#4 Nick Kefalides - Marine Raider / MARSOC Operator 02:51:52

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Get a subscription, support the show. Thank you. Let's get on with it. He proceeds to look at me and one of my other comrades and he's like, hey, go ahead and put the body on the hood. On the hood of what? So you fucking took out number three. Having that natural instinct to react and to do what needs to be done. You can't train for that. You were hand selected again to come on as a fucking operator.

A car bomb was driven into one of our vehicles on the convoy. We did what we were trained to do. They were taking kids and filling their bicycle tires with explosives and they would have the kids ride their bike towards the convoy and start detonating their fucking bicycles. I got up on the top of the roof and started engaging targets and you can see the guys were running back and forth. Sure enough, they're still coming.

And I just engaged a single round to each guy. They were from all different directions. We cut out murder holes in the walls. You're 19 years old and you just got your first engagement and shot your first man. Your fucking service record is amazing. I've worked with a lot of different operators from all different branches, especially when I was at CIA. If I could go back...

and operate with somebody that I didn't get to before, you would be fucking top of my list, dude. And I don't say that shit to very many people. Welcome back to the Sean Ryan Show. I want to kick things off and say thank you to all our patrons on Patreon who've been supporting the show behind the scenes. Because of your support, we've been able to upgrade all of our equipment, and you'll see the benefits of that as you watch the show.

Also, I want to give a big thank you to everyone who took the time to go to iTunes, hit the subscribe button, and leave us a review. If you haven't done that yet, please go to iTunes, hit the subscribe button, leave us a review. Even if it's just one word, that's what we need to get this show up in the top charts. If you're watching this on YouTube,

and you're going to want to because there's real gunfight footage of our next guest in combat in Afghanistan. Hit the subscribe button on YouTube, hit the like button, share it with all your friends, leave us a comment, and with that being said, I'm ready to introduce my next guest, number 004.

He's a United States Marine with four combat deployments. He spent some time in the infantry on the front lines in Iraq back in the early days.

He was hand-selected to become a plank owner of MARSOC, which is the special operations unit out of the United States Marine Corps and became a Marine Raider. He shot and killed the number three high-value threat in Afghanistan in his time. Guys, if you think you have what it takes to become a Marine Raider, you better fucking think again.

At the end of this, there'll be a debrief covering the entire experience. We also interviewed his wife while they were here. Everyone, this is better than entertainment. This is the real thing. Please welcome my very good friend, Mr. Nick Kefalidis. Nick, it's an honor to have you here, man. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, man. It's truly an honor to be here, to just be able to sit in this chair, knowing the guys that have sat here before me. Some bad motherfuckers have sat in that chair. It's a privilege, truly. Well, I'm just super stoked you guys got out here. I know it's a little out of the way, but, you know, the last time we saw each other was, what, two or three years ago, probably teaching on the fucking gun range, and...

Then we kind of split and you went to Tampa and I stayed on the fucking range for a while. But but anyways, now you're a professional fisherman and that's fucking awesome. I'm like super stoked. So I got you a present. Oh, shit. That might help you take your fishing to the next level. So if you reach over there. Yeah, there it is. Oh, what's in there?

No peeking. Hey, no peeking? No, none. Okay. You want me to go ahead and open it? Go ahead. All right. Oh, God. Dude.

These will come in handy. I love to snack when I'm out on the boat. It's just like feeding is continuous. So those are actually great bait for bass. Oh, no shit? Yeah, and there's different colors in there so you can use them. Okay, cool. Some colors work better for different seasons. Yeah, yeah. I know the red ones, they like for spawning.

I really appreciate it, dude. I'll try to make sure that these make it till tonight. Right on. But getting kind of into it, I've been really looking forward to this one because we haven't had a Marine on yet. And so I'm excited about that because my personal opinion is I think the Marine Corps is probably the most effective force

self-sustaining unit or branch of the military because they're so they're self-sustaining I think you guys are probably the most eager to get in there and get to war you do you guys are very fucking effective extremely violent and hungry for it and definitely the biggest libo risks out of I'd have to agree with that yeah

Uh, there's Marines. There's definitely fucking trouble. Yeah. I've told people before, you know, if you haven't partied with a group of Marines before you, you really haven't experienced part. It's just a whole nother level. Yeah. But, um, and I'm excited because you are actually, you might, you're one of the only guys I've ever met who actually has real ground combat time in a, in an unconventional unit when, um,

You were soft and in a conventional unit when you were a grunt. And I kind of want to go into the differences that you saw on both being a grunt and a MARSOC operator. But anyways, let's start with your childhood. So where did you grow up? I grew up in South Florida, Palm Beach County area. So my mom and my dad were actually both Marines.

I can actually say my mama wore combat boots. No shit. Yeah. So mom and dad were both Marines. They were stationed together in Hawaii. And that's where I was born there in Kanaue Bay, Hawaii. At a young age, we moved from there shortly after my mom and my dad got out of the Marine Corps. They both did enlistment and got out.

moved back to Florida, which was home for them. That was my first time as a baby, you know, when we moved from where I was born to Florida. And then I grew up there, you know, all through grade school and high school and everything. So South Florida is what I would essentially call home. So your parents were both Marines, but you weren't necessarily a military brat. They were out like at a very young age. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. But, you know, anybody that's been in the Marine Corps kind of knows that that

in that lifestyle. It sticks with you. You don't really... You know, they have that saying, once a Marine, always a Marine. I feel like it kind of holds true because...

You keep that regimented lifestyle, you know, that discipline. And they passed that down to me. I mean, my childhood, man, I remember getting like chores in my house consisting of like white glove inspections to make sure I dusted my bathroom correctly and shit. Holy shit. Shit that I had no clue was actually going to be relevant during my time in the Marine Corps because you actually get inspections.

Like you get inspected on how you clean things and stuff like that. You guys have the worst inspections. Yeah. Whether it's a uniform inspection or field day or, you know, field day is the term that we use to clean. You know, it would be like every Thursday would be field day. And there's times I can remember, dude, we've had inspections. You know, our company gunny would come through and the inspections would go. We just keep failing until like 3 o'clock in the morning.

And we had to be up for PT at five. And I think there was a kind of a method to the madness, if you will. Like it wasn't just to make us, you know, just to be, you know, mean to us and be like, no, you suck at cleaning. It was to see how we would perform with sleep deprivation, you know, being up all night and then having to perform two hours later, you know, on a strenuous, you know, PT exercise or doing a ruck march or a hike or something like that. So, yeah. Yeah.

So what did your parents do in the Marine Corps? So my dad was a combat engineer. My mom was an administrative clerk. And then my stepfather, he's a Vietnam-era Marine scout sniper. He did multiple tours over Vietnam and saw some pretty hairy shit. No shit. So when did your stepdad come into the picture?

Yeah. How old was I when my stepdad came into the picture? I want to say I was like probably 12, 11, 12 years old when he came into the picture. Okay. So I was still fairly young, you know, almost a teenager. Were you close with your biological father? Yeah. Yeah. I've always been, my dad and I have always been close. Are you close with your stepfather? I mean, close in a sense, like

We could go months without talking and then pick up right where we left off kind of thing. Like, we're not like, you know, close as my biological father and I are. But, I mean, we get along good. There were some times during my childhood where we didn't get along just for, you know, random reasons. But that's just, you know, childhood and parenting, you know, in general. That's how it is. So he was a fucking scout sniper in Vietnam with multiple tours? Yeah. Yeah.

He saw some shit. He had some kills under his belt and stuff like that. And I think I kind of, you know, like a lot of teenagers, you kind of go through that phase where, you know, you don't really want to, you know, follow the rules and that shit. And he was just like, hey, you're going to fucking live here. You're going to live by my fucking rules. And him and I fucking butted heads quite a bit. But, you know, you get past that shit, you know. Yeah. As I've gotten older and I've matured, him and I have gotten closer and closer. The Vietnam era is like,

I'm in fact, that's, that's the whole reason I even joined the military to begin with. Oh, no shit. Yeah. Like I just, I, I, I feel like that, that era just got, I mean, those were some hard dudes and they did not have, like, they didn't have the backing of the country like World War II did not to take anything from World War II. Cause that was, you know what I mean? But,

But coming home from Vietnam, you definitely weren't getting a fucking pat on the back. Hell no. And I think that Vietnam is like really where special operations and unconventional warfare really started to come into play. I agree. And yeah, I mean, so would he tell you things that happened over there or...

He didn't really advertise stuff. He wasn't a big drinker, but if he had a couple beers on a random occasion or whatever, he'd loosen up and some things would kind of slip, especially if it was like me and one of my stepbrothers were around. It was just us, and it was kind of that environment where it wasn't a bunch of family members and people around. He had said some things, but you could tell he had been...

He'd been through some shit. Like, he has pretty severe PTSD. I mean, we knew it. Like, I was exposed to that as a kid before I even knew what the fuck PTSD was. Yeah. You know, even when I joined the Marine Corps, I didn't really have a true understanding of kind of what he went through. But I just remember, like, waking up in the middle of the night as a kid and I could, like...

My bedroom was kind of right down the hallway from our living room, our family room. And he had one of those lazy boy recliners. And I remember waking up at night, and this happened multiple times, where I could hear the rocking chair squeaking.

like somebody was sitting in it and I just thought it was really bizarre I'm like you know as a kid you're like oh my god is there a ghost in the house or whatever and I remember waking up in the middle of the night and just not being able to resist going out there and see why this chair was squeaking so I'd get up like I was going to the bathroom and uh he'd be sitting there like in the dark with his 357 magnum sitting on his lap fuck man and like I don't know what kind of state of mind he was in

you know, or what he was doing. I didn't ask. I just remember going out there, seeing it and him being like, what are you doing? And I was like, oh, I had to go to the bathroom. And so I didn't know at the time, I thought it was really strange. But years later, as I came to understand what PTSD was and kind of some of the things associated with having PTSD, I kind of realized, well, you know, he was just kind of having one of those moments, you know? I mean, yeah.

You probably fucking saved his life by coming out of your room. There's no telling, dude. Yeah. There's no telling. Holy shit. Yeah. Do you see a lot of similarities between what you've gone through and looking back, what he was doing? Yeah, absolutely, man. Yeah? A lot of the isolation, anger, stuff like that. You're trained to...

to act with violence. You know what I mean? And you come back and you're put into civilization and you're expected to act as a normal member of society. Forget everything you know. Yeah, yeah. So I can surely relate to seeing how he had reacted at certain times and the way he was. Surely does relate to the way I've dealt with it. So growing up, did that...

Did those stories, is that what inspired you to become a Marine yourself or walk us through that? Not really, because I mean, well, in a sense, yeah. Like he did tell me a lot of cool stories about like the Marine Corps and, you know, like, you know, some of the experiences he got to, you know, got to enjoy. And my dad did the same thing. You know, they...

at the time they wanted me to join the Marine Corps. They knew that it was going to be a good thing. It would set me straight. It would set me up. Even if I did one enlistment, they knew that the Marine Corps was going to be a good thing. So they had always kind of pushed, you know, Hey, you're going to join the Marines, right? You're going to, you know, my, my dad just kind of made like, he just kind of was like, you know, well, the Marine Corps, you know, set you up, you know, you get free college and you teach a discipline and you know, you'll be regimented. You'll meet some really good people. Um,

I don't know, man. It was in the back of my mind. I kind of always knew that I was going to join. What age would you say? Like it became like very apparent, like, well, this is where I'm going.

Honestly, man, 9-11. 9-11? Yeah. Even as a kid growing up, I watched Full Metal Jacket and different war movies and stuff because I found that very intriguing. As a kid, I was always a little shit. I was always getting into fights and beating people up and stupid shit. I just love that adrenaline. I wanted to serve my country. I wanted to...

protect the people and that's kind of essentially what you know you were trained to do and how old were you when the towers went down I was I want to say I was 16 years old I was sitting in I was sitting in math class and you know it's it's kind of vague to me and how it happened but I just remember I

The phone ringing in the classroom, my teacher's phone's ringing and he answers the phone. It was like, like as if like he never stopped, but he stopped like as if it was an emergency and,

And next to, you know, uh, he hangs up and he had a TV in his classroom. A lot of us, you know, growing up, you remember you had like some days you would watch like movies or documentaries or history or something like that. He had a TV in his classroom and he rolls the TV out and he plugs it in and he turns on the TV and we just are watching, you know, the towers had just fell, uh,

you know chaos ensued and you know we're all kind of like we're kids man we're looking at each other and we're like the fuck is going on like what just happened slowly but surely like you know this picture is being painted as to what just happened you know to our country you know and i had some time to kind of really ponder the whole thing that was going on and uh that was kind of the

That was kind of the moment, man. That was the moment for me. I knew right then and there. I was like, I'm fucking going. No shit. So, like, as it's happening in, like, real time, that's when you're like, this is, I'm fucking going. I was so fucking enraged, dude. Like, I was so enraged. I just wanted to get in on the fight, you know? Yeah. I knew that, I knew who was responsible for that attack on our own soil, and I just wanted, I was up for blood. Damn. Yeah.

That's pretty heavy for a 16-year-old. So when did you wind up... When did you actually enlist in the Marine Corps? Well, it's kind of interesting. I didn't enlist until I was 18, but I had moved out of the house at the age of 16. No shit. Yeah, I was living on my own at the age of 16. All on your own? Yeah. Like, I literally was in high school, and I had a fucking apartment and a job. Damn. Yeah. So...

From that age of like 16 to 18, there was a lot of fucking off in between there. Boozer? Oh, dude. Like, not really booze, but just like adrenaline junkie. Like, just... I used to street race a lot. I had a couple of the Fox Body style Mustangs and I was into muscle cars. I was into street racing. I was into going fast. And...

I'm telling you, if I, if I hadn't joined the Marine Corps, I would have ended up either dead or in jail. Like I'm convinced that I would have ended up either dead or in jail had I not joined the Marine Corps. Damn. Yeah. I can relate to that. I could definitely relate to that. But, uh, so, so you joined at 18 at 18. Yep. At 18. Um, you know, I was talking to my recruiter, you know, really good dude, Jason Batson. Um,

And him and I actually became pretty good friends. Like we, we hung out quite a bit. Like, I don't know. He, I, he took a liking to me and he wasn't one of those recruiters. I was just like, you know, Hey, like you should do this. And, you know, it was just worried about, you know, hitting his quota. He really did give me some tips and pointers to kind of get me pointed in the right direction to help set me up for success. Once I did, you know, graduate bootcamp and all that stuff. But yeah, 18, um,

I remember at the time that I was supposed to go, there was a huge hurricane growing up in Florida. It's a huge hurricane every summer, but there was a huge hurricane coming and I was kind of torn between, okay, do I stay and like make sure my family's going to be okay? Or do I go? And, uh, you know, I don't know what, what's going to happen. My dad was like, you need to go, just go. Like, don't worry about anything at home. This is your time. Go. Which, uh,

Sorry, let me interject here. I'm just curious. Which real dad, stepdad, which one was kind of like guiding you in that direction? My real dad. Your real dad? My real dad, yeah. Your stepdad, was he like get in there or? No, not really. You know, my dad was probably the most impactful individual in my life. So, you know, when he died,

He was a father, but he's also a mentor. My dad, he was probably one of the biggest models in my life in terms of being a mentor and a father. What he thought meant a lot to me. I was very critical of myself and everything that he would say and do. I would try to learn from him because he's just full of knowledge.

And, uh, he just, he, he told me, he's like, you need to not worry about what's going on here. If this is what you want to do, you need to go. Don't sit back. Don't just go. No shit. Yeah. No. And, uh, knowing like knowing that you wanted to go to combat, I don't think it was really a reality for him at that point because this was like, I mean, it was, it was still early on. Yeah. And, uh, I just don't think it really registered for him. Yeah. Um,

Until I graduated boot camp, got assigned to my unit, went through the School of Infantry, assigned to my unit, and started a workup to deploy. We started training right off the bat. Hold on, let's backtrack just a second. So you went in the Marine Corps. What was your contract? Basically, I signed up to be a ground pounder, to be an 0311 infantry rifleman. What's that pipeline look like?

Honestly, man, the pipeline is short. You go to an eight-week course, School of Infantry, and they teach you just basic infantry skill sets. Different weapon systems, different tactics, patrolling, hand and arm signals, radio communications, just basic stuff that can be built upon. Once you get to your unit, the follow-on training continues. It's a little bit more advanced training.

a little bit more fine-tuned if you will you know one thing that uh like really that i want to say about the marine corps is or i want to ask actually is a marine like grunt unit is

fucking effective at what they do. And, uh, historically, not just, you know, modern day warfare, uh, you know, starting from nine 11 in the middle East and, uh, to the invasion of Fallujah and shit, but, you know, Vietnam, uh, Somalia, they're more hungry than any other fucking branch than any other unit. It's a very young demographic and, uh,

What is it about that, like, that's different than the other branches, I guess is kind of what I'm asking, is at what point or what do they do in that training that motivates the Marines so much more than the Marines?

than the other units. I mean, every single fucking Marine that I meet is, I mean, they, they are fucking hungry. And, uh, and I can't say that for, for every unit, uh, in the other branches. Yeah. I'd have to agree with that. Um, it's funny you mentioned that because we, you know, I respect all branches of military. I don't give a shit whether you were a cook or whether you were a gunner and a turret, like,

You were contributing to the mission in some aspect. You've got my respect, but it took me time to grow to that, have that mentality. Uh, I used to be like, you know, fuck that. If you're not infantry, you're just a POG. POG being the acronym we use for personnel other than grunt. Uh,

But we used to laugh and be like... People that had never done time in the military before would ask me, like, what's the biggest difference in the Army and the Marine Corps? By no means am I bashing the Army, but I used to be like, all right, so think of meat eaters and leaf eaters. You've got the two here. We're carnivores. I don't know, man. It just... I think...

It starts from the day you arrive at boot camp and you step on those yellow footprints. They literally break you the fuck down mentally, physically, psychologically to nothing. I mean, I'm sitting there watching grown fucking men cry like babies to go home. You know, guys claiming that, you know, all of a sudden now their religion doesn't allow them to...

you know, to, uh, be involved in the training that we're required to do. And I basically, man, it's, it's like a mentality that they ingrain into you, just the way that they train you. And then they build you back up, you know, to, to be what they want you to be. And I think it's just like, by the time you graduate bootcamp, especially in a wartime, like, you know, you're hearing and seeing about all this shit that's going down and you just got these, you know,

that just got done training their entire life for three fucking months consisted of making it so that they can go. Yeah. So knowing that they're going to go to combat, you know? Yeah. Um,

I don't know, man. I really think it's a lot of tradition, the way from boot camp, as regimented it is, the way the drill instructors are. I mean, it is, it's, I'm going to say like for me, boot camp from a physical aspect was not a challenge. I, you know, I was prepared. I made sure that I prepared for boot camp, you know, physically I was there.

What I wasn't ready for was the psychological aspect. And that's where they really kind of build you up. And man, by the time you graduate boot camp, man, you're just, you know, you're a machine. You're thirsty for blood, you know, and they've trained you to be this machine. Yeah. I mean, it's fucking effective. And another thing that I find really common amongst Marines is, I mean, you guys are fucking tight and you take care of your own.

And a lot of other units, especially in soft units, we can be a little dramatic at times. But, I mean, it functions and we're very effective. But I can't say that about we can flip the switch and turn it on. You know what I mean? And we can also turn it off.

And that's when usually, you know, bored soft guys, a lot of fucking drama winds up, uh, happening sometimes. And, but I don't really see that in the Marine Corps. And one thing I noticed when I was going through training, uh, both at, uh, in the SEAL teams and at CIA was, um,

A lot of the other branches, like guys, like they finish their shit and they're fucking gone. And at a very young age when I went through buds, I think, uh, I think when I got, I was about 19 and, um, the guys that were switching over from the Marine, uh, grunt units, uh,

were always the last ones out. They were always the ones that were, um, helping guys with their swim times. They were helping guys with their rifles, how to clean them, how to take them apart. It was, it was always, uh, the Marines or Navy corpsman who, uh, served with a Marine. Um,

They had that shit down pat, every fucking one of them that I met. And they were all solid dudes. In fact, the guy that won Honor Man in my Buds class was a former Force Recon guy. But it just helped me understand what happens. Because it really is. Every one of them that I've met is like that.

I think there is. They really put a lot of emphasis on... I'll give you an example. If you're on a platoon run or something, you're only as fast as your slowest man. So everybody knows, I don't give a fuck if you can run three miles in 17 minutes fast.

This guy here can only run it in 22 minutes or 23 minutes. We need to up his run time because as a unit, we're only as fast as that guy. And I think that crosses over into every aspect, whether it has to do with training or whether you're in combat or you're in schools and you're learning, just gaining more knowledge. I think we've just always had that.

That mentality kind of ingrained in us to help the guys within you because it's not about you. Collectively, you're a unit, and the success of that unit doesn't just rely on one or two people. It relies on everybody within that squad or that platoon. But it's also tough to say. I mean, it's part of the process. Tough to pinpoint it. Yeah, I mean, they break you down.

And just everything, all the training, which, I mean, it's been so long for me, I can't even recall half the shit we did in boot camp. So you join at 18, get through boot camp, you go to infantry school, and then you get to what unit? I get assigned to 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines. And what year is this? This is 2000, this is the end of 2004, I want to say it was like.

Actually, it was probably December timeframe of 2004, maybe January of 2005. I get assigned to 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines. Okay. And that's stationed there in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Okay. How much time does it take to show up to boot camp?

Get through that, go to infantry school. Now you're at the unit. How much time are we talking? Six months, a year? Five months. You got three months for Marine Corps boot camp and then the School of Infantry is eight weeks. So add another two months. You're looking at five months. Sometimes when you graduate boot camp, you might get a week of leave between the time you graduate boot camp and the time you go to School of Infantry or you might get a month. It just really depends on time of year, holidays, you know, stuff like that. No shit. So...

In five months, you go from fucking dumbass high school kid who's racing cars to a fucking warfighter within five months. Completely changed mindset. Everything's different. I wouldn't say that you're a full-fledged, ready-to-go warfighter, but you've got some training under your belt. You've got that mentality ingrained in your head. At that point, you know that

It's happening. I mean, you're definitely a war fighter, whether you like it or not. You know what I mean? Because you're fucking going. Yeah. And so how long were you at that unit until you got your first deployment orders? Like six months. That's it? Yeah. Like when I got to the unit...

They were pretty much had already started a workup. Workup for the deployment can last anywhere from five months to nine months, depending on how much time you have.

When I got there, they were already in the middle of a workup. So I got there and jumped right into training. I mean, we were going to places like, you know, going out to California and doing training there on Lejeune and stuff like that. Like we were getting ready, you know. And it was shortly after that when we got our date as to when we were leaving. How long did you have before you were leaving? It was about, you're talking about for training? For your first deployment. Between the time I got to my unit and the time? Yeah. It was probably about six months.

So, okay, so we're looking at a year from enlistment to deployment? Pretty much. Less than a year. No shit. Yeah. Where were you going? We were going to Iraq. We were going to a place called Al-Karma, Iraq, which is just north of Fallujah. Oh, fuck. Anybody that's been deployed to Iraq probably knows about the city of Karma or the town, the village of Karma.

It's a bad fucking place, man. Yeah. Probably one of the fucking worst places I've been in my life. Had they already... Had the Marine Corps already invaded Fallujah at that point? Yes. That was 03, I believe, right? Yeah, yeah. The initial invasion had already taken place, but there was just a lot of residual just bullshit still going down. So you're like fucking, what, 19 years old at this time? Yeah. What... How did they tell you, like, where you're going? Do they...

I mean, I know how they do it in the SEAL teams. You kind of know, like, the entire fucking workup where you're going. Yeah, it's different because it's like, you know, they really utilize the chain of command in the line company or the infantry units. So somebody in my position, you know, I didn't know shit. I just did what I was told.

That was it. I followed orders. The way they let us know, I guess, you know, as it got closer to deployment date, they called in the platoon sergeants and the squad leaders. And they, you know, sat all these guys down, let them know where we were going, roughly about how long we were going to be gone. And they were then ordered to, you know, hey, you need to disseminate this information to your guys, right?

With obviously a laundry list of shit that needs to be done prior to deployment. You know, next of kin and, you know, living wills and shit like that. Shit that you normally like, you don't really think about. But that's the shit you really got to take care of before you leave. Yeah. I mean, did any of that shit even seem real at the time? Did it hit you what you were getting ready to go do at all? I don't think it hit me until I stepped off the bus in Kuwait.

Oh. We got, we were in Kuwait and I stepped off the bus. That fucking door opened, dude. And it was like, think of like when you open an oven door, how that fucking dry heat just fucking hits you. Yeah. That's what it felt like when the door to that bus opened and we got off and we looked around and we're like, it's going to be a long fucking summer, boys. A whole fucking, a whole nother world. Yeah. Yeah.

What did they... Did you have any fucking clue how dangerous, how bad it was where you were going? Did they give you a briefing or were they just... I mean, this is where we're going. Get your shit ready. This is when we leave. Dude, honestly, man. When we got there... I can't remember the unit that we did left seat, right seat with, but...

They went out with us for a few days, you know, on some convoys and stuff. And they were like, yeah, man, we've gotten like two engagements in the last six months. It's been really quiet, you know, not really much to report. You know, they gave us what info they had, but it was really not that kinetic of an environment at that time. No shit. Yeah. And then if you fast forward,

to a month or two into our deployment, we were getting engagements every fucking day, getting blown up by IEDs, rocketed. I mean, you name it, dude, it was happening. And there's a reason that that took place. Oh, shit. Yeah. Well, let's take a quick commercial break, and we'll pick up right where we left off on your first combat deployment. Sometimes these episodes can be pretty long, and they will always keep you on the edge of your seat.

rather than sit here and watch it alone, why don't you head over to vigilanceelite.com, buy yourself some company, and get some Vigilance Elite gummy bears. Not bad. All right, we're back from the break, and we left off. You're on your first combat deployment with the infantry unit. You guys did a turnover, and they told you that everything's been pretty cool and calm and collected in the city and pretty inactive.

So let's go from there. Yeah. So they basically tell us, Hey, you know, we were just trying to gain the atmospherics as to what's going on. And they told us, you know, Hey, it's been uneventful. Um, you know, and they showed us, you know, different, different areas and, and, uh, you know, in our area of operation, you know, points of interest and things like that. Uh, but, uh,

you know, for the most part, when they were like, all right, you guys got it, you know, uh, they were like, you guys got nothing really to worry about. Everything's good. You know, just, you know, mind your P's and Q's, keep your eyes peeled kind of thing. Uh, and it wasn't, it wasn't even a week into the deployment where, uh, you know, we got our first engagement, you know, it just happened like that, you know, and at the time you had, uh, Al Qaeda was, was in the area. Uh, that's kind of who we were fighting at the time was Al Qaeda. And, um,

You know, they're always going to test the waters. They know when new units are coming in, you know, so they're going to test the waters. They're going to see what, you know, what they're dealing with here. So long story short, I think we were convoying from 1OP to back to Camp Fallujah at the time or something like that. I think we were like transporting. That's what it was. It was our company commander needed to go from one of our observation posts back to Camp Fallujah for a big meeting with the general.

And we were the ones that were going to be transporting him and providing security. So, you know, we mount up, we're going on this convoy and we're approaching, you know, we're going down MSR Chicago, which is like the main route, you know, to get back to Camp Fallujah. And there was an abandoned building, you know, kind of off to our right flank. And a guy basically just jumped out of the, you know, one of the doorways of the abandoned building and just starts, you know, lighting up the convoy with an AK and

And, you know, we smoked his ass. It was just like, you know, he's done. Stopped the convoy. CO decides he wants to get out and check out the situation. So we cleared the compound, you know, the abandoned house where that guy was in. Make sure the guy's, you know, dead and all that stuff. And he proceeds to look at me and one of my other comrades. And he's like, hey, go ahead and put the body on the hood.

On the hood of what? On the hood of the number one Vic, which was his vehicle. He put a dead body on the hood of the lead vehicle. I was just as shocked as you are, man. I was like, sir. And he's like, do what I fucking said. Put that dude on the fucking hood of my vehicle. And so at that time, you know, we're rolling around and, and up armored Humvees and, uh,

We would do random vehicle checkpoints. Like if we were in an area where we wanted to start searching people, we would have 50 feet of Constantine wire compressed. Essentially, it's razor wire, barbed wire, whatever you want to call it. We'd compress it, coil it up, put it on the hood of the Humvee and strap it down. So this way when we need it, we just cut the straps, pull it out, and now we got our vehicle checkpoint ready.

And so we put this dude on the hood, and you had this dead guy, he's bleeding all over the place. He's all kind of tangled up in the C wire. - Hold on, let's backtrack here. So how many fucking cars are in infantry?

At this point, I think we had four, maybe five vehicles. Typically, when we rolled around as a platoon in that deployment, it was four Humvees. But I think we had an extra one because it was the headquarters vehicle, which was the CO and then his personal radio guy and all that. Okay. I was expecting like 20, 30 cars. No, this was a small convoy. That's how we rolled around. It was pretty small. And then this guy, it was just a loner just getting his fucking jihad on. Yeah, just a dude. I don't know what.

Honestly, man, I don't know what the fuck was going through his head. You're one dude and you got a convoy of fucking four or five Humvees, but it didn't end well for him. How close was he to the convoy? Man, he was close, dude. He was probably less than 100 yards. If I had to guess, I'd say probably about 70, 80 yards. Okay, that's far. I'm guessing it was like

Usually when that happens, everybody wants to pull the fucking trigger. Everybody pulled the trigger. Okay. So he had a lot of... We had just gotten into country. It hadn't been a week. And you've got young PFCs and Lance Corporals who have had all this training for the past year and finally have the opportunity to utilize it. So, yeah, everybody pretty much... It all happened at once. I mean...

It didn't last long, but nonetheless, yeah, it was a little bit of overkill. So you're 19 years old, and you just got in your first engagement and shot your first man, and then threw him on the hood of the lead vehicle. Yeah. We had boners up until we were told to put him on the vehicle. That's where you draw the line, huh? Well, we were like, wait, what? Guys, this was a lot of fun, but...

Shit's getting a little weird. Yeah. And from that day on, now mind you, this is a seven-month deployment. This is not even a week into it. From that point on, that entire deployment, we were engaging every single day. Every day? Every day. If it wasn't a firefight, it was being rocketed or RPGed or IEDs. It was always something. Mortars, incoming mortars, like...

It definitely stirred the pot, if you will. How long is a deployment with the infantry? Seven months. Seven months? Seven months. Seven times 30, what's that, 210? That's 210 engagements at a minimum. At a minimum, dude. And you started right off the bat. There's times where, yeah, we would convoy. I remember there was one day where we... My vehicle...

How the fuck I have all my fingers and toes to this day, I don't know. Because I remember a specific day, my vehicle, I don't know how, but by chance, my vehicle got struck by an IED three times in one day. Damn. Three fucking times in one day? Yep. What the fuck kind of vehicle were you riding around in? Well, there's a lot of different variables that go into play with IEDs. Sometimes they bury them too far. Trigger man's not on. You know, the...

you know, detonation devices, there's a lag in it. It's not, you know, as accurate as they're hoping for it to be. So we just lucked out, man. Wow. I mean, there was guys that definitely took shrapnel and got injuries and stuff, but, and those were some of the smaller IDs, I guess that I've encountered throughout my, my time over there. But, uh, I remember that, man, it was like, it was kind of a running joke, you know, as my career progressed, uh,

And I got to different units. It was kind of like the running joke, like, yeah, I don't want to be in his vehicle because I was known for getting blown the fuck up. Man, when we were running vehicles overseas, especially in Iraq, that was the one thing that fucking scared the shit out of me. And I think that was because you have no control. Yeah, that's right, dude. You have no control whatsoever.

And, you know, people ask me all the time, you know, hey, what do you think was worse, Iraq or Afghanistan? And I'm like, depends on what, you know, what we're talking about. But in terms of like,

And people getting wounded or killed, I felt like Iraq because it was just, they didn't really have much of a desire to fight you. Now granted they would, they would initiate an ambush by detonating an IED and then follow up with some pop shots and a couple rounds and then they'd be gone.

In Afghanistan, I mean, you know just as well as I do, those fuckers will sit up there in fucking man dresses and flip flops and fight you in the mountains for days on top. You'll be in a tick for hours. Yeah, they were dedicated. But the IEDs are really like, that was for me too. Like you roll through a marketplace and all of a sudden you see it's just a straight ghost town. Yeah.

Like, you know shit's about to go down. And at the time, we're riding in up-armor Humvees, like the high-back Humvees, which were, you know, they're armor about that thick. Now, granted, it's supposed to be titanium armor that comes up on the back of the Humvee. You're sitting essentially in a pickup truck with armored sides on it. But the armor only came up to about, yay, like about this high. So your head's still kind of sticking out. Oh, shit. So you roll in, you hear them, you know, on the mosque.

On the microphone of the mosque, they're praying. Town is just complete ghost town. You know shit's about to go down, and you're just like... Do you have translators? Yeah, yeah, we had some translators at the time. So were the mosques, at that time, were the mosques putting out, hey, the Americans are running a convoy, come kill them? Because they were doing that all over...

all over every AO, as far as I know. Especially in that time frame. And that's when the EFPs, I believe 04, was when EFPs made an appearance, which were the worst fucking IED ever. Probably still to this day. Well, Nick, I did a lot of research on you before you got here. As much as I could. It's kind of hard to research it because you don't post any of this shit anymore. But...

I talked to a guy who was there with you and he told me a story that you guys were held up in a building and look at you. You don't even know what fucking like, yeah, which building. It's funny, dude, because like there's a lot of shit that I've like, I don't remember about like,

You know, my time overseas, stuff that I... But I'll get around guys that I've served with or buddies of mine. And when they start talking, like, some of them's memories are a lot better than mine. You know, maybe it's part and part to do with my TBI. But they'll start talking and shit starts coming back to me. I'm like, holy fuck, I remember that. Well, let me refresh your memory. So you're taking fire from another building and you were in one of those bombed out, fucking half-built Iraqi houses. And...

There was a small group of guys that was going to go to the house that you guys were getting hit from and kill those fuckers. They needed cover fire. Apparently, the Marines that were on the roof at the time on the machine guns were being pussies. And you ran up the stairs, swatting the Marines off the fucking stairs that were in the fight. Oh, shit, I remember that.

and uh man the machine gun and uh and then they went over and killed those fuckers so your buddy dan instagram handle zero three og yeah ring any bells yeah yeah dan and i go way back man well i got him on the phone here oh no shit oh you got him on the phone hey dan how's it going man

Yeah, thanks for coming on. So I just gave a brief description of the story that we discussed on the phone a couple weeks ago, and I got Nick sitting here, so I'd like to hear the story from your angle and from Nick's angle. So were you guys side-by-side when the initial engagement happened, you and Nick? Yeah.

We were probably, yeah. The same room. Oh, shit. So you fucking run to the roof and give them cover fire, and Dan was able to go. Yeah, they did it. We had probably half a squad do a movement to contact when we started taking fire, and I was just trying to use up as many rounds as possible that we had up there. How many guys? Dan, if you don't mind me asking, how many guys were engaging you? All in the same building? Yeah.

so they got positions and jumped back in their vehicle. And you and how many guys went to go kill five or six dudes? Not even, which was a squad. So, yeah, sounds like it. Yeah, Dan, I think it's safe to say that that deployment probably took years off of our life. Did you get that, Dan? I was saying it's safe to say that that deployment probably took a few years off of our lives.

forget for sure. Nick, you showed me a video right before we came up here of your first deployment and you guys got hit by Al-Qaeda had coordinated an attack on the Iraqi police station.

And you guys found that video on YouTube? The video actually was, yeah, it got released on YouTube somehow. Like, I know that our unit confiscated the camera. Essentially, these guys attacked the Iraqi police station that had been abandoned by the Iraqi police because shit had got so bad in that AO. So we basically took it over and made it into an observation post. All of a sudden, we get the call, QRF, QRF,

The police station's getting attacked. So we roll up there and you can see the guys playing his day. There's probably half a dozen dudes there, you know, PKMs, RPKs, RPGs, you know, just laying it down to the police station. And we roll up, you know, flank them and just...

you know do our thing and uh i guess the video had gotten confiscated now at what point the video went from whoever's hands to making it on youtube it made it to be pretty famous you know pretty infamous uh attack on the iraqi police station in al-karma so it's pretty pretty crazy if we can dig that video up i'm putting it on all right dan's got it dan you have that video yeah yeah

Yeah. He's got more pictures and videos. Walk us through that, if you don't mind. He'd be punished. Oh, shit. And there was a fire. Police station at the time. Some police force. And they tried to... Get him off. It was nuts. Holy fuck. Yeah, my squad was pretty... Like, they were pretty lit. Like, my squad had some problems. Like...

Just the guys that were in that squad were just not, they had a couple screws loose. But it really benefited us for that deployment, I can tell you that. Yeah. Damn. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you calling in, Dan. And you guys got anything to say to each other before I end the call here? Yeah. Hey, bro.

I really appreciate it. It was definitely a surprise. And I want you to know I love you, man. I love you too, man. I appreciate it. And fish and shrimp. I'm officially guaranteed to get some good ones. Thanks, dude. Well, hey, Dan, I really appreciate it, man. And I'll be in touch soon. All right, man. You too. Later. How'd that feel? It's crazy, man. Like, that guy, like, Dan and I, I mean, we did everything together, dude. Like, we were like...

inseparable like you know just good dude you know everything everything ever since we were in the same company in boot camp we're in the same platoon you know all through school of infantry we're in the same platoon all through you know second battalion second marines that whole deployment i've got some good memories man some really good memories you know if

You know, that time, you know, got some great memories and some not so great memories, you know, with the things that we experienced. But that was pretty cool, man. I was surprised that you had him on the hook there. Yeah, I talked to him a couple weeks ago, and he told me that story. And I was like, holy shit. I mean, you know, you came here, and I think you were a little intimidated because of some of the guys that sat in that seat. But, I mean, just that one moment.

that he told me out of the, you know, I mean, fuck, that deployment alone, what did we just say? We had 2,210 engagements at a minimum. And you yanked a fucking turret off a machine gun and put yourself in harm's way so that your buddies could go and fucking kill the insurgents that were trying to kill you. And, I mean, people don't do that shit. So, you know, that's...

pretty fucking heroic. Yeah. I mean, at the time I didn't feel it was heroic. I still don't. I mean, I feel like, I mean, it's just one of those things, man. It's like instinct kicks in. And that's what I've, I've said for the longest time, like guys that, that work in the soft community that do like do what you did and do it, you know what I did and stuff like,

That can't be taught. Having that natural instinct to react and to do what needs to be done, you can't train for that. It's just you're either going to do it or you're not. You're either going to be the guy taking cover or you're going to be the guy that's suppressing fire to make sure that your guys, your squad, your platoon, your team, whatever it may be, doesn't get whacked. Yeah.

Well, for those of you listening who want to know who Dan is, you can check him out on Instagram at 03-OG. And there's some interesting stuff on there. Yeah. So moving forward in that deployment, I was really pumped about that phone call. And I wanted to get him on here and reconnect you guys because that's probably been a minute. Yeah.

but is there anything else that was a major event that happened on that first deployment? There's so much stuff that happened, man, but, uh, it, it all just kind of runs together. Uh, I learned a lot. That was the most important thing is that, you know, that deployment for me really helped set me up for the soft world. You know, it, it gave me an appreciation that most guys that don't get to experience that lifestyle or being part of a, an infantry unit, uh,

uh, you know, comes with. So, you know, I'm grateful for that. That's my roots. That's where I came from. You know, I didn't start out, you know, as a, as a soft team guy started out as a ground pounders and infantry guy, I get dudes that hit me up all the time. And like, whether it's young guys that are getting ready to go into the military or guys that have done a few years in the military as infantry, who are getting ready to transition, they're going to go to take assessment selection, you know, to go to Marsauk or whatever. And

They'll hit me up and they'll say, hey, do you have any recommendations? I try to give them tips and pointers and stuff, but the biggest thing is you can never be too prepared. Go prepared. Yeah. So let's move forward then. So then at some point you decided you wanted to move into MARSOC and become a raider. So let's revisit that experience. Yeah, so at the time...

Marine Raider wasn't even a thing. Now, granted, the Marine Raiders dates back to World War II, right? The Marine Corps has been conducting special operations for as long as they've been around. Now, it wasn't until 2006 where we were taken under the wing of SOCOM and became what is now known as

MARSOC, the Marine Special Operations Command, or the Marine Raiders. At the time, it was still just the old force reconnaissance companies. And it was a totally different format on how these companies were laid out in terms of the teams and all that. I didn't know really anything about it. I just know that my company commander pulled a select few from the company. I don't remember how many guys it was, but it was...

like probably 20, 30 dudes from the company. And he said, hey, there's a reason you're here. I have basically requested that you individuals come here and it's because I want to provide you with an opportunity that's out there. And that is to go and be a part of this MARSOC unit as security platoon.

And at the time, we're young, dude. We just got back from our first deployment and we're looking around each other going, what's MARSOC? At the time, we were already counting down the days to when our first turn was up because life sucked so bad on that first deployment. And just with that infantry unit, you were just looked at as another number. So it's like we had already made our minds up that we're getting out. But this opportunity had been presented to us. Hey, you can take an in-dock unit.

and try out to go. And if you make it, there's good things to come. So at that point, really I'd have shit to lose. I just knew that life was miserable where I was at and I wanted a change. I wanted an opportunity to kind of better myself. And so I did, took the, you know, the little screening and in-doc that they had

ended up making it and went over to MARSOC as part of the trailer/security platoon. And essentially what our job was to do is basically provide security for the DASR platoon, which is basically a short acronym, DASR being Direct Action Special Reconnaissance. We would provide security for those guys when they're going in to do raids or do a hit on a house or something.

we would be the ones manning the heavy guns, the machine guns, you know, with our experience. So you guys were like a blocking force, essentially? Essentially, man. Essentially, yep. Squirters, making sure there were no squirters, making sure if there were any reinforcements that came in while our teams were boots on the ground and, you know, were inside, you know, whatever complexions

compound or house that we were hitting, you know, just making sure that they could go in there and do what they needed to do without worrying about the outer cordon. Okay. So real quick for the audience, a squirter, get your mind out of the gutter. But a squirter is basically when a unit hits a house or a compound or whatever it may be, the people that

are bad that are in that compound that run and try to get away from destiny, a blocking force is there to basically eliminate them so that they don't get away and fuck another unit up. So we call that squirter patrol or a blocking force.

So you're a blocking force for Marine Special Operations. And so basically you were hand selected. Yeah, essentially. You know, when I got there, I mean, dude, we had the that was the longest workup prior to deployment I have ever done. I mean, we shot I can't tell you how many thousands of rounds of ammo, different shooting packages, different training packages and stuff.

It was all really great training. They ended up making me an element leader during that time. So I had a fire team under me that we deployed together and all that. Did you work with the SPAC ops unit as an infantryman? Yes. Yeah, like while we were there, everything was kind of like,

whatever training they conducted, we were conducting and we were, everything we did was together because ultimately by the end of that workup, we needed to be meshed as one because we were going to be, I mean, we're there helping each other, you know?

So, yeah, everything. And that's that was cool for us as infantry guys that went over. We had gotten training that we had never even dreamed of ever getting. I mean, going to Hawthorne, Nevada, doing, you know, high altitude shooting. And we went up to, you know, Fort Campbell and trained with, yeah, I think it's fifth group or whoever it was that we were training with and, you know, training with, you know, little birds and, you know.

Apache's and stuff like that, you know, calling for air and, you know, engaging targets and stuff like that. Just stuff that we had never really thought we'd get the chance to do. And it was cool. We got to do all that stuff. The biggest difference, you know, from infantry transitioning over to MARSOC was the funding. When I came up in the Marine Corps, it was always do what you can, make do what you can with very little. Like we always...

Did the most we possibly could with a little bit that we had and we went to Marsoc We had all the ammo we needed we had the weapons we needed we had the gear that we needed You know all that stuff, so it was a totally different world how long after the train how long after your hand selected to do security for? Marsoc or Marsoc or reconnaissance at the day was it when we went over is when it turned when it was turned to Marsoc No, that was in 2006 okay

How long after you got there did you deploy again with that unit? Well, yeah, that was... I got there as soon as we got to MARSOC. It wasn't but maybe two weeks, and we rolled right into a workup. And that was a nine-month workup. And I'm talking we did everything. Oh, shit. Nine months. Nine months. And you're working with...

Yeah, yeah. Essentially working with the operators. You know, different school. We had a school phase where guys were tasked out to go to different schools and learn different things. And then once that phase was over, we come back together and we train together collectively as a unit. How did they receive you guys? They hated us. They fucking hated you. They fucking hated us. You're a blocking force for them. And they fucking hated you. Yeah, like they hated us. I'm trying to remember...

A guy that I later down the road ended up becoming friends with, he's a very well-known guy in the community, but he hated us with a fucking passion. He's like, basically, I remember one day he's like, you know, he's talking to one of his buddies and he's like, man, these dudes are like little fucking Iraqis. Why are they even here? You know, they just didn't want us there. And the reason being is that

we didn't come up the way that they did. When they graduated the School of Infantry, they may have went directly to BRC, the Base Reconnaissance Course or Amphibious Reconnaissance School, and we didn't go that same pipeline. We didn't go. And honestly, to them, we just were not up to par. We couldn't do what they did because we didn't have the training and the experience. We just weren't as good as them. Yeah, but you weren't doing what they were doing.

Yeah, man. It's just one of those things, man. The egos were flying around and we just kind of kept our mouths shut. We knew that we were the new kids on the block and we didn't really have what they had. But we knew that our time would come. Our time was going to come where we could prove ourselves and we would be looked at as an asset. And that time did come. So you go on deployment. Where are you headed? Chilobah, Alabama.

Afghanistan. Oh, J-Bad. Yeah, old J-Bad. It's a nice town. So you're in J-Bad, and what's the mission? Because it sounds like infantry was a lot of presence patrols and kind of PSD work for high-ranking individuals. Now you're attached to a SOCOM soft unit, which, you know, the mission is completely different. Yeah, totally different. I mean, it's...

I mean, it's not like you're... We're not out there doing things like presence patrols and you patrol in the area just to kind of gain atmospherics. Every time you went outside of the wires with a purpose, we were running missions. Very planned out

down to the Nats ass detail missions, running raids and doing big sweeps of villages where we're going through and might be rolling through a Taliban infested village. You like that word, infested. So it was very different though. And our mission, again, was to provide security for the Diaspora platoon. That was pretty much our main goal there.

Making sure that they you know could do what they needed to do Oh man in the heavy guns setting a cordon, you know all that stuff But we was for for more more or less direct action raids and stuff that yeah Hvt's and shit. Yeah folks in on Hvt's or at some point they changed the HVI's because Hvt's wasn't politically correct or whatever but no picture figure yeah

How did the op tempo change? Were you guys still getting in engagements every night or did it kind of change a little bit? It changed. It wasn't that deployment at first. It wasn't really quite as kinetic. I mean, we did get in some engagements, but it wasn't as reoccurring as it was. We did have lots of get lots of radio traffic, you know, and cell phone traffic that we were tracking. They were planning on taking over our compound.

breaching the walls and taking over. So that was always there in addition to being outside of the wire when we're doing missions and whatnot. But we did get engaged and ultimately, as sad as it is to say, that deployment got cut a little bit short because that was the very first MARSOC company

to deploy to afghanistan that was like since marsok had been stood up we were the first ones to go what year is this this is uh we left in the beginning of 2007. okay and uh we ended up getting kicked out of country i've heard about this incident so i've heard about this incident at the first the first marsak unit to deploy under socom and uh

I heard it was a fucking shit show. Yeah, to say the least, man. It was a Fox company. And, I mean, I was working at the time under probably one of the most respectable officers within the force reconnaissance MARSOC community at the time. Major Fred Galvin was our company commander and commander.

He basically... He knew what the fuck we were there to do. And, you know, unfortunately, the incident that happened that resulted in us getting kicked out of the country, it ruined careers. His being one of them just completely ruined guys' careers. Well, what was the incident? So...

Those guys recently got exonerated. This has been years. So think from 2007 to when they got exonerated in 2019. That's the amount of time it took. It's fucking 12 years. 12 years, dude. By this point, their careers have went down the drain. And now they're just trying to save what's left of their lives. But ultimately, it was a vehicle-borne IED that struck our convoy.

And we were being engaged from, you know, multiple different compounds, you know, around us. And Marines doing what they are trained to do, you know, start to push out of the kill zone and engage the threat. At some point in time, somebody, I don't know if this was a tactic that was used by the Taliban at that time, saying that there were, you know,

innocent civilians that had gotten killed as a result of this, but it went up to the top of the flagpole, man. And it was a huge investigation on why these Marines basically killed innocent civilians in Afghanistan. Everybody kind of forgot the fact that what initiated this engagement was it was a car bomb. A car bomb was driven into one of our vehicles on the convoy. We did what we were trained to do. Yeah. I remember...

hearing about that and yeah special operations handles shit a lot differently and it's a lot more surgical and uh it was very yeah like i'll give you an example man like for those of you that haven't been to afghanistan before you probably wouldn't know this but like there were times where we'd go outside of the wire to zero in different weapons you know go out go out test the the

Mark 19's test, 50 cals, make sure everything was working properly, knowing that we had an upcoming mission. Dude, those little kids there, little Afghan kids, they would literally be sitting there off the side of the Humvee as, you know, we're engaging, you know, targets, you know, we're just, you know, at the range or whatever. And they would be sitting there collecting the brass. Yeah.

So I remember, you know, one of the investigators is some high ranking, you know, uh, officer who didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. Cause he had never been in combat before. It was like, well, you guys say that you were engaging enemy combatants that were firing from you. You know, we went back days later, we didn't find any spent brass on the, on the ground. And we're like, well, no fucking shit because it's been collected, you know? So somebody that hasn't been to Afghanistan wouldn't know that or hasn't been, you know, uh,

In combat, per se. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's really easy for these fuckheads to backseat quarterback an entire event and, you know...

They don't even know what the fuck it feels like to get rocked by an IED. Then you throw in, you know, you brought up the kids and this reminded me, I remember when I was in Afghanistan, they were taking kids and filling their bicycle tires with explosives and they would have the kids ride their bike towards the convoy and start detonating their fucking bicycles. And you've got people that are, you know, they're wearing the, the, the, the man jammies, uh,

attire and they'll clack rounds at you you know off at you with an ak and then hide the ak under their under their fucking clothes because they're so baggy and when all this shit's happening all at once it can be real fucking hard to id and pinpoint

where the threat's coming, especially when it's coming from fucking everywhere. And I mean, they would have guys dressed up like women in burkas wearing a suicide vest that'll blow a fucking building down. And then you got some fucking jag that comes in and, you know, backseat quarterbacks, the whole fucking thing, and ruins careers and lives. And yeah, fucking sucks. So you went home.

Yeah, we went home, man. That was, it was tough. You know, after a nine-month workup, you know, it was really tough to come to terms with the fact that, like,

Well, that sucked. But also, it sucked for us because all of SOCOM is looking at us through a microscope at that time to see what are the Marines going to do. How are they going to perform on their very first deployment? And it was just a complete, in the eyes of the time, in the eyes of SOCOM, it was a complete flop. And that was in JBAD that happened? Yeah. I had heard that was in Kabul.

Kabul. It was in Kabul. It was in Kabul, yeah. Okay. We were working in JBAT and in Kabul at the time, though. We were operating right out of Kabul Air Base there, and that's where it happened. How long were you guys in country? How long was that deployment? I think it ended up like...

From start to finish, it maybe ended up being like 100 days. Oh, shit. Okay. Maybe 120 days. Yeah, it got cut real short, man. Maybe 120 days tops. That's still, you know. When you guys got home, how was the morale with everybody? Morale was low, dude. Morale was real low. We didn't know what was going to happen with the guys that were under investigation. You know, we really didn't know what...

what the future was going to hold for them and there was a lot of changes made like when we got back from that deployment they completely did away with the whole format of the company you know where you had your trailer slash security platoon you had your dasher platoon that worked together um that went away that completely went away so at that point it was like

All right, so all you guys that came over from 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines, don't really have a purpose for you anymore, so you need to go home. So you're going back to the grunts. Well, that's what most of the guys ended up doing, got sent back. There was a select few of us that they, I don't know, I mean, I don't know how it happened or why it happened, essentially, I guess...

Some of the guys, the company commander and platoon sergeant from that DAS platoon saw something in a few of us that he really liked and thought that we could... I don't like what I just said, but anyways. I think what you're trying to say is you just got fucking hand-selected for a second time to... To stay, but on permanent orders. As an actual operator. Yes. Now, and that was under the...

I don't want to say agreement, but it was basically like, hey, you're getting orders here, but you're going to get schooled the fuck out because we understand that, yes, you've got some combat experience. Yes, we feel like you're an asset to the battalion, but we need to get you up to speed. Things that we don't really get as infantry. Do you know how fucking big that is? Seriously, you got fucking hand-selected to go to a...

essentially a blocking force for Marine Special Operations, MARSOC. You did that. You did a three-month deployment. Whatever the fuck you did in that three months must have been pretty badass because then you were hand-selected again to come on as a fucking operator without going through the selection course. Just to put this shit in perspective for you, all the way up to the top level at fucking Dev Group and CAG,

you screen to go there they don't fucking they're not out there hand selecting everybody you might get a push like hey you might you might want to fucking go screen and go to dev group they had a dev group doesn't come fucking find you you know so yeah i just want to say that did you ever think about at the time no dude and you know it's weird because at that time we were at a weird transition from

force reconnaissance to MARSOC. So there was still a lot of unknown. We were still going through a lot of growing pains. At the time, there was no individual training course, which is like our Q course, nine-month training pipeline that you go through to become a critical skills operator. There was no course. There was no assessment selection. So

There was no real option at that point. I could have went to BRC, but at that point, recon battalion was going to remain as part of the Marine Regiment.

And MARSOC was going to be part of SOCOM. So that training at BRC was kind of, it wasn't completely relevant. You know what I mean? Because it didn't include a lot of the training that you need to have to become a CSO or critical skills operator. While I did have some of the amphibious training and stuff like that, and a land nav piece and whatnot, it just wasn't. And that's why they developed SOCOM.

much longer in-depth course being the individual training course. So yeah, at that time I was essentially, I got grandfathered and, uh, you know, went to schools and stuff like that. So, but it was at the time, I didn't really think of it the way you just put it, you know? Yeah. Well, you know, that's, most guys don't think about that. Uh, cause we're

Some of us are humble and, you know, some of us aren't. But I would say the majority of guys are pretty fucking humble. But, you know, there's a perspective for you that you probably never thought about. And you should be fucking pretty proud that you were hand-selected to become the fucking plank owner of what wound up becoming MARSOC. Yeah. How long was... How many different schools did you go to and...

How long was it before you wound up deploying again? So shortly after getting back from the deployment with Fox Company, I basically re-injured, re-aggravated a prior injury from my first deployment. I was involved in a IED rollover incident, basically where my Humvee was flipped. I broke my back and I had multiple, ended up needing multiple spine surgeries as a result of it.

So that kind of put a kink in the plan of that whole school phase. While I did manage to get into a couple schools, when I re-injured, I think I was at one of the schools.

It was like one of my PME courses, which I don't know if you guys did that in Navy, but like your professional military education courses, like the shit that you're required to have in order to get promoted to the next rank. I scammed out of those. Did you? And you got lucky. We had, dude, they were like anal, like you were going. Like didn't matter how cool you thought you were or what you had under your belt, like you were fucking going. So I re-injured my, you know, I re-aggravated my injury.

Um, at that, at that course and, uh, you know, I had to go, you know, I had to get surgeries and stuff like that. So I was rehabbing man. And, uh, you know, a lot of people didn't notice, but at the time, like my wife and I had a child who had some severe medical issues. You know, he was eating through a feeding tube and he was really young, man. He's only like three or four months old. And all we knew is that he had some issues going on.

And we were trying to get to the bottom of that and figure out, okay, what's going on with my son? I mean, we were traveling all over the country, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, going to see all these doctors and specialists to perform these different procedures and stuff on my son and different tests and stuff to figure out what was going on. So at the time, my leadership, the command thought it was in the best interest of myself and my family.

to get orders to the Marine Special Operations Schoolhouse. I'd be taken out of a deployable billet

Put over at the schoolhouse for a term that would afford me the time needed to be able to one to rehab to get back to full duty and then to to give me the time I needed to be able to take my son to these different, you know appointments and stuff like that and to figure out what was going on with him and dude, that was probably I'd say that time frame was probably The hardest time out of my whole military career even at some of the shittiest times during my deployments like I think that time was

It was probably one of the hardest times of my military career. Yeah. So you're rehabbing your back. You're trying to figure out what's going on with your son. Oh, yeah, and I'm going through a divorce. You're going through a divorce. Yeah. And then on top of that, you're dealing with all the combat stress that comes with the job. And that's a lot to deal with.

A whole lot. So what happened with your son? How's he doing now? Dude, like my son, he is light years ahead of where he was at that time. I mean, they didn't think he would walk. There was a lot of unknown. He has been diagnosed with autism. He has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which were good things. We got answers. We wanted to know what's going on. Why is my son this way?

But ultimately, he's gotten the care and the treatment that he needed. He's progressed, like I said, light years ahead of where he is. And he's good. I mean, he's good to go. He's come off the feeding tube. He's eating enough food by mouth to sustain his weight. He does speech, occupational, and physical therapy every week. He goes to a school that's specifically for kids with special needs. So he's doing great, man. He's doing awesome. That's awesome, man. Yeah. I can't even...

That's a lot to go through. Yeah, dude. And the thing that really fucked with my head the most was during that time, you know, I got sent to the schoolhouse specifically for the reason to, this is going to give you the time you need to get back to full duty, take care of your son, get your life on track. But,

people under the leader my leadership didn't always understand that guys that i was close to understood what was going on but for the guys that didn't know what was going on you know it was tough man i'd go you know fly up to cincinnati children's hospital for two weeks with my son and my soon-to-be ex-wife to you know go have this procedure for my son and i'd show back up at work and i'd have a guy be like oh cool it's it's nice for you to come back to work when your kid gets sick again oh man that shit really fucked with me man like it it

It hurt because I knew that, like, I already felt bad enough. I already had that guilt trip of not being there. It was already bad enough being at the schoolhouse and being pulled from, you know, the team. So, you know, so there was a little bit of a gap in time between that 2007, 2008 deployment till my next deployment. You know, I did a term at the schoolhouse and then I was sent to the regiment and

I ended up coming back to full duty, three spine surgeries later. I'm still jumping out of airplanes. I'm still, you know, rucking. I'm still all the shit that, you know, doctors told me you're never going to be able to put an 80-pound ruck on your back again and walk. You know, it's just you're not going to be able to do that. And I just wasn't hearing that noise, you know. I would see some of the statements that would come back from the hospitals, like for my son's treatments and shit, and did astronomical amounts of them.

And I'm thinking to myself, if I get out because of this injury, I'm never going to be able to, like, what are we going to do? Who's going to pay for this? I'm not even, you know, if I get out, insurance companies might not even cover my son because he's got now a preexisting condition. So that was my motivation to come back to full duty.

Physical therapy on base wasn't doing shit for me. I fucking hired a personal trainer at a fucking sports rehab facility that trained fucking athletes. And I went in there, fucking put my goddamn medical record on the fucking table that was about that thick at the time. And I told him, here's my deal. This is what I do. Here's my situation. I need to get from where I'm at back to this. And I paid out of pocket at this sports rehab facility to get back to full duty.

Had that not happened, do you think you would have separated at that time? What's that? Had what not happened? Had your son been taken care of or did not have the medical issues, do you think you would have separated? It's tough to say, man, because, yeah, my son was a big part of that decision, but also I wasn't ready to drop my pack. Yeah. I just wasn't ready. I hadn't gotten that monkey off my back yet. Yeah. Yeah.

So you went back to war. Yeah. Yeah, basically, man. At the first opportunity I was given, I was working at the regiment under a Master Gunnery Sergeant, a good old Frank. And I told him, I said, look, I don't give a fuck what it takes, man. If there's any opportunity to get back into a team, like, sign me up. I'm ready. And sure enough, we had a...

A buddy of mine who was actually deployed at the time with Fox Company, who was deployed with them, and he stepped on a pressure plate IED and lost his leg, and they needed a combat replacement, somebody to go over there quick, fast, in a hurry to cover down on his duties. So I volunteered for that. Went over 2013.

I went over this time. It was went to Kabul province and essentially finished out the deployment there shortly before coming home. The unit that was coming over to replace Fox company golf company was getting ready to come and do turnover. And I got an email from a master guns back stateside and said, Hey,

We've got an 18 Charlie with this team whose wife is having some serious medical complications. He's not going to be able to make the deployment. Would you have any interest in cross-decking? It would help us out tremendously. So that turned into that, you know, four-month deployment. Well, it was left of that deployment anyways. It ended up being four months for me. That four-month deployment turned into like an 11-month deployment. Holy fuck. Yeah.

11 fucking months? Yeah. You didn't come back once? I came... I went back... At that time, I didn't know I was going to be cross-decking. Yeah. And I had my house and shit back home that I needed to... I just wasn't administratively prepared to be gone for that long. And I said, hey...

those guys aren't here yet let me fly home for a week let me just get all that stuff you know under wraps make sure it's good to go and I come back so I went home for about a week and a half and then came

and jumped right into a team that I had never worked with. Now, granted, I knew a few of the guys in the team. I had been through different shooting packages and demo packages and shit like that working with these guys. But for the most part, I was like the new guy on the block. So, yeah, technically, you went from the training house to right in the fucking thick of it. Yeah. As, I mean, it's your first, technically, your first...

as a special operations operator from MARSOC. Yeah.

- Yeah, so, and I was looked at, you know, like, for the guys that knew me in that team, they were excited to have me there because they knew, you know, what I was about. But for the guys that didn't know me, it was like, who the fuck is this guy, you know? So that first month of that deployment, a lot of it was having to kind of prove myself, you know, showing that I was there, you know, to contribute to the team and to do bad things to bad people. - Yeah.

What was the op tempo on this deployment? The op tempo of that deployment was just insane. No shit. I'd have to say that deployment was probably the most fun I've ever had in my career. Yeah, I mean, it's just, that was a correlation of like the years of training and blood, sweat, tears, everything that you put into, you know, the training and the workups, getting ready for deployments.

and then that just having that opportunity being presented with that opportunity of being able to utilize all that training and that's those skill sets in a real life you know real world life kind of thing what was the primary mission was it we were there doing FID you know we had our host nation forces we were running commandos we were running ANASF which for those who are not familiar it's Afghan National Army but they're special forces so

We stood up a curriculum and a pipeline for the commandos that wanted to go like a special forces route and get more training. And we literally trained those guys on everything. How many guys are there? Because sometimes we did FID and FID was like fucking...

One Iraqi, two Iraqis. We had two platoons attached to us. They were living in the same compound as us. So you're like doing the SF mission for the most part. Yeah. Now, and that turned into like that FID mission turned into more like direct action, special reconnaissance type missions. You know, our job was to be there to mentor and advise people

the Afghan national army to ensure that they had the training they needed to be able to take the wheel. Uh, it doesn't always work out that way. Yeah. Uh, but during that time, I mean, we were at a VSP, a village stability platform, uh,

kind of in the middle of nowhere in Harat province. And where we were, man, it was just surrounded by villages that were nothing but Taliban. So if we weren't outside the wire getting in engagements, they were rocketing the shit out of us and, you know, doing stuff like that. So it was, we stayed busy. And even like the guys in that team, like,

They didn't like to have nothing to do. They were always wanting to work. Everybody had crazy work ethic and just was ready to go. We knew that that deployment was kind of the end of the line. That deployment was essentially right before the plug was pulled and majority of forces were pulled out of Afghanistan, and we knew that. All the VSPs were getting demilled and tore down and all that stuff. I know this from when we were working before, and I've heard...

You know, you talk about it and I've seen the video, but a major event happened that you were involved in again that you can essentially take credit for. So let's go over what happened there. - We basically got tasked with going through, you know, got tasked by Siege Soda. They wanted us to go and do a sweep through this village

where they had intel saying that there were some IED facilitators and guys that were running, IED and weapons facilitators and guys that were running back and forth from Afghanistan and Iran. Guys were coming back and forth. And when they came back, that was essentially the area where all these weapons and IED-making materials were being disseminated to Taliban agents.

Uh, so we were, you know, tasked with going through doing a full sweep of this village, searching everything. It was supposed to be like a two day op and we were going to walk in because at that time their EW or their early warning signals were just, they were good. They knew every day if we left the wire, they knew we were coming. If you know, they would have, you know, little brevity codes, you know, the wolves are coming, the wolves are coming. You can hear on the, on the cell phone chatter. And, uh,

So we said, you know what, fuck it, we're going to walk. So you fucking humped in? Yeah, we fucking humped in. You know, we had, I mean, you're talking two days, two days worth of shit in a ruck. And you think two days, oh, I'll just pack some skivvies and socks now. You need fucking batteries. You need chow. You need enough ammo or if shit hits the fan, you're not going to go Winchester. So we're loaded the fuck down. Did you guys have any fucking assets or was it just...

As far as air or QRF? For that mission, we didn't have... There was no QRF. We were out there on our own, dude. We were, I think, 60 miles from the closest base. So we were on our own. There was no QRF. Occasionally, we would have ISR and stuff like that. But for that one, we did not. No shit. Not until the daytime. So we walk in at night. Once we get into the village...

you know we basically hold up in a compound wait for daylight daylight comes we come out of the compound everybody goes to their positions and we start our sweep wasn't even 10 minutes we started taking fire at this point we had three elements all three elements were split into different positions uh my element we slipped into a compound the closest compound that we could find to take cover um

And basically we fought from the compound. They were from all different directions. We cut out murder holes in the walls of this compound. I got up on the roof for a lot of these houses in Afghanistan, the way that they're constructed. They're essentially mud huts. They're hard, not hard as concrete, but they're big mud huts. And they've got these giant domes on the top.

almost like fighting positions. And so that's what I did. I got up on the top of the roof and started engaging targets. And you can see the guys were running back and forth and popping out of doorways and buildings and stuff like that. So yeah, I was up on the roof. They kind of honed in on my position and

You know, you could see like where I was kind of tucked in between these two domes. I would put my head down and you could see like rounds would be like ricocheting off the top of the dome. And at this time I had a helmet camera on and I'm just kind of, I went back and looked at the footage afterwards and it's like, I'm just sitting there laughing. But, uh, it is weird. Sometimes it's a good feeling when you're getting shot at because it's like, you know what, it's about to happen. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh,

uh, it just so happened that my team leader happened to be with my element. Uh, when that went down, he just happened to be with us as we were doing the sweep and he's down inside the compound and he's on the fucking hook with our JTAC trying to get air assets on the line to get him to come in. And, uh, he's like, dude, you need to come down. You need to come down. So I come down off the roof and, uh, we had three murder holes, you know, dug out, uh,

out of different sides of this compound, one on each side. And so he's like, hey, if you want, you know, go in there with so-and-so and, you know, just man the murder hole, just, you know, see what's going on. So for a while there, there was a lull in fire. You know, it wasn't really shit going on. It got quiet. It went from just like as shit was going off everywhere to just stopped. So my buddy's like, hey, man, I need to piss. You mind just, you know, keep an eye on me? Yeah, do good. So,

I'm in this murder hole. I'm just sitting here and I'm watching. And all of a sudden I see two dudes on a motorcycle hauling ass. They're coming and they're trying to flank us this way. I don't know if they had another element or something that they were trying to get to or what. But I could see...

When they were hauling ass, they both had man jams and both had AKs strapped to their backs, which, dude, we were just in a firefight. Like, you're a military-age male, you're on a motorcycle, and you've got an AK strapped to your back. Like, fair game. Well, as I'm in this, you know, I'm looking through this murder hole,

I didn't catch the guys on this motorcycle until I got about to my right lateral limit, if you will, or to where my field of view was cut off. So immediately the instinct kicks in again. I haul ass. My buddy, he's coming from using the bathroom back into the room where we were at.

I'm like push him out of the way I'm I move and I'm hauling ass and I was trying to make it to the other side of the compound so I could get into the other murder hole to see where they were going so at the time we had one of our commandos was was He was in that room and I go in there. I'm like, hey, let me get in here Let me get in here. So I get in and sure enough. They're still coming and

And, you know, I just engaged a single round to each guy. First one launched the driver of the motorcycle off the motorcycle. We were at really close range. I don't think they realized that we had murder holes dug out and they didn't see anybody on the roof anymore. So I think they took that as a window of opportunity to make a run for it. You think they thought you were dead? I don't think they thought I was dead. They could have thought that. They may have thought that. But all they know is that there was nobody else on the roof.

returning fire because when I was up there I'd pop up over the dome you know return some shots get back down well a good 20 minutes went down when it went by where I wasn't up on the roof so I think they saw that as their window of opportunity to either try to get away or try to get to another position or whatever they were trying to do and essentially I got they got cut off yeah so I engaged both targets um and then the fire starts again like well let me back up

engage both targets you know let our team leader know let our jtac know hey we've got two guys down over here on a motorcycle all right we'll check it out what range was it like how close we were probably like 50 yards 50 yards not even okay not even now that i'm thinking of it it's probably closer like 35 yards oh fuck it was close okay yeah they were real close to the building and

Where the road was they were trying to trying to go by and he flew off the fucking bike the first dude the first guy So the first guy that I engaged was the driver of the motorcycle because that was I wanted to stop the motorcycle So he was the first one I engaged literally that was my first time ever shooting a guy a bad guy in combat with a Scar heavy so I know we got a lot of people either love or you hate the scar I'm not a huge fan of it, but

I'll tell you what it does at close range is pretty impressive. So yeah, essentially kind of launched this guy off the motorcycle before the motorcycle could fall over. The guy in the back tried to stand up as the motorcycles falling over. And about the same time that his feet hit the ground is when I pulled the trigger on the second shot. And, uh,

Yeah, it took him out as well. Shit. So you must have hit him from the side then. Yeah, yeah. They were coming from the side, so I hit them both from the side, yeah. Fuck. And they're just one shot? One shot, dude. That's all it took? That's all it took. Goddamn. One shot on each. That was it. Fuck. And so moving forward, we had a couple casualties. We had a medevac bird en route, but...

Because of where we were at, it was too hot. We needed to link up with the other element that had the casualties. We needed to link up with them, which is like probably 500 yards away to another compound to be able to provide security so that the bird, the medevac bird could land and pick up our casualties. How many were they Americans or were they? We had two. I want to say two Afghans and one American. Yeah. There's two Afghan National Army guys there.

you know, one U S coalition guy. Yeah. Um, none of them were severe, but severe enough to where we needed to call a medevac. So we exit the compound, you know, we still, we know everything at, by this point, an hour or so has gone by with no fire. We go to exit the compound. We don't make it, you know, a hundred yards, uh,

we start getting engaged again. They were just waiting. Yeah. They were waiting for us to move. And this time they were behind a wall and they had PKMs, RPKs. Oh shit. I mean the whole nine. Luckily where we were at the time was close to a little irrigation ditch. And so you're talking like an element of, you know, six, probably like six soft guys. And then like another dozen commandos. And we're all like crawling through this ditch. Yeah.

And I distinctly remember laying face down in this ditch and my ruck, mind you, I packed out my ruck. Like I was going to need it for two full fucking days. This was supposed to be a 48 hour mission. So I'm crawling through this ditch and I can feel rounds impacting my rucksack, which I do still have the rucksack. Oh shit. Yeah. So I could feel the rounds impacting and, uh,

Right in front of me is our JTAC. They weren't hitting your fucking gummy bears, were they? Oh, dude, that would have been fucking game over. I kept those on my person. Yeah, first line. So JTAC's right in front of me, and he's on the hook. He's trying to get Apaches to come in and whatnot, and we're pinned down. I'm sitting there, and I remember being in boot camp.

And having to go through the little course that they had with like, you know, barbed wire little things and you're crawling through the mud and they're like, drag your face, drag your face. And you're like thinking to yourself at the time, when the fuck am I ever really dragging my face in the fucking mud? Like what?

And at that time, I was dragging my fucking face, dude. That's how low I was. I was trying to get so small in that little ditch because I could feel those rounds impacting my ruck. And I was like, man, a couple inches lower and they're going to hit me. Yeah. All of a sudden, this makes sense. Yeah, yeah. So I'm dragging my fucking face. And sure enough, fucking...

come in and just start doing gun runs. No shit. I'm talking danger close because I'm literally in the irrigation ditch right behind our JTAC and I can hear him saying, I don't give a fuck if we're danger close. Fucking engage. Was this daytime or nighttime? This is daytime. Oh, fuck. This is daytime. So two Apaches come in and are just fucking destroying everything. How close?

Like less than 100 fucking yards close. Okay. Yeah. That'll make your asshole pucker up even more than it already is. Yeah. So, but that was like, so that happened. They engaged the enemy, eliminate the enemy, and we keep going. We link up at the other compound. Medevac bird comes in, and then we end up, you know, leaving. I think it was the following afternoon. We had a team meeting and the talk.

And we're kind of going around the horn, getting intel reports from our intel analysts and different things, you know, trying to just everybody's keeping up to speed. And my team sergeant was like, yep. So just so you know, K-Fed, you got dead milkmen. Everybody's like, what?

Dead Milkman was number three on the HVI list at the time. He had been getting tracked for multiple deployments, multiple SEAL teams, multiple ODAs, trying to fucking get this guy. And it just so happened by chance he was one of the guys on that motorcycle. And you fucking got him. Apparently I got him.

And you were the only shooter. Yeah, only shooter. Nobody else saw him because unless you were looking through that murder hole, you wouldn't have been able to see him. So you fucking took out number three at the time. I think number three has, what, like a two or three week life expectancy for a long time. But I mean, it's fucking number three. That's...

How'd that feel? Felt good, man. Felt really good. At that time, I had already been accepted in the team. I'd made friends. Those guys were awesome. We had been through shit together already, but that felt really good. The only way we found out was, just as well as I do in that culture, they are supposed to bury their dead within a 24-hour time frame.

And the way we found out is by that afternoon after we had left, because that happened about mid-morning, by late that afternoon there was like 350 to 400 people there for a little funeral service for the burial of dead milk men. How the fuck? ISR feed, basically. They were able to ID him from that? You guys didn't take any skin or fucking fingers or anything? Hair, yeah. You did take hair samples? Yeah, we took hair samples and stuff.

So between that and then, you know, all the intel we got, you know, ISR and stuff like that, showing the funeral and everything, all the cell phone chatter and stuff that was going on between the locals and the people there, we had gotten dead built, man. Fuck, man. Yeah. Well...

I'll bet they're glad they hand-selected you for that fucking unit. So, otherwise, that motherfucker might still be running around, especially since everybody was already after him, you know? And that's how it is, too. All the fucking units are competing with each other, you know? The fucking SEALs are competing with MARSOC, Greenbury, everybody. We're all just competitive nature guys, you know? We're just all trying to...

And it was just one of those things, dude, right place, right time. I didn't do anything that anybody else wouldn't have done or wasn't like I, you know, did anything special to get in that position. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And, you know, I knew I was engaging somebody that was a threat. Didn't know who it was, though. It was a fucking huge threat. Yeah. Was it the driver of the motorcycle or the passenger? It was the passenger. He was being, come to find out, it was like he was being escorted out of the area. Yeah.

I'll be damned. I think it's safe to say that that op was probably the highlight of that deployment for me anyways. For me personally, that was like the highlight of that deployment and essentially highlighted my career. I mean, it's when everything comes together, years and years of training and dedication that you put forth to what our job entails and you have the ability to utilize that.

you know, over there, that's like, it doesn't get better than that. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, I mean, uh, I could definitely see how that will be the highlight. Fucking get rid of number three. But, um, you got rid of another number three. Yeah, we, we went on, we, that deployment, that was about halfway through that deployment. And, and again, it was a very successful deployment. Like we did a lot of shit. We ended up, you know, killing some other H, you know, high, high value individuals. Uh,

you know, before we left. So if you, if you gauge your success by that, like we, we went there and did what we were required to do or expected to do, I should say, and then packed our bags, went home. Yeah. It sounds like you guys were operating at the, at the fucking apex of what anybody, any operator could dream of. And, uh, that's fucking awesome, man. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good way to put it for sure. For sure. It was very, uh,

the satisfaction factor was definitely there. You're doing everything you put the time in, and the blood and the sweat and the tears to do, and then you go home. And how was that? So you go home. This is where shit starts to fall apart. Yeah. You know, everybody, the modern day guys or the guys that are getting out more recently, they start hearing these stories about the transition. And I think it's

Probably the most dreaded part of your life that these guys have to look forward to when they get out. Yeah, the transition for me, it was extremely challenging. You know, when I got back from that deployment, you know, a couple months had went by and I started noticing that I was...

experience and things and you know having just certain scenarios and situations and symptoms I guess you could say I didn't know what the fuck was wrong with me you know I didn't know what was going on I mean I would have like these fits of rage where I would just go from like zero to a hundred like that you know severe migraines headaches I mean straight up like debilitating felt like you couldn't fucking do anything

I remember there was a point where just driving to work, driving to the battalion in the morning, I'd have to pull off the side of the road and throw up. Couldn't tell you why. Holy shit. Yeah, couldn't tell you why. Now, I didn't really, all this shit was happening. The depression set in and all that stuff. And I never said anything. It was just kind of like swept under the rug.

And it kind of came to a head. I remember I was getting ready to go to a school. I don't remember if it was Dye School or what it was. I was getting ready to go to a school, and I needed an updated physical. So I go into BAS, which is our doctor's office, if you will. And I'm like, hey, I need some signatures from the doc. I need a physical. The corpsman there is like, roger that. Let's go ahead and get your vitals, yada, yada, yada.

And so he sits down, takes my temperature, you know, does my blood pressure and he starts asking me questions and he's like, he's like, did you run here today? And I was like, no. And he's like, would you drink a pot of coffee? And I'm like, no, what's up with the weird questions? And he's like, well, dude, your fucking blood pressure is like,

sky high. And I'm like, what is it? He's like, your blood pressure is one 55 over one 22. Holy shit. Yeah. And he's like, I don't know if you just hang here for a second. I didn't know this at the time, but he went back to the MO, which was the medical officer at the time. Uh, who's a female, uh, Lieutenant and, uh, I won't say her name, but, um, he was back there for about five minutes and he came back up and he's like, Hey, uh,

he's like it's just gonna be a few minutes i'm like is everything okay and he's like yeah yeah and he's like i don't know if we're gonna be able to get you the signatures or anything right now he's and i'm like what the fuck are you talking about well i need to leave if that's not gonna happen he's like you can't go and i'm like what do you mean i can't go and he's like the doc specifically told me that you're not allowed to leave so she pulls me into her office and she's like yeah your blood pressure you're at fucking risk of stroke like your shit's high as fuck

And this had been like 20 minutes had gone by before she had called me back. And during that time, I guess she's going through my medical record with like a fine tooth comb. She didn't know who I was. When we were gone in that deployment is when she came in to the battalion. So she didn't know anything about me. There's this new guy that just got back a couple months ago from this golf company deployment and was trying to go to the next cool guy course, you know. And she sits me down and she's like,

Has anybody ever gone through your record with you? I'm like, nope. And she started kind of asking me, you know, questions. Have you ever felt this? Have you ever done this? You ever, you know, had this experience? And I'm like, got to the point where I was like, yeah, what are you getting at? You know, and she's like, there's, I think there's a correlation between your high blood pressure and what I'm reading here in your medical record.

And that was kind of the come to Jesus meeting that I felt, I think that I really needed. Well, what, what specifically did she read in your medical record that this is related to? I had a total throughout my career. I had been exposed to 12 drugs.

Either IEDs or large blasts. Some of them were RPG blasts. Some of them were when my vehicle was struck by an IED. Some of them were just random IEDs that went off when we were on a foot patrol and I was in close proximity. So recorded, I had 12 in my medical record. And that doesn't even count all the...

all the breaching, all the rockets on all that. Oh, hell no, man. That's not like, you know, we're, we're training on the range and shooting laws, 84s, you know, shit like that. And doing demo packages. No, this is like when incidents happen where I could, I potentially lost consciousness or was like, I had a time where my eardrums got ruptured because, you know, struck my vehicle. But, uh, yeah. So 12 fucking, so basically 12 fucking TBI's.

It had the potential to be that. Now, I didn't lose consciousness 12 times. From what I can remember, I probably lost consciousness like four times, maybe five. But whether or not that categorizes it as a TBI or not, I'm not too sure. But there was 12 cases, 12 instances throughout my career where it was significant enough to be documented in my medical record. Fuck, and this is from...

First deployment that you ever made with the infantry all the way to the last one with MARSOC. And this is the first time that... Yeah, any kind of red flags. And it was good because the way she approached it, you know, we're very fucking hard-headed. We're very prideful. Like, we're quick to sweep shit like that under the rug and just focus on the mission, you know, at hand. And that's kind of what it was. And she kind of was like, look, fuckstick. Like...

you've got some issues you know and when she kind of put it that way and she she's like you know asked me questions about family i told her about my son and she's like listen she's like your son you care about your son right yeah he's she's like you want to make sure he's taken care of like yeah she's like you can't do any of that unless you take care of you and that kind of resonated with me you know really kind of kind of hit home and uh

So she's like, I want you to be honest with me. She's like, go home for the weekend. I want you, I'm going to make an appointment. You're going to come back next week and we're going to do a full physical. And I want you to be honest with me. And so I went home that weekend and just kind of thought about everything. And I was, I was scared to talk, to say what I was experiencing because I was on that, that high, you know, we had just come off a,

really successful deployment and I was getting ready to go to a school that I've been trying to get for a while. And then after I got back from that school, I was going to jump into another workup and deploy again. How long after deployment is this happening? After that last deployment, it was probably two months. Holy fuck. Were you having any symptoms on deployment? Yeah, it actually, the symptoms had started even prior to my last deployment, but it was all stuff that I just...

Dude, we don't say shit. You know what I mean? It's just you don't want to do anything that's going to remove you from your team. Stubborn in a sense. So yeah, that happened. Went back the next week and I spilled my guts, man. I told her everything that I was experiencing. I told her I don't know what the fuck's going on with me and I've been super depressed. So long story short, she wanted to enroll me in the Spirit Intrepid Center on Camp Lejeune, which...

was our brain treatment facility. It's a 20 week inpatient or outpatient program, uh, where they do everything from like vestibular rehab to cognitive therapy, uh, physical therapy, occupational speech therapy, uh, all that stuff. And, and you're, you're basically going there and you're receiving treatment every day for, for 20 weeks. That's, that's your sole purpose. And she thought that I needed to

to go into that program because of everything that was going on. And so they could kind of dig a little deeper and see what was going on. And that's when, that's when I found out about the TBI and they had done MRIs in my brain and shit. And, you know, it was just like, okay. So when you went home for that weekend, nobody wants to be, I guess I shouldn't say nobody. Most guys don't want to be diagnosed with anything because they don't want to be

separated from the team or miss a deployment or any of that shit. But on the other hand, at least for me, I didn't want... I was also at the same time scared to... I didn't want to hear what the fuck was wrong with me. And I know a lot of other guys have that. They have that...

Did you have any of that? That fear that... Because once you get it, it's fucking real. Yeah, dude. I was scared. And I look back on it now and think how foolish I was. But I used to be that guy that was like, what the fuck is PTSD? Yeah. That shit's for the weak. That means you fucking have a weak mind. That's how I used to look at it because I was just...

Didn't know. I was uneducated. Thought I was fucking bulletproof. That age, that's how you feel. You feel like you're unstoppable. And that's kind of where I was. And it was a humbling moment when I realized, like, this is me. Like, I'm human. And the accumulation of all these deployments and all this shit, like being at a high stress level in that fight or flight mode for years, you know, I was...

that was me now, you know, these are the effects, all this, these things that I was feeling and experiencing and everything. It was a result of all that time that I had spent doing that, that cool guy shit, you know? So everybody's like, you know, not everybody, but I'll get a lot of people like, dude, holy fuck you. Like the things that you did is fucking amazing. Like I would, I would kill to fucking be able to do some of the things that you did. And

While I'm grateful, I'm kind of like, it fucking, it came with a price. It came with a real hefty price. Have you heard of operator syndrome? They're now saying that, I'm going to fuck this up, but they're now basically, what they're doing is that PTSD became so broad that now that they're starting to,

or have started to diagnose operators like yourself with operator syndrome because of all the other fucking symptoms that are coming out, you know, like your PTSD is different than the admin person who had a random rocket land next to their fucking bunkhouse. So...

And I believe there's seven, I can't remember exactly what they are, but I believe there's like seven different kind of symptoms that make up operator syndrome, which is all from combat stress. That's interesting, and I can totally see that. I remember one of the things when I was at that brain treatment clinic was they asked me if I would be interested in doing group therapy. And I promised myself that when I went there that I would go in with an open mind and I would try things.

my best to take advantage of every resource that was available. So I tried it. And, you know, the first one I went to was the only one I went to, but it was like 15 people in a room, all either Marines or Navy corpsmen and everybody had their own experience. But the thing was, some of them were combat related and some of them weren't like a guy was, you know, you had a E2 or E3 sitting next to me who had been in a car wreck for

and was suffering from TBI and PTSD, which I don't take anything away from his accident and his injuries, but it's totally different. So it just was hard for me. It wasn't relatable. It was hard for me to be in that setting. I felt like if I was going to do counseling or therapy, it probably needed to be better. Probably needed to be alone. I didn't do well with group therapies. But anyhow, so I was there, did the 20-week program,

And during that time, it really opened my eyes. Seeing where I was at with my baseline, with all the different tests and shit, it revealed that I had issues. Yeah. And I guess as I was being, as I was realizing, coming to the realization that I had issues, it was really, that snowball effect was really taking place. My issues were getting worse and worse and worse. And at one point, man, I just got...

I was in a really deep, dark place in my life. That was right before I got out of the Marine Corps. I had basically been given a choice. I was told I was never going to deploy again, that I had a choice to either do a lateral move to a non-deployable MOS, essentially in an admin job, or I would be medically retired, that I had to choose between the two.

And that kind of fucked me up because I wasn't ready to drop my pack. I wasn't. It was very difficult to come to grips with the fact that it was over. Yeah. How did they tell you you're not going to deploy again? They told me I couldn't afford another concussion. They're like, you're going to turn into a fucking vegetable. Like, you cannot afford another concussion again.

If you deploy again in the teams, there's a very high chance you will get another concussion and you can't like we don't want to risk severe brain damage at that point. You know, not saying that that's what's going to happen, but they're erring on the side of caution, you know, at that point. Yeah. So that was tough. There was a time, dude, where like there wasn't a day that went by where I didn't contemplate suicide and think it out like how I was going to do it.

How were you going to do it? I had an array of different ways I was going to do it. Were you drinking? Yeah, drinking. I had gotten divorced. I had a failed marriage. I was living in a three-bedroom house all by myself. So I'd go home and I had nobody. It was just lonely. And I was trying to battle all these demons on my own.

Not really knowing what the fuck to do, you know? Yeah. And I was resentful of the guys that I had served with, the guys on my team, because the thing I've learned about not just the Marine Corps, but all branches, regardless of what you're doing, is when you get out, that train doesn't stop rolling. That train keeps going, and it doesn't look back. It doesn't slow down. If you get off...

Thanks. Have a good time. It does exactly what the fuck it is supposed to do, whether you are there or not. Yeah. And that's a fucking tough pill to swallow. I didn't get any calls. Nobody checked to see how I was doing. I don't think anybody really knew. I was so like isolated. I just isolated myself. And, uh, dude, I don't, I don't even know how the fuck I pulled myself out of that hole. To be honest with you, man, it was bad. It was real bad. Um,

And for like a solid year and a half, I was not myself. Like I did some shit that I look back on now that I'm just like, fuck, the fuck is wrong with you? You know what I mean? Just like... Give us an example. Failed relationships, you know, with people, different, you know, just the way I would act, you know, like I just didn't give a fuck about anything or anybody, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

I think I know where you're going with this. But I'm curious, did you look to your, I mean, your stepdad was a sniper in Vietnam and who had come home and he's still alive. So did you look to him for any type of guidance or did you? No, I didn't, man. No, I didn't, man. I was partially embarrassed about it.

I didn't really know how to feel, but I didn't have a mentor or somebody that I could talk to or somebody that could be like, yeah, dude, this is normal. It wasn't like that. And honestly, it was probably best that I experienced it by myself because I learned from it. I learned a lot. And ultimately, man, I think my son is probably what kept my head above water because I came very close on a couple different occasions to taking my own life and

Thinking about my son and him growing up without a father is what stopped me. So fast forward, you know, I get put on a med board. I'm found unfit for duty. I'm given a date to get out of the Marine Corps. I'm done. I'm being medically retired. What year is this? This is the end of 2014. And...

I feel like the fucking walls are closing in around me because I have no fucking idea what I'm going to do. How does what I just did for the last 11 years of my life going to translate to the corporate world or the civilian sector? Yeah. I don't want to be a fucking cop. I see what those motherfuckers deal with and

quite frankly, I just don't want to do it. Yeah. I was done carrying a fucking gun. Had enough, didn't want anything to do with it for like a year and a half after I got out. I never even picked up a gun. Didn't carry, didn't have any fucking sold on my shit, dude. Sold all my guns. Where did you, did you, where'd you go? Uh, I moved back down to Florida. That's where, you know, where I grew up and my dad lived there and

you know, I went, I went and moved in with my dad temporarily for a few months. He was, you know, he's been the most impactful person in my life. And he was the one I felt like I need to go be with him for a little while and just kind of try to clear my head, but, and figure out what the fuck I was going to do with my life. What's next? What am I going to do for a living? You know, I can't like, so I just, I didn't know what to do. You know, I was kind of lost in life and, uh,

So during that time, when I moved back down to Florida, I dabbled in a few different things. I tried the school thing. Gee, I built that fucking worked out like a fart in church. How long did you try that? I'm just curious. A semester and a half. You gave it a good go. Yeah, I gave it a good go. But it just wasn't for me, dude. It just...

I tried it. I thought that was like the thing to do. Yeah, well, coming back from four fucking combat deployments, being blown up 12 times, killing the fucking number three guy, SWAT Marines that are pussies out of the way so you can jump on a machine gun and then go into a fucking classroom with a bunch of 18-year-old fucking chumps. That had to be a tough pill to swallow. Yeah, dude. You want to talk about feeling like an insignificant piece of shit?

I was just trying to figure out like what the fuck happened a year and a half ago. I was fucking like on top of the world. Yeah. You know, I was on top of the fucking world. Um, and it was tough, man. So I did that. It didn't work out for me. Then I thought, all right, so maybe I want to do a trade school. Maybe I want to go be a Marine, Marine technician, go learn how to work on outboard motors and stuff like that. You know, got everything was doing my vocational rehab, you know, packet, uh,

Going to that. I went the first day and I was like, nope, this isn't going to be good. Why is that? I could just tell there was, you know, certain guys, there was younger guys in the class. And then between that, certain guys in the class that I knew I wasn't going to mesh well with. And then there was a personality conflict with the instructor himself.

I was just like, yeah, I don't, I don't want to do this bad enough to, you know, to stick this out for, I think the course for that was like almost a year. And, uh, were you getting a lot of anxiety and shit being around people? Bro, it's fucking unreal. And when I talk about like personality conflicts and not meshing well with some of those other students and stuff, I think a lot of that was me. You know what I mean? Like, it was just me. Like I had no idea how to fucking deal with,

being like a member of like civilization regular society you know what i mean like somebody would be fucking tapping their pen on the desk while somebody's talking you're trying to concentrate and i want to fucking slam their face on the desk you know yeah no i i think uh that's a big reason why people are always asking uh we get a ton of emails and then uh one of the a really common question is why do

guys that come from special operations community or, or war fighters. Why do they always self isolate? Why do they wind up in the middle of nowhere? And, um, I think we're all just trying to avoid confrontation because we cannot deal with it. Um, the way we used to do the first day I moved back down to Florida, I broke a guy's jaw. Like,

We're at a storage unit. I was getting my stuff. I won't go into too far into detail about the storage, but the guy deserved an ass whooping and I gave it to him. But, you know, hours after that, deputy shows up to the house. You know, luckily I didn't get in trouble because the officer felt that my actions were warranted. But that kind of was like, okay,

I can't fucking do this kind of stuff anymore. Like, I'm going to end up in jail. You know, I can't react the way that I normally would react. How many relationships... Well, let me rephrase this. What relationships did you not ruin? Because a lot of guys ruin all the relationships with family, wives, girlfriends, friends. Dude, I think it's safe to say that I probably fucking ruined all of them. Even with your dad? At some point in time.

Yeah. Later down the road, my dad and I kind of had a falling out. Since then, we've rekindled that. Him and I are real close, but yeah. So you said you pretty much fucked up just about all of your relationships, even with your dad. But you came down here and you're newly married, just like me, so...

Obviously, you had at least one that worked out and was able to put up with your fucking bullshit. I think that's what it boils down to is when you end up meeting your soulmate, it's that one person that's willing to put up with your shit. Yeah. I met Jillian about four years ago. We got married in October last year. She was my saving grace, dude. I mean...

When I found, you know, refound my love for fishing and taking the guys out, that made me feel accomplished. But she was that missing piece to my puzzle. She, you know, keeps me grounded, brings me back down when I'm, you know, out in left field. Uh, and ultimately she's the one that pushed me to pursue my, my goals, my dreams, my aspirations. So I got her locked down now. Well, that's fucking awesome, man. Yeah, man. We're, we're really happy and we're both in a really good place. And, uh,

I'm a very lucky guy. Yeah, you guys are good together. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. A lot of people want to know how they can help somebody with PTSD or post-traumatic stress, TBI, with the transition. And I can tell you what definitely does not fucking work is when people try to relate to

to what you're dealing with who have never fucking been there. So don't do that. But do you have any advice for people who do want to help anything? I mean, if you want to help, just be a good fucking American.

Don't let guys that have done so much and sacrificed so much for the country feel like everything they did was for a fucking waste. Getting on social media and posting videos of yourself doing fucking 22 push-ups, you're not fucking making a difference. You're not doing shit. You're not raising awareness. You think you are, and whoever fucking started that might have thought it was, but you're not.

Okay, so just be a good fucking person, you know, be a good person. And if you by chance do come across a combat veteran, just fucking say what's up. You know, don't sit there and try to ask them how many fucking people they've killed or don't do that shit. Just, you know, just ask them what's going on, you know, talk to them, introduce yourself. I had a guy I remember one time when I was I went to another brain treatment facility.

In Dallas, Texas, I was working out at the gym there that was right across from the facility there. A random dude just came up to me and he's like, sir, I don't want to interrupt your workout, but he's like, I recognize you. Your picture's on an OAF page. And I'm like, that's pretty fucking, or not being a trained observer, that's pretty fucking good.

But the kid didn't have any expectations. He wasn't like, you know, trying to fucking find out, you know, info about like what I did and just, you know, Hey, can I get a picture with you? He genuinely was just like, dude, I want to say I got a ton of fucking respect for you. And, uh, I don't, I don't have any clue what, what you may have experienced, but, uh, you know, I just want to tell you, thank you. You know, that's pretty cool. You know? Yeah. But, um, yeah. So, you know, fast forward, uh,

probably a year from there, you know, I was still trying to figure out what the fuck I was going to do in life. And, uh, I get a phone call one day from a guy by the name of Ed Salou. And, uh, he goes, Hey dude, you want to go fishing? And I'm like, uh, you know, I always want to go fishing, dude. So he's like, uh, he's like, well, here's the deal, man. He's like, do you want to go down to Costa Rica and go bill fishing on a private yacht, sport fishing yacht? And,

just hang out and relax for like a week. And I'm like, yeah, what's like, what do I got to do? Like, where do I sign up? Or, you know, I'm like, what's the catch? And so long story short, he's like, look, man, I got, there's this organization called Freedom Alliance. They do here, but they call the heroes vacation every year. And they basically select 15 guys to go down to Costa Rica and, uh,

go down for a week and basically go bill fishing, you know, for Marlin and sailfish and stuff, you know, once in a lifetime opportunity. And it's funny because in between missions on my last deployment, I remember we had a little internet center and I remember going in there and getting on the internet and researching about like different charters and stuff. Cause I told myself when I get home, like that is my number one on my bucket list. I want to go down and catch a trophy billfish and,

And the opportunity was presented to myself. I got to go down there and it was a life-altering experience. No shit. Yeah, I grew up fishing down in Florida, freshwater fishing, saltwater fishing. Like I grew up doing that. But during my time in the military, I basically didn't do any of that. Like I didn't fish at all. So when I got home, I kind of rediscovered my love for fishing again. And when I went on that trip, it was just like,

it was life-changing dude it really was it was it was a life-changing moment in my life and i just kind of you know a few times during that trip i kind of sat back and just observed to see what it was doing the impact it was having on the other guys that were invited to go on this trip and i'm like and the light bulb came on and i'm like i'm like i could make a difference

I can fucking do this. I have the experience and the resources and the gear to fucking be able to get more guys out on the water and let them experience this. And so that's what I did. You know, I talked to the director, director of Freedom Alliance, talked to the president of Freedom Alliance. I said, listen, I said, I love everything that you guys are about, everything that you're doing.

and i want to be a part of it i want to volunteer i don't want any money i don't want anything i just want to be able to contribute and i would love to start doing more than the one time a year where the guys would go down to costa rica so i started running i started taking combat wounded veterans on offshore fishing trips to the bahamas and uh it was amazing dude the impact was happening on these guys it was just like unbelievable and for me that was like

The biggest thing because for that year after I had just gotten out, the biggest thing I struggled with was trying to find my purpose in life again. Feeling like I was just a total piece of shit and wasn't doing anything. I needed to find that sense of purpose again. And I felt like I was contributing to the mission just in a different aspect than I was prior to that.

So it was really cool to do that. And that led in, you know, doing those trips and realizing how much of a difference it was making and how much of an impact it was having on these guys. I took it to the next level. I used my GI ability to go to captain school. Uh, so I went to a 13 week, uh, captain's course, uh, ended up graduating as honor grad, uh, from that course, got my U S coast guard captain's license. And, um,

Now I've kind of found my new calling. I'm a full-time fishing guide. I started a business, Warrior to Bass Guide Service. I'm a full-time freshwater fishing guide, targeting mainly largemouth bass. So it's what I do to put food on the table for my family now. I really enjoy it. I get to meet people from all different walks of life and provide them with lifelong memories with their family members and friends and stuff, get out on the water.

But my biggest enjoyment is I still do the volunteer work. I still take veterans. So in between all my work, I have blackout dates where I will schedule to fly veterans in to fish for two days so that they can experience that. - Well, I remember, I think when we met, you were still working with Freedom Alliance. - Yeah. - And we had just started teaching together. And you invited me to go on that trip

And we're Baton Rouge, right? Venice. We were in Venice. Yeah, Venice, Louisiana. Yeah, on that tuna fishing excursion. Yeah, which was fucking awesome. And I really trusted you. Before that, I didn't do any of that stuff. Because I've seen so many fucking nonprofits use...

the veteran card and the treatment card to fucking bind their pockets. - Yeah, they abused it. I know exactly what you mean. - But you invited me and I was like, well, fuck. I mean, I had a lot of respect for you and I trusted you and we went and it was a really good fucking experience. And it wasn't, it's therapy, but it's not, it's just nice to get your fucking mind off of shit

and be around some like-minded people. Which is another reason I was actually a little hesitant to go is because with what we used to do, there's egos fucking run rampant and sometimes that can be pretty toxic. But that was a really good trip. And all the guys that were there, there was four of us, and it was other than the fucking cold,

That was awesome. But yeah, no egos flying around. I remember telling my wife, like, I was actually kind of shocked that you said yes. Like, I really, I knew your kind of your outlook on, you know, some of the different benevolent organizations and how they abused it and didn't do the right thing. And I was shocked that you came, but I was happy that you did. That's what it's all about, man. You get out there, there wasn't, you know, like I said, no egos running around and

Even though it's not a therapy session, just by nature of what the trip is, it ends up being kind of that way. It ends up everybody gets something out of it, whether it's just, you know, talking to a guy that may have similar experiences that you do. And in the end, you feel like you're not alone because that dude knows exactly how the fuck you feel.

Like that's a big deal. Yeah. Well, the way you structured it too, you had guys that were fresh out, you had guys that were, had been out for a little while and then like I had been out for a little while. And I think that was, I think that was really good because the guys that are fresh out, that's it's fucking seems hopeless. And then you see a guy who's

been out who's coming around and it gives you, uh, it, it just makes you realize, you know, fuck it's, I can overcome this shit. It's possible. Yeah. You know, that guy's doing great. Gives you hope. Yep. Gives you hope. I mean, you've done it. I've done it. I mean, how many guys have we helped kind of walk through, uh,

the transition and multiple different facets. You know, I've had guys reach out to me and they're like, look, man, what do you, what, what do you think about this? You know, what should I do? You know, guys that just don't know and kind of looking for direction, you know, guidance. And I feel like I fucking learned it all on my own. Like I, I went struggled through the transition and ultimately I, I feel like I've had a successful transition, but yeah,

If I can help anybody from going through what I fucking went through, I want to help them, you know? It's almost like for the young MARSOC guys that are coming out now, or maybe they're not even young, you know, that shit could be fucking 40 years old. But to see a guy like you who's been there and done it and admit that you've gotten help, it makes it okay, you know, for the next, for the generations that are coming out. And I do have a question, though. Do you make...

Do you make everybody who catches a fucking tuna eat the heart out? Yes, that's tradition. Two things that typically happen when you catch your first tuna, you got to get in the water with it, which we didn't make you do that. But what we did make you do is you got to eat the heart. Not the whole thing, but you at least got to take a bite. So for those of you guys that have or have not fished aboard any of Captain Mike Ellis's

boats with relentless sport fishing. There's kind of a tradition that's kind of adhered to and anytime you catch your first yellowfin tuna, that is you will taste the blood of that tuna. So eat your heart out Sean. I spit it out and give you worms. Freedom Alliance Relentless Sport Fishing. Good stuff guys. Good job man. Congrats.

That's just a tradition, man, that's come from years back. And it's just fun, you know. And I feel like anybody in the normal state of mind would look at you and be like, yeah, that's not fucking happening. But with guys like us, it's kind of like, you got to fucking do it, you know. Yeah, well, you made me do it. I was going to finish it, but then you told me I'm going to get fucking worms. So, but...

So you do that, you're able to do that now with your charters. What's that? They take veterans out. And that's probably, that is probably even better because it's a one-on-one experience. We had, you know, we had a captain and three other guys. Yeah. And then, but now you're the fucking captain and you're the combat vet that guys, you know, can look up to. Yeah.

And it's a one-on-one session. Yeah. Typically, the way I'll do it is I'll invite two guys. So it'll typically be two guys and myself. But I just want to emphasize that this is not a for-profit. These guys are not being charged. When they're invited, I select these guys and nominate them to come down for these trips based on people, not just...

random like oh i got you and you these are people that i feel can benefit from it that need it you need that reset button what's that you verify oh absolutely everybody that i've taken i know i either know or have somebody that's very close to me that knows them and this is to ensure that everybody that gets the opportunity to go on these is actually uh deserving of it

But, yeah, it's, you know, basically myself and two other guys and, you know, we go out and just relax and decompress and have a good time. And, you know, we catch fish, which is always a plus. But at the end of the day, it's that...

Breaking away from the everyday stresses of life and the bullshit and all that stuff and letting them kind of reconnect with, you know, old comrades or, you know, just like you said, like minded individuals who might may have experienced similar things or similar struggles, you know, and getting them out in the water together and.

And next thing you know, you got two guys that may have not known each other prior to that or they may have known of each other but never really met who are now lifelong friends. They had that connection, you know. Building a network. Absolutely. Which is fucking huge. Absolutely. Well, I think that's fucking awesome what you're doing. And so who's covering the cost of...

Taking these guys out. Well, I am. Basically, you know, I'll just I'll put money aside, you know, when I can on my busier, busier days, busier times a year. You know, I'll set some money aside and, you know, I'll eat the cost. You know, they're not they're not paying me for, you know, to take them out. Like, it's just my boat, my gear, my time.

The money that I do put forth is to cover things like airfare, lodging, food, all that stuff. So right now it's me. So we kind of talked about this before he came up. And I mean, I just think it's fucking great that you're paying for to help and give back to the community. But I mean, in my opinion, you shouldn't be the one paying to give back to the community. So

We spoke a lot about and talked a lot about business before we finally sat down and got you on the show. And so you can donate to Nick on Venmo and PayPal and anything that gets donated goes to

the next set of veterans that you're gonna help. - Yeah, to a therapeutic fishing retreat. - And we get questions all the time at Vigilance Elite on how can I help the veterans? How can I help the veterans? How can I help the guys coming back home? What can I do to give back to them? Well, now's your chance. Nick's doing the dirty work. Not dirty work, but Nick's doing the good work.

He's a great role model for the guys coming home, and he's got a lot of good advice. And the more money you donate to, what's your handle? So you can find me at Warrior2BassGuideService. Spell out the name Warrior, the number two, and then Bass. You can find me on Instagram. You can find me on Facebook. Or you can go to my website, Warrior2Bass.com. So all those proceeds...

Get veterans out there, and you've got to find an example of somebody who's had a successful transition. So check out Warrior 2 Bass, although I think it should be Warrior 3 Bass. So I want to kind of wrap this thing up here, Nick. I just want to say it's been a real fucking honor to have you sitting in that chair across from me. And, you know, your fucking service record is...

I've worked with a lot of different operators from all different branches, especially when I was at CIA. I worked with all of them. And I got to tell you, if I could go back and operate with somebody that I didn't get to before, you would be fucking top of my list, dude. And I don't say that shit to very many people. But...

You're just a solid motherfucker, man. Yeah, I appreciate that, man. I feel it's mutual. I knew that from the time when we started teaching together and doing the training and whatnot. I always thought to myself, man, we could have fucking wrecked some shit if we were deployed together. You're damn right. All right, check out Warrior2Bass on Instagram, and best of luck to you, man. Thanks, brother. I appreciate you having me on the show. It's been an honor. Cheers.

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