief and,

And you're going to get your orders. Yeah. And part of the dive fair program, I didn't realize this, was you have to be a corpsman. Okay. I didn't see that in the fine print, but I finagled my way when you go up to get your rates, made up some bullshit. And I found out what the shortest A school was so I could get to Bud's right away. And it was an air crew survival equipment man or a parachute rigger. So I would get that. I knew I would finish boot camp, go to Millington, Tennessee.

It was like a two or three week a school and I was with Marines now, but I mean, I'm talking huge do I had there's one huge Marine one white dude one black dude huge Marines I'm still intimidated by Marines and then this big black marine this I'll never forget He's a staff sergeant. He taught me how to wind a bobbin and how to sew and at first I thought okay I'm into some shit, but I don't know and then I'm like wait a minute sewing might be an awesome thing

Trade I'm gonna pay attention. This is a big tough marine taught me how to sew I learned about Siflacrate a fire for a console machine and you know what was bullshit and but that in the teams I chose that to be a good thing but before we had all the high-speed kit that they you need to cut this pocket off so it here where do you want your stuff and But never tell anyone you're good at it because then your first LPO he'll have you sewing everyone's uniforms Yeah, you have a year workup to get all 100 Whatever. Yeah, I went to Millington and um

Went back to Butte, Montana for leave and then drove my truck to Coronado. And the first place I stopped in Coronado was right by the Hotel Del. And I just wanted to get in the ocean to, you know... If I was talking to 19-year-old Rob O'Neill now, I'm like, dude, you're going to get ocean time. Just stay out. Yeah. Don't take cold showers. You just... My thing about the cold showers when I...

I talk to young kids, young men that want to be SEALs and they'll say, what should I be doing to get ready for buds? And I'll say, well, let me answer your question with a question. What are you doing to get ready for buds? And they say, taking cold showers to get used to it. And I'm like, you know what, stop that right now. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to give you an example. If I told you in 30 days, I'm going to kick you in the nuts as hard as I can.

And in order to get ready for it, you had your best friend kick you in the nuts every single day. Guess what? It's still going to suck when I do it. Don't prepare for shit. It's just take it like a man. Every single time. Yeah. So I got there and, um, it was a Thursday night and I was in the, I got into the, the, the, um,

The Pacific Ocean. And all of a sudden, there were these boats rowing by. And there was chemlights on the side of them. And it took me a second to realize, oh, shit. I'm checking into class 208. That's 207. And this is hell week. And I still get goosebumps thinking about it. Damn. Boy, you talk about swimming. You just jumped in with both feet. And it's about to be on. And then, yeah, I got a hotel. I checked in on a Friday, which was stupid. Wait till Monday. Yeah.

Like, why do you want quarter-deck watch when you can at least go have your last beer in peace? Yeah, and then 208 started. Bud's Class 208. You know, it's typical, starts off with...

At the time, I think we called it PTRR. Yeah, that's what they called it. They didn't have quite the pipeline they do now. They're doing it better now with actually getting guys ready with prep and nutrition. This is back in the day when you had a Navy SEAL as a skydive instructor and you eat shit. He doesn't tell you how to work your canopy. He laughs at you. They have so many guys signing up now, apparently. This is from...

this family that i used to train when i did tactics and stuff he this kid went in they have so many people signing up to be seals now that or go to buds i guess that they have to they can't even take them all really yeah they're they're showing up and they sent this guy out to the fleet for two years but broke his contract

That's how many people are signing up. Well, that's what tells you about a contract with the government. They can tell you to go fuck yourself. Yeah, we've seen plenty of that lately. But yeah, checking in though, it goes from watching a special on a cable news special about some reporter that went to... Now you're at Bud's. And I don't know what the fuck. And they brought us into a classroom and we were still in our whites, our dress whites with like the... I think, what, do you have one little...

service medal or whatever. Yeah. And we check in and this instructor came in and he goes, hey, anybody want to quit? And he was fucking around like a team guy joke. This dude goes, I do. Right off the bat? And everyone thought it was a joke. He's like, no, he just, he got orders to buzz to get off the ship. No shit. And then he quit because he knew he'd get like three weeks on shore. To do whatever the hell he wants. Yeah. So then he quit. And then we had an instructor named Eshelman.

And he's a legend, if anyone knows who, a legend. And he said, this is how I started. I started to realize that they're training you how to be successful in life. He said, all right, I know. I mean, and buzz instructors are not historically nice guys. But this guy was like, he would say stuff. Look, guys, I'm not here to intimidate. I'm here to motivate. He was our class proctor. So that is the one that helps you through. And he said, I know you've seen the movies and

Probably read the books regardless of what you've been told this course is not impossible. Okay people graduate look at me I am living proof so I will never ask you to do anything impossible But I will make you do something very hard followed by something very hard Followed by something very hard day after day after day for eight straight months And that sounds like a lot to get from not eight months from now But don't think about that because that is not how you achieve a long-term goal You do it like this you wake up in the morning on time Then you make your bed the right way then you brush your teeth

You just started the day with three victories. That's three wins already. Make it to the 5 a.m. PT on time. And as I'm beating you, do not think about the pain you're going through. Concentrate on your next goal in life, which is breakfast. After breakfast, make it to lunch. After lunch, your next goal in life is dinner. And after dinner, do everything you need to do to get back into that perfectly made bed. And because you took the time in the morning to make your bed the right way, regardless of how bad today was, and it will be bad.

Tomorrow's a clean slate tomorrow is a fresh start when you feel like quitting which you will do not quit right now That's emotion. I want you to quit tomorrow if you can keep quitting tomorrow You can do anything in life and that's what I I mean I thought I wasn't gonna make I had to get up 15 minutes early to put on sunscreen like I thought that would be a reason a sunburn would get me out of buds You know little shit like that, but it started to enforcing me fuck that I'm gonna put sunscreen on I'm gonna fail a swim

But I'm not going to quit. And then you start seeing guys quit. And one problem, too, is I called it sympathetic quitting. When someone that you think is tougher than you because he's louder than you quits, well, if he can't make it, I can't make it. And I'm sure you saw it, too, in Bud's. Yeah. Well, should they just follow him? It's like, fuck him. Like, even in the movies, when you see someone go into the bell and the other students are like, no, no. It's like, fuck you. Quit. I don't want you. Fuck you.

Yeah, join them. I'm not quitting. Yeah. And then it just, you know, it turns into Hell Week and, you know, all of a sudden it's Breakout. Like, we're in the tent. I know it's coming and Breakout starts which is organized chaos. They're, you know, get a muster, get your bow and like, they're not going to. They got instructors like that are retired in there to fuck with you. Yeah. Just to realize the chaos and there was a guy that quit right off the bat in Breakout and I'm like, dude, this is the best part. Like, this is the movies and then

And then again, it's just the I did have someone say you're obviously your next goal is your next meal. Your long term goal right now is sunrise of Wednesday. And if you can live the sunrise, you'll probably be so doped up from lack of sleep that you can double just push you through. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it's Friday and then...

We did you know the mud pits the famous shit at the end like the bacteria infested cesspool we're whatever and I remember we had Admiral Richards was gonna secure us in a typical Admiral he was three hours late so they have to beat us for an extra three it's like could someone just Secure the shit. Can I get a gay rage? Just let us go. Yeah. Hey, I remember he said he's shaking everyone's hands and like he's like the first Admiral ever met no He's like congratulations O'Neill. Thank you. I don't know wipe that shit off your face. I'm like Roger that. Oh

Yeah, then all of a sudden, Hell Week's over. And then you're in the Walk Week where they're actually letting you recover.

And then I'll never forget our first swim because now you're done with Hell Week. And obviously Hell Week, I think, is the reason that Navy SEALs in combat will walk three miles out of their way to avoid getting their boots wet. Yeah. You get tortured. And our first two-mile swim, they had us line up and face the ocean. The first time getting in the ocean after Hell Week. And they made us line up and we're just staring at it. And the same instructor, Eshelman, he comes walking up and down. He's like, first time in the ocean since Hell Week, huh, gents? Yeah.

Kind of spooky, isn't it? And then you do that, you do the hydro recon, and then boom, you get your blue helmet. You're in die face. What did you find? Did you make it through all at once? Yeah. You were in an original? Yeah. Oh, that's not very many of those. I know. And it didn't make sense to me because, I mean, pool comp, they have you do the test on Friday twice, and if you fail, you have to do it Monday. And then if you fail that, you're done. And people don't realize a lot of dudes fail pool comp.

And you can get kicked out for failing pool comp. Most guys get rolled to make it again. But I failed twice on Friday. And then I remember just practicing untying knots. Practice breath holds. How am I going to get through this? And that started to enforce that failure is sometimes a learning lesson. You can learn. Don't be afraid of failure. Just don't quit. And then I went through and I...

I think I untied most of the knots and you know, you come up at the end, I feel fine. And then this instructor's here and it's here. O'Neill pass. I'm like, fuck yeah. And he grabbed me and he goes, you untied three of my whammy knots, fucker. And then you get out and you're in dive phase. And now, and that's where you learn that the Navy can make anything suck. Yeah. Because diving, scuba diving, I don't know if you know this, is fun. Not in the fucking Navy. No. So, you know, you do a little bit of open circuit stuff. Then you do the cool, uh,

100 120 feet dive in the Pacific which is neat then you get into a dragger and then just learning how to count kicks and then Ship attack shit and you know dive medicine dive physics and you know the classroom stuff where that now this is where the meatheads who can Run five miles they fail. Yeah, because now you got to learn about Boyle's law. You got to learn about the bends learn about AGEs or chill gas symbolism shit like that and all of a sudden you're done with that and now it's third phase and

And at this point, no one had told me that San Clemente Island is by far the worst part. I mean, I thought Hell Week was bad. I thought Pool Comp was bad. The fucking island for me was the worst. No shit. 40 straight days of nothing but getting beat. And I'm convinced the instructors are hitting the sauce a little bit out there. They're reminding us that we're killing you on one of the nicest beaches in the world. Nobody can hear you scream out here. And their thing was wet and sandy every hour on the hour.

For 24 hours. It doesn't matter what you're doing. You need to run to the surf. And your swim buddy goes with you. Every hour on the hour. And I have pictures of shit. There's no point in even going to bed. Just sleep on the floor and then they're watching. Or we think they're watching. I mean, they might not be, but what if they are? Yeah, I had my swim buddy. He just got some sort of homesick or some sort of island fever and he kept fucking everything up.

he like he he forgot to put the buff buffer in his gun the spring and um and the instructor said did you do a function check on this and he's like yes i did he's like he pulls it back there's no spring so obviously the gun doesn't work he goes all right you two wet and sandy every hour so i'm getting punished for this guy for my swim buddy and then uh i'll never forget i think seal team three was out there so the buds compound is here and then the kick-ass seal compound like for navy seals and they're still legends to us um

They they fucked up a a demo shot in the bay there. Uh, they didn't they didn't double double Fucking whatever it didn't go off. It didn't go off So now you got all these charges the water don't go off and there's like this I i'm i'm gonna screw up the regulations for the navy, but I think it's uh, 48 hours No one can even get in the eod can't even go in there because it might go and and Everyone knows that an explosion of water is way worse than an explosion on land because water doesn't compress so um

My buddy fucked up again. And they're like, okay, God. And the instructor goes, well, I can't get you guys wet every hour. I can't put you in the surf every hour because I have demo shots. And I go, I will hit him with the fucking hose every hour on the hour. Let me do it. I'll spray this motherfucker. So yeah, but then the island ends. You know, you take the C-130 back. And now they're saying, okay, well, they read our orders on the island where we're going.

So, and I don't know if they still do this, but we used to do a dream sheet. You put your top three SEAL teams in a row, which to me was like, this is cool. Where do I want to go? And I think a guy that I knew said, don't put, I mean, obviously put which team you want first, but then put the other teams on that coast because you might not get two, but you will get eight, which is awesome.

Whatever you do, do not put SDV anywhere. Yeah. I mean, it sounded like a good deal at the time because you get free fall. And that's like the only good deal. But apparently SDV is a motherfucker. Yeah. So I put SEAL Team 2, SEAL Team 8, SEAL Team 4 because they're all on the East Coast.

And at the time, the only real work we were getting was Bosnia, Kosovo, and SEAL Team 2. That was their AL, so I kind of wanted to go to SEAL Team 2. Plus, you know, it was one of the first two SEAL Teams. To me, I still love to say SEAL Team 2. That's awesome. And I'll never forget, they were reading our orders, and they're like, so-and-so, SEAL Team 3, so-and-so, SEAL Team 1. They go, O'Neill, SDV, sorry, SEAL Team 2. In that one second, I'm like, no! No!

SDV2? You're ready to quit right there. I made it all the way through. You're like, I'm done. That's what you're doing, like 12-hour dives in the Chesapeake Bay in February. Fuck that. No, thank you. Yeah, but I got COT, too. And then all of a sudden, you're, you know, go to medical, get your shit done, go to dental, get checked up, and then go to Fort Benning.

And it's like, holy shit, Buds is over. Yeah. Now what? I have to be an Navy SEAL. What does that even mean? And then you go to Benning, and I'd never worked with the Army before. And it was just cool. Again, because I looked up to the Army. Rangers are fucking studs. And I went, and these are kids that look like me in Army uniforms. And they're asking me about Buds, and I'm asking them about Basic. And then we're going through...

through Airborne which is just a clown show yeah just I mean because the army makes those instructors to keep your attention that ridiculous dancing around shit well they hate us too oh they hate us I would hate us imagine the worst thing that they could have done is send I didn't mean to say clown show Airborne obviously rich history just some of the shit they did was a clown show yeah um but um

Yeah, I mean, imagine taking someone at 19 or 20 years old, just finished the hardest military training in the world, and your punishment is to do 10 push-ups. You need to do two pull-ups before you go into the chow hall. All right. Yeah. Two pull-ups, how many times? 100? But no, I mean, that was cool. But then, in their defense, too, and obviously, you know, in our service, we make fun of each other. You know that.

But then the first jump I I mean it took a while like I'm convinced you can teach someone how to fall and push them out of Planted one day, but they take their time and you're in those gravel pits or whatever falling but the first time I jumped the first time under canopy and I landed and one of the black hats when instructors said I was that and I was like that is the coolest thing I've ever done so that was awesome you see and then all of a sudden BAM you go to seal team - you didn't have SQT back then no. No, we went through seal tactical training and

What was that? I went through SQT, so I don't know what that was. Well, it's a 13-week course that they ran two times a year. So you get there, you're in the training department with the older guys, and then you wait until you're classed up. So you can volunteer. You're picking up brass and shit. Okay. Yeah.

Actually, that's where I met Don Shipley, Senior Chief Don Shipley. I think one of the first sales I ever met, he came in. Don Shipley, to this day, is one of the coolest motherfuckers I've ever met. He came in in his khaki. I'm a new guy. I'm trying to blend into nothing. He came in in his khakis. He goes, oh, fuck it. Who wants to come with me to the Chiefs Club and get a beer? I was like, I would love to. No, you're not going. I would. And Shipley just turned out to be one. He was so cool. I would volunteer to jump with the platoons.

Just to get, I want to get the gold wings. That's your next goal. I don't have a try-to yet. You have to get through SEAL tactical training, which is 13 weeks, and then a six-month probationary period. So I want to get the gold wings at least so I'm a new meat, but I'm not that new. And I remember jumping once with Don Shipley and just like, I mean, so these are static land jumps and he turns back, he's doing the jump master win thing and he kind of goes, and he fucking sends us

We had dudes in the trees like, eh. He's like, let's go to the bar. Well, yeah, we're not staring at this canopy. Just get out. And then, so SCT was run at, first part was in Puerto Rico.

For combat diving and that was different than um than buds diving because now I mean they're legitimately Teaching you how to dive how to do your kick count how to get your your shit, right? And you're wearing the the wetsuit you want or don't want what makes you comfortable and then just doing like a turtle backing which you know That's the worst part But then you do the four hour dives and two a day and then up to camp uh, or fort ap hill in northern virginia And um, then you do all the land warfare. It's basically land warfare Uh, then demo a lot of demo

One of the best demo experiences I had, best and worst, was... So Master Chief Pig Wagner was running it. He's a Vietnam guy. And he's up there running the show because he didn't give a fuck. And we had always read that you can light C4 on fire and it won't do anything. It'll turn into a vapor. We'd read it. I ain't doing it, right? So he pulled us out the first day and he's like, yeah, okay, you two are going to come up here and you're going to light this around the class and prove...

And I remember, I don't know if I had a lighter or Bob, my buddy had a lighter, but one of us did. And as soon as it flicked, he set off a four-pound charge in the woods. They did that same shit to me. They did that in once. Apparently, it's a good go-to. It worked. But then you light it, and you can do this. And then you learn about C4. You can do anything with C4. It's not... I mean, it needs that violent blasting cap. Yeah. Basically. Yeah, so we did that, and then you go back to SEAL Team 2, and then they have a...

Six months of your in there observing you like and so seal team - they're keeping time How fast do you run the old course? How fast was your base to her? How fast was your swim? They're timing you and they're watching and they're being pricks and I had a dude check in His last name was courier master chief. I didn't know he was a master. I didn't know he was about to be the command master chief Young looking guy red hair looks nice. I

He seemed like a nice guy. He had a damn locker. And I'd never seen him before. And he's a young looking dude. I'm like, you know, I'm about to be a team guy. So anyway, so we went to...

We were going to the O course. So there's two O courses at Little Creek, as you know. There's a small one and the big one. And the small one is just for time. It's like you're running in your monkey bars or whatever, parallel ladder, whatever they call that shit. And then you jump over this and you're running it for time. You do three of those, then you do a big loop and do three more, and then you go back to the team and whoever wins, wins. And I was chasing Art Tolke. So I'm a new guy, 20 years old. And Art Tolke is one of the one percenters who he will beat you at everything.

So I'm, I want to, I can run fast, I'm still fast from Buzz. And so I'm like going through the little thing and then I'm going through the tires and I hear that dude courier yelling at me, stop skipping every other tire. I'm just trying to haul ass. So I'm running around and he goes, he yells at me from one of the, he's yelling across now at the old course at me.

He's like, I thought I said you should stop skipping every other tire. And I yell at him, man, if you were fucking fast enough, you'd see me skip every other monkey bar. So I'm just yelling at a team guy because my trident board is that day. Now I get my camis on. I go to the trident board. Guess who's in the center of it? That guy, Mark Currier, the command master chief. Oh, shit. Yeah, and I just told him to fuck himself on the old course. So he decides whether or not I get a trident. And he goes, you're the guy skipping every other monkey bar. Why do you do that? You need to cheat? And I said, I go...

Yeah, to beat Artoke, you do. So that was a long trident board. I did get it that day. And then now you get assigned to a platoon. Right on. And that's just one. I mean, that's like a brief. It's every moment in time of how to get there. And then you get your trident. And then you get your blood wings. They're allowed to do that. Yeah. And now you're a Navy SEAL. So looking back through that whole pipeline, was there ever a time you wanted to quit? Every day in buds. Yeah. What got you through? Um.

Everyone who said I couldn't do it. Yeah, just I don't I'm not gonna go home with this Seems to be the common denominator. I think it is. I mean, it's it's not because uh, well because it wasn't hard I want to quit every day. Yeah, fuck those ocean swims Yeah, fuck the the the conditioning runs the mind The mind games on the soft sand runs when you're finally coming back after five miles You go right to the compound or right past it. What was the hardest part for you?

I think the swims just because my times were just there they they put me with a good swimmer Because I wasn't a good swimmer and he could guide the key You know as we know the key to ocean swims is guiding getting there straight because if you're doing this number you're just adding to it so I would just stare at Monty and and he would swim and I would just kick and So you got into team two right started team two and I

What were you guys doing? What was going on in the world? A little bit of Bosnia still. Sarajevo. And I don't think anybody had killed anybody yet. So we didn't really know what was happening. But that's kind of what it was. And I was assigned to a MARG platoon on an amphib ship. The USS Austin, which is an Austin class LPD, which means it's the original. So we crossed the ocean on a flat bottom LPD, which is horrific.

And as a Navy SEAL on a boat, you don't have much to do. I did. I took advantage of it. I would go around to different shops and see how they worked, what the quartermaster's doing, what they do in the air loft, what's the steering like, and boats is made. Cool motherfuckers. And that's another part where a lot of team guys, if you can imagine, are cocky to fleet sailors. And I would tell a lot of SEALs, because I did a couple cruises on ships, I would say, you know, there are guys on the ship that work a hell of a lot harder than you do. Navy life's no joke.

Yeah. And I just tried to learn about it. And I met the Marines. It was my first time working with amphibious reconnaissance. Cool dudes. Great dudes. And we went over there. And all we were going to do was training exercises. I mean, we went to Rota, Spain. I don't know how many times. Italy, like 11 times. And we did get... So I actually... I'm sorry. I went through sniper school before that deployment. So it turns out Chief John Judy, who was my recruiter, did not lie to me. They would send me to sniper school and just get through butts first. Yeah.

I'd love to see him again. I mean, that was awesome. He was never mean to me. He just kind of, you know, you're good.

And so I did go to sniper school at Camp Atterbury, which is awesome. And that sniper course is based off of the Marine Corps sniper school. So when I got on the ship, when we're not doing anything, I would get with the recon snipers and we would just talk about ballistics and talk about minutes of angle and how you do this. How do you set up your hindsight? What do you prefer as far as taking shots and picking their brains? Because, you know, there's no internet and you can read your books, you can lift.

Yeah. What are you going to do for the next 10 hours? So bullshit with them. And then we actually got called in to, at the time, it was a real world mission to go into Albania because there was an exercise going on with some admirals and I think the president of Albania. And then there was a terrorist threat. So this is 1998. And that was the first time in the Navy that I'd heard Osama bin Laden.

So Al Qaeda is threatening this exercise. Al Qaeda is run by... Like one of the briefs, Osama Bin Laden. Like, yeah, I heard of him because of the thing in 93 when they bombed. Yeah, okay, I know who that is. But he wasn't Osama Bin Laden yet. And so we... I mean, I did get briefed on it and we're never going to see him. But I got to set up like my first range card. I'm overwatching this award ceremony, which is kind of cool. I mean, if Al Qaeda pops out, I'll just... I'll shoot one of them and...

And that'll be it. That'll be it. We'll go get a beer. That's it. No, but that was like the first thing. We did some security on the housing complex at the embassy. And that's actually the first time I saw SEAL Team 6 guys. Because I had been told... They were doing personal protection on a lot of bigwigs at the embassy. And I...

I'd been told that SEAL Team 6 had been disbanded. It doesn't exist anymore. And I saw them. One of the older guys at the platoon goes, yeah, those are dev group guys. That's SEAL Team 6. I was like, those fucking guys are legends. First time I saw them, first time I heard them lie. And then we go back to Virginia Beach after eight months at sea and start another workup. And then it's a part of the team guy life where they call them the one hump chumps. The most cocky guys at a SEAL team are the guys with one platoon. Because I know everything now. I'm not a meat anymore. Yeah, you are to somebody.

I ran into a guy. Know your heritage. You're a meat to somebody. You're a new guy to somebody. I ran into it. So I'm a cocky one-hump chump. I'm at the SEAL reunion in Virginia Beach. And you know how you see those old school badass dudes with the big trident hats? Yeah. And I saw this old dude. He's a little too old for me being cocky. And I go, hey, what buds class were you? Oh, shit. And he said, well, I went through Hell Week in 1944.

And I said, there was no Hell Week in 1940-40. He said, there was on Omaha Beach. Know your heritage. I'm like, holy shit. Damn, dude. Yeah, old school guy. I mean, that's, again, goosebumps. Holy shit. So that's when I learned to just, you don't know, don't talk shit. You don't know who knows what. Yeah. Never start a fight because you're probably going to lose. That's fucking cool. Yeah, that's kind of, that's a cool thing. It's like, I want to fuck with an old guy. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and then another platoon, we got spun up quickly to do a strike platoon on...

The uss kennedy, so we did a shortened workup and they actually the only reason I got in They made a quick platoon of experienced guys I don't know why but I got picked because uh, I was a sniper and they needed a sniper One of our guys was a radio guy. They picked him and another guy. Um, Just a linguist or some shit and then we got into a a pretty stacked platoon and uh, we went overseas and and We did a couple things we um

We were doing the interdiction operations in the Persian Gulf. Like, you're taking down Dows. A date smuggler. We took down the Russian tanker Volganeft, which was a big deal at the time. It was a smuggled Iraqi oil. I mean, the closest we got to combat was I think we confiscated their steak knives. And then we drove it to Oman. And then we finished that platoon. And then we timed another platoon. And...

i did a uconn this time so i went to germany were you getting discouraged at all or uh no because i thought i was getting real work i mean we really went in with loaded weapons we really took down ships and not a lot going on yeah and then i knew we'd get to we'd do a pump in kosovo on this one for sure and i'm like okay that's i mean there have been a couple shoot shootouts there i will get to um

To try out my hide site skills because I guess a lot of the a lot of the seals a lot of that we're doing it We're getting compromised by farmers and that's how you start learning. Okay, you're in someone's backyard They they're gonna recognize you yeah, and so we learned about that You know, I did a couple hide sites in Kosovo camp bond steel ate really good food and then we left back to Germany and now we've been to Kosovo and

This is my third platoon. I can be the shit at JB's Gallery of Girls when I go back home or whatever. Is that place still there? I have no idea. I love that place. It was called Stopless Go-Go. Not Topless because they had little things on. Wasn't it right next to the... What was that bar right next to it? It was right next to it. The Brass... The Brass Bell? The Brass Bell. Yeah. I don't know if it's still there. I haven't been back there.

but yeah we so we're back in uh at unit two up in germany just finished kosovo and then i was in the um uh operations room uh type we did have email at the time because it was september 2001 and um

We saw the TV come on and they had a picture of the Twin Towers, the North Tower was on fire. And they said, obviously this is breaking news, a small plane has hit the World Trade Center. And we're looking at it and we're trying to think through it. That's a nice day, man. That's clear. And that is not a small hole because that's a huge building. That's a big fucking hole, man. And then the second one hit. Yeah.

And someone did say, "That's Osama bin Laden. That's al-Qaeda, man." Everything that we know just changed right now. So we're deployed and it's like, "Well, all right. I mean, where do you want us to go? We're overseas." And it didn't happen. They did obviously send guys right in and then we went back and that's when I put in my package for Green Team. "Do I want to go to SEAL Team 6 now?" So when you saw the planes hit the towers, did you have any

Recollection of bin Laden's name from before when you were going? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we talked about Al-Qaeda just in some briefs here and there. Okay. Yeah, and we knew they were a threat, but we never knew it was that. When they first hit, we're thinking we're going to Sudan or something. We're going to be fighting in Africa or whatever. And then they obviously figured out where they were. And I put in my package and I had enough time between going to Green Team

to do another deployment. So I got on another another MARG deployment and I'm like this is going to be sweet because we're going to go in with the Marines through Turkey and we're going to because now it's 2003 and that's kind of a I jumped some time there.

But now we're invading Iraq. And we talked about this earlier. For whatever Iraq was worth, I was excited because we're going to invade a country. I'm a Navy SEAL and we're going to kill. Yeah. And I want to. Because we're all still fired up about it. I mean, that's how we got away with invading Iraq because of what happened on 9-11. And then with me being the... I don't know what it is about me, but there turned out to be a problem in Monrovia, Liberia with the embassy. There was a civil war.

And they wanted to evacuate the embassy. So they literally turned us around. So the Marines are off. Oh, shit. And they're going, oh, man. And we did talk to them afterwards. And they invaded Iraq. I mean, that's fucking an invasion. But we went back. So instead of going into a gunfight, I did my first and only real-world hydrographic reconnaissance.

So, and the funniest part of that was because, you know, you always get briefed on dangerous marine life. But whatever. I don't give a shit. They're not going to hurt you. But this one we paid attention to. And they said, because you're going to be swimming in on the coast of Africa. And there's every man-eating shark you can imagine is here. And there shouldn't be any, but...

If you see saltwater crocodiles, they're 20 feet long. They'll eat you. And then now, there aren't any hippos, but those are the deadliest animal in Africa. They kill more people than anything. Oh, and here's your landing point. It's called Black Mamba Point. The reason it's called Black Mamba Point is because it's full of black mamas, and they're very aggressive. They'll chase you, and they'll kill you. After that, it's like...

All right. So, and then even when we flooded the, the, the well deck of the, of the USS LaSalle to get off, there were hammerheads that were like swimming into the ship. Holy shit. What the fuck is this? Yeah. Like, can we just go to the fucking invasion? Can we go to Iraq? Yeah. But I know we, you know, went into the, did a hydro recon. It was kind of cool because we did the, the no ship thing and the Marines did come. I think the Marines came in by helicopter. It's like,

You're welcome. Oh, man, dude. But yeah, then we... So we didn't have time to invade Iraq. And then we went back and then I was a master at arms at SEAL Team 4 for like January to March when Green Team started. So I ran PT and then went to selection. And so then you go over there and it's like, all right, here, fuck. Because, I mean, Green Team is...

You're betting your trident right now because you'll either be the guy that made it or the guy that tried and didn't. That's a lot to deal with. And you can get kicked out of selection for anything. I've seen really, really good dudes just fuck something up and they're gone. Have a bad day. And everyone has a bad day. Throw the wrong shot though, you're fucking out. Back when you went through though...

there probably wasn't as many guys going to green team no i don't think so how many guys were going in um we went with about 60. and then we got like 30 through okay that's half i think 60. but i mean they did spin up to the point where they did two they were doing two green teams a year yeah and that was just a different animal um because you're not gonna get quitters you usually won't get quitters

So they're trying to find guys who can think through problems, who can think, who can make decisions rapidly, who's not going to freeze at the door. And I've seen dudes do it. In a close quarters combat situation, you've got a breaching problem. I've seen guys freeze at the door. They forget to look for the hinge. They forget which goes where. And it's sort of the, if you want to be fast, slow down. If you want to deal with chaos, breathe.

And I tell people that now at boardrooms. If you're having a shitty meeting, stand up and breathe. And that's so, you know, learning the slowest, smoothest, smoothest, fastest, and you'll get through it. And I, you know, I've had days where, because CQB is the notoriously hardest part of Green Team when you're, because they just, they really just hammer you for shit.

I've had days where I can do no wrong. Three runs in a row, everything's smooth, it's fucking easy, to the point where the last run of the day, they have me carrying a broom because they told me I'm not safe with a gun. Just getting in your head. And what they will do there is punish you for things you didn't screw up.

But hammer you for it. Like what? Can you give me an example? Overpenetration. You're supposed to be six inches from the wall. You're four inches from the wall. Get outside. And they just are hammering you. Tire drags. Sweating. Dehydrated. Getting in your own head. What did I do? I know I didn't fuck that up. They know you didn't fuck it up. But you don't know that they know that you didn't fuck up. And as soon as you're done getting beat, they put you right back in the front of the train. And this is when you haul ass through it. You're not slowing down in this. You're running fast because...

What they're telling you is we've just punished you for something you didn't fuck up. Can you get over it or is it going to stay in your head? Okay. And some of the best advice again in life is whatever it is, get over it, learn from it and get the fuck over it. You know, you're not getting that playback, learn and move on. Well, how would you compare green team to buds? Is it, is it harder, but different because you're doing the 10 mile run in the morning, but then it's not, then it's just tactics.

With skydiving, it's just a lot of shit. Hay-hos, halos, combat jumps, all that stuff. And then the CQB is just... It's repetition, and it's just... It's the constant scrutiny. It's so many instructors hammering you at once. It's a mind game. I mean, it is the best time of your life. It's just hard. Yeah. Would you say there's like a certain attribute they're looking for in an operator to get over there, or...

You know, it's hard to say because it's like buds where you can't pick who's going to make it and who's not. I mean, you can. He's going to make it. But I don't know about these guys. The gray man wins there too. I think the green team is more of a if they like you from the beginning or if it's kind of a good old boy network too, like someone says, hey, you do want this guy, they're going to hammer him. They're not going to know that they're kind of looking out for him. But if they don't like you, you're fucked.

Like if they pass your picture around the team rooms and someone knows you from CP Shuckers, well, fuck him. That's it. That's all it takes. Could be. That's how it was, I think, then. And I was fortunate. I was liked by a few guys. And, you know, I fucked things up. I mean, everyone fucks things up. But I think I kind of got it. Just slowing it down. The realization, it's like with a golf swing. If you watch yourself swing, how fast you're bringing it up, slow the fuck down. Keep your head still.

Let's take a quick break and then we'll get into the rest of it. I don't know about you guys, but summer is my favorite time of year. And if you're a business owner like I am, the last thing you want to do is spend your time sorting through a bunch of resumes of unqualified candidates when you could be spending time with family, making s'mores around the fire pit, going for a hike.

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You're showing up, you're done. How do they figure out what squadron you're going to? Once you do realize that SEAL Team 6 exists and it's not a development squadron. It is. I mean, you're developing ship, but then you're shooting people with it. The squadrons at the time, or the two original squadrons, were blue and gold for Navy.

And actually, the reason it's called SEAL Team 6 is because Dick Marcinko, just a phenomenal ultimate Navy SEAL who was the commanding officer, he called it 6 because he knew Russia would say, there's SEAL Team 1, 2, and 6. Where the hell are 3, 4, and 5? Not just a hat rack. Yeah. But when I got there, there was blue and gold, and then gold, they absorbed into red squadron, which is the one I wanted to go to.

Why did you want to go there? Well, because of Neil Roberts. Okay. He was obviously Roberts Ridge, and that was Red Squadron, Red Team at the time, that went into Takagar, and he fell out of the helicopter. That's the first time...

It really sunk in that we're fighting some fucking animals. This is Al Qaeda. And they're not going to just kill you. Did you know Neil? I did. He was one of the first Navy SEALs I met. I met Don Shipley. I met Neil Roberts. Neil Roberts took me and my friend Matt to lunch at Arby's. I'll never forget that. Brand new guys, SEAL Team 2. And he was just always so willing to...

to help you with anything. From the finance rate you're getting on that car at that stupid used car lot off base, to here's where you put your 60 patches.

okay come here this girl's crazy get away from her Neil Roberts is the guy and you know his name is Neil Roberts Robert O'Neill and he was red hair I mean a complete stud like he was way better than me like I think his O course time is on his headstone still because he had the record for so long which I think is fucking awesome but he was just he was a one percenter

But in every way, salt of the earth. Nicest guy in the world. He can murder you with a knife. Like, just awesome guy. And just because of the fight at Takargar, the story of what happened, everything from Chapman to Slab, what they did on that mountain, Brett Morgani, the guys, how they just never leave anyone behind and they went back. And they got in one of the worst gunfights you can imagine. Close quarters with PKMs getting shot at you at night.

and just to hear and i'm not going to tell their story i wasn't there but just to hear them um debrief us i was like okay i want to go to i mean the bones man blue team awesome gold team doesn't take awesome but i just wanted red um i mean i'll i'll go to the other ones because just i mean it was even cool to go through green team because the instructors were all at squadrons and as a new guy looking at the trident i felt like that looking at the bones looking at the at the crusader

Damn. Looking at the red man. And I just wanted red team. I felt it. Did they give you a choice? No. You get picked. They actually have drafts. And every year, one team is first. No shit. And then you rotate. And then every time it's your pick, one troop or one team gets their first pick. So you actually go through a process. I actually picked DJ Shipley.

And I'll never forget when it was my turn to pick. I was like, that guy's still available? Fuck. Our team just got better. Oh, shit. So how does it work then? Do the instructors give you insight? Yeah. You're playing the good old boy network. Your red team instructors are coming up to red team saying, I'm not going to say anything you want. This guy, here's the order that you want to go. And we want him in the squadron, but if your team can get him...

Yeah, it's fucking awesome. So I just I got red and I don't know why but I remember they posted a list on the on the cork board and it's like okay you see the guys it's like oh sweet man, you know Reeves got gold and that's awesome and Mike Koch is going to gold and oh look at me and Nate were at red and this and just I mean it's you all made it so you're going to know each other we call it the second deck once you get to the second deck is when you're part of a squadron and then going into the second deck

for the first day is, um, shit, I'm a new guy again. And the first thing I remember walking into the red, red team room was, uh, obviously it's, it's the way it's just the, the way it's designed, the memorabilia shit. I'm Neil Roberts. Fucking bent saw is up there in a frame above the desk where he used to sit. Wow. But it's like, it's from reading history to being now you're a part of it. But now it's like, Holy fuck, I'm scared of these guys. Um,

What impressed me the most was how fast they could do CQB. Like, if you're not in the front, they're gone. They're going to dust this place. But the second thing was how funny they were. The humor and the camaraderie. Like, oh my God, I thought I was funny. I got to step up because these dudes are funny. And they're just good dudes. And I maintained that up until the last day. My last day at SEAL Team 6, I was lucky because every single day I got to go to work with people who were better than me.

And we didn't necessarily undermine each other. We would ask each other questions. "Well, you do this. Why does that work? What do you think about that? How should I carry this?" I got to a point where I was telling my guys, "You don't need to carry a pistol." And they're like, "Why is that?" And I'm like, "Well, if you get into a room and your primary goes down, your buddy already killed him. And if you go outside with a pistol, just fucking bring a cleaning rod."

Or throw rocks at them clean your fucking gun. But this pistol's not doing shit. It's weight. You're carrying weight Take that shit off your gun. It's not a space gun You need you need your eotech and a laser and an extra battery for your nods because it's gonna fail Yeah, change your batteries every day. Yeah, but uh, yeah, but the first day they're just watching them work and then Seeing how how how they work together and the humor and the camaraderie and and that's what I think makes a great team is morale They always made sure morale was high. Uh little things like uh, you guys have anything to do go home be with your kids

We're not doing shit today leave and it was a it was a big boy mentality like Our first muster is gonna be 10:00 a.m. I miss I'm just assuming you will have gone in and worked out by then Yeah, and we did and it wasn't like organized PT or March to the surf zone It's like do your thing. Can you can you carry me if I get shot in my body armor? You're doing those workouts then we have no problem. I

And then you do the, you know, we got there, we're doing a work. And it was just like, now it's like, over there, it wasn't new guy. It was like newer guy. And instead of like, fuck you, you idiot. It's like, here, let me show you how that, come on. Let me show you a quicker way to make that seven foot charge. Watch this. So it's actually pretty fucking welcoming. Yeah, it is. A green team, they fucking hammer you. But they all go through it.

And then once you're through, like I saw green team instructors that I thought were the meanest motherfuckers in the world. Once you get to the second deck, it's forgotten. It's a game. We're just, I want you, it's the same in Bud's. They're fucking hammering you because I will have to go to war with you. I might. I might.

Can you can you do it? Yeah, but then you get up there and it's like you I mean you get you got friends everywhere you know everybody and um And and now we're going to war and I mean other than a couple things, um, we weren't losing a lot of fights So didn't really hit, you know my first deployment. Well, that's what it hit because my first deployment was to um, Jalalabad, afghanistan we were running a safe house, which is um

Some guys cooler than me and probably a three-letter agency carried a briefcase full of money and bought a small hotel and then hired locals to be security and plumbers and shit cooks. And then here's your safe house.

And it's a safe house because you're stimulating the economy. You're paying the guards and they will work for money. You're shopping in the bazaars. You're eating shawarmas out in town. And then, you know, the family around you doesn't want to get mortars. So they'll make sure the Taliban doesn't come in. And that's my first one. And I didn't I'd never been to war. And I'd only seen.

it on TV. So I assumed it was as bad as it was on TV. I assumed there's a suicide bomber around every corner. Everyone's going to be shooting at you. It's going to blow up all the time. And it took a while to realize that in a war zone, most of the people just want to get on with their lives and raise their families. Most of the people are not combatants. They're just fucking over it. But the first few times we were doing some new technology in Jalalabad, we're doing, so it's now we're doing Mount.

in j-bad so hold on just for the audience military operations urban terrain so it's it's uh urban urban fighting so it's like everywhere it's a it's a not just a 360 range it's everything range and you can get shot at from anywhere and you don't even know why something can blow up everything next you can blow up um and i remember thinking that i'm kind of wasting my energy jumping behind shit and you know there's i think we had four dudes that's four guys from red team to include so i

Three SEALs, one EOD. But at that time, EOD was going through Green Team with us. So, I mean, they're shooters. And I remember jumping around and I looked at my boss who was... He was involved in Operation Anaconda where Robert Trich happened. And he'd been awarded a Silver Star for some of the shit they did. And I was watching him and I remember looking over and he's got like body armor, short sleeves, big old beard. Like he's got one of those cop radios. And I remember looking at him thinking...

I want to be cool like that. I want to look cool like that. And, uh, we got, we got back and I told him, I'm not kissing your ass, but how, how weren't you afraid? And he goes, well, how do you know I wasn't afraid? I said, because you didn't look like it. And he goes, that's right. You don't know if I'm afraid, but if I show you that I'm calm, you'll be calm. Calm is contagious. And that's how you learn. It's like, okay, that's fucking cool. I just got to look cool. And so we did a couple of things here and there. Well, like one of the, one of the funniest things I saw was, um,

We learned that if you run into a foreign fighter, is anyone not from Afghanistan, or if you're not Iraq, anyone not from Iraq. So you've got Jordanians or Saudi Arabians. If you run into them, they look different. They speak Arabic. They're there for one reason. They're not teaching school. They're Al-Qaeda.

I got a very short course in how to be a battlefield interrogator. So my job was to, and we invented these tactics as we went along. As soon as we took a house down, shots fired or not, whoever's surviving, we're interrogating them right now. Put the interpreter behind him. I'm interrogating you because you catch them with their pants down. They're nervous. They don't know how to act. I ran into a Saudi Arabian, this big fat dude, and I instantly started laughing.

I said to him through the interpreter, I said, you don't know what that t-shirt you're wearing says, do you? And he had no idea. His t-shirt said, it's not a beer belly. It's a fuel tank for a sex machine. And so I'm like, you just, you just saved yourself a beating. Cause that's awesome. I wish you had a picture of that. Yeah. Oh, I wish I had that shirt. If I've been known, he's better to take it from NFT out of it. Um, but yeah, I mean, so we were doing that kind of stuff and, and, um,

It was, it was, that's what we do. I'm getting to know the locals. I'm getting to know a little bit of the traditions, how you do this, getting to know the local food. Um, you know, even driving to a Sada bat up the Konar river at the time, because we were doing it right. And we didn't, we hadn't pissed off everyone yet, but there's IEDs, but, um,

One night, we would drive dirt bikes around town, locals that we would purchase the local bikes, put on the pro-tech drive. This is when the airfield wasn't built up. There was still Russian shit there. And the ranger stayed there. The ranger sniper teams were there. A couple of Marines were there and stuff. And they're putting up a few tents here and there. And they said, hey, some guys from the East Coast just flew in some helicopters. I was like, fuck, let's go see them.

And so we drove over there. That turned out to be a Turbine 33. And I bullshitted with some of those dudes. Talked to Dan Healy about Sam Adams. I went to sniper school with Dan Healy. And he loves Sam Adams. He's a New Englander. And we're like, what's the deal? And they said, we just inserted four snipers into the Korengal. The Korengal Valley. They're looking for Ahmad Shah. And then once they find him with eyes on, we're going to go hit the house. And we were like, fuck yeah. Can we go?

And so we were we were trying to work at scheme because our head shed from from six was in baudrum And they told us no no one from co team six is getting on those helicopters. We think there's missiles and um, we're like, yeah, cool, man Fucking have a have a good fight and I had a some of my guys were down front maybe so we took them back to our uh, uh our safe house and we had some contingency funds that you're supposed to use to build up the um, the um

the infrastructure. So we had some dude build this stupid cold tub, like the size of a hot tub but it's cold. And we were just sitting there. We could get Heineken over there. So we were sitting there having... And actually the Heineken story is funny because when I first got there, they had a place where we could send the interpreter to get booze for us. I mean, obviously no one drinks overseas.

But we sent them there and the price was, I want to say 20 bucks for a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and 30 bucks for a case of Heineken. And so we sent the turps out. My trip was Larry because we couldn't pronounce his name. So he's just Larry.

and you send them out to get some stuff and uh i'm i'm the newer guy there but i'm now you know i'm i'm over there and uh he came back with nothing he said yeah the the guy running the shop said i know who you're selling this to these are for the americans and the prices went from 20 and 30 to 50 and 60. i'm like this are you kidding me get your on so we roll over there and we go to the guy look i can appreciate inflation

20, 30, you go 25, 35, that's fine. You raise it that high. You can't sell booze in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. I'm going to take it all for free and put you in jail. And he goes, 25 and 35 is fine, my friend. I'm like, motherfucker, couldn't we just done this in the first place? So...

So we're at the safe house, and we were actually, technically a Ranger major was in charge of us. We did have senior enlisted guys with us, but the Ranger major was kind of running it between Jalalabad Airfield and our safe house, and he came out. So we're drinking Heineken in this tub, and he said, hey, your boys just got fucked up. We got to go. Oh, shit. And we're like, whoa, what do you mean? He goes, yeah, they just shot a helo down, and we got to go.

That was your first deployment over there? Yeah, first one. How long were you in country before that? Oh, shit. I was almost done, so three and a half months. And that was, this is June. And we rolled over. I ran into a few guys I knew from SEAL Team 2 that had put me through training, Master Chiefs that were there. And the other helicopter that missed, and I don't know if it was 3-4 or 3-2, got missed. The pilots landed in the wrong spot on the...

Did a different base on in Jalalabad because they were something happened So other guys were coming in they didn't get shot down and I'm they said yeah just it just came out of the valley and turned and it hit and it went down at 3:3 went down and One of them missed us damn so we're talking to guys that just got shot up by surface-to-air missiles, even though technically that's not what happened they're telling me face to face missiles were coming out of that Valley and

And it was more of a holy shit. I mean, it's good to see you because the world's still a decent place because you're still alive or whatever the fuck we're saying. And they came out and said, look, there's a crash site. We got to get up there. And they're not going to fly us because they're shooting down helicopters now. So figure it out. And we're running around this makeshift airfield. And there was like a B-hut full of rangers. And we're like, hey, here's the situation. And we told them and we're like, I need five guys, right?

And all 20 of them jumped up and said, we should, you know, we should take us 10 minutes to get ready. We'll be out in three. And then they came out. We decided, go get whatever vehicle you can, steal shit, commandeer it. We're driving as far as we can. And then we're humping up into the valley. And we didn't know if there were survivors. We didn't know what happened. But we knew Taliban was up there.

And so we drove as far as we could, and then we started walking up. And this is daytime. It's, I don't know, 90 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit humidity, and we're humping up to, I mean, to the point where there were dudes, like, I carry too many mags because it's so, there were dudes passing shit back to, like, who's tanking it? Just drop it. So keep water. Maybe we can get an airlifter or something. And then, you know, we humped up for, like,

for 10 hours. So we're not quite there yet. And I remember looking around saying, hey, did any of you guys call home before we left on this thing? And they're like, no, why? And it's like, well, all our families know is a bunch of SEALs from Virginia just got killed and they haven't heard from us. And so that's going through your mind too. We're sticking each other with IVs, hanging them in trees and stuff. And I remember looking at a guy saying, you know, this is why training is so hard because if we were going to quit right now, where the fuck are we going to go? So we kept going up. They did fly in...

They did fly in a helicopter from Bagram, more of Red Squadron. They got to the crash site first. So they, I mean, I don't know who wants that job, but they got the job and they're going to go to the crash site, find it. And, you know, some of the stories that I've heard were like Lou Langless was looking at the crash site and he said, I'm going to go try to get some intel from the village. And he looked over and said, I just never want to die like that. You know, and Lou was on extortion 17. Damn. And you just hear safe stories about, you know, life is fragile, man.

And so we started humping back down. We're trying to leave this. The sun's going down. And then we spotted some Taliban on the opposite ridgeline. And, you know, we're like, fuck it. Let's call in. Who wants to hit them? And the cloud cover was coming in and nobody wanted to get under it. You know, because fucking you're in the Western Himalayas, man. This is Hindu Kush shit. But the A-10s would.

And that's the first time I've seen an A-10 get called in. And it just... It was so low and... It came over us. And an A-10 obviously shoots... What is it? How many rounds? 3,000 rounds a minute or something? Something crazy. I don't know. Someone's going to correct me, but it's a lot. It's so much it sounds like a growl. And when it came over us, the first thing we heard was the bullets going supersonic. Then we heard it. No, so we saw the smoke, heard them supersonic, heard them hit, then we heard it shoot. So it's... And that's when he...

There was a Marine, I know people have heard this, seen the meme, but I'm pretty sure it was coined that day. There was like a Marine or a young private in the army that said, it is true what they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Except an A-10. An A-10 will fucking kill you. It's awesome. Oh, shit. Well, then we walked down and we're closer to Assadabad than we are. It had been maybe two days.

And we're closer to Asadabad than we are to Jalalabad. So we're going to go to Abad and we're going to rack out there. They've got beds or a floor. I don't give a shit. We've been awake for so long. And that's when the dude that got the note from Marcus, he showed up. So he's got this. You were there when that guy showed up? Yeah, when the guy showed up. And because we had an argument with the, you know, I'm not trying to ruffle any feathers here, but we had an argument with the agency because they don't, they never want to burn a source, which is fine. That's their thing, gathering intel. Yeah.

But this guy knows where Marcus is and you're taking us there right now and and I don't give a shit if they kill you What's it worth thinking? They're agencies yelling and they something along the lines of well We're not sure if this is him because he didn't cross the T's in his name Latrell and we're like, yeah But it's on tack notes and he got his fucking social right? It's him. We're going

so there was a big argument there i'm pretty sure i know a guy got fired for that um one of the rangers got fired i think banned from the country but he made the call we're gonna go so then we got back in the car we drove around the pesh river valley um you're going around abad up to pesh which now you're in in no man's land and um marcus i guess had gone from the corongal into the shuriak valley which are two i mean these are two neighboring valleys and people don't understand in afghanistan

There have been families living in these valleys for 10 000 years that i've never met Yeah, like they don't you don't you're not allowed in and hate each other hate Yeah, they'll cut your head off and like put like old school dracula put it on the steak type shit so we're driving in there and This is a part where i've seen Afghanistan's a different world and people don't understand that If they if they've when I first got to red team I was asking guys what's afghanistan like they said

You just have to see it because you're not going to believe me. Yeah. And so we went up there and it's like they don't have water. And I remember seeing that there's kids. I'm a father and I'm seeing these kids. I remember handing a bottle of water to a little girl. She opened it, dumped it out so she could play with the plastic. So then we're pumping up again another mountain and it's just steep terrain. And then we knew he was up and over. Marcus is down in this village and we got up and

Almost to the top and one of my guys said one of my guys said I got to sit down I can't I can't I can't go anymore. We've been awake for three three days. I can't go and I said that's okay We'll just tell mrs. Luttrell Marcus his mom that we didn't we were this close But we didn't get him because you got tired and he goes yeah, you're right And I said do me if I said do me a favor Tell that shit to me in one minute cuz I don't think I can go any further And so we're just whatever trying to get up to the top and that's you know Rangers came in he loves they did get Marcus out and

And then now we're just in the Shuriak Valley. It's like, all right, well, let's try to live our way out of this one. So wait, you weren't with the Rangers? It was just four of you guys? No, no, no. We were with Rangers. And there were Marines and shit there. I'll never forget seeing Marines because we got to choose what we would wear. I'd had no body armor, a couple of mags, and a shirt.

They're wearing full like first sergeant told me I need to wear all this shit I'm like I said at the beginning Marines are fucking bad motherfuckers. They will they will take shitty gear and make it suck even more Semper Fi baby, but yeah, the Rangers flew in and that was ballsy too because one of our options was I mean we well I'm let me back up when we had that dude Afghanistan might as well be the 13th century we showed this guy

an aerial photo of his village on an iPad. I might as well have just showed him an actual picture of Allah. This dude looking at an iPad. Like, one minute you're fucking your animal, now you're looking at an iPad. So we were going to fly in. He couldn't really pick it up, but we thought this could be a mudsuck. We're just going to walk. But Rain just...

Fucking being Rangers man. They will do it and they did and they got and then we lived our way out and then the you know the remaining Two or three weeks is a miserable deployment. We lost so many great guys on that on the hill Yeah, and then so that's deployment number one. Damn, dude. Yeah, that's a it was intense I mean cuz we I mean if at first we were just having fun and it wasn't real I mean it was real but like the fight is over army the Green Berets and CIA took care of that shit They bond the fuck out and we're just we're gonna rebuild or something. I

And then Delta's gonna find bin Laden. We're just gonna do this. The food was great. Yeah. What- so what were you guys doing before that? We were just testing new technology trying to find, um, we found a few minor Al Qaeda guys in town. We- we actually, there's a video online where we found- we put these, um, there was an Al Qaeda guy working at a gas station. He was laundering money and funding shit because that's one of the major ways- there's only a few roads, obviously.

And we, the RRD Rangers, the, and they're awesome dudes. They went out on an R&S and they watched this damn gas station in it for five days, which just sucks, like in the heat.

And then we they know they had eyes on whatever they and we rolled from the safe house 30 seconds grab the student and rolled out with them There's a video that they made of us rolling up. We wear this ridiculous haji gear I'm not I don't blend in. I don't know if you know you don't blend. Yeah, we go to work with Scott But um, we you know, we roll up we run in we run out We got this doing the van takes away. They made a video if you could find it online it says a snatch and grab at the grab-and-go and

It's literally a 30-second mission. And that was, we just rolled him out and flew him to Bagram. But we were just, we were using technology to track Al-Qaeda and see what they're doing. And mainly, I mean, we're just rolling them up to get intel. We're trying to build the network to find. There's not a lot of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at this point. They all went to Pakistan. So not a lot. I mean, a couple dudes up in the Korangal. But most of them went over to the federally administrated tribal area, the FATA. And they're all over there on that side.

And that's another story that I have two deployments later. Let's go into it. Okay. Well, I mean, we did go to Iraq next. We'll go—we'll jump to this, and then we'll go to Iraq. Okay. So my next deployment to Afghanistan, instead of being a member at the J-BED safe house, I was in charge of the Assadabad safe house. So I'm the team leader there, which means I have one other guy with me from Red Team.

And then we have a few augments that are probably going to screen for DevGroup, but aren't there yet. So they come over to learn what we're doing. And then we're working with the agency, running sources back and forth. And mainly this is just for drone strikes so we can get intel, hit these guys or whatever. And we were getting bored. And a very important lesson I learned on this deployment is never die because you got bored.

Do everything like you do anything and always follow your rules. People die because they take shortcuts or they get bored. I got bored. And I came up with a plan with the chief of base. He had actually been with the agency fighting with the Mujahideen against the Russians. So this dude knew the area. And so he and I, over cocktails, I think the agency calls it fellowship. Over fellowship, we came up with a plan that we know as per rules of engagement,

If we have troops in contact and positive identification on the border, we can pursue, I want to say 10 clicks inside of Pakistan. So we knew there was about a click in and a click and a half in. There were two al-Qaeda safe houses. So we figured if we go up there on the border and sort of show ourselves, they'll shoot at us. We'll call air support. We can hit these houses. That's going to be a good mission. Cross border. This is badass. So that's the plan.

And everything went to shit because we get up there. I got a couple army guys and then a few Afghans. And we had actually put on the brown tiger stripe stuff. And I don't even know if that's legal. So we don't look like Americans. So we're trying to, if Al-Qaeda or the Taliban sees us, they're not worried about air support because this is simply, you know, ANA, Afghan army. We'll kill them.

We didn't we didn't put that together because they're like a truck came up and some dudes got out and it's like it's like I'm almost a flash checkpoint and they walk up and they're yelling Us to come talk to them for tea and I was like, yeah, you guys go talk to him Don't tell him there's Americans here, whatever so they went down there and that kind of came back and they said yeah They want a team but we're not falling for that. So they went to this thing. We got the high ground here It's it's 11:30 in the morning. We stayed overnight. We're up there. It's 11:30 in the morning and then another truck came up full of guys and

And then another truck came up full of guys. And then another one. Now we have a little bit of high ground, but there's a lot of dudes down there. And this is some serious fucking ambush shit. I'm in charge. I'm, you know, an E6 or E7, but I'm the ground force commander of this one. It's my call. It's like, well, I mean...

We can get the fuck out of here right now. They might not notice. So I'm like, yeah, we're going to beat it. So we had some guys below us, a semi-mortar team, but they weren't U.S. Army. We didn't know if they could do it. So we're running down to them. I'm explaining what's happening, and we got to haul ass, or maybe we can get ex-filled. And that's when one of the Afghan guys I was with said the first words I ever heard him speak in English was,

He pointed up and yelled, bad guys. And I remember looking up and now this is going to be a real gunfight in the mountains at high noon. And watching dudes run that fast and they had brown uniforms almost on. So it turns out to be a mix of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and Pakistan military. No shit. And we're looking up and they're surrounding us and they're hauling ass.

And they just start zipping rounds at us. And you can hear them, you know, zip, zip, zip. And the scariest ones were the ricochets. Zip, zing. So we're like, we can't move now. We're pinned. And they got us on like three sides. We had separated. I had a new guy. He was SEAL Team 4. He was my radio guy. He had never...

ever called in real-world close air support, and I need him now. And he's maybe 100 yards away. I had heard up to this point some of our standard operating procedures that originated from Vietnam were lines of gear, how you wear your gear in lines. First line, second line, third line. Your first line gear is your most important shit. It's closest to your body. It's on your belt. It's...

An extra mag in a pocket in Copenhagen. Whatever. Cash. Second line gear is your second most important stuff. Magazines, grenades, maybe some more water. And your third line gear is your least important stuff in your rucksack. So that's your sleeping bag and ground pad, extra socks, foot powder. The reason, so I've been told, you keep it that way is because if you need to run, you can start ditching your shit in order to get lighter.

Now that's the first time I've ever heard anyone do it. I dropped my ruck. I sprint over to Tony. I got to get to him because, you know, and the people just eating dirt. I lay next to him and I said, okay, here's the deal that we're up on the thing where they set the flash checkpoint, hit that first. And he said, I can't, we don't have any air support.

I'm like, okay, this is bad. You've got to get some, whatever it takes. You know, we'd been up there for a day and a half. They'd lost interest in whatever, and the other people, whatever. So we're laying there, and I'm just right next to them. And the rounds are getting so close that they were hitting air bursts above us with RPGs where explosion, and they're shooting mortars at us too, that you'd hear an explosion and look back to, are my legs still there?

I mean, nothing was hit and I don't know how. It got so bad. We did this for an hour. The worst feeling I've ever had in the world is having someone shoot a effective fire at me but realizing I can't shoot back because my rounds probably won't reach him and if I lift my head up, I'm done. We were seeing tracers right between us. How many of you guys were there? A total of...

five or six Americans. That's it? Maybe 15 Afghans. How about the... Oh, I don't know. There was a lot. There was three or four truckloads full of them. Shit. So we're up to this is all happening and now they were to the point they were so close that I had a dude shooting at me. He looked like me. He had a red beard, a white guy shooting a PKM but he's yelling Allahu Akbar, God is great in Arabic.

So now I'm seeing this shit. And again, we don't have, I don't even have night vision because I don't need it. It's daytime. It's in my, whatever. And that's when you start to think, okay, not only is that Al Qaeda, that's a Chechen. This is where you save at least one bullet for yourself. Yeah. I'm not, those guys will skin you alive. And we, and, and, and this is all happening. And finally Tony said, all right, I got one. I got one. I said, awesome. Get that fucking checkpoint, get it in here now. And he said, okay, I can't. The batteries in my radio just died.

Because we had been out there and it had been on and they just, they died. And so one of my jokes about this is, I don't believe in micromanaging. You should teach your people how to do it and let them do it. But right now I figured it was a proper time to micromanage. I said, change the fucking batteries. And he said, I can't. I'm not carrying the spares. Remember, you are. They're in the rucksack that I dropped. Oh shit.

So I said something I mean, I don't have a choice at this point I said something along the lines of don't tell mom I did this And I ran so i'm running to that thing and I don't know I don't know I'm saying 100 yards and I don't know how I hadn't been hit at this point and naturally I know where they're packed and probably at the bottom of this fucking thing I'm open to this damn thing. I grabbed the two old school batteries now i'm running back fuck the rucksack I have the batteries and I I chucked him to him and now we're calling an air support and uh

There was a funny story something uh, okay. No what what he said was uh bombs away two minutes out and i'm like Two minutes. What did he fucking drop this from the space shuttle? Is that the first nothing takes two minutes to fall anywhere? Well, it turns out it was I think it was a it was bones It was a b1 and he was at 60 000 feet and he just dropped three jdams uh three two thousand pounders and it's danger close but like whatever and uh

One of the guys said to me, "This is Danger Close. What do we do if it hits us?" I said, "Not a problem. Plug your ears." And then they don't whistle, they sizzle. It sounded like bacon. And then the whole hillside lit up. And I'm watching dudes on fire running around that we just hit with... That's the first time I was like, "I will never make another joke about the Air Force." That is a thank you. I heard that was America. And now they're running.

Al Qaeda and I'm now I finally getting some shots off. I think I killed the Chechen They're running up the hill fucking light them up And it turned the tide there and then we called them in again It actually got to the point where we bombed Pakistan for four hours One of the guys we called in his call sign was dude one two Which I thought was just awesome and he was you know now we're calling him where he's flying upside down and he's he's like wanting us to describe what we see and it's like, you know, can you see the

The peak with the snow. Yes. Can you see the intersection of the river? Yes. That's one unit of measure. I want you to take two of those units, please. At 097 magnetic, all this bullshit. But like the first thing that the conversation that I had with him was so awesome. He, cause you know, we had adrenaline going. He wants you to calm down. So he said, just talk to me like I'm a man. And I said, I see why women find you attractive. Yeah. So we, so we get done with that.

And we can find... And then at this point, you know, we got more fast movers. The coyotes showed up and they're just bad motherfuckers. And then we can call in to a couple 60s. We got some army pilots coming. They're going to pick us up. We're going to bounce. So they called us in. I got on the starboard side, the right side of this Black Hawk. And now we're leaving. And it's maybe a 10-minute flight back to Abe. That's how close we were to this, right on the border. And that's the first time I saw the...

the battlefield that we just created and it is scorched earth and i'm thinking oh man we just bombed pakistan that is an international incident yeah then i thought i'm in charge i'm probably going to hear about this oh and i was right because we landed at abad and they had already flown a two-star general in there meet with us and and he said uh

And I'm in a good mood at this point. I was going to die for the past six hours. Now I'm going to live and I'm in a good mood. And he said, hey, O'Neill, you realize we're not at war with Pakistan, right? And I said, yeah, man, but we were today and you should have fucking... Yes, sir. And he said, yeah, there's going to be an investigation, obviously, and you're either going to get a silver star or you're going to spend the rest of your life in Leavenworth.

Shit. And you think waiting an hour for a bomb is a long time. Try waiting three weeks for that decision to be made. We got lucky, though. And the footage is still on the internet where Pakistan was saying it was an unprovoked attack by American forces like they always do because it turns out Pakistan fucking lies to us. They had the footage as they're getting the stuff. They go, okay, well, really? Now look at this. Here's your guys attacking my guys. They said there were something like 21 martyrs from the... We killed like 21 Pakistanis that were fighting us. Wow. So that's like a...

So I did get a Silver Star. You did? Yeah, yeah. That was my first Silver Star. What's actually funny is I'd been lying to my mom my entire career because it's easier to go to war than to send someone you love to war. But their worrying is not going to affect how you do. So don't make them worry. Just lie to them. We're not doing shit. Don't worry, Mom. Iraq's not what you think. We're not whatever. My mother came down to Virginia Beach for the presentation of the Silver Star, and they actually read the unclassified article.

version of what happened and she's sitting there listening and I remember saying mom I Promise you I'll never get another silver star now fast-forwarding to the day after the bin Laden raid I said mom. I think I lied to you. I think I'm getting sick. It's over stuff Yeah, damn dude that crazy and that was just because um, I

Another rule in life. You don't need to go looking for it. Don't go looking for it No, if it's meant to find you it'll just find you don't like Well, like thanks to jujitsu don't fight anyone in a bar. You don't know who's a black belt very true Don't go looking for it If you get in a bar fight and someone starts with a leg kick apologize a biometric. No, my bad. I was wrong exhale through the nose Damn, yeah. Well, let's uh, let's take a quick break and then when we come back we'll talk about we'll get into Iraq cool. I

I want to take a minute to tell you about Vigilance Elite Patreon. Patron support is what makes this show possible and gives me the ability to bring these one-of-a-kind stories to the public. Go to patreon.com slash vigilance elite and support the Sean Ryan Show today. All right, so we're back from the break. Let's talk about Iraq. Iraq, again, was one of those things where I hadn't been, and I knew it was...

It was more dangerous than Afghanistan at the time because foreign fighters had realized it'll be easier to kill Americans in Iraq because we can get there a lot easier than to go to Afghanistan. And they had learned our tactics. They knew what we were doing. They knew that one of our tactics was if there's an open door, we're going to run into it because a lot of this stupid, not stupid, but just arrogant...

Special Forces not special forces All of us were there is gonna be a fight anyway Let's just get it over with that was the mentality at the time I'll kind of knew that so leave the door open have machine gunners inside and then just drill the first four guys in the room They did that and so we went over there our army counterparts took some pretty heavy casualties and and that's when we kind of Started to learn that the one of the worst things you can and have nothing on them. Those guys are complete studs. I

But one of the worst things you can say when you're running a team is, well, this is the way we've always done it. It's like, wait a minute. Why are we running in there? How about we just stop? Why don't we just clear the room from the door? We invented combat clearance. Why are we sprinting at night through houses with white lights when we can put our nods down and own it? And why are we yelling? Stop yelling.

When you turn a corner and you point your gun up, I don't need to hear you yell, "Stairwell!" I'll assume there's a stairwell. Shut the fuck up. So we started training on silent runs. And we learned when we were silent, not only were we faster and more efficient, we were communicating at the highest levels simply by reading off each other. There's no reason to give someone your position.

And then we, so we just started reinventing tactics. Not just we at Red Squad or SEAL Team Six, Delta was on board with all this stuff and we're all, and what we were really good about too, I mean, I mentioned a cross, a rivalry type thing between services.

That wasn't us or Delta. We would cross-train with each other. And then most importantly, the guys that just got back would debrief the guys about to go over. And we would take them on, even when we got, like when we're leaving our relief squadron, we would take them on a shakeout op. Like, here's what we're doing. Here's how it works. Everything from intel to workout schedules to here's what you should do. And here's the dangerous part. Here's what we're looking for. And we, you know, we did a lot of that stuff. And it was everything from

snipers realizing that they're climbing the roof. So they, okay, I don't, I mean, I'm not saying I agree with this in Iraq, but I don't need body armor. I need to be light. I don't need this many magazines. I haven't shot that much. But again, too, be careful what you wish for. I had a sniper of mine that I was telling him, because he's climbing every building, and he's the first one out there leading the patrol, and we're doing, you know, we realized that you don't need to land on the X. Land over here. We'll walk in. And when they figure that out, we'll take motorbikes in, and then we'll walk in.

I had one sniper that I was saying, we had an argument at six. I was a sniper at two, but then I said, you can be an assaulter or a sniper at SEAL Team Six. And I said, I want to be an assaulter. My joke was, and again, joking, but not seeing the future. I said, I know snipers are going to kill more people, but I think assaulters are going to kill more famous people. You said that? Yeah.

It's a joke. It's like the thing with my mom. We're not doing anything. Snipers will kill more people. Assaulters will kill more famous people. Damn, talk about throwing some shit out into the universe. That's what I'm saying. So we had this one sniper and he got to the point, I think,

where he was carrying one mag, a 5.56. He loved the 5.56 with the 14-inch hopper. And then one mag and a harness and no water. That's his loadout. That's it. And I'm like, dude, I know our plan is to only be here during one cycle of darkness, but eventually you're going to want more bullets than that.

And I think our last gunfight on that trip to Iraq, we were in a weird gunfight and the snipes were up top and he was blasting out. My nickname was Nizro, Navy SEAL Rob O'Neill. Nizro! That's so my friends at the bar could yell, what up, my Nizro?

And he yelled out, he goes, "Nisro, I need a mag." And I said, "No, dude, I told you to carry more bullets." And he literally goes, "Come on, I can still hear him screaming." But we were learning stuff like that. We learned you don't need to rush through. The first kill that I ever got was on that Iraq deployment and it's when we just decided

Because we were still in between the nods up or even look under him white light fast. We said we're gonna go slow We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna go in quiet. We're not gonna blow the door. We're gonna pick the lock We figured out ways to break the glass quietly and open it and just go inside wake them up, you know Catch them when they're sleeping see how many guys you can touch while they're sleeping. Well, we started having competitions How many al-qaeda guys can you check for a suicide bomb and then wake them up by saying shh?

And then watching a grown man shit his pants. That was one of the greatest things ever. But one of the nights we were going into this thing, we had a lane, a hallway, and like the first time we're trying this quiet and we're walking in, this Al Qaeda dude hops out. He's got an AK-47. He could have killed every single one of us, but he couldn't see us. So we hop back in the room and now we, okay, there's shit.

We had a guy with us, Andy, who is a special boat service guy at SBS. And Brits are the fucking best. There is funny...

Or if not funnier than we are but I compare them like we're the normal keys they're the sharp keys on a piano like it sounds good but it's a little off. He had a cloud of death over him. The other Brits said you're going with Andy he gets in fights like he just it follows him. You will get like you're going to get in a fight and so Andy happened to be with us and then one of our guys goes through we clear the room and one of our guys his first kill blasts this guy

splits him wide open and then we're kind of looking over there and Andy who's been in fights since the invasion like Andy can you go check that guy he walked over with a white light and goes oh he's fuck mace so at this point now that they heard us shoot inside we got the D-boys hitting another target our snipers are going hot

So, myself and one of my guys were like, "We gotta get out and get into this." These are our first kills. This actually turned out to be the sniper who initiated the fire to rescue Captain Phillips and the Smalley Pirates. We got our first kills together. We went outside and we did this cross pan that we'd always been working on. Like, if you're on this side, you cover this way, he covers this way. And then you wave and move or whatever. So, we're out here. These two dudes pop up like pepper poppers. So, we get our first two kills and I'm like, "Shit, I just killed that guy." And he goes, "Yeah, I just killed that guy."

Okay, what do we do now and he goes maybe we should try one of those bounding things And then it kind of sinks in and that's another you know, we finished that off We killed a bunch of dudes. We got that was our first major fight in Iraq and

Where the tactics were using worked, but how did they adjust to us? How do we read we might need to readjust to this and and that was another thing where? Now seal team six was getting in fighting getting kills and it was just sort of okay now And this is before the Afghanistan huge fights and okay now now I have my first kill now I'm I'm part of the club and this is it. I'm in

And then, you know, we finish Iraq and we learn stuff and then we go back and we train and then we keep talking to the other guys that are over there, learn new tactics, what's working, what's not working. Do you like which barrel, which magnifier are you using with your optics? Um, um,

We had to tell some army guys, like, look, that laser, this thing, that pistol grip and all this is great in Iraq. When you get to 10,000 feet in Afghanistan, you're not going to want that because weight is measured in ounces and ounces equal pounds, and it's going to suck. What do you need? You need a neotech and an iron sight. You're good. That's it. So, yeah, so that was Iraq. So we bounced from Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq. We... I was...

I was part, my fourth deployment was, we called it the deployment that never was. Because we had, so the commander of SEAL Team 6 just got us authorized. For some reason, we were not authorized to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. We were supposed to go only after Al Qaeda. Really? Yeah, it was weird. It was, you know, I mean, it makes sense, sort of. You want to just send the Tier 1 guys after the Tier 1 targets, but...

We're getting bored and there's a lot of fighting in Kandahar. So they authorized Team 6 to start targeting Taliban. That's when Blue Team went in there and just fucking crushed them. Got in fights like epic shit. I mean, there's books out there. Mob 6 by Chef that's fucking amazing. He's just a fucking stud. And so our group, they wanted to all go to Afghanistan to include the headshot. So the bosses, the CEO of the whole team, they're all there. And they sent a troop of us.

15 news to Iraq and our boss his name is rich Davini and I can say that because he's made himself public stud - he was a guy that Taught me nobody ever worked for me. They work with me and he agreed to work for Delta like a lot of arrogant team guys wouldn't want to work for them He's like, you know what if we're gonna get work It's gonna be for them because like it or not the army runs a show so we started working for Delta and it happened to be during the surge of the awakening when when

Stan McChrystal, General, excuse me, McChrystal realized if we start killing Al Qaeda, which are Sunnis that are hijacking Sunnis, we can get them to rise up and help us and we can win this war. And they did. Guys like Stan McChrystal, Bill McRaven, they were on the right track and they were, you know, I would follow those guys to hell. But we started hitting those targets on basically kill missions.

Every night. And we were to a point where if we only killed 11 dudes, it was a waste of our time. No shit. It was insane. We're targeting Al-Qaeda in places where they've never seen guys like us. We learn how to interrogate people. You get a cocky Al-Qaeda guy. It's like, I've seen Americans before. And you say, really, do they look like me? And they kind of look at your tattoos. I have a Demon Hunter patch, a beard, like...

I'm not here by accident, my friend. I'm here for you." Like just fucking awesome shit, psychological warfare. And we called it the deployment that never was because everyone's in Afghanistan from our crew and they're fighting and they don't give a shit about us. So as long as we keep doing this, it's on. And that was, I mean,

I think the Iraq war was completely fucked up, but that was one of the best summers of my life because at the time, we were warriors and that's what we're here. We're here to kill you. Yeah. And we fucked them up. We, we, we didn't have one of our guys hurt. We, I don't know how many kills we got, but it was guys like Rich that were running the team. Like, like we would hit a target.

And because of the intel on target, the battlefield interrogation, we would hit a fall on target. So it's like, and so we would go out with Rangers and I love working with them because, you know, you got, they're obviously capable of doing all this, but they generally would put like a machine gunner and they're kind of blocking as we hit the point target. Once you hear the Rangers going hot and you know, Rangers know like two things, ruck hump and fucking kill it. So they're just awesome guys.

Obviously they're better than that. I love Rangers. But once you hear them outside, like you hear the 240 going hot, it's like, okay, it's a fight. So we would go from house to house. And I'm talking, we're getting kills in every room. And we're doing a quick brief to the boss. Like, okay, we got to hit this building right here. And I think, you know, I'm talking too fast because I talk fast as it is. And I look at Rich and said, all right, you know what, sir?

I'm sorry, you're in charge. And he looked at me and said, oh, make no mistake, I'm not in charge. I'm responsible. And that's a great fucking leader right there. Yeah. And so we would do that. We had missions where... So you were, hold on. So you were just, you would go hit a house, you would do an interrogation, and then immediately from there do a follow-up. Depending on what we found. But we generally found the guy we were looking for in the first house or someone that knew...

who was, we, there was, Jesus, there was one guy, and you've been to Iraq. It's a fucked up place too. We were going after a guy called like Mullah Muhammad One Arm because he's a mullah and he's got one arm.

We grabbed a mullah pulled him back. His name was mullah Muhammad one arm, but he was missing the wrong arm There was another one who grabbed the wrong guy. Holy shit, but we would do stuff like The way that it worked for us is we we started al-assad out west and we were hitting targets up into Syria and then we cleared it to you know, We got into Fallujah got into Ramadi got into Baghdad north of Baghdad and it's not just us but we're working with the army with the Air Force with the Marines and and we're getting shit done and we're really winning this war and

And there were times too, what I love about special operators is they really know how to solve problems. They came to us with, there was a problem north of Baghdad, I think it was called Bakuba, whatever, but it was a peninsula. And it was a small peninsula, but it hadn't been touched since the invasion in '03. So this is 2007, this place hasn't been touched because there's 19 Al-Qaeda guys there and they're IED makers, they're Improvised Explosive Device Makers.

We haven't gotten to them because there's one road in. No one wants to drive that road. They're going to blow you up. We're not going to carpet bomb them because there are so many innocent civilians there. I mean, you do have certain collateral damage, but we're not going to kill that many innocent people. Plus, they're getting bullied by Al Qaeda, tortured. We can't fast rope. They're going to shoot us down. So they came to us and they said, can you guys solve this problem? And being Navy SEALs, we're like, well, yeah, it's going to suck, but we can swim in.

And it's not a swim like a Bud's ocean swim. It's like a swampy, shitty, nasty, whatever. And you know, there's water in Iraq and people don't realize that. But we did. And we went in with 17 seals and two dogs, two Malinois. And they're important to the story because we got in there immediately, immediate gunfight. But we cleared 10 houses. We killed all 19 guys. Didn't hurt one woman or child. Then we left. Swam out.

Uh, the next day the locals woke up and you know, they're the usual terror reigned by these al-Qaeda fucks, but now there's no one they're dead. They're gone. And they had a block party. So we have assets above and they're watching this cause you want to see who, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to give away tactics, but you want to see what happens after for following it. And there's this block party going on. The block party got so big. Um,

A reporter from Baghdad, a newspaper reporter from Baghdad went up there and interviewed the people in the houses that we had taken down and asked who came last night. And the headline on the newspaper said they were ninjas and they came with lions. No shit? Yeah, fucking lions. How cool is that? That's pretty badass. So, but that's what we did for that. We got, I mean...

I mean watching I was you know just proud of my guys that's when I realized that right now and this is probably me just being arrogant right now Red Team is the finest fighting force in the world there's no one that doesn't I mean obviously there are guys that do it like that but I'm here I see it now this is my bubble but I fucking love these guys yeah and I think that was the most combat that we'd ever seen and that was that 2007 deployment to Iraq damn how long are the deployments over there four months yeah and you guys were just hitting it every night yep

Son of a bitch. We were in places where we put up makeshift tents to sleep. Like, not like, but I mean, it's not secure. Like, there's concertina wire maybe and some Iraqi guards. Like, you could be in it every, you know, but like no internet, no TVs. The chow hall is a mile and a half away or whatever. And there's so nothing to do. Like, I remember a guy singing. I learned the Cincinnati Bengals fight song because I was sleeping in between two dudes from Cincinnati. Still know it.

Let's go into a little more detail. So you swam in. Yeah, it's not so much even a swim. It's just a really shitty swamp where you're grabbing the dogs by their handles and just inserting to, like you get under palm groves and the big grapes with the huge rats running across it. Yeah. And, you know, the closer you get to target, the dogs are barking. They know you're coming. And then you get through there. Snipers start climbing and then...

Once the snipers get up there and you hear them go hot, it's just on. But I mean, we were good at it. So we're moving quickly through houses. I mean, not too... But we were killing dudes in houses. Clearing one man in, blast him, and then move down the thing. And you're killing other dudes. And at the time, it's cool. The further you get away from that, you start wondering what you're doing. Yeah. Does that bother you? Oh, yeah. There are certain guys I think about...

There's one guy in particular that I think about that I killed. He was the second guy I killed in this house. I entered the house, killed the guy in the front. I went into a bedroom. I did a one-man entry because I'm an idiot. And there was a guy that was in bed with his wife. And I gave him the courtesy of, calm down. You're waking up. Obviously, a guy with green faces in your room, and it's scary. Calm down. And there's a fucking AK-47 next to him. I'm like, come on, don't do that. And he went for it. I blasted him, killed him, and...

And then his wife sees it. So I just shot this guy next to his wife. You start to wonder, like, now the only reason I shot that guy is because I am in his house and we were born on two separate parts of the planet. Yeah. And I don't know him. And then, I mean, the further you get away from it, it's like, what if we had met somewhere else, like in a coffee shop in France? Would we have shared a joke? Was he funny? Didn't matter. Damn. I think I found the further you get away from war, the more it starts to sink in. Yeah.

that a lot of guys are killing each other because a lot of narcissists that are in charge have you do it do you think i i often wonder that too what would we have got along or i don't it's crazy i feel like i would have liked half of those people probably more than

More than the people that I'm around you probably have a lot more in common. Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, it is fucking crazy Yeah, it's insane to think about yeah, I mean because the the the humanity of it people don't realize that the humanity that This I mean this is people in there's these are dudes in their house with their families. Okay, he's going for a gun He's got a gun he's aiming at me now. Is he protecting his family and has not is he is he had carpenter? Yeah, he needs an AK because he lives in fucking Ramadi

And again, I think it's just because one thing I started, the more senior that I got, one thing that I disagreed with was patrol to contact and strike to develop. It's like, look, man, you're going to go to a house and find someone with a gun and kill them because you went to it. You're in his house. I mean, I remember one of the things where I started to not turn, but like,

Say no more. I went into the wrong house and I was in a swamp and I was walking across this white carpet and the only two people in the house were a woman and her 10-year-old daughter. And I looked down at their white carpet and I remember thinking, I understand why they hate us. Imagine someone doing that here. So I mean, the shitty thing is you get...

The more time you get to think about it, the more you think about it. And you start to realize it's a big planet, but it's a small world. And it's just a couple people sending us... I mean, he believed in his cause. I believed in my cause. Yeah, that's where I was going to go, too. I mean, I don't know what the percentage of people that actually stand up for what they believe in. But I thought it was a lot bigger until 2020 came around. And then I realized...

Man, the majority of these fucking people are just sheep. Sheep. That will just do whatever they're told. Whatever they're fucking told. And they turn it political. Yeah. And we're going up against the whatever percent, let's just call it the top 1% that actually stands up for what they believe in. And it's just on the other side of the world and they just believe something different than what we do. And they believe it. And...

They just believe in their cause. I mean, yes, they're the bad guys to us, but we're also the bad guys to them. I mean, they attack us because we're the great Satan. And I tell... Think about the crazy aunt you have at Thanksgiving dinner that is so religious that she knows everything. They're just like her. They just believe something else. I mean, the more deep you get, it's frustrating. Because you start to wonder who's calling the shots. But I mean, that's what we did. Like I said, at the time,

27, 30 year old, 32 year old, fucking bring it. I'll fight anybody here. And then you start to question. I mean, I've had guys say, do you think, are we going to get past this? Are we going to be good with life? I think the PTSD comes with it. And that's real. It's unfortunate. And a lot of guys, a lot of men and women went through a lot of shit because some politician told them they had to.

You're absolutely right. I think that's why they recruit them young, too. That's crazy. Even now, thinking about Iraq, I can sometimes sit there and think, so Iraq, what the fuck was that all about?

I think about that, too. I think it was all Halliburton. It was Halliburton. Someone's getting paid. Someone's getting paid for the anthrax vaccination, smallpox, all the vehicles that we left there, the shit we brought over. Every single round, all the body armor. Someone's getting paid for it. Oh, that's a big contract. Yeah. Well, I mean, Halliburton did what? They were... Oh, yeah. They were everything. They were the carpenters. They were the chefs. They were the trash people. They were the fuel people. They were...

The cleaning crew, they were everything. Every aspect of life in Iraq that was on an American base was put together by Halliburton, who was tied to Cheney. Yeah. But anyways, moving on. Yeah. Moving on. So where did you go after Iraq? So we did Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, and then I did the rest was Afghanistan. I'm trying to think of which ones I went to. We sent a small team.

So then it reversed. The majority went to Iraq because they got the debriefs on what we were doing. Now the fighting's in Iraq, so they sent a small group of us up to Bagram. And I'm talking a small group, eight guys. And we were just, we had the ability to augment other groups. And we went out on hits, which were rare. We did find some IED guys. We did get some shootouts there.

Winter time, Afghanistan, so not a lot to do. We got to know each other really well. We held training, reaching charges, how to get better at stuff, working out. A lot of MMA stuff, which is a pain in the ass when you're sparring with guys that are bored that know how to fight because they just want to get after it. A couple things here and there. It wasn't very exciting, but we kind of did that.

Trying to think of the other ones. Well, let's talk about the Alabama. Okay, so that was so that was in 2009 and We were sort of aware of The Mariska, Alabama getting hit by Somali pirates, but we didn't know what was gonna happen And I was actually so we're stateside and we were we were the National Mission Force for it for something like that That would happen. I happen to be at my daughter's Easter Tea Party at her preschool on my birthday and

It was Good Friday, April 10th, 2009. So it was an Easter tea party. And we were just giving the kids treats. I had a pink plate in my hand. I'm giving her cookies and cupcakes. And we got the call. Captain Phillips, they sent us a code that we knew what it was. And basically what they're saying is, okay, he got captured. You go and get him right now. So your shit had better be ready. You have a certain amount of time to get in there and a certain amount of time to take off.

And we had been... SEAL Team 6 was designed to do this, to rescue American hostages at sea. It had never been done, not one time. No shit. This is the first one. 28 years it had never been done. And we had been selling that we can take... I don't want to give away the timeline, but we can take off in a certain amount of hours. And we had the commanding officer of SEAL Team 6 on my bird, and we took off at, you know, 59 minutes. Whatever, 59. I could see the...

Okay, we did it in a certain amount. Now we're flying. And in that amount of time, we, not just me, but we as SEAL Team 6, we had thought of everything. Every imaginable at-sea rescue, a nuclear problem, a yacht, whatever. We had never thought of a lifeboat, a fully enclosed orange lifeboat being towed by a Navy destroyer. No one thought of that for some reason. So we, okay, we're like, well, we have...

We have 15 hours to come up with something. So everybody, the newest goddamn guy on this plane, think of something. Ram it with one of our boats or a helo. Think of something. And we're going to list all of them. And then we're going to start crossing them off. And we'll take the top five. And then from there, we'll get to the best one.

And we did not go over there to kill those pirates. We went there to get Richard Phillips. If we can, we'll just negotiate. They're already negotiating. They didn't send an entire squadron to negotiate. Plus, we've been killing people all over the world. But we put the snipers down when we got there to watch them, make sure nothing unsafe happens as we're preparing for the rescue.

And as we were preparing for the rescue, something very unsafe happened. And they shot. That's how it happened. There was no three, two, one, execute. It was just boom, boom, boom. No shit. So it was all just bam. Yeah, someone shot the red off each other. Like the plan that I thought was going to work, that we came up with, was...

And I thought this was brilliant. This is why I was actually getting coffee in the chief's mess because we're gonna do this plan Was uh, yeah, I didn't do shit on that fucking thing. Yeah, hold on you didn't that was that was off-camera wood So you were getting coffee? I was I had just made chief and I was so happy to be in the chief's mess on a Navy ship that I'm in there bullshitting with like the boasts made chief and we're talking about Who are the Redskins gonna draft or some shit or really just whatever and the snipers took the shot. I

The plan that we came up with, meaning me and my team leader, was these are not terrorists. This is brilliant. These are not terrorists. They're criminals. And now they're scared. And they're seasick, which they don't like. And they're out of cot, the drug they take. All we got to do is bring them some water and some radios. Get them some radios to the village elders. Let them talk. And tell them we're going to bring them in. They just want to go home now.

We get them close, you know, the sun comes down, jam the comms, pull them a couple clicks up, and my team will be on the beach. And once they get off, we'll handle it. We either, hey, we're friends, beat it, or we shoot them, and then we take him. So that's the plan that I thought was going to work. So I'm talking football with BMC, and we got a message that someone said, yeah, we got him. And I was like, got who? Dude, we got him. We got Captain Phillips. Like, holy shit, you guys are awesome. Right?

Yeah, they got him and, um, uh, yeah, they took the shots. Um, I think one of the coolest stories that doesn't get enough credit is, is, uh, you know, the slide for life, the obstacle we have at Bud's where you climb up and you slide down a rope and like the Marines have it. Army has it. I remember seeing that thinking, um, the fuck is the use of this? No one is ever going to need to know how to do this. One guy needed to do it one time and it was after they shot that sniper needed to go down and, uh,

Pull Phillips out. I'll tell you a story. Now, this is not my story. It's just a good story. So I'm assuming it happened this way. The sniper said... And he's probably full of shit. But he said when he was going in there, he had to go to his pistol. And he did carry a pistol, thank God. And he said, but I'm going into the small space. And this is the only time in my life that I get to rescue someone. So I got to think of something cool to say. Do I say we're a SEAL team? Blah, blah, blah. And he said he went in there and they'd been using...

this entire boat as a toilet for like four days and it's in the African heat and now there's three dudes laying in it and their heads are split open.

And he said that he... I think it's something cool to say. He looks at Richard Phillips and said, I'm definitely going to need therapy after this. Fuck! That's what I say? Need therapy? Holy shit. But I mean, the thing about that, though, was from Virginia Beach, 15 hours and 46 minutes later, we had a full head count in the Indian Ocean. We rescued Richard Phillips on Easter Sunday. The thing that people don't think about is, I mentioned we hadn't done that in 28 years. So...

Imagine those snipers were in their own beds in Virginia Beach four days before that on a long weekend. It's a long weekend. We've never done this. I'm going to skip work and I'll sight in my gun on Tuesday.

Their guns did not need to be sighted in for the most difficult shots of their lives, but their guns were sighted in for the most difficult shots of their lives because they were prepared. Wow. Crazy. Those snipers are just complete badasses. How many snipers were there? I mean, we jumped in with 103 people. You jumped in with 103 people? Yeah, I think we had 98 canopies, five tandems, some shit. Yeah, I mean, every swinging dick that was in Virginia Beach was going on this mission.

Is it just because everybody wanted to go? Everybody wanted to be on the off. This is a real jump. Yeah. The first one. So you brought 108 people. We had dudes, I swear to God, with riding desks that were like, yep, I have a trident. I haven't operated in 12 years, but I'm jumping. I can still remember this stuff. We had dudes, that was their first jump. They were tandem men, comm guys.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so, I mean, there's a sniper team there, but there was three, I want to say, that shot. Shit, I thought it was like five or six of you guys. I didn't realize you brought everybody in the fucking kitchen sink. There was dudes in there before us from a more advanced team.

Squadron that I'm not gonna get into they were sort of there, but then they you know, we we've they were already overseas They brought us in from Virginia Beach. Okay, and those I mean the snipers. That's just I think that's just cool Yeah, so was it three simultaneous? You know what? I don't think so, but that's what the debrief said. All right. I wasn't there I was I mean I wasn't there. No, but they I know they got him. I

Well, it's cool that you're a part of it. Yeah, yeah. It's actually pretty fucking funny. You're in the chief's mess bitching about football. I think it's awesome because if people say, you know, you're telling stories that aren't true, it's like, no, I really was in the chief's mess. Like, whatever do you mean? Holy shit. But yeah, then that was that. So now that's the pinnacle. We've done the hostage rescue. We've been in the gunfights. We've done this. And then we're going to go...

i'm going to go to afghanistan again and this time so i'd been in an outstation i'd been on the strike teams i'd run the outstations now i'm the senior enlisted um running all of them i'm the senior enlisted for all the outstations and my job simply now is to work with the agency get intel from these different places try to find um cross-border operations again um and so at this point osama bin laden is a ghost and i'm not he's not even on my radar

I was at the point, just being at SEAL Team 6, I remember thinking, I hope I get to meet the guy from Delta that kills Bin Laden. This is as close as I'll get. This is awesome. I hope I meet him. So one of the big... The biggest thing we did on this one was we found an Al-Qaeda guy, Abu Iqlis al-Masri or some shit like that, who was a Tier 1 target in Korangal. And we did a snatch and grab on a highway and got him. This other strike team were doing...

We're doing stuff. One of the newer guys first deployment with red team actually got six kills at once with a saw which I thought like that's that's pretty cool. Yeah, but watch this in it, but it's so this is uh, this is um January of 2011 and that's all we're doing and you know trying to develop ship over I'm more planning Training trips for when we get back making sure the guys on my team are running their trips the right way where we're gonna go and we planned the first

trip back for my team, my troop actually, was to go to Miami to dive. Because our biggest concern is more piracy. The pirates have been adjusting to what we're doing. They had motherships. Can we do open water dives?

On a ship that's not a or a ship that is anchored. How do we find it? What can we do? And we're just coming up with shit But we're done with deployment and we're also in south beach. So I want guys to have fun We're gonna train but then we're gonna go to happy hour. Yeah, hang out on the beach have some drinks and we train them all and We were down there. We're staying at the courtyard Marriott near South Beach and we're outside well before we went on this trip our boss the the commanding officer red squadron was

Coming on the trip and we're kind of like well that's a drag because can't have as much fun with the CEO there But he got pulled like yeah, you got to go to DC for something So we're good We didn't know why the CEO and the Master Chief went to DC but we're down there and then my boss got a call my troop commander and he said hey We got to go back. We got to go back to Virginia Beach So pack your shit up as soon as you can we're gonna get the first flights out of here. Like what the hell? All right, what's going on? Fuck I don't know so we flew back

to Virginia Beach and they brought 28 of us into a room. Now we've got guys on different trips that got pulled in, senior guys from like, there was a rock climbing trip in Nevada, but they got, the senior guys got called in and then other guys came in from Arizona and then we're here. Other dudes are junior guys at SEAL Team Six are there, but they're not in this secret room and they said, "All right, you guys are here because this is not a drill. This is real. We found a thing and this thing is in a house.

And this house is in a bowl and this bowl is in a country. And you guys are gonna, you're gonna go get this thing and you're gonna bring it back to us and show it to us. And we're like, okay, no sweat. First we're wondering why us, but okay, well, what's the thing? Well, we can't, can't tell you. Okay, well, how are we getting there? Can't tell you. What country is this? We can't tell you. How are we getting there?

Can't tell you. How much air support? None. Like, all right, that's an answer. No air support. It's all we know. And they said also, we're only bringing shooters. Only SEALs are going on this. So we can't bring our kick-ass Air Force, CCT, the radio guys. We can't bring the PJs who are paramedics or fucking medics. So if you know any medical shit, bring some medical shit. If you know how to use a radio, you're the radio guy.

Keep it light because we only have a certain amount. So what the fuck is going on? And so we would walk around we're trying to get our shit ready We knew there would be two two birds. That's all we knew We assumed it would be ospreys off of a flat top going into Libya because the Arab Spring had just started and there we're gonna go get coffee and they want to Interrogate him so we're gonna get him in a brain. There's got to be that and

But we're walking down, we're in the new building where all the cages are together on the bottom and we're running into guys from other squads and they're like, hey man, we heard something's going on, what's going on? And we're literally like, I have no fucking idea. And they got mad at us because they thought we were lying to them. And we'd run into them when we'd go out at night. Guys, I don't know what we're doing. But we're getting our shit ready. This went on until Friday and they said, okay, everyone go home, be with your kids,

And you're coming back on Sunday and we're going to drive you somewhere and we're going to read you in on what this is. And we're like, okay, who's going to be there at the read-in? And the tired bosses were like, oh, probably the vice president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of the Navy. And we're like, oh my God. And then they're going down the list. They said something, blah, blah, blah. They said CTC pad, blah, blah, blah. They're going down the list. I'm like, CTC pad, that's CIA counterterrorism.

Pakistan, Afghanistan. If we're going to Libya, and I didn't say anything, but you know, we went home, hung out with the kids. We came back on Sunday and they split us up into vans. We had four guys in my van. I got my buddy driving, my other buddy up front, my troop commander, my boss is right here. And then I'm sitting here and I explained to them on the drive down, we're going to somewhere in North Carolina. And I explained to them exactly what I just said here. And I said, this isn't Gaddafi. They found bin Laden. And my boss looked at me and there was no cheers. He goes,

That's exactly what I was thinking. So we just start talking about this and my buddy driving the van, I'll never forget the way he looked at me in the mirror and he said, "Man, O'Neal, if we kill Osama bin Laden, I will suck your dick." And we had a laugh about it. Then, you know, fast forwarding, obviously three weeks to the day, we're looking down at bin Laden in his house and I said, "Well, now's as good a time as any, I guess." He's like, "Oh, fuck you." And I'm like, "Your bet." But we got down there and they put us all into a room

and the commanding officer of SEAL Team 6. So each squadron had a commanding officer, but 6 was like a group. So that commander, that CEO came in, and I'll never forget the way he said, "The reason you guys are here is this is as close as we've ever been to Osama bin Laden." And I mean, it sinks in, but there's, you know, we're professionals and we're like, "Okay, are we going right now? I mean, we're ready." And they explained to us, they brought in the agency team, which is mostly women, and explained to us

they went into such depth of how they found him in his long briefs were almost like look it we believe you i don't need to know this shit just you tell me where he is i'll carry the gun and the sledgehammer and um they you know they were very cool the way they talked to us and and then they had a they told us that the president had uh he had about five options to get him and they said you know obviously um

Carpet bomb the fuck out of it hit and I think the Air Force wanted like 22 jams to make sure it's like you're gonna kill everyone around Yeah, so that's a I mean, we'll never know if we got him They there was something about they called him the pacer. They could see him walking outside We can hit him with one bomb, but I mean we know how that works it you fuck up that one You're you'll never find him again

We actually laughed at this one. They said, we can do a joint op with the Pakistanis. And it was like, oh, yeah, tell them about it. He's fucking out of there. Or you're an option, and then you guys can figure out a way. And so we're thinking everything jumping in. No, can't do this and whatever. And even the president didn't know about the, I guess the chief of staff of the Air Force said, well, there is one more option. And he told him about the helicopters that no one knew about.

And so then we just started training and that was an option. So we trained there. It wasn't to, it was, you know, obviously to get to know the exterior, but don't tell me about the interior. I'll figure that out when I get there. Don't tell me there's seven men and 10 women and 16 children. You tell me how many people you think are there and I'll figure out what they are when I get there type shit. And we're just kind of coming up with contingency plans. We wanted to prove to them that,

the powers that be that we are a good option, that we know what we're doing. And it even got to the point where President Obama said, I was never 100% convinced bin Laden was there, but I was convinced you guys could go in and find out and come home. And so we trained on that and we tried to think of contingencies, try to brainstorm everything. You know, what if the cars leave? What if we get squirters? Who's doing what? Coming up to this and...

Then we would go back to the hotel or whatever We're staying at and somebody at the CIA had made a two-scale model of bin Laden's house. I'm talking to the no shit And so we're talking about it just and we're training 12-hour days and talking about it every night than doing it over Heelos fat. We fast-fought so much. I have severe tendonitis still from just grabbing that damn rope almost the point like

Can we just simulate we fast drove? I know how to do it. I can fall. Yeah But one night, um, one of the bosses said all right What's the worst thing that could happen? And the youngest guy in the room said the helicopter could crash in the front yard and we're like what the fuck? Why would you bring that karma here? Yeah, and he goes I don't know shouldn't we talk about that for 30 seconds? So we did that and then we went out west to a a certain place and I we were even to a point where um

Like I'm known for morale. I want to keep morale high, crack jokes, have fun. But guys were joking around the table one night and I said, "You guys realize this is a one-way mission. You should take this a little bit more seriously. We're not coming back from this one." And then, yeah, they're like, "Yeah, shit." And so we get out there though and they brought us into the... The movie Zero Dark Thirty kind of plays it right where the seals walk in, they see those helicopters.

And I remember I started laughing and they're like, "What's so funny now?" And I said, "Well, before I thought there was a 90% chance we're gonna die, but I didn't know they were sending us in on Transformers." And that was kind of insightful. And these things, someone designed it. The pilots that came out, they gave us the four best pilots in the world, Army pilots. They'd never flown these things and we trained on those for four days. And then we went one more time home to see our kids and then we forward staged to Jalalabad.

Because if they if President Obama gives us the green light We want to be right there so and you know, you still can't and the reason they picked us is because we had a team already in Afghanistan We had the National Mission Force which is for a contingency But if that team in Afghanistan stopped working and just started training someone might notice if the National Mission Force leaves Someone might notice this squadron is supposed to be leaving. No one's gonna care. That was us. So

It's better to be lucky than good. So we went over there. There was a squadron over there. And we came in to do the Bin Laden raid. And they knew it. Can you imagine? And they, I'll tell you what. I cannot say enough good about them. I would have been, fuck you guys. We're SEAL Team 6. And you guys come to do it? They could not have been more welcoming to us. I mean, they were pissed. But they were complete pros. Wow. And then we waited there.

We would play poker with those guys. And they said we actually weren't fun to play poker with because you're like, fuck it, I'm all in too. I'm going to die tomorrow. Just, you know, dark humor. But then we did get the green light and we're going to launch. We have Saturday or Sunday.

to launch because that's our 48 hours of 0% illumination. And if we miss that window though, we gotta wait 30 days. We're going in 0%. And we got lucky because the rumor was that Bin Laden was going to leave on September 11th of that year to a new place. That's the rumor. It could be false, but that's what I heard. So we got the green light. We didn't launch on Saturday because of the correspondent's dinner. And we figured if...

The entire cabinet and the president in a room with the entire press corps and they all get up and leave the press corps and like huh? What's that all about? Yeah, and I guess even Hillary Clinton was like wait, we're not launching on Saturday because of a dick fuck those guys We launched yeah, which I mean Hillary Clinton, you know, I never vote for her, but I take her in a foxhole But then yeah we did on so we did on Sunday we're gonna go Sunday and it's it's a hundred percent we're going and we went to um, we went into a hangar to get the final brief and

We're going over everything that we're going to do. And we, I mean, we're good. We know the exterior. We know who's supposedly there. We talked to the Intel analysts. They're with us still in J-Bad. And Admiral Bill McRaven, he's given us the last speech. And he said, you know, guys, last night I watched my favorite movie, Hoosiers.

And the best part of that movie is when this team from Hickory, Indiana, makes it to the state championship. And they walk into this gym, and it's an arena. And they're starstruck, and they're just looking around. And coach had one of the guys grab a tape measure and say, what's the distance from the back of the rim to the free throw line? He said, it's 15 feet, coach. All right, get on his shoulders. What's the distance from the hoop to the floor? And he said, 10 feet, coach. And he goes, I'm sure you'll find these are the exact measurements in your gym in Hickory.

This is just a bigger arena. And he goes, you guys do this every night. This is just a bigger arena. And then we were leaving. I remember we went up to him and said, hey, Admiral, you're so fucking busy. I doubt you watched Hoosiers last night, but you were born to give us that speech right now. Yeah. And so then we left. We took a team picture. And then we had our gear on and said goodbye to the guys that were there. And we actually...

You know, we're going with the shooters to the first two birds and it's you know instead of uh instead of like Giving them a fist pound. It's giving guys hugs and it's like I see on the ground and and then you know We left you do the last thing take a piss or what like one of my concerns was how are we gonna pee? On the way. I don't want to get out have to pee like and they actually someone came up with these little I don't they have another probably common those little diapers you unfold you can pee in them and

But I actually, I don't even trust these things. I'm peeing in a bottle and I'll throw up. I actually kept the damn bottle of piss in my pocket the whole mission. I forgot about it. I was pretty excited. I mean, to the point where we were, we were, we were given access to everything. Like didn't even need to be approved for use yet. If it works, it's,

You can have it and we but we're now we're measured like we're trying to cut guys off for like you're too heavy these two guys don't carry that because certain pounds of fuel to get there because we don't have Refuse that calculated. We were trying to keep it to that 32 minutes on the ground We had a dude come in this I don't remember what the hell he was trying to sell us, but he said Here's this box

that it jams everything. Like it jams cell, but like it can jam landlines. It jams this shit and it weighs, and it's like a kilometer radius. Wow. And one of the guys goes, has it been tested in a helicopter? And he goes, no. And he goes, I have a better idea. Can you invent something that's only 30 pounds? It's the radius of this room and it jams bad ideas. Yes.

Anyway, so we went out there and we got in the bird's-hub and then we took off and we left. And we had a 90-minute flight into his house. Now, we actually had more birds behind us. There was actually blue team guys in 47, the Chinooks behind us, 45 minutes. And then there was more on the border with Rangers. And then there was more. Oh, wow. Because the word I got, I wasn't there. And this is some South Side Chicago fucking politics.

was when they told President Obama our plan that like, yeah, they're going to get here. The first, if they get contact with the PAC mill or the PAC police, we're going to hard point. We don't want to get in a shootout with them because they're not our enemy. And then you can send someone to negotiate with the Pakistanis and pull them out. And he goes, that's interesting. And then he looked at the chief of staff of the Air Force and said, what do you need to rain hell on Pakistan? My guys aren't fucking surrendering to anybody.

No shit. That's what I heard. And that's pretty cool. And that was... So this is a mission now where politics is out the window. And you gotta figure, President Obama, he's gonna lose re-elections if we all die. And not that that matters, but it does to him. Yeah. But he's making the fucking call because this is what we're gonna do. So we have birds behind us. Like, if we need to get... If we need an IRF and a QRF, we got our guys coming in and we're fucking... We're fighting. And I know we have...

Shit above us, but they didn't really tell us because we got enough on our plate Like I'm assuming someone that's invisible has some bombs up there. So we're flying in 90 minutes to get into bin Laden's house and We can get shot down now at any time. We don't know if this technology works We don't know if the the most high-speed Pakistani new guy is Manning the radar system pointing that way and they'll shoot us down and we can't even even be mad at him because we're invading. Yeah but worrying about

That missile isn't going to stop it So if you're worrying about something that it doesn't stop worrying you're wasting your energy if we die we die And so I'm looking around that other guys in this bird How are they handling it and do just sleeping and I remember thinking you were asleep on the ride to bin Laden's house You have ice in your veins man. That's just fucking insane And I'm sitting next to Cairo the dog and then cheese the he wrote the book no ordinary dog they're back there and Cairo's just you know being a good boy and and uh,

I was counting to keep, I learned in Kosovo as a sniper to count. When you're glassing something, just count. Zero to a thousand, thousand to zero, and then change your cadence, keep your mind working, but keep focused. And we're like 90 minutes in, or 80 minutes into a 90 minute flight, and we banked to the south, and I don't know how I remembered it, but I was counting 5, 56, 5, 57. Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended. You know, politics, whatever, that's what George Bush said on 9-11. And I was like, shit.

I'm going to keep saying that. And then it's like, wow, I'm on this mission. We're on this mission. We're going to fucking kill him. So we did another bank. And then the air crew guys opened the door. And now we're looking out. And that's something they don't get credit for. The air crew guys, they put their asses in those seats too. If we get shot down, they're dying as well. And their job was to keep the bird flying and open the fucking door. What if we couldn't figure out how to open the door? Something that simple. He knew how to do it. He opens it up. Now it's a... Abbottabad, Pakistan is a resort town.

And there's electricity. This is not a training area. This is not Afghanistan. This is some serious Navy SEAL shit we're about to do. So the perfect plan was, I was in the second bird. The first bird's going to go right in between Vinland's house and the guest house. They're going to fast-drop everyone out. We're going to insert a sniper. Some snipers, a dog, an interpreter, and a machine gun. Then my team's going to go to the roof.

We're going to fast rope down onto the roof. And then we're going to figure out how to get to the balcony. And basically that's, I'm going to fucking jump. I'm going to shoot it out. There's probably a window there. Bin Laden's in the, the woman told me third floor, Bin Laden is in his house. And that's what's going to happen. And then it went to shit because I guess there was an updraft. There was, the weather was different or something. And the pilot realized that if he, if an inexperienced pilot would have tried to power it up,

And that would have flipped it or something. He explained that later. He said, the safest thing now, if I can pin it to the ground and put the tail on the fence, we could live. So he did that. And he saved everyone's lives just making that decision. And it was on purpose. So we took off to go to the roof. But our pilot, now the communications is kind of sketchy here.

Our pilot saw him do that and he realized it bullshit if he can't hover I'm not trying up there. So we just went back down So all we know is we went up and we came down and the pilots basically saying get out and I remember putting my first foot came out I'm looking at bin Laden's house and I remember thinking fuck it. I guess we'll start the war from here. I

And I knew damn well there's a wall, just because we train so much. There's a door on the wall, northeast corner, which is off to my left. And so the breacher decided to go up and put a seven-foot charge of C6 on it. So now because we're hitting this side, they're somewhere in there, I think. We're going to go into the house this way, and we can go up with them. He blasted the door. It opened like a tin can, and there's a brick wall behind it. So on the wall, there's a wall, and the breacher said, all right, failed breach. This is bad. He said, no, this is good.

That's a fake door. Nobody does that. He's in there. So then we know there's another door over here, which is the carport, which we know opens because the cars go in and out. And we didn't know what happened. We heard them saying dash one going around. But what they were saying was dash one going down. So we just gave him a courtesy. Hey, we're going to blast the carport. And they said, don't blast it. We'll open it. And the door opened and the thumb came out with a glove that I recognized. And now we're at a point in life where it doesn't matter why you're here.

You just are. Yeah. I tell football teams that all the time. It doesn't matter why it's second and 15. It just is. Time's kicking. Let's move. So we walk in. It didn't make sense to me why they're in there. I saw the air crew standing there. I saw American flags, but different gear. I remember thinking, who the fuck are these guys? Whatever. And so there's already a gunfight. Stuff's going on. Explosions. We go into the main house. There's guys going down the hallway. This is the first floor of Bin Laden's house. And we're backed into this...

Into this room and i'm like looking around for bombs like they're gonna blow this house up if anyone's gonna martyr himself It's been live. I don't see any but i'm seeing guys knowing that they could blow up, but they're not it's not affecting them They're doing their jobs and being proud of them. Like this is just you guys are fucking cool and uh, uh the guy next to me in the room he whispered he said helicopter crashed and I said what helicopter and I thought some of the birds behind us had crashed

But he said, bro, our helicopter crashed in the front yard. You walked right past it. Holy shit. That's like, okay, that makes sense. Let's take a break. Let's take a break. I hope you're enjoying The Sean Ryan Show. Let me take a minute to tell you about Vigilance Elite Patreon.

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and head over to patreon.com/vigilanceelite and get your subscription today. So I'm watching guys do their jobs even though we're in this is a an extremely high high threat situation um and dudes are dealing with problems but what I remember seeing

You know, they just... The guy just told me the helicopter crashed. I'm like, what helicopter crashed? And I thought one of the other helos had been shot down. And he goes, bro, our helicopter crashed in the front yard. Like, you walked right past it. And I remember just sort of trying to justify my... I'm like, well, I must have been looking this way because that's been Lod's house. But I'm watching dudes run from different rooms to grab kids that have been separated from their families to bring them back to their families so those kids would not be as afraid as they are right now. And I remember thinking...

Being proud of the guys, but then thinking that is what the good guys do. Al-Qaeda's not doing that when they come to our house. You're going to shoot it out, they're going to cut people's heads off. We do that because we're the good guys. And I'm sure you've seen it in combat. But now we're on the first floor and then they reach to the second floor. The woman that found bin Laden said, I don't know what it looks like inside, but there will be a stairwell going to the second floor and you will run into Khalid bin Laden.

And he's 20 years old. That's Bin Laden's son. And that is his last line of defense. He will be armed on the stairwell. And she was so badass. She said, here's the way she put it. If you can ace him, you get a shot at the big guy. And that's just, that's a cool brief right there from a badass, you know? So she was right. And it turns out she was 100% right on every single person in and out of that house. Nailed it.

We get to the stairwell and it comes up and comes back. So the stairs go this way, there's a little area and then it comes this way. And Khalid was there and he jumped behind a banister. And I'm at this point now because I had the front row seat to the coolest mission in modern history. I'm just watching cool guys, right? And they're going up the stairs and he jumps back and I'm a certain amount of guys back. And normally in an urban setting, if we're fighting up, I will pull guys out.

I only want a certain amount of guys on there just to avoid unnecessary deaths if he starts dropping shit on us, like grenades and whatnot, or takes a shot down the stairs. But I figure we're going to die anyway, so I want to see how this goes down. And I'm just standing there. I don't have a shot. And now we're back to being quiet. And it's dark. And the point man said something like, and I'm going to fuck this up. It was something like, Khalid, Irfa Aydek, Khalid Delta Rasha.

Something like that, but it was basically come here come here in two different languages that he knew Khalid spoke Which I think is incredible cuz I would have thought he would have pinned it try to get a shot off and Khalid simply got confused and he leaned over the thing and went what no shit that is the coolest thing I'd ever seen in combat how tactically savvy are you to think of doing that like well, he doesn't know he doesn't know we might be Pakistanis here to move him. He doesn't know I'll just call him out and he did and

So he's armed perfectly within his rules of engagement. We step around him. We go up to the last, the second deck, the last set of stairs. And I moved from this point from like the eighth guy to the second guy because everyone else went to the right and to the left because they're going to, you want to clear obviously the area before you move on. But now we're down to two and we're pointing at the last set of stairs. And above it, there was a curtain. It looked kind of like a shower curtain, but it was like a green olive drab type thing.

And we can see there's sort of backlit. There's people moving. And we assume those are the suicide bombers. But Bin Laden's in there. And the guy in front of me took a shot before we got there. And they're moving around. And I'm the two-man. And my job as the two-man is to hold him and wait. His job is to simply look forward. Don't drop security. And I got you. And through effective communication, when it's your time to go, I will squeeze you. It's on. I'm just telling you through effective communication we have enough guys.

But we don't have enough guys. We're out of guys. It's two of us. And I want four more. I'll take two. But he starts saying, we got to go. Come on. We got to go. He doesn't know it's me. He knows it's one of his guys. And what he's saying is basically suggesting those are the suicide bombers. But if we go right now, we can beat them. And I remember taking a deep breath and

It was by no means bravery on my part. It was more of a, okay, we're going to blow up now and I'm tired of thinking about it. Let's fucking get over with it. So I get in the squeeze and he goes up and he moves the curtain and there are three people standing there. He didn't have even enough time. He just jumped on them. How he doesn't have a Medal of Honor is beyond me. He jumped on the grenade so the guy behind him could get the shot. Damn. And simply because he went this way, I turned this way.

And standing three feet in front of me is Osama bin Laden. And he's got his hands on Amal, his wife's shoulders. And I don't know what he's doing. He's not surrendering. He's maneuvering somehow. His hands are on her. And I remember thinking, he's taller than I thought. He's skinnier than I thought. So you knew it was him. Right away. Right away. His beard is gray. He's not surrendering. He's got to have a suicide belt. So I shot him twice when he was standing up.

I shot him again on the floor and then I moved Amal out of the way. So I can hear Bin Laden taking his last breath. When I shot him, he fell to the foot of the bed. Where'd you shoot him? I shot him in the face three times. I moved Amal and his two-year-old son is now standing there. And this is the humanity of everything. This kid has got nothing to do with this. I'm a father. And I picked him up and I moved him to the back of the bed and I...

She'd been shot and and I turn around and I kind of froze and I'm okay We get with other Navy SEALs are now coming in a lot of guys are in there and one of my guys came up to me and He said are you good? And I said no no, what are we supposed to do now? And he said now we find the computers we we do this every night hundreds of times and I said, yeah, you're right I'm back. Holy shit, and he said to me. Yeah, you just killed Osama bin Laden your life to change get to fucking work and

And so we did. They started, you know, we actually took, we do have pictures of Bin Laden. It's actually my gloves in there, putting his head together for the picture, dumping water on him. And like, it was, I think the pictures haven't been released because it's one of those things where you really don't need to know how justice looks when it's served. It just is. So those pics on the internet, those are bullshit? No, they're fake. It's split from, he's split from here to here. Oh, God. I mean, he got hit three times with a, I'm shooting 77-degree hollow point at three feet. Oh, okay.

It's a devastator. Yeah. And so they're dressing him up. Guys are doing SSC. And I went down to the sensitive site exploitation. We're finding Intel. I went down to the second floor. I had two other dudes with me. And we're going through. Now we found these huge offices with, I'm talking computers, hard drives, like the old school towers. We're pulling big kit bags from underneath the bed. And we're opening them. And I thought it was freeze-dried steaks.

and it's like wow these guys are in it for the long haul this is and it's like wait a minute no this is raw opium they're trying to make money off this and so we're finding all that and we were we were finding so much stuff from from pictures to the heart hard drive like we're cracking those open pulling the hard drives cds um uh papers handwritten letters um and we're just shoving it into these it was to the point where we wanted you know we wanted 32 minutes on the floor i think we were there for 47. and now it's like okay come on we now let's let's get the out of here

I went back upstairs. I actually carried, I helped two, three other SEALs carry, we carried bin Laden down all the stairs we just came up. And I remember yelling at guys, "Guys, fuck them. We're leaving. Get out. We're figuring this out." Outside, I think the ground force commander coordinated a way for another bird to come in to get us. We're going to put him on our bird. The first team's going out on that. They're going to go refuel with another bird on a mountaintop.

We went out with the body. We actually sat it down next to the lead sniper from the Captain Phillips raid and said, here's your guy. And he looked down, he goes, you got to be shitting me. I'm like, no, we got him. He goes, let's fucking leave.

So they took off with them. We went around to the other, you know, I think it's to the east side of the compound. We're calling in a 47, but we don't, like I said, we don't have our CCT guys. So we're calling it in and we're rusty. Yeah. And I remember seeing the, there's a guy on Twitter who was tweeting. He was live tweeting. Why would they be doing helicopter operations on a Sunday or some weird shit? And I remember seeing him thinking if we were in Iraq, I'd blast this dude because he's outside of a target with a phone.

But we're in a pack, they have no fucking idea that we're here. So then we're calling this bird in and I remember we're saying, "Hey, so we have to blow up the bird inside. We're gonna leave it. We're blowing it up." But I asked someone, I was like, "What was the time fuse on that thing?" And they're like, "Well..." I'm like, "Holy shit, abort!" We had to actually call off the bird coming in to get us because we were gonna blow it out of the sky.

So they aborted and turned. Then the fucking thing blew up. We almost just blew our own helicopter out of the sky. Then they came back in, we get on that thing and then we take off. And now we're leaving. On a mission where we're supposed to die, but now we're leaving. And if we can live for another 90 minutes, if we can cross the border to Afghanistan, we get to see our kids again. We get to live another 50 years.

but they know they gotta know we're here and they could shoot us down probably with an f-16 that we sold them the packies worrying about that is not going to stop it so i'm not going to worry so we're sitting there in this bird i have the um the the lead sniper from the captain phillips right there was a weird thing with um with jealousy um when when this sniper initiated the fire um because sometimes when people are so close to doing something they get angry

And they were giving him a lot of shit, talking about firing him. I remember saying to him at work after the Phillips raid, "Hey man, don't pay attention to that shit. You're a fucking hero. Don't you ever forget it. Take a Copenhagen from me. Take mine. You're a hero." And I would remind him that. He was going through a really rough time. We're sitting on this bird flying out and I'm trying to absorb what the fuck just happened. And I see this Copenhagen come in front of my nods. And he said, "Take one of mine. Now you know what it feels like to be a fucking hero." Which is just insane.

A dude next to me from the other squadron, blue squadron that was there, he's from New York, and he asked a question that every SEAL asked when they found out bin Laden was dead. He said, "Who got him?" And I said, "I think I did." And he said, "On behalf of my family, thank you." So now it's deep, and we gotta, you know, can't worry about the shit, so we just start our watches, and so we're counting. We gotta live the 90 minutes, but it's been 10 minutes. Now it's been 20 minutes. Now it's been 30 minutes. And now it's 40 minutes, 50 minutes.

We got to get to 90 minutes, but it's been 60 minutes. Then I start thinking about like all the weird sports analogies, like watching a no-hitter at the top of this seventh at Fenway Park. Like I'm not going to say anything. I don't want to jinx it, you know, but it's been 70, now it's been 80 minutes. Then I start thinking about one of the greatest games ever played when the Team USA hockey team beat the Russians in Lake Placid. A team they're not supposed to beat, but now they're winning four to three. And you can hear the crowd counting down 10.

nine eight seven six we got to 85 minutes into the flight and the pilot came over the radio and just as cool as ever said all right gentlemen for the first time in your lives you're going to be happy to hear this welcome to afghanistan so yeah so i mean and that now it's like holy shit we did it we land the now the other bird had to go to a mountaintop and refuel there and the other stealth bird with another 47 they're still coming back and so it's like okay come on guys they land

and like no one's hurt and then bin laden's over here the the guy that was in front of me to go up the stairs into into bin laden's room we're like hey man you and i need to talk and we go over into the corner and he's like what the happened on that stairwell i'm like it was just down to us i don't know i mean that and then he looks over to the woman that found bin laden and said uh well there she is you got to go give her something man you own this like yeah you're right and i walked over to it i pulled the magazine out of my gun i jacked the last round out and i said you have room for this in your backpack

And she said, "I think I do." And then I said, "Well, we have something to show you." Now, in the movie Zero Dark Thirty, they brought the woman over to Bin Laden's body and it was like a moment of pause and they opened it. She looked and she was all thoughtful and she cried and left. That's not at all what happened. Here's what happened. I gave her the mag and said, "We have something to show you." Now, it starts to, again, moments were sinking in but it's like, you know what? This is historic. This will be in history books.

You know, she found him though. She's the reason this happened. She gave up her life for this. She doesn't have a husband. She doesn't have kids. And she's been working on this 20 hours a day for years. And then I'm like, you know, this is like, this could go down with Iwo Jima. But then as being the arrogant Navy SEAL, I'm like, put the pressure on myself. Shit, I got to think of something cool to say. So we're walking over to the body and I thought this would have been good enough. I looked down and I said, is that your guy?

And she looked down for a second one. I guess I'm out of a fucking job and left. You gotta be shit. Left at that. Yeah. So then we, um, we, uh, McRaven was there. He actually, uh, he there, the, now there is when the process of, we do have some DNA tests. We got a lot of pictures. He was talking to, um, to the white house and he, he had one of our snipers laid out next to him. Cause our sniper was six, two, our tallest guy was six, two. And, uh,

He said, "Yeah, I just had one of our tallest guys lay down and he's shorter than, I think it's him." And the president says, "Let me get this straight. You can blow up one of our $200 million helicopters, but you can't afford a 99 cent tape measure." So they're doing that and we fly him up to, I remember Craven just, we're standing there. He came up to me and he kind of just put, he didn't say anything, but just put his hand on my shoulder like this. And it was like just a fuck yeah moment. Went up to Bagram.

I mean everyone we're still looking around at each other now. We got everything laid out the the smart got bin Laden's body is laying there We're laying out all the stuff in order of which room which floor which building and they're going through it. There's a dude doing DNA tests and and We're just kind of standing around the army brought in these those big green tubs full of breakfast sandwiches We have the news on there's a big TV on and you can hear it kind of

You can hear it building up like they know what's happening. Geraldo's out there with people in front of the White House and our guys are on the phone with the White House and they're just trying to, the president wants a full count how many were wounded, how many are killed, what's the total and we're just standing there. Bin Laden's right here and I remember everything quieted down. The president is on TV with a red tie walking down red carpet and

Came up very presidential to the podium and said tonight I can report to the American people into the world the United States conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden the leader of Al Qaeda I hear the president of the United States say Osama bin Laden I look at Osama bin Laden and I thought how in the world did I get here from Butte, Montana? Damn, dude and that and that's it and then we um

And then here's where it gets cool. I mean, just camaraderie thing is like, well, we should shower up because we're flying home and I could use a drink. Where are the fucking Seabees? You're going to find everything. You're going to find showers. You're going to find pizza. You're going to find beer and probably some whiskey. So we went over there and it was, you know, that's when it started to get a little awkward because they do have the internet over there. We're getting everything. SEAL Team 6. SEAL Team 6, Bin Laden. You know, and then that's, this is going to be bad.

But for now, it's going to be good. And actually, the ground force command, when we went back, the ground force commander, who is probably the smartest guy I've ever met, photographic memory, he could operate on an hour's sleep a night and be fine. And he's by the book. But he pulled the point man and me into a room and he poured us a shot. We all took a shot together. And he's like, great job, boys. We hop on a plane. We leave.

Pop an Ambien, which was awesome. And we slept at Virginia Beach. We landed there. And then it was almost like a scene where there were people waiting for us. Other SEALs were there with a couple buses, coolers full of beer, and cheers and high fives. And then we went to the command. And that was it. I was like, we're going to be the best friends in the world forever. Man, that's fucking... That's insane. Wow. I need to tell a part that I didn't. You can edit in.

If you don't mind, I'm just going to hit it. Okay. So we're having this conversation when I asked what helicopter crashed. And he said, dude, our helicopter crashed in the front yard because I thought it was something else. As we're having this conversation, one of our snipers was running around the compound with Cairo. And his job was to circle it twice to make sure no one squirted, ran out of the building. And when we're having this conversation inside, he ran into the point where the pilot had the...

tail on the fence. So he's looking up and sees this tail. He didn't know they crashed either. And he came over the radio and said, guys inside, be on alert. They are ready for us. They have a training mock-up of our super secret helicopter in the front yard. And there was a weird silence and the boss came over the radio and goes, no jackass, that's ours because we crashed. And he said over the radio, yeah, that makes a lot more sense than the shit I was just saying. Carry on.

Holy shit, dude. Damn. Yeah, we got to Virginia Beach, though, and then it just turned into, as opposed to being in the shadows, everybody wants to come down and meet us. They want to fly us places to meet us. The Secretary of Defense came down, and it started to suck because there were dudes that had been at Red Squadron for 16 years that moved on to operations, and then they wouldn't let them in the debrief with the Secretary of Defense.

And it's just like, this is going to, there's some bad blood's going to start because of this shit. And, uh, you know, and a lot of guys work, a lot of guys do want to be the 30 year Navy SEAL who retires and then lives in Coronado undercover forever. And, uh, they kind of got that violated. I mean, one of the, one of the funny stories though is, is, uh, like I was mentioning earlier when, when people, the first question people asked was who got them. And, uh,

They would say Nizro got them. And I guess the most common answer was, oh, fuck, we're never going to hear the end of this. Damn, dude. That's, man, that's an awesome. Fucking crazy. Fucking, I don't even know what to say. Yeah, I mean, it's like it was written that way or scripted. It's just the way it worked.

Great team. The pilots that got us in and out. I mean, that takes balls to fly Chinook that far into Pakistan to pick up guys that are already in gunfights with Al Qaeda. And I think we killed like three of the top four that night. No shit. If we hadn't, we did within the next few days. And there was like 11 other ops that JSOC did that night in Afghanistan. It was a fucking... I mean, it was being part of something great and I couldn't be more proud. That's insane. Yeah. That's insane. Let's take a quick break. That was heavy. Yeah.

Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave The Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, so we just covered the whole raid. Yep. Everything that happened.

There's a lot of conspiracies out there. A whole lot of conspiracies out there on whether it was a double. But why did they dump the body into the ocean? They had told us that's what's going to happen even before we left. And I remember we were asking, why is that you're going to dump him in the ocean? And they said, well, because we don't want a shrine to him where people can worship. And I remember explaining to them, you don't understand Sunni Islam. You don't.

There's one God you worship a lot. Not false prophets. They would not do that to Bin Laden. You don't worship him because they don't believe in that shit. You can do something else with him, but they were convinced they wanted to do that. There are pictures of him that I've heard are in cabinets at Langley. I don't know. All I know is we handed him over to some senior guys from the army and they flew him to the USS Vincennes. I believe I said that right. I could be wrong, but it's that ship. And they have the coordinates of where they dropped him. And I didn't see it.

I believe it. I mean, I know he's dead. I know we have pictures. I wish they would release him, but I didn't see it. So, you know, as far as I know, he could be freeze-dried somewhere, too. Huh. I mean, I don't know. So they told you that before you even went on the raid? They're like, hey, we're going to dump him in the ocean. Yes. Why would they even tell you that? I don't know. I mean, I had a lot of different options for him, but that was it. That's going to happen. Just bring him out. And, I mean, they labeled it. They did the test. They have the test. But someone took the body away, and then we never saw it again.

Interesting. Yeah, it is. Have they ever done that with anybody else? Not as far as I know, but... Yeah, I've never heard anything. Yeah, they were saying they brought him to that ship, they gave him a proper burial, and then they threw him over, and no one was allowed to watch, I guess. A proper burial, huh? Well, a proper burial... Let's see. As far as getting thrown over the side of a ship, I guess it's proper. Kick him off a fucking fantail? That's about it. But yeah, they wrote down the coordinates, and they apparently marked the pad eye on the ship.

Which means whatever, but yeah. And there are guys that said they were on the ship that they know what happened, but I don't, I mean, I've never seen footage of it. So it's, I mean, I can understand too the conspiracies around it. Like why, you know. I mean, it's definitely odd. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. I mean, because like I said, there's not going to be worshipers for him. And even now with that, it kind of is the mystique of did they really get him type shit. Yeah. When did you...

When did you decide you were going to come out and say that you were the shooter? I didn't do it at first, but my name did go around really quickly in Virginia Beach and Coronado and in D.C. and New York because people just know people around there. And I was getting calls the next night from people saying, hey, man, tell us what happened, all this shit like that.

You know, and there was people kind of new, and they would single me out in different briefs. And I really didn't care for that because I've always said it's a team effort. It's not me, guys. Look at the pilots. Thank them because they're the smartest. Thank the intel officers that found him. And then it just started to get awkward. I decided, you know, it's...

I might move on and then we went from the the best time in our career to the worst time because soon after on extortion was August 6th extortion 17 was shot down we lost 31 Americans and we went from planning missions to planning funerals and It's like, you know what? It's time to leave I need to I want to see my kids get married but because we lost so many guys that gold we need to backfill so I'm going to do one more deployment and

So I actually left Red Squadron and went to Silver Squadron to go immediately to Afghanistan because my entire point was I came in through the front door and I'm going to leave through the front door. I'm going to do one more deployment to prove to you guys, you know, I'm not in this for the fame. I'm not writing a book. There was rumors that I'm writing a book.

Like someone actually pulled me aside and said, one of my officers said, I heard you just got a $17 million advance to write a book. And I said, well, I don't think you know how books work because you don't get a $17 million advance unless you're a president. But yeah, but there was just, you know, rumors flying around and all this shit. I did go to Afghanistan and, you know, I extended and I got out in August of 2012.

And then, you know, I started work. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what the hell I was qualified for no degree I started working in Washington DC on Capitol Hill with different people and I met I met a congresswoman Carolyn Maloney from New York and she said, you know, you should probably Donate something to the 9/11 memorial and I did because it's if you haven't been to the memorial you got to go It's insane. It's a chronological order of what happened on 9/11 and at the end I anonymously donated my shirt and

With an American flag just so people could see this shirt was in the room with bin Laden the CIA Analyst donated a coin that she had and it's kind of there But when I donated it I went into a room where there were 30 Some people I didn't realize I was gonna be speaking right then they had all lost someone in the towers and And I'm up on stage and I this is the first time in public. I told the story and to see their responses to Crying in their hands

you know, wanting to give me a hug. And they were saying that there's never going to be closure, but this helps with the healing. We can put a face with what happened. Because like we just said, we buried him at sea. You don't really know, but I'm telling you what happened because I was there. And I said, I actually had a film crew there to document me donating it for historical reasons. But I was like, if I can help 30 people with the healing, I can help

thousands if I tell the story and then it was a tough decision but I got my story approved the only one approved through the Pentagon and I came out with a story just you know I've assumed risk before and I'll do it again it's worth it yeah so you went to silver after that I did what were you guys doing over there another winter deployment to Afghanistan okay I actually bin Laden wasn't the last guy I killed with that gun

No shit. Just kept it with me. Actually, we did a—I think my last mission was my very first L ambush, which I think is cool. Yeah. Well, when we were trying to sell it, because you're selling it to staff officers, basically, that I don't know how they don't know. We saw this truck would leave this place, go around a mountain and drive through the snow and wait to ambush Americans. And they did it like on Tuesday, and Intel saw them.

And then they did it on Wednesday and then they did it again on Thursday, but they're not finding anybody. And my troop chief and I were like, hey, if they do this on Friday, the day of prayer, they're definitely doing it on a Saturday. So we came up with a plan like, well, we'll just insert where they drive, get behind these rocks, put snipers up and we're selling it to them. And then and we sold to this army officer like, well, then we're going to set up an ambush. And the officer said, what's an ambush?

and um i said sir an l ambush is the second thing they teach you in the army right after that's your rack this is an l ambush and he goes well who invented it i said i think sun tzu invented the art of war um and he goes well which i said well we're gonna set up an l i'm gonna form a line of death i'll be in the middle here and when he's coming at me i'm gonna stop him and he goes what if he doesn't stop i said i'm gonna shoot him this is

What planet are you on? Wow. Yeah, so we did. We set it up. And naturally, the ISRs watched them. They can't get their car started because it's Murphy's Law. And so we're literally smoking cigars. The sun's up. And we're waiting for this dude to drive around. No one's going to be there. And we kept it simple. ISRs are going to tell us green light, yellow light, red light. That's when you jump out and you stop them. And it's in the wide open area. And sure enough, they're coming. They finally got the car started.

You know green light yellow light red light we hop out and then I'm looking at the sky and he's driving this a car not even a truck and I think this is the first words he ever spoke in English where he put it in reverse and just goes fuck fuck fuck and the Cars peeling out and I'm looking at this dude and there's a you know two dudes in front three dudes at the back and I'm like Hey, man, get out of the car

Get out of the car. You need to get out of the car because we got snipers. And one dude hopped out to go to the trunk. This guy's head blasted off and then it turned into just a shootout. We killed all of them. And it's like, well, that's an L.A. ambush. That was my last mission as an A.B.C. And then I got out and then...

You know, transition out and learn... You got to learn that there's a lot of life after the military. You know, military is unique because you can get in at 18 and retire at 38. And at 38, you got a lot of life, I hope, left in you. Yeah. And then that's when the real work starts. What do we do now? Well, what was it like, you know, getting out? I mean, you killed the most wanted man in the fucking history of the world. Everybody wants to meet you. Everybody wants something from you. Everybody wants to hear the story. I mean, did you...

There couldn't have been any time for just you and family. No, there's not now, too. And, you know, I'll get shit on the internet. They're like, why, hi, I'm Rob O'Neill. I haven't talked about Bin Laden for five minutes. It's like, yeah, but, you know, stop asking, and I'll stop saying it. You got to figure every person I ever meet wants to hear that story. They want to know what happened. And that's fine. That's great. I mean, if I helped this country and our cause, whatever that was, then I, I mean, obviously what that was, whatever.

I'll do it. It's always in person. It's a good thing. I mean, the only issue I have in person is we'll be at an airport bar and someone will recognize me and want to do a shot. I'm like, yeah, cool. But someone else will see me and they want a shot. And then, you know, all of a sudden it's like, okay, you 10 guys had a shot. I had 10 shots. This is bad. Damn, dude. But no, I mean, it was uncharted territory because, you know, even I was talking to different agents about speaking and he said, I'm trying to figure out if,

you know, trying to price the guy that killed Hitler. And I'm like, well, Hitler killed himself. And he goes, exactly. And so it's just, you know, everything's been new. And I didn't know at first what's going to happen. I don't know now what's going to happen. But, you know, I mean, it's been, people have been good. Yeah. I mean, it created a lot of animosity, you know, obviously throughout the community. And, uh,

You know, we kind of talked a little about that a little bit off camera, but how, how are you? Cause there is a, there's a lot of hate in this community. Oh, there's a lot of hate. And no, it's, it's tough at first because, um, you want, you want to be liked and your reputation means everything. But then you got to realize that, you know, what someone thinks about you is none of your business. Stop wasting the negative energy on what they're thinking of you. And if they're pissed, there's nothing I can do about it. If they ever want to work with me, I'll work with them. That's fine. If you want help, ask, I'll help.

But if you're just hating, then take it somewhere else. I mean, there's a point where you just got to stop caring. I don't care. Yeah. And it's like, there's even been points where they're like, well, we heard you didn't kill Bin Laden. And I'm like, some days I wish I didn't. I'm just telling you what happened. Yeah. How long did it take you to get to that point? Oh, fuck.

A couple years. Yeah, I'll bet. Well, because all you know in the SEAL teams is the SEAL teams. And you're in that bubble. I mean, even when you... You know other SEALs and you know the bartenders. And everyone around you is doing the same shit. I mean, as far as work. And, you know, I found myself in a spot where... I'm just in a spot where anyone could have done it. I just happened to turn the corner. And it's just...

I mean, it sucks. You know, you want to be liked, but there comes a point where what you worry about isn't going to stop it. So yeah, get on with it. Well, I think the reason I'm asking is I think a lot of guys need to hear that because, you know, I don't fucking care. I'll just say whatever's on my mind. That's probably the nicest thing I've ever told. It's in this community, you know, it seems like, like I said, we talked about this earlier, but I want other guys that are coming out to hear this shit is, you know,

In this community, everybody likes each other until you're doing better than they are. And then you're the fucking hate target. Yeah, you're the target. And, you know, there's, I mean, it's 2022 now. Guys are getting out with full careers. You know, first time ever where guys have been in combat their entire career. They're going to get out. They're going to write books. They're going to start companies. And they're going to get a lot of hate from the guys that are in. Yeah.

It seems like as soon as you come out public with anything, it's like, use your resume. There's nothing wrong with that. And I remember one of my first days at Red Squadron, the CEO of Red Squadron said, you know, when we got out, we could all be millionaires. We could take over the world, but we're never going to. Because he recognized it as well, just the animosity. For some reason, like everyone's successful, but then they hate success. Yeah.

I don't get it. I mean, it bothered me for a while, but I'm not losing sleep over it now. Well, that's good. Yeah, that's good. But, well, yeah, let's talk about what you're doing now. Yeah, so I transitioned out of the military. And what I realized is that I didn't know what to do. I had no idea. Am I going to sell sunglasses or t-shirts? Am I going to do whatever? But I learned that a lot of people want the traits that we have.

as Navy SEALs, as special operators, effective communication, problem solving, the ability to have the difficult decisions with people, to run a team, to promote who needs to be in fire, who needs to be. So I started a foundation. It was at first called Your Grateful Nation, but now it's called Special Operators Transition Foundation. And it helps special operators find out where they want to live, what industry they want to be in.

Because I've had employers now with some of the products coming out of universities, they don't want that shit. They said, give me one of these guys, men or women, and I'll teach them how to do this job. I want that attitude in the boardroom. So I've done that transition process.

Foundation and then I just I got myself into public speaking. I've been on TV analyzing different stuff I worked for Fox News for quite a while I started an apparel company RJO apparel stuff like front toward enemy which to me kind of summarizes everything Front towards your problem. Yeah, and on the guess what's in the back the back like even the hoodies We have this front toward enemy and the back says back. It is a it's not a hoodie It's it's an instruction manual on how to wear a hoodie. I

So, you know, we did that. I'm involved with a beer company now called Armed Forces Brewing Company, which is veteran-owned. Me and a couple of our SEALs, McTeams and Ray Cashcare. We have different beer for different branches. We actually, for the Army-Navy game, we had beat Army and beat Navy cans. We sold out at the Army-Navy game. We're getting distribution in 50 states.

Just because it's cool and it's a beer and it's for veterans. Not just for veterans, but for Americans. Veteran owned for American. And Americans like beer and they like veterans. So anything like that, just entrepreneurial stuff. Like I said, the more special operators, more Navy SEALs I can work with, the better because we're going to do better. And it's just, it is what you make it. I mean, you can sit at home and feel sorry for yourself or you can go do it.

Yeah, that's for damn sure. So what about the new book, The Way Forward? The Way Forward I wrote with Dakota Meyer, who is a Medal of Honor recipient, a Marine,

uh ganjigal valley one of the worst fights i've ever heard his story is incredible i'm not even going to tell it read the book it's amazing similar to me shooting that guy in the room he got in a fight where he's rescuing uh his entire team died he's pulling him out and he got hit in the back a butt stroke from a taliban guy and he actually got into a fist fight to the death with a dude

To the point where he was getting choked out. And I don't know if he faked being choked out, but he ended up turning around. He shot him with a .40 Mike Mike. It didn't arm, but it hit him. And then he ended up killing this guy with a rock. Oh, shit. And it's the point. And again, I don't want to tell his story, but it's like he says there's a point in a man's life where you're looking him in the eyes and you both know it's coming. And then the book's called The Way Forward because it's now what?

We did all this fighting. We did all this killing. You start to question why we're killing these people and what's the way forward. Everything from anxiety to abuse in the bottle to suicides. What do we do next? And I think everyone has what do we do now. We talked about the CEOs that have their first day. What next? And that's what it's about. Dakota's awesome. But again, with the animosity, he's got stories where he's got, I mean, I thought the Marines were the tightest group.

That's what I think. Are they not? No. He's gotten the Medal of Honor physically ripped off of his neck at a Marine Corps ball. You've got to be shitting me. And so it kind of addresses the... What the fuck, guys?

So, I mean, it's a great book. The stories are incredible because I talk about everything from, it's the transition from the military to the adventures that I get into. The story about my wedding that Kid Rock is in, how we lost the wedding rings and I had to get my buddy Shorty to find them and how he, I had brand new security at, I'm at a church in, in,

Massachusetts at Cape Cod and I hired local cops to be security because I have some celebrities there Like I said Kid Rock was there and I'm I don't know who's gonna show up because it's a public wedding This guy found the rings and what I told these cops was what you got to look for is their hands and

And especially if a vehicle screams up. My buddy was screaming up to the thing after he found the rings. Hops out, reaches for the rings out of his pocket. He's getting drawn down by these cops and just sprints in, hands me the rings. And then it goes on to other Kentucky Derby stuff. But the one story I have in the way forward is, I'm not going to ruin it at all, but it's a hunting story.

With me, some guys I grew up with, my father, my nephew, my brother, and some Boston police officers. And I've been called out more on that story being bullshit than the Bin Laden raid. Oh, shit. Oh, the story's hilarious. But you don't... Let's hear it. Well, the way it started...

I don't want to ruin the book, but I brought my brother with me. My brother's a DJ, a morning show DJ. He's not a hunter at all. Never been a hunter. But I brought him out to the Powder River in eastern Montana, which has some of the best hunting in the world. And we're going to split up. I sent my brother Tom with my buddy Smooth, and they're going to go this way. What I didn't realize at the time is Smooth is a former Army guy. He loves to hunt. Like he's hiking. Tommy's not. He doesn't like to do that shit. So he's humping up this hill.

We're on the other side. I got some of the Boston police guys there. And another truck went up there looking for elk. And I guess my brother was lagging a little bit far back. My buddy Smooth said, you know what? You stay here. I'll keep you in eye shot. I'm going to keep walking up. And all of a sudden, my brother Tommy started roasting a bull. And he comes back. My buddy Smooth comes back. He goes, what the fuck are you doing? And he goes, what, do you want some? He goes...

"What about the deer?" And he goes, "Fuck the deer. I didn't bring enough for the deer." So they're doing this. I'm on one end and we're trying to set up another ambush. We have radios, which is totally illegal. Now my buddy Swift and Ed are in a truck driving up. On the way out here, they'd stopped at a gas station and Ed decided to buy a Reuben at a gas station that had probably been under the heat lamp for a solid three days. Not a good idea.

So we got these radios. He immediately got some really bad diarrhea. And I hear over the radio, oh my God, Ed just shot himself. And I said, what? He shot himself? And he goes, no, Ed just shit himself. And I'm like, well, how bad is it? And he goes, pretty bad. He filled his socks. So they're driving down. My buddy shit his pants. My brother's getting high. I'm over here. I'm like, look, we're going to call this a day. Get out of the mountains. So we go back to the cabin, break out the whiskey. And I said the next day, um,

we're going to hunt the white tails because we're in the mountains looking for mule deer and elk now we're going to go to the white tails they're down by the river that's you know a couple hundred meters this way me and smooth they're going to walk through here we're going to push these white tails out they're going to see the bend in the river some will cross but some will come to you so i send my my father down to one end with my nephew and i said to my dad dad here's the deal all you got to do is nothing just sit here nothing

So we go out there. We put the cops out here. We're pushing them. Now we're doing sort of an ambush again. The deer come out. They run to the cops. They blast a few. We get in here. A buck comes past me. I shoot him. And then my buddy, Smooth, who just couldn't get a break on this trip, I see this monster white-tailed buck, and I can see Smooth pointing at it. And he just kind of puts the gun down and yells, God damn it!

And I said, "What? Why didn't you shoot?" And he goes, "The only two things I saw in the scope was that huge buck and your fucking dad." Oh, shit. My dad got up and was just walking through there, like a geriatric or whatever. And he felt so bad, my dad just goes,

next time just shoot so so it's like all right cool whatever um no before we do this sorry tommy was worn out my brother tom from the hump the day before so when i was knocking on the door i was like come on we're hunting he's like no we aren't doing anything i'm sleeping so i go to my um the deer that i killed we're gutting them me and smooth and then swift comes out on a four-wheeler obviously with because it is seven in the morning and uh he said hey congratulate oh tommy got his buck too

And I said, "No, that's not possible. Tommy's asleep." And he goes, "No, Tom shot a buck." And what turned out to happen is Swift was on the... We started this ambush. Swift saw these bucks running towards the thing and he'd already filled his tag. And so he's knocking on Tommy's door. He's like, "Tommy, get out here." And so Tommy came out and probably a joint in his hand. And he said, "Well, shit." And someone handed him a gun and he shot this buck that was coming, whatever. And we go, "Tommy, how'd you shoot that buck?" And he goes, "He was coming right for us."

He goes, I was in my best porch camouflage. Holy shit. And he goes, so what do I do now? And they go, now you put on orange and we go get the damn thing. Damn, dude. So yeah, but people have said there's no way that happened. But that's one of the stories. Well, I'll link all the everything below, you know, for people to go buy it. And hey, man, I don't, you know, we've been going for quite a while, so.

Might as well end it, but... Awesome, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you for coming and sharing all those firsthand accounts. My pleasure. Best of luck to you. Appreciate it.

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