Jocko Podcast 271: Stories of the Horrors of War. "Only Cry for the Living", w/ Hollie McKay.

2021-03-04T08:29:03Z

Underground Premium Content: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @echocharles @HollieSMcKay 0:00:00 - Opening 0:10:24 - Hollie McKay, Only Cry for the Living 2:49:56 - Final Thoughts 3:06:29 - How to stay on THE PATH. JOCKO UNDERGROUND Exclusive Episodes: https://app.redcircle.com/shows/64a89f88-a245-4098-8d8d-496325ec4f74/exclusive-content Jocko Store https://www.jockostore.com/collections/menApparel: Jocko Fuel: https://originmaine.com/nutrition Origin Jeans and Clothes: https://originmaine.com/durable-goods/ Origin Gis: https://originmaine.com/bjj-mma-fit/ 3:27:00 - Closing Gratitude.

AI summary of episode

But I think, during the process of this book, and I talk about a little bit in the book, but it's often, you know, as a as a writer, I think it's an advantage because you're telling stories, and so it's almost cathodic, so people are telling you terrible things, and you have a way to release it out of your body, whereas I know a lot of my colleagues who have photographers or videographers sort of in combat, I think that they suffer more to be honest, and I've heard this from other journalists, because maybe they're not getting that same release that I get as a rasha, you know, may or may not be true, but that's sort of my experience with it, but I know, and I talk about in the book, and it's not always the most obvious things that I use the word break you, but it's not always, you know, digging up the mass graves, or seeing somebody be killed, or, you know, they're horrific things, but for me, they want the things that, you know, shattered me, the things were, and there's one that really sticks out for me, and that was in, in Xinjiang, in the city, and it had been completely destroyed, and a few of these very poor people had moved back to live in these houses where there was no water, no electricity, there was nothing, and because they couldn't afford to live at Camp Seven, and so I remember being there one day and there was a young father, and he had two young children, and he was just living in his old bummed-out house, even though there was nothing in there, and he said that he, they were easy, and he said that he's why I could be taking the children's mother, and that the captured her cold team and said if you give me X amount of dollars, it was several thousand dollars, then, you know, I would turn her, so this poor guy for months walked around and around the village, and everybody was trying to give him money, and he's selling his furniture, and, you know, doing whatever, and he finally comes up with the money, and then he calls the the captor and says, hey, I've got the money, and he says all of the prices doubled, and at that point, the man just gave up, he just gave up, he said, I can't, I don't have that, no one else was going to give me any more money, and so he's sitting over these kids, and I just, and that was the story that really, really cracks me because I felt so helpless, and I thought I can't even give you money, because I would be labeled as a, you know, giving, financing a terrorist regime if I did that, because they're paying ISIS to get their women back, but to him, that was, that was his wife, that was these children's mother, and just the fact that she's probably not even alive now, because he just could not come up with that money, and he didn't have the resources to do that. So I can go in and I can spend, however long I want to spend there months, weeks, whatever, and you get their stories, and you, you tell their stories, and then you get to go home, I get to get on a plane, I have an American passport, Australian passport, I go home, and they don't, they don't get to go home, they don't get to, they don't understand what, what that, that in itself being such a luxury, and there's a guilt that I, I feel with that sometimes, in just, in being that, and they don't view it that way, they view it as, why, you know, what a gift it is that someone would want to even come in and tell their story and would leave their comfortable home in their, you know, families and come and talk to us, and that's how they view it, which is lovely, but for me, it was always, yeah, a sense of of just filling a little bit of guilt about it, and I always tried not to be a vulture, I didn't want to go in and have somebody sort of open up and tell their story and then I, and then I take that story and I leave, and I don't know that it's ever, it's ever going to change anything for them, I don't know that it's ever going to do any good for them, so but I still I think about it a lot I think about you know a lot of the people that I meant and think you know I try to find out where they are what they're doing I think today with all these you know what's app signal encrypted messaging you stay in contact with these people a lot and that's something that a previous journalist and different generations didn't have so today which is lovely you can still sort of stay in contact with them and their families and but I found and currently what I'm currently on is the to do something hard like hard where your body has to be like hey we got to recover from this whether be like a one small body part situation even like a met concentration like that just at least one thing I like that on these kind of one-off days you a normal workout day as hard it's it's gonna be a hard one You'd be surprised how many people want to platform, you know, get them to talk and and often I think a lot of it came down to, they just hadn't talked to anyone for a while, so they were ready to talk to someone and they wanted to tell their story and you get them going for a minute and they're spilling their life to you because they've been locked up or whatever the situation is and people like to listen to themselves speak and that's what I've certainly found in interviewing a number of different jihadists and they want to talk. You know, I'm going to end and, and, um, as I read through the book, which I'm going to, I'm not going to do it justice because, you know, we're only going to read, obviously, not going to read the whole thing right now. well that's a probably a great place to wrap this up because what you've absolutely done in this book is you have told their stories and we will pass these stories on to as many people as we can and I think like Haley love said you know you've got what your talent is right you've got your skill in life and Haley love can make videos and sing and and you've got this ability to write and share these stories and that's what you've done so echo I heard about them and we went to sort of, we went for long drive to meet them and they were these extraordinary, easy women, most of them had come from Xinjar and, and so when, when I just came in in 2014, these, the easy, these had to flee up the mountain, because there wasn't anywhere to go, it was all surrounded at the bottom, and the tragedy of it was, so many of them died on that mountain because they stopped to death, it was a middle of summer and a rock in the summers, something else, but they stopped, and if they were describing, you know, having to throw children off the mountain, because that was going to be a better way for them to die than to, to die of stovation or dehydration, and that was really what's put in America to get back involved in Iraq was the Zidi plant, and the fact that of what happened to them was just in there was no, it was so hard to get aid and anything to them, so the women that survived that formed their own unit that they called the Sunlades, the first of the Sunlades, because they wanted to, I think, was multiple reasons, but they wanted to, to aid find their women that was still missing, and be they wanted to be involved in that in that liberation of getting their towns and villages back, and they were just really really extraordinary women. I remember when when I got back from my last deployment and then I retired and I you know we talked to guys and see stories about guys that would that guys that were in Vietnam more and they go back to Vietnam and then when I started doing the podcast we met guys that had gone back to Vietnam and I read more stories about guys that had gone back to Vietnam and then you know you can take it to the the guys that weren't World War II that would go back to the beaches of Normandy and and I remember thinking to myself as far as going back to Iraq especially when I first got home this is I don't want to go back there don't want to go back there And I think just, I guess by nature, you know, with a lot of journalists, whether they've had, you know, tremendous years behind them doing this or not, it's, I guess it's that same notion of, you know, we're not working for the government, we're not working for anyone in particular, you know, beyond our organizations. and I didn't there's there's plenty of stories in there where I know from being in combat myself how close you were to the front lines how close you how much danger you were in all the time so thank you for writing the book but also thank you for your courage and your bravery to go out there take these risks to capture these stories to capture the horrors of war so that hopefully we as a race of people in the world can learn to avoid it at all costs absolutely thank you Holly thank you thank you both and with that Holly has left the building and left us with an incredible book with some incredible accounts in it so definitely check out that book a lot of horror in that book a lot of horror in the world And then when I realized I really need to take a break was sort of several years after, and it was in Africa and East Africa, and I'd interviewed a woman from the Congo who had had, you know, sexual violence, and she'd had these babies out of rape, and just what she went through, was so horrific, and she'd been shunned by her community, and she was running, and she was just the most extraordinary woman, and she was so, the name was Nancy, and she was so strong and amazing, and I just remember sitting with her for hours and with these babies, and having that feeling of, oh my god, I don't, I don't even feel this, I don't, I don't feel anything right now, and that really bothered me that I didn't feel anything, and so after that trip I went home, and I, I didn't go anywhere, I don't think for about six or seven months, because I just felt that, yeah, if I'd got to that point of just not reacting, that was not the point that I wanted to get to, and that's when you just have to take a break, and that's it. But like you just, they be standing side by side with a native speaker, and, you know, my seal interpreter would say, hey, the local guy said this, and then the native speaker would say, hey, here's what he actually means, and there's just a little bit that you're just not going to catch, you know, it's just not going to happen. But then, if you're a doctor after a while, it becomes less of, oh, I'm cutting this person open more like this is like a, you know, like a specimen that I have to like work on kind of thing. There's a little bit of a Walmart process and I found in a couple of the situations where my fixes would get very angry and I would have to ask them to leave or, you know, because often, you know, it's their relatives, you know, people that are being killed by these people and they're hate is so strong. And what the other crazy thing is, you know, when you talk to people and, you know, I would explain, well, you know, we were working with often times of majority, she, uh, army and it would be hard for them to interact with the Sunnis and people have no, but they don't understand what we're talking about. but i wonder if you can find something that's not american made in the whole chain like if you go to one of the looms that they got could you find like a set of screws that are used in there you like hey those are made in you know somewhere you are going to be hard pressed to find something in your jeans that is not 100% American Yeah, I know that the locals' ability to understand and give you these nuanced things, you know, the interpreters that we had would, you know, because we'd have, we'd have Americans, like seals that had been trained to speak Arabic. so it's an awesome book and yeah check it out a lot of horror a lot of horror in the book a lot of horror in the world I kind of feel like we should do our best to bring some good in the world starting with our own lives trying to live a good life start there And that was a big bit, but you know, with ISIS, you know, you disband and, and entire, you know, the Sunnis were very dispensed and after a sedan and yet they still had their weapons in there out on the street and feeling, you know, persecuted by by the government Probably more than it seems like if you had the attitude like, I'm going to tell the truth and people are trying to adjust your stories and you're like, not not complying with what they want you to do. yeah it keeps your body there trying to you know to it trying to adapt adapt and get you know kind of rebuild itself as the new and improved version you know And I always felt very comfortable in the fixes and the people that I use locally that they had sort of the know how to at least, you know, with exit plans and other things like that. once well you need some supplementation for sure you need some supplementation in fact you got a little supplementation routine boom you're gonna be on the track even quicker faster more effectively the worries jockel has some supplementation jockel feel so here it is you need protein supplementation got milk tastes like a dessert by the way I've been on that train for about a almost a month now I forgot I forgot the joy the glory so actually going rewind just a little bit so all this stuff you can be on a subscription So, I had, I had set markers on you for myself really, especially because I was, you know, spending so much time in the stories, we'd just get heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier and I would just be living in it, and I'd be living on a floor somewhere, and I didn't have a team, I didn't, I didn't have people around me beyond, you know, my fixes and who I was very close to, but I just knew that I, I wouldn't be able to do my work effectively if something, or I was hearing things that were really tragic, or something tragic had happened, and I didn't feel anything. but I found that if you sort of spread it out little bit more and I try to go hard to on every single day like hard at least one thing hard you know some people and I can't do anything really beyond that I think that was also something I had to learn was that you want to be able to think that a story is going to make a difference it's going to change the answer you know some law makers mind somewhere It's like she, she like, you always hear people going back to your roots, you know, go back to her, she straight up went back to her roots and she lives there now and pretty awesome. And I just thought, this is just, it's such a, it's a place beyond a place that I can, you know, thank goodness, can never imagine getting to, or hopefully never would, but the depths of what they'd endured, the thousands of people from their community that had been taken, and, and just, it was so hard to even now to wrap my head around, but for them, it was just, there would be on the point of even reacting to any of it anymore, and they were just so lost, and so, so broken by it all that I just, nothing was triggering them anymore, and so here was I feeling terribly unprofessional and crying, but I just, I, I couldn't, I just couldn't stop, and it was just, yeah, that was a, probably the only time I've really done that, but that was, yeah, And I remember just getting out of that being like, oh, I had, and I know of other journalists, I knew a couple of people and they, they got busted a checkpoints and turned around or turned in or whatever it was and, and for me that was going under the radar. so yes let's not let our lives and capabilities go to waste in any way let's try not to how about that I can't you know intention is a big deal it is just knowing these things that's a that's a huge start you know like

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jockel Podcast number 271 with echo Charles and me, Jockel Willing. Good evening,
[00:00:07] I got good evening.
[00:00:16] First they put us in a school in Tala Far and held us for 20 days. They didn't let us eat or drink.
[00:00:24] Only the children are given a little bread, but we had to go to the bathroom to share it.
[00:00:29] If they caught us sharing, we were tortured. The children were dying, starving.
[00:00:42] They wouldn't drink the little amount of dirty water. So we found some toothpaste and put it in the
[00:00:48] water to pretend it was milk so they would drink it and not die from dehydration.
[00:00:52] Dold of emotion, Basima recalled everything down to the most minor detail.
[00:01:03] How they were transferred to Mazul in cattle trucks and stashed in a traditional ceremony hall.
[00:01:09] How the elderly had to give their children urine to drink to keep them alive after ISIS cut their
[00:01:16] only water pipe. How everyone became so sick and malnourished that clumps of their hair would fall to the floor.
[00:01:29] But the worst was yet to come. In the middle of the night, the ISIS men were coming in and yelling
[00:01:37] to know who is still a virgin, Basima whispered. And from the age of eight, they were taking girls
[00:01:46] to the market to sell for a cigarette. However, Basima and several other siblings fought up a plan
[00:01:56] to avoid being violated. They tried to look like ugly boys by using a piece of broken plate to
[00:02:03] shave their heads and dressed in the men's clothes they found hidden away.
[00:02:10] We thought if they must have stuck us for boys, we would be taken out and killed.
[00:02:14] Rather than raped, she explained. But instead, when they knew our trick, the men came in and
[00:02:23] stripped us in front of everybody. In front of everybody, hundreds. They touched us everywhere,
[00:02:31] sexually abused us. My father and brother had to watch. And that was the last I saw of them.
[00:02:46] Basima did not shut her when she talked about the abuse. She was telling her story, but she was also
[00:02:54] telling somebody else's story. She was telling the story of so many other women. Perhaps that is
[00:03:02] how she was able to get through it with strength by separating herself from the narrative.
[00:03:14] When initially snatched, Gazal was with her six-month-old son,
[00:03:19] Boktyar, and five-year-old daughter, Darren. When Gazal, while Gazal clutched her screaming
[00:03:29] son, Basima claimed to be the mother of Darren, it hopes that the ISIS operatives wouldn't sell her
[00:03:35] if it was clear she was no longer a virgin. Gazal spoke of her ordeal in a tempered rhythm,
[00:03:45] relentlessly tugging at her dress and glaring at her raw crack-tands.
[00:03:54] At first, she said she refused to go with the wally, but he dragged her by her hair and took her to
[00:04:02] her and back to her to the Syrian city of Minn-Biz near the Torque Turkish border.
[00:04:08] They were yanked into a house like the headquarters where there were already two other Yazidi slaves
[00:04:20] and a constant ebb of foreign fighters. The wally said, I must marry him,
[00:04:30] but I refused so he took my son and I didn't see him for two days.
[00:04:35] After that I begged and cried. He started torturing me and said I had no option but to marry him.
[00:04:49] Only it wasn't a real marriage, but it was no ceremony. It was just rape.
[00:04:57] I was forced to be a Muslim to pray five times a day.
[00:05:12] The coalition bombs soon started falling on ISIS installations, bases and homes,
[00:05:18] but they also fell on people who were already scared and suffering, who had no arms and no
[00:05:24] choice but to be there. After Gazal was gone, Basimah said that she and scores of others,
[00:05:32] including Yang Daren were wounded in an air strike on the prison.
[00:05:39] Shrapnel pierced her head. Basimah's only treatment was her long ebbony locks getting shaved off.
[00:05:46] She received no medicine. The slaves were propelled down 22 skewed steps into an underground
[00:05:56] weapon storage filled with guns and bombs which would become their living quarters for more than a year.
[00:06:07] We were tortured. There were no toilets, we had to eat, sleep and do the necessary
[00:06:15] all in the same place. All kinds of insects and flies were in there. They forced us to convert to
[00:06:25] Islam. We were made to look at beheaded bodies through the little window.
[00:06:33] We didn't know when our time was up. All we could think about was whether it was better to live
[00:06:42] or to die. What is a war? It is trying to remember those we treasure who are taken while
[00:07:07] at the same time trying to let them go. What is war? It is waiting to kill or is waiting to be killed.
[00:07:18] What is war? War is a war inside the war which the world cannot see.
[00:07:25] But sometimes if you get close enough you can hear it. It is inmates being endlessly beaten,
[00:07:32] lashed, mailed with statistic tools and kept in small cages. What is war?
[00:07:43] A human shell might have made it through the storm in one piece. But what is inside will forever
[00:07:48] be filled with a dull pain of waiting, waiting for evil to enter to violate the person they once were
[00:07:56] one more time. What is war? It is ugly. It is lies. It is ugly. Lies. What is war?
[00:08:11] War is distrust, dishonesty, skepticism. What is war? War is a vision of agony that becomes normal.
[00:08:26] That's what war does to people. What is war? Everything you could imagine hell to be.
[00:08:34] Only worse. And those are some excerpts from a book called Only Cry for the Living,
[00:08:54] which as you can see is a harling book about the absolutely savage reign of terror perpetrated by ISIS.
[00:09:06] I rack and Syria. And throughout the book, it asks that question over and over again. What is war?
[00:09:13] War. And that is a complex question. And it requires answers from many different angles.
[00:09:28] And this book does an incredible job of giving us some of those answers. The book was written by
[00:09:35] an Australian American journalist by the name of Holly McKay who spent time on the ground in Iraq.
[00:09:44] Afghanistan and Syria has been embedded with Australian and American troops sat through military
[00:09:51] tribunals and interviewed hundreds of soldiers, civilians, and government officials before
[00:09:59] during and after the horrors of war. And it is an honor to have Holly here with us to share
[00:10:12] some of her experiences and some of the things that she learned along the way. Holly.
[00:10:22] Thank you so much for coming down to join us. Thank you for having me. This is definitely
[00:10:29] a very rough subject that you dove into and that you pursued. And I didn't know you or anything about
[00:10:40] you really until I started reading through the book. I just basically knew that you were a journalist.
[00:10:47] But there's some interesting the pathway that you took to get here as I kind of explored that
[00:10:52] is interesting. And before we jump into the book, I just want to kind of get some of your background.
[00:11:00] You know what's going to say most books and it's true. And most books people at least
[00:11:05] people write books and they say they're not about themselves, but they write about themselves.
[00:11:08] Right? And you actually don't spend a lot of time writing about yourself in this book.
[00:11:13] So just a little background before we jump in about, you know, so you were born in Australia.
[00:11:20] Yes. So I was born in North Queensland in Australia and my dad was in the mine so we moved
[00:11:24] around a fair bit. And then when I was very young, I became very, very heavily involved in ballet.
[00:11:31] And so when I was 15, I went to a boarding school. It was kind of a fame school
[00:11:38] in Sydney where we could train full time in different sort of arts. And then we did our sort of
[00:11:45] schooling on the side as well with that. And we could all work professionally. And so it was just a
[00:11:50] very interesting way to study and grow up. And I really thought that that was the career that I was
[00:11:56] going to go into. It was going to be ballet dance. It was going to be ballet. Also that is a
[00:12:00] psycho totally psycho thing. Totally psycho thing. And I, you know, but what I always say and people think
[00:12:06] it's just it was the best training ground for what I ended up doing because you you learn to just
[00:12:13] to push yourself beyond any kind of boundary that you ever think. And that's just normal. And when
[00:12:18] you're that young, you're just it's normal to be 15 hours a day in these crazy shoes with bloody
[00:12:24] feet and being yelled at and being told, you know, you can only eat this, this and this and you
[00:12:28] have to weigh this. And it's just this so much discipline involved in it. And it really was the
[00:12:33] most amazing training ground. But on top of that, what it did was it really taught me so much
[00:12:38] about the world that I wouldn't have known in my Australian bubble. When you say what you just
[00:12:43] realize that through ballet, there's all these different countries. You know, I'll get yeah,
[00:12:49] like I give me something to go on. Because for me, you grow up a little New England kid. It's like,
[00:12:52] okay, cool, this is the world. Yeah, and it's, you know, I learned about the civil rights movement
[00:12:57] through Alvin Ali who was this incredible, he's got an art center in New York City. And that's how
[00:13:04] he had this amazing piece called Revelations. And I just remember being about 16 and just watching
[00:13:09] it and just the music and it was gospel music. And I learned about this sort of whole culture.
[00:13:14] And we did that with so many parts of it. I think the Rolling Stones, that was this amazing
[00:13:19] ballet with that Canadian company, it's set to the Rolling Stones. And so I learned about
[00:13:24] hedonism and all these, you know, different things in an era that I really didn't know. And
[00:13:29] it really sparked this insatiable appetite for the world. And that was through the music. And
[00:13:35] this sort of deeply, a beyond that. And I really, that was what I wanted to pursue. And that's
[00:13:40] sort of why I guess I left, I left time very young to go and study. I broke my ankle. So that sort of
[00:13:46] set back some of the immediate professional ideals that I had. And so as soon as I kind of healed a
[00:13:53] bit, gone to university, an opportunity came up to go to New York to, I had, I got a scholarship
[00:13:59] I could finish my degree there. And so I thought, you know, well, finish a degree. Maybe I'll go
[00:14:04] back into the arts. I didn't work out that way. I ended up in a journalism career and it was not planned at all.
[00:14:11] But yeah. When you went to New York, did you go to study dance still?
[00:14:15] No, so I was studying at a small university, just off Wall Street, called Paste. That was affiliated
[00:14:20] with my university in Sydney. And I was studying, it was media arts, but I had a specialty kind of
[00:14:26] in writing was what I loved. And I wasn't sure what direction I was going to take that or whether
[00:14:31] I was going to go back into the ballet field. So being in New York City, I got a chance to do both,
[00:14:38] you know, sort of the hub of creativity really. And kind of study and have a really great time.
[00:14:44] I turned 21 in New York. Then, then, so did you, what did you end up getting your degree in?
[00:14:51] Media Arts and Production. And with the specialization, you know, it's a fancy BA, but it's,
[00:14:58] I specialized in sort of writing and human rights issues. So I always had that sort of passion
[00:15:03] of trying to understand the world in a little bit of a deeper lens, I guess, at that point.
[00:15:09] So what year did you graduate from college? 2003. And then, did you go back to Australia?
[00:15:15] So no, so when I was in New York and I arrived and then everybody is talking about these internships.
[00:15:22] And I had no idea what it was. You know, Australia, we just work, you know, you work, you go to school,
[00:15:28] you, whatever. So they're talking about internships and I was like, I want to do one of those things.
[00:15:32] What are they? This sounds fascinating. And I went to a bunch of websites and
[00:15:38] stumbled across a fox website. And I didn't, I didn't even know what fox news was at that time.
[00:15:42] And it was early digital era. And I taught myself to web code just for fun one at school. And so they
[00:15:50] said, well, we're building up a digital thing, you know, you obviously seem to like that kind of thing.
[00:15:56] Would you like to do that? So I thought, yeah, I'll give this a go. This sounds great. And so I joined
[00:16:02] the newsroom there. And I really, I fell in love with storytelling in a different way. I was so used
[00:16:08] to doing it through dance, through physically, through my body, through other, and being able to kind
[00:16:15] of be there and it was much more literal than what I'd used to. But I really, I fell in love with it
[00:16:20] and being able to write. And this whole new medium was just beginning. And I just, I really threw
[00:16:26] myself into it. And I loved it. And then, at the end of it, you know, as I said, I was 21 and they
[00:16:32] said, well, sponsor you if you'd like to come in and work here full of time. And so that sort of
[00:16:36] made up my mind pretty quickly that that was a pretty amazing opportunity. And the dance career
[00:16:43] might have to be for another life. So yeah, so I was sponsored. And they said, would you like to go to
[00:16:52] LA? And I was, I was really in love with New York. But I said, sure, let's go to LA. And let's do this.
[00:16:56] And so I went to LA. And I guess by default, being in Los Angeles, there was, you know, the entertainment
[00:17:04] hub of the world. And so that sort of seems to be, and I had my own column, which again was sort of
[00:17:12] a bit of a baptism by fire. And I was just immediately thrown into this cage of, oh, yeah, I described it
[00:17:20] when I got there, Joko. It was the summer of 2007. And Paratelsin had just gotten out of jail.
[00:17:26] And somehow I'd made friends with an assistant of hers. And she was living in this beach house
[00:17:31] down in Malibu. And so every day we go to these parties at Paratelsin. And it was, the paparazzi
[00:17:38] were lining up on the beach. And I just remember thinking, this is the biggest circus I've ever seen.
[00:17:43] Like, this is this is ridiculous. And it stayed that way for me. And I think even though I had
[00:17:51] some really incredible opportunities and to meet really amazing people too. And I don't think I really
[00:17:57] at the time, you know, when you get to sit down for 20 minutes with Steven Spielberg or something,
[00:18:03] I don't think I really, you know, valued. I think it was just, it was too young to kind of understand.
[00:18:08] This is pretty cool. But I just got to meet so many people from different walks of life. I would be
[00:18:14] I'd be covering a sug-night trial and comp to it. And then next minute I'd be, you know, driving to
[00:18:20] a choreography session with the SPICE Girls reunion tour. It was just this real crazy, you know,
[00:18:26] they'd be at that, you know, a ditty's party and then I would be at, you know, some other cool place.
[00:18:32] And it put to me the funny thing about it was I always felt, I was the outside looking in at something.
[00:18:38] I never felt part of it. I just felt like this was this, it was a launch pad, but it was this
[00:18:45] incredible stepping stone. And I guess similar to the ballet, it told me something really crucial,
[00:18:52] which was just enough out the BS. And that's something that's, I don't think there's a better training
[00:18:58] ground for that than than being in that entertainment world. Because you learn to see through people so
[00:19:04] quickly and you learn to really navigate, there's so many layers around these people. They have
[00:19:10] publicist managers, there's just so many layers. And a lot of intimidation people trying to stop
[00:19:17] you from running a story, people trying to spin this this way that way. And it really taught me
[00:19:23] it from a very young age to be very resilient against that. To be, no, that's not, that's not what I saw.
[00:19:28] That's not what happened. That's not what the situation is. Why are you doing that? And I think,
[00:19:34] yeah, I can't imagine that's something that's really served me, served me really well.
[00:19:39] So the name of this, what was the name of your column? Poptons. This is my old boss. I don't know where
[00:19:45] that came from. He just came up with it when day to day. This is what it's going to be. And I,
[00:19:50] let's do it. Did you, isn't it, as a reporter, aren't you supposed to feel like an outsider?
[00:19:57] Are you supposed to be on the outside looking in? And technically yes, but in the entertainment industry,
[00:20:02] and this is one thing that always bothered me about it was that people were so busy trying to be
[00:20:08] friends with these people. And I could never get my head around. And I was like, they're not my friend.
[00:20:13] I don't want to be that friend. I have my own friends. And so I think people always,
[00:20:17] automatically assume that you must, yeah, that you must, you know, want to be this friend and everyone's
[00:20:23] kissing each other's ass on a red carpet. Don't you look great tonight? No, what?
[00:20:29] So people get totally sucked into the whole thing. Totally sucked in. Yeah. And that was what,
[00:20:34] yeah, that was one thing that annoyed Mary. I, I remember being about 22 and one of those
[00:20:39] big entertainment shows, a producer had approached me and said, you know, we'd love to talk to you
[00:20:44] about a job in this and that and probably stupidly because the money was probably quite good. But I
[00:20:50] said, oh, no, not interested. Thank you. And that was about my immediate reaction was I would just
[00:20:56] have to sit there and basically be nice to you all the time. And that wasn't, that wasn't the
[00:21:01] person I was. I wanted to understand the real story behind it. And it's hard to do that in the
[00:21:10] Hollywood without sort of being being shunned, I guess. And anyone who does kind of do that,
[00:21:14] they are shunned. They don't get the access. They want to, the places and things. And I think
[00:21:20] people are really drawn to that world because they want to feel that, that being part of something.
[00:21:26] So at what point did you sort of envision where what you really wanted to do?
[00:21:34] So I was a slow process. I started to do a lot more sort of investigative work. And then I would sort
[00:21:42] of pick up different politics stories. I was always very vested in world affairs and there was a great
[00:21:49] afar and correspondence in our bureau and he'd spent a lot of time living in Pakistan and just,
[00:21:54] you know, having credible stories and he really, and I sat with him and he really gave me that
[00:21:59] encouragement that I needed. And that was just you just have to go and do it. You love to travel,
[00:22:04] you've traveled to all these places and I, and I traveled a lot and I'd sort of learnt to speak
[00:22:09] a little bit of Arabic it's gone now. But growing up I'd learned to speak and I just had a real
[00:22:15] appetite for understanding different parts of the world and kind of growing up, growing up in the
[00:22:21] time when Afghanistan and Iraq and a lot of friends of mine that were my age were kind of being deployed.
[00:22:28] And so I always really wanted to understand it and then with his name was Dominique and his support
[00:22:35] was just you've just got to go and do it. And so I just, I really just had to put myself out there.
[00:22:41] I had to be that annoying person to my bosses. I wanted you this. I wanted to do this. I wanted to do this.
[00:22:46] And luckily I had people in New York that supported me that looked at my work and thought, well,
[00:22:54] we've thrown her on so many different stories and she's always managed to come back with something.
[00:22:59] And she knows how to investigate. She knows how to work independently. So why not?
[00:23:03] So that was sort of my, my segue into it. And I really reached a point where I knew I had to leave
[00:23:08] that it's a tame thing and did you create enemies in the entertainment thing?
[00:23:12] And I wouldn't say I created enemies. I mean, there was certain, you know,
[00:23:17] I definitely had a few run-ins and I definitely spoke my mind.
[00:23:21] Probably more than it seems like if you had the attitude like, I'm going to tell the truth and
[00:23:25] people are trying to adjust your stories and you're like, not not complying with what they want you to do.
[00:23:30] It seems like it'd be pretty easy environment to make people mad. Yes.
[00:23:35] Yeah, I did. And then, sort of I guess, toward the last year or six months I was doing it. I,
[00:23:43] I probably looking back and I'd check that out a little bit. But yeah, you do. You create enemies
[00:23:49] as you go. And again, I just, I think I just slowly was removing myself at that point anyway.
[00:23:55] So what was the first, did you get like an assignment to, like your first assignment that started
[00:24:00] to move you down this path of this going to war? So I was, I was in, and I sort of been traveling
[00:24:08] through the area and then I ended up doing some work there. I guess the biggest one was,
[00:24:14] I was in the Middle East during when 2014, the Warbroke out in Gaza. So I was sort of going back
[00:24:23] and forth between Israel and Gaza and sort of being able to cover it because I was there.
[00:24:29] That was kind of my baptism by fire. What were you doing there? I was vacationing, visiting
[00:24:35] friends in Jordan. I was hanging out with Bedouins in a Bedouin tent. And you know,
[00:24:39] you know, a pen in a notebook and a comma. Yeah, and then you have contacts back in your
[00:24:45] news station. You say, here's what's going on. And I wrote some stuff there and then I sort of went
[00:24:51] back and I thought this was just, and at that time that was also when I assisted sort of really
[00:24:55] sparked, I guess, in the Middle East. And I'd been covering a closely sort of following the
[00:25:03] Arab Spring, which was all in those years prior to that. So I just, I was so invested in it,
[00:25:09] I guess. And I harassed and harassed and then made contacts with different people and fixes on the ground
[00:25:16] in Iraq. And yeah, I went for to cover ISIS, I guess, after that would have been the fall of 2014.
[00:25:26] So that was in the very beginning stages. I mean, I'm just sitting here thinking,
[00:25:34] we, everybody kind of knew what ISIS was. It's a very courageous move to say,
[00:25:40] that's what I'm going to go. Do go find out what these folks are up to. And I use the term folks
[00:25:45] very loosely with them. You know, I'm going to end and, and, um, as I read through the book, which I'm
[00:25:53] going to, I'm not going to do it justice because, you know, we're only going to read, obviously,
[00:25:58] not going to read the whole thing right now. The, the book is, you know, I got the manuscript.
[00:26:04] I don't know when. So a year ago, six months ago, a year ago, something like that,
[00:26:09] because we ended up publishing it at Jockel Publishing, which was awesome. It's, when I, I read
[00:26:14] like the first seven pages and just said to myself, are you kidding me? This thing, this story needs to
[00:26:20] get out. So with that, um, I always have to make that caveat that when I read this thing,
[00:26:28] it's, if it seems like it's, oh, wait, where did that come from? Who's that character? It's because
[00:26:32] I'm not reading the whole thing. And you, you have to get the book to really, to follow your story.
[00:26:40] And it is chronological, you know, it starts off in November of 2014. It ends up when close to 2019,
[00:26:46] I think, but it is chronological, but it's also, it's a moves around from location to location,
[00:26:52] story to story, because sometimes you're in Baghdad, sometimes you're in Raka, sometimes you're
[00:26:57] out on the outskirts of Missouil, you're traveling to all these different places, but it's,
[00:27:02] it's way more evident when you read the book, the whole book rather than me just sitting here reading
[00:27:08] chunks of it. So that's my caveat. When you are traveling over there, just, are you just traveling,
[00:27:18] are you traveling on an American passport? So I became an American citizen in 2017. So initially,
[00:27:26] I was just Australian, I was a green cod holder, and then I got, I got my citizenship in 2017.
[00:27:33] And then when you're traveling into a country, so I was in the military, and so we would have
[00:27:40] an official passport. So not a diplomatic passport, which was a black passport,
[00:27:46] but not a regular American passport, which is a maroon passport. We would have blue passports,
[00:27:51] which said that we're official, I guess, government Americans, is there anything that you have
[00:27:58] that gives you some kind of indication as press? Nope, journalists, it just regular citizens.
[00:28:06] Nothing special. You're rolling in there. Yeah. Who's supplying you with gear? Who's giving you
[00:28:12] body armor? Who's giving you helmets? Right. So I did, I did have my, we all generally as journalists,
[00:28:18] we all have our own, or I arranged to wherever I'm going, if I could. Get me training? Yeah,
[00:28:24] we're kind of chasing this. Just sort of basic, you know, a hostage training, just kind of the
[00:28:28] basic first aid. You just kind of have to do a few basic things you go, but most of my training
[00:28:35] was really on the ground. And the approach that I decided to take really early on, which I think
[00:28:40] served me, and it's probably their approach that I will always take, is very under the radar. So
[00:28:48] I would see people that went in, especially, and it's very difficult with television, because television
[00:28:52] crews have to go in with cameras, and they go in with a lot of security, and you become very visible.
[00:28:59] For me, I went in. I would organize to meet with locals wherever it is. I was going my local fixer,
[00:29:07] local house, I'd be staying in, and I would just very much go under the radar. And to me,
[00:29:12] that was always the way that I felt that I could get the story, and even though people thought,
[00:29:17] oh, you have to have security, you have to have this, you have to have that.
[00:29:20] I never felt they needed that. I felt that that would have made me more of a known presence,
[00:29:27] which would have been more dangerous for me. As a writer, I felt that I didn't need a lot of those
[00:29:33] things, and that was always, and I discussed those things with my, with my superiors, and ahead of time,
[00:29:40] and that was always something that they took, and enabled me to make those decisions, and be that
[00:29:47] independent. And how good was your Arabic? It was okay for a while. Where did you learn Arabic?
[00:29:53] You know, I grew up, so where I was going to school was a sort of there was a big Lebanese community there.
[00:29:59] So I was interested, and I just, I would have people teach me, and so, but I always worked with
[00:30:04] the translator because I couldn't pick up the dialects. I mean, the dialects were just so confusing,
[00:30:09] and I didn't want to risk ever, I guess, getting something that would have been crucial and getting it wrong.
[00:30:15] Yeah, I know that the locals' ability to understand and give you these nuanced things,
[00:30:22] you know, the interpreters that we had would, you know, because we'd have, we'd have Americans,
[00:30:26] like seals that had been trained to speak Arabic. I God bless them. They do their best.
[00:30:32] But like you just, they be standing side by side with a native speaker, and, you know, my
[00:30:40] seal interpreter would say, hey, the local guy said this, and then the native speaker would say,
[00:30:46] hey, here's what he actually means, and there's just a little bit that you're just not going to catch,
[00:30:51] you know, it's just not going to happen. So you definitely, it's like trying to
[00:30:57] try to tell the difference between, you know, someone that's from New York, and someone that's from New Jersey.
[00:31:02] There's people that can go, oh, yeah, guys from Jersey, that guy's from New York, you know,
[00:31:05] and the same thing overseas. And you are correct. Here's the weird thing about what you said about
[00:31:13] security is a low profile, 99% of the time is going to be better, no one's going to notice you,
[00:31:23] no one's going to care, but people freak out about us. There's that 1% of the time, and then what
[00:31:28] do you do? And then you weigh those out, because if it's only, if there's only a tiny chance of
[00:31:32] something happening, and then you're in a really bad situation, because you don't have any security,
[00:31:36] that's horrible. But when you have security, you increase the chances so much that it's a gamble.
[00:31:43] This is always a gamble. And I always felt very comfortable in the fixes and the people that I use
[00:31:49] locally that they had sort of the know how to at least, you know, with exit plans and other things like
[00:31:56] that. And I always had context in the US, in the region, and other places that if I was desperate,
[00:32:02] that I could, I could turn to if I, if I needed to. How did you go about finding your fixtures?
[00:32:08] General, I mean, depending on the sort of assignment by assignment, but I usually went through
[00:32:13] either other journalists who gave referrals to people that they'd worked with, or people that
[00:32:18] knew that were living there without the businesses that had used different interpreters. It really
[00:32:22] really depended on that. But usually, it's always what a mouth. I would never just pluck
[00:32:27] somebody a face-fucking and expect them to be a fixer. It always be several layers of people who
[00:32:35] could sort of vet and work for them and then do a little bit of my own background digging on them
[00:32:40] and just try to make sure. And you can never get it right there. I mean, there's plenty of situations
[00:32:44] and unfortunately, we're journalists have been sold out and other things, and we saw that a lot
[00:32:49] in Syria with us, but in my case, I always worked with some really just incredible people.
[00:33:00] I've got all kinds of scenarios running through my head right now.
[00:33:03] I get an attention. When I look back at my life, my whole life, in my entire life, from the time
[00:33:09] I was born until like two days ago, I always think about all the things that I've done, where I look
[00:33:14] back and say, man, that wasn't too smart. How good. Do you do that? I was in the medicine that I thought
[00:33:19] the things that I did. I mean, not just in a rock, but in a rather places in Yemen and Afghanistan,
[00:33:24] and in my 20s, and I just would never do them now. I would never do them now. I look back and I think,
[00:33:30] what were you thinking? Or, I guess, in the beginning, and this is where experience comes into it.
[00:33:39] You almost, maybe it's naivety. You don't always know what you're getting yourself into,
[00:33:45] and you get out of it, and you find, and then I look back on it now, and I think that was so stupid.
[00:33:52] What you're thinking? That wasn't all worth the story. I mean, did you even get a story out of that?
[00:33:59] Yeah. As I read your book, that's what I was thinking. There's a lot of you got lucky a lot,
[00:34:06] which is awesome. You know, you had a massive amount of courage to go into these, which is awesome.
[00:34:11] And I wanted to ask you that. Did you feel, do you feel looking back like now, like you
[00:34:17] you were a little naiv at the time? And obviously, sometimes a little bit of naivety and arrogance
[00:34:26] is really nice when you look back at it if it went well. Which it certainly did for you.
[00:34:31] Awesome. All right. I'm going to jump into this book. The first boy to introduce himself was
[00:34:40] a nine-year-old named Abdulla. He struck me with his light eyes, gap to smile, and spattering of
[00:34:46] freckles across his nose. There was a gentleness to it, to his demeanor. I wondered how such
[00:34:51] gentleness could come from a child that had been ripped from his home by war. Abdulla told us that
[00:34:58] he was a Muslim from Sinjar, or Sinjal, as they say in Kurdish. He had been forced to flee
[00:35:06] two months earlier when ISIS invaded his village. He insisted on showing us around the camp,
[00:35:11] annotated, annotating like a proud tour guide. He explained the different people who lived there,
[00:35:16] and where they were all from. He explained how they had been confronted with the same vicious enemy,
[00:35:21] and how they coped in different ways. Some ISIS we knew, Abdulla said,
[00:35:27] some of our neighbors became ISIS too. I did not know then that such a phrase would be repeated
[00:35:33] time and time again as the years went on. I did not realize then the importance of that phrase.
[00:35:39] The clef's and all the conspiracies that would come from it. That one phrase would come to
[00:35:46] represent the fissures of a country that I wasn't sure could ever be put back together. Our neighbors
[00:35:52] became ISIS too. You know, the something that I failed to do as I put these notes together is
[00:36:00] is you, throughout the book, you pick these characters and you revisit them.
[00:36:05] And I get some of them, but I don't get all of them. I'm not sure if I get back to Abdulla,
[00:36:10] but that's what you do. As people hear me talk about these different characters,
[00:36:15] look, the book is 450 pages long. If people are wondering, oh, I wonder what happened to that
[00:36:22] kid or what happened to that character, many of the characters that you become close with,
[00:36:27] you revisit over the years. And as I said, the length of the book is five years or four or four
[00:36:33] and a half years, something like that. There's a lot. I mean, think of a kid that's 10 years old becomes
[00:36:38] 14. That's a big difference. And obviously there are also our characters that
[00:36:43] you never see again. And God knows what happens to them. Fast forward a little bit here. The
[00:36:53] soldiers at the Mazul Dam greeted us warmly. The Peshmerga began and this, I'm giving everyone a background
[00:36:59] in Peshmerga, what you do and look, you give all kinds of nice little history lessons in here, too.
[00:37:03] The Peshmerga began as something of a mountain militia in the 1920s when the push for Kurdish
[00:37:09] independence began. In recent decades, they had faced unrelenting persecution from the bath
[00:37:14] loyalist and of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, one Peshmerga fighter told me they don't
[00:37:21] suffer from psychological issues pertaining to combat because they have grown up around fighting
[00:37:26] and have developed an early understanding that it is just what we have to do to them PTSD
[00:37:32] was something of a first world phenomenon. We worked with Kurdish soldiers sometimes in the Iraqi
[00:37:40] Army and they were just really good and they just were really good. They have that's why that's what
[00:37:48] they do. They grow up fighting. That's sort of their thing. It's like when you're in the US military
[00:37:53] and you meet someone that's from Wyoming and they grew up hunting and living out in the land
[00:38:02] and they're going to be good soldiers. That's just how it is. Somebody from Alabama that grew up in the
[00:38:06] woods, they're going to be a good soldier. That's just how it is. That's how you feel about the
[00:38:10] Kurds. That's how I always felt about the Kurds. And just because they say they don't
[00:38:13] self-fulfirm any psychological problems doesn't mean they don't. And that's just a very different
[00:38:18] relationship that they have with it. And not just the Peshmega but in a lot of the, you know, in
[00:38:23] the Middle East and those in the armies and things it's just not something that they
[00:38:28] acknowledge or really talk about. Yeah, in many ways it's something that we haven't talked about
[00:38:35] up until these reap most recent wars. Yep. Even though it's always been there,
[00:38:41] you continue on here. The Peshmega soldiers range from around 18 to more than 70 years old with many
[00:38:46] coming out of retirement in the quest to defeat ISIS threat. During days of intense conflict,
[00:38:52] the Peshmega are lucky to return to their base for two or three hours of sleep and a quick
[00:38:56] bite to eat before venturing back to their fighting locus. As it's due to a prominent portion of
[00:39:02] the fighters are not soldiers but what they call security advisors who don't take a salary and volunteer
[00:39:07] simply out of devotion. There are special forces that have been arranged for these people.
[00:39:13] They don't register their names and don't sign contracts. They just want to serve and Kurdistan.
[00:39:22] One Peshmega soldier explained how ISIS commanders often drug young fighters with special
[00:39:27] tablets that leave them disoriented and shooting wildly into the night. Sometimes they were able
[00:39:32] to keep going despite being shot several times taking upwards of 20 bullets before they went down.
[00:39:38] For those who survive and that's been referenced the ISIS fighters,
[00:39:41] when they realize what they've done, they sometimes regret it.
[00:39:49] And you say here, almost every Kurd wants to share their history. History of their people and
[00:39:56] their oppression. But the string that could be weaved through and through was that they did not expect
[00:40:01] to be granted freedom for nothing. They knew they would have to fight for every fight for it every
[00:40:05] step of the way. The secession of let downs, of losses and gains was all part of their rough climb
[00:40:11] up the rope of revolution. At the top they would find their independence. When they referred to
[00:40:17] their soldiers killed on the battlefield, they sometimes said that they were martyred and sometimes
[00:40:21] said that they were murdered. I wondered how differently Americans would see wars if the press
[00:40:27] and the people spoke of our troops in the firing line as having died in a homicide rather than
[00:40:32] killed an action. And now you reflect on this battle that had taken place. The rain fell harder,
[00:40:39] the bullets flew wildly into the growing darkness that hid the dead ISIS bodies nearby.
[00:40:45] Hungry, untamed dogs had gouged into the skeletons almost immediately. Some had been dead for days.
[00:40:52] Some had names and others had been left nameless. Some,
[00:40:57] maculated by the creatures howling at the moon, had no faces. So you jump right into this stuff
[00:41:09] with, I mean this battle that's taking place up at the muzzle dam, you're seeing the ISIS fighters.
[00:41:16] This is a long way from Paris Hilton's Malibu beach parties, I guess. Definitely.
[00:41:23] And when I first went, you know, I didn't go with the intention of of going to the front lines.
[00:41:30] I really went with the intention of trying to understand, I guess the human cost of war and I really
[00:41:36] just wanted to go and talk to people that lived there. I wanted to understand what it was like to
[00:41:41] be a displaced person, what it was like to sort of have everything and then have nothing.
[00:41:48] And I just happened to sort of make a good connection through somebody and then when I went to meet him,
[00:41:57] it was a crazy story. He came and picked us up. The car got stuck in the mud and there was sort of
[00:42:05] a lot of fighting going on and we sort of had to go into a different direction and then we ended up
[00:42:10] sort of on the front lines. It wasn't something that even really planned and I'm sure my boss
[00:42:14] would have had a heart attack if I sort of told them in advance. But yeah, it was a it was a night
[00:42:20] very eye opening and even when I I guess the times that I've spent with the Peshmerga with other
[00:42:27] soldiers, Iraqi soldiers on the front line, it's always still being that same theme for me
[00:42:32] of wanting to get that human cost. So I'm much more interested in in those stories, I guess,
[00:42:38] from my perspective than what we call the Bang Bang. It's what journalists usually call that,
[00:42:43] the sort of the more military aspect of it. I want to understand who they were, who their families were.
[00:42:49] What their motivation for being there was, as you said, it's, you know, these people coming out
[00:42:54] and volunteering and then not getting paid and they're bringing their AK47 from home and they don't
[00:43:00] really have much more beyond that. And I just that to me was fascinating. What is it? What is motivating you?
[00:43:06] What is driving you? What? What are you sacrificing to do this and do you plan to just keep doing this
[00:43:12] over and over again? And I think for me that was always the question that I was trying to
[00:43:19] trying to understand, trying to piece together in my head.
[00:43:24] Yeah, and as I'm sitting here thinking about you on the front lines for the first time,
[00:43:28] sort of and then going back to the conversation we had about being naive and I just,
[00:43:34] I just remembered a conversation. First of all, I've had this conversation with a bunch of
[00:43:37] veterans, but the one that came to my mind was a guy by the name of Dean Ladd, who is a
[00:43:44] Marine in World War II who went on the island campaign and he was going into Tahrua as a Marine,
[00:43:55] as a Marine, Paltoon Commander or a Company Commander, I forget which.
[00:43:59] But I, there was, this was an insane operation. They could tell it was going to be insane.
[00:44:04] You know, they're going to storm the beaches where the Japanese had been dug in for three years.
[00:44:09] And he did this over and over again. But I, you know, I said, well, did you think anything might
[00:44:13] happen to you? He said, no, that's always going to happen to the other guy, which is what everybody thinks,
[00:44:18] creatures what everybody thinks. And you know, that's what I think, you know, that's probably going
[00:44:23] to happen to somebody else, but not me. Yeah. And I think just, I guess by nature, you know, with a lot of
[00:44:28] journalists, whether they've had, you know, tremendous years behind them doing this or not, it's, I guess it's
[00:44:34] that same notion of, you know, we're not working for the government, we're not working for anyone in
[00:44:41] particular, you know, beyond our organizations. And so you sort of have this kind of strange freedom.
[00:44:48] Now, what it's telling you what to do, you know, and, and, and, and for me, I guess I really
[00:44:54] want to take advantage of that and, and just, yeah, I remember one time being it, um, did you
[00:45:00] have a good at tauging your face? Just that's not a bad guy. I think I flew through there, but I never
[00:45:06] spent any more time. I spent a bit of time there and I was with the Aussie, and then I was supposed
[00:45:10] to go to Ellisad on the, at the Marine Base there, and there was just dust storm after dust
[00:45:15] storms. Every flight was getting canceled. I was like, I just want to go back to Baghdad. I was
[00:45:19] trying to get an interview with Saadar, and I, which just, let's just go to Baghdad, and I couldn't
[00:45:25] get back to Baghdad. And so I was literally just calling a cab from Taji to like, come and get
[00:45:30] me, so I could drive back to my hotel and meet my fixer and Baghdad. I remember the Aussie's is standing
[00:45:35] and I'm going, you'll just crazy, and then it's so really jealous. I was like, yeah, I can, I can do that.
[00:45:42] Yeah, and what's interesting going back to the earlier conversation, if you were to take a
[00:45:47] convoy back from there to Baghdad, you would probably be a great risk. Much greater risk than if you
[00:45:54] were in a cab on Orange and White Opal, Freaking Taxi Cab that are driving all over the place.
[00:45:59] Yeah, and I, I would do that through rock. I remember going through like all these Iranian
[00:46:04] militia checkpoints, and I was, would be in these, Yazidi cars with a baby on my lap, pretending
[00:46:09] I was a Yazidi. You know, put the scarf over my head, there's a baby in my lap. I think I managed
[00:46:15] to get through about 100 of these Iranian chia checkpoints and not one of them questioned me.
[00:46:22] And I remember just getting out of that being like, oh, I had, and I know of other journalists,
[00:46:26] I knew a couple of people and they, they got busted a checkpoints and turned around or turned in
[00:46:32] or whatever it was and, and for me that was going under the radar. I got to where I needed to be.
[00:46:38] Had I even got the the checkpoint permission slips that you're supposed to get? I wouldn't have
[00:46:44] gotten through. So sometimes you just got to not play by the rules. Under the radar, that's the theme.
[00:46:52] I got one more, maybe it's not the last one, but earlier in the book, there are some history lessons,
[00:46:57] like I said, even though most of the book is more just interviews with people and what you're actually
[00:47:03] saying, this is a little history lesson on March 17th, 1988, the morning after Saddam Hussein's
[00:47:08] bath party unleashed a tirade of chemical weapons and killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in the city of
[00:47:14] Hullab, Hullab. So how much are you? Hullab, a few brave photojournalists have ventured into the
[00:47:21] city to ensure the brutal dictators atrocities would be documented and exposed to the world.
[00:47:28] And you're, you're now interacting with one of them. Accrum looked at me shyly extending his hand.
[00:47:33] Nearly 27 years later, he was working at the memorial site known as the Hullab-Jum Monument and
[00:47:40] Peace Museum constructed in 2003. On the anniversary of the attack in 2006, residents,
[00:47:47] thousands of residents rioted at the site, protesting what they thought was to be capitalizing
[00:47:52] on the tragedy and misusing aid funds destroying many of the archives. The monument was rebuilt
[00:47:57] into a hub of reflection and solace poised against the serene Iranian mountain side with several
[00:48:05] abandoned bath party tanks sitting idly to one side inside the iconic photographs taken
[00:48:10] in the pallet aftermath of the attacks had been recreated as life-sized images and statues.
[00:48:16] A mother clutching her dead bite baby, lifeless children strewn across pavements.
[00:48:23] And here's Acrum talking, we need to remind the new generation about what happened to
[00:48:27] this town and we need to keep reminding them so that it doesn't happen again.
[00:48:35] Sometimes I can't stop crying. Every day I look at the pictures and I am reminded that it is
[00:48:40] my family in those pictures and quote, there was such a depth of sadness in the way he shared
[00:48:47] a story constantly relieving a cursed history. Sodom had ordered the chemical attack,
[00:48:53] amid the Iran Iraq war following intel reports that Iranian soldiers had been implanted inside
[00:48:59] the Kurdish city. Acrum still didn't seem quite sure how or why his life was spared,
[00:49:08] or why he was the only survivor within the proximate area. He recalled having instinctively placed
[00:49:14] his mother's scarf around his mouth for protection the moment something fell wrong.
[00:49:19] He recalled throwing up blood into the scarf which still smelled of his mother even though she was dead
[00:49:26] beside him. He recalled the way the vision blurred slowly fading into blackness.
[00:49:35] He remembered cars rolling over bodies as other victims in their last few minutes on earth
[00:49:41] vomited chunks of green. Some were visibly burning. Their skin boiling with bubbles.
[00:49:50] Others laughed uncontrollably an e-reside effect of the lethal chemical cocktail of VX, VX,
[00:50:00] Seren Taboon and mustard gas. That's a chilling vision. What kind of health was this guy in now?
[00:50:18] Was he scarred? Yeah, he definitely. He was well, it's looked normal but
[00:50:25] there was something about him. I can't put my finger on it but there was definitely something that
[00:50:31] that wasn't quite right. Fast forward a little bit. There's a section called the faces of evil.
[00:50:44] This is November 2014. Some ISIS soldiers will tell you that the reason they joined
[00:50:50] were simple. Straight forward woven into the web of basic survival money protection food.
[00:50:56] Other times the reasons to pledge allegiance to the terrorist group were complex,
[00:51:00] deep-seated in sectarian tribal and historical grievances dating back centuries.
[00:51:07] So what is war? War is a composite of individual stories and reasons. One rarely the same as the
[00:51:16] other. I pointed out the introduction that you asked this question over and over again more times than
[00:51:20] I read. Maybe that's the first time you asked to ask the question. But what's interesting about
[00:51:28] that answer to composite of individual stories and reasons. That's what this book is.
[00:51:32] It's like you're compiling all these different perspectives that people have, what they've been
[00:51:38] through and how they ended up here. Did you have that intent? When did this work that you were doing
[00:51:46] start to formulate in your head as a congruent story that you could put together in a book?
[00:51:51] It's something I guess. It's like most of this book was written handwritten in notebooks.
[00:51:57] So you can imagine how many of those are sitting in storage right now.
[00:52:00] But yeah, I think from sort of the first in 2014, I was trying to craft together how I wanted
[00:52:09] to weave these stories and how to make it a bigger story. And I knew that I didn't want to write
[00:52:15] something that was political, a policy driven or I just I didn't feel that that was my job as a
[00:52:21] journalist. I wasn't here to change laws. I wasn't here to to become or to be a court-on-quote expert
[00:52:29] in anything. My job was to tell a story. That was what I knew and that's what I knew that I could do.
[00:52:36] And so for me it was it was early on that I started to shape that idea and I didn't quite know
[00:52:41] how to put it together and then I guess around 20 and of 2015, I thought, you know, this is the
[00:52:48] approach I want to take with it. I really have to be patient because you're going to have to stick
[00:52:52] this out for a few more years. This isn't something that you can work on in finishing the next
[00:52:57] couple of months. So I had to give myself a good lesson, lesson in patience and just continue to
[00:53:04] just spend the next few years just going back and forth and spending as much time as I possibly
[00:53:10] could on the ground. And then I guess I felt that I had an and I could have kept going. That was
[00:53:15] the thing. I just I could have kept going. I could be there now and keep going. And still have
[00:53:19] these incredible stories. But at some point I had to realize, okay, you need to stop. And
[00:53:24] you know, there are other things you need to do there. The place is you need to focus, but there
[00:53:29] also has to be beginning and then into this. So yeah, I guess it was sort of 2019 that I decided that
[00:53:35] I think I had enough to put some together. But have you ever read Hiroshima?
[00:53:42] No. Oh, it's one of the most incredible incredible books about Japan and it was a journalist who
[00:53:49] had gone back and he was telling story, these individual stories decades after it. And it had such a
[00:53:54] lasting effect on me growing up and that was sort of, I guess, one of the biggest motivations in
[00:54:00] the style that I took with it was again that human cost and then just telling the very narrative
[00:54:08] story from as many perspectives as possible. And it's much detail as I possibly could as well.
[00:54:15] And I think that was something I wanted to bring out was it's those small details that make up the
[00:54:21] big ones. And I think it's the individual stories that tell a big picture. And sometimes we can
[00:54:29] look at statistics and we can look at the things that really distance us from a conflict because
[00:54:35] it's really easy to do that. You can say, okay, well, 200 and two people died in that suicide attack.
[00:54:40] But you tell a story of one person who died in that suicide attack and it's probably going to
[00:54:46] have a much more profound impact on you. And that's what I wanted to drive home was how the individual
[00:54:52] stories make up the big story. It's the micro in the macro. Yeah, that's very reflective of
[00:55:00] the way I will with this podcast. Of course, do we cover some big, you know, general patents
[00:55:06] books, yes, we do, but the majority of the books that we cover on here are written by a Lance Corp or
[00:55:14] Corp or a private that's out there in the front lines, carrying a machine gun. Because once again,
[00:55:21] when you're talking about what the general saw or what the general did, there's an altitude there.
[00:55:27] There's a lack of connection in many cases as to what actually is happening on the ground and
[00:55:32] what that looks like down there. So, yeah, you're effort to do that absolutely came through.
[00:55:39] And that example of the suicide bombing, yeah, I see a statistic of 222 people were killed in the
[00:55:44] suicide bombing. You can read that and you can move on. You can you can read see that headline and
[00:55:49] read, you know, what city was in and cool. You got the information you can move on.
[00:55:53] When you read about one of those victims, their family, how it's going to impact them,
[00:55:58] what mark it's going to leave, how they ended up there in the first place, what their goals and
[00:56:03] dreams were like, that's, that's the impact. And by the way, it's not always good.
[00:56:13] As is the case here with Omar, back to the book, Omar, 25 year old ISIS fighter from the Iraqi
[00:56:21] village of Dor Saladin admitted that during ISIS's first month in Mosul, he had killed scores
[00:56:30] of his countrymen and foreign contractors on their behalf.
[00:56:36] Quote, they came to our area and forced me to protect their lands. Omar said,
[00:56:41] flatly of his ISIS commanders, his thick monobrow remaining frightening still, a physical manifestation
[00:56:46] of the emotionless figure before me. After a while, they told me, when are you going to start
[00:56:52] protecting your own land? His eyes burning into mine, he went on to describe the words of his
[00:56:58] superiors. They told me to do it or die and then they killed people in front of me.
[00:57:05] By his count, he had racked up 70 executions in a matter of months. He mandated that he
[00:57:11] killed his victims with rifle shots and was chillingly candid about why he did it.
[00:57:26] Yeah, it's fascinating that you're sitting face to face with these these individuals.
[00:57:32] And obviously, you have a knack for getting people to talk because throughout the book,
[00:57:37] you're getting people to explain things to them to you that are either an incredibly painful
[00:57:44] or be incriminating like that. Somehow you're getting these people to talk at some very impressive.
[00:57:54] You'd be surprised how many people want to platform, you know, get them to talk and
[00:58:00] and often I think a lot of it came down to, they just hadn't talked to anyone for a while,
[00:58:04] so they were ready to talk to someone and they wanted to tell their story and you get them going
[00:58:08] for a minute and they're spilling their life to you because they've been locked up or whatever the
[00:58:15] situation is and people like to listen to themselves speak and that's what I've certainly found
[00:58:22] in interviewing a number of different jihadists and they want to talk.
[00:58:28] You say here, the facilities director of security noted that most ISIS fighters were uneducated
[00:58:33] and easily led down the grizzly path of violent jihad. Some regret their actions, some do not
[00:58:39] the guard said to me earlier, nonchalantly, understand that most are young and have no information.
[00:58:45] They are impressionable. They listen to the second life paradise story, 72 virgins, rivers of wine,
[00:58:52] and staying young forever. That is all they know.
[00:58:55] And you look, there's so many interviews in here with all these different people who you've
[00:59:06] got to get the book to read food them, they're powerful. I guess I got drawn into this section,
[00:59:13] a star spangled love. The notion of giving thanks to the Red White and Blue was not lost on the
[00:59:19] people of Kurdistan. The bald eagle, old glory and the almighty American dollar were king and the
[00:59:25] Kurdish part of Iraq. Most ethnic Kurds did not hide their affection for the US, a concept that
[00:59:30] had become rare in the predominantly anti-American throngs of the Middle East. Shopped,
[00:59:35] peddled American flags. US military gear was prized and the local spoke glowingly of the
[00:59:41] notion of the nation that they created with removing Saddam Hussein, the dictator who's heavy hand
[00:59:47] had so often come down on the minority group, clustered into the northern region.
[00:59:52] Imagine if America didn't exist, said a counten, Kurdot Amin Agah, whose home was outfitted with
[01:00:00] Israeli-American and Kurdistan flags and who wears a US Army shirt and a Navy seal watch.
[01:00:08] Without America, the world would be run by China or Iran. With dui eyes, he turned to me in earnest.
[01:00:15] America represents freedom he stressed. Our dream is to be eternally allied to America.
[01:00:24] You don't hear a lot about that. Yeah, that was fascinating. When you go, it was this little
[01:00:30] pocket of the Kurds in the North. They just loved, they loved both bushes, they, you know,
[01:00:38] it was just something that they just, they thought America was the ones to save the day.
[01:00:42] Yeah, I mean, you go in and talk about how you're walking through the, like the bizarre has
[01:00:49] red white blue has flags called this stuff in there, just pro-America, pro-freedom.
[01:00:55] And this is also interesting. Kurds who as a group are overwhelmingly Muslim also portrayed
[01:01:00] themselves as more religiously tolerant. Right now I'm working with Muslims, Yazidi Christians,
[01:01:06] we're all working together, said one high-raking KRG official. They celebrate occasions together.
[01:01:12] It's something very beautiful. I have friends who pray and friends who don't. That's not my
[01:01:16] problem. That is their choice. That is how the Kurdish people think about religion.
[01:01:20] On one early December morning, I saw several Kurds, busily setting up a deck, and decorating,
[01:01:26] Christmas trees. Whether it was done in a secular embrace of a foreign religious right or simply
[01:01:32] to make guess more comfortable is not clear. We're still new to this, a Kurdish hotel employee
[01:01:37] said with a smile, bickering with a coworker on how to decorate the tree, but we love it.
[01:01:46] Very tolerant. Yeah. Set-and-up Christmas trees. Yeah. During the, uh, after the 2003,
[01:01:55] a rocky vision, they marketed, they had an entire tourism marketing campaign called the other Iraq.
[01:02:02] And that was sort of how they would try to draw people in to come and visit them,
[01:02:06] was this other Iraq. They called themselves. So even though they belong to Iraq,
[01:02:11] they tried to be the other. So that was their kind of approach. Beautiful.
[01:02:18] Fast forward a little bit. That summer I drifted between displacement camps. The big ones and the
[01:02:25] small ones. The ones that were new only just established to accommodate the constant swell of newcomers,
[01:02:30] but ones that have been here for years as past wars melted into new wars. Over time the camps
[01:02:36] had burdened into little towns of their own, complete with banks and bridal stores and markets
[01:02:41] and places to buy home goods and sweaters. What is war? War brings resiliency. It is turning
[01:02:51] what feels like a prison into something of a home. What is war? War is running. It is not knowing
[01:02:57] what is on the other side. It is being unwelcome in your own home. It is being unwelcome away from your home.
[01:03:05] Sometimes war is walking too. One moment here and the next and some no man's land that you could
[01:03:12] that could never be home. It was drifting from place to place, both in mind and body.
[01:03:19] Crazy to think these camps are set up for so long that they become little villages.
[01:03:31] What is really sad is that so many of them still exist. Because I guess it is really out of the main
[01:03:38] headlines of the news now, the resources are just there is nothing. The likes of Bessie Murn,
[01:03:44] Gazelle, there are still camps just with nothing and no resources. It is almost even a war situation
[01:03:51] for so many of the displaced now. It was for them four years ago.
[01:04:01] You say here in a small camp designated especially for displaced Christians, a group of men
[01:04:06] looked me in the eyes and said certainly that they do not bother trying to read or watch the news
[01:04:10] anymore because it was all fraudulent, all lies. As you are hearing that, does that make you think,
[01:04:23] okay I have to tell the truth. I can only imagine hearing that from your perspective.
[01:04:27] Yeah, for them I think they just grown so frustrated. I think when you see such
[01:04:34] atrocities happen in the beginning, you really believe that there is no way the world is going to sit there and do nothing.
[01:04:40] I mean this is crazy. Somebody is going to do something, someone is going to stop this.
[01:04:45] And then you reach a point. A year in maybe it is 18 months in. When you realize it is not,
[01:04:52] well it is not that simple but it is just not the situation is not changing. And so for them I think
[01:04:57] that was just the acceptance that the news was never going to help them. Nobody was ever going to
[01:05:02] help them and so they come to that sort of group rationale of they mustn't be telling the truth.
[01:05:08] Because if they weren't telling the truth and this wouldn't be happening. If the world knew
[01:05:13] what was really happening, it would have been stopped by now. So therefore it must be all lies.
[01:05:21] How much do you think these stories get lost because of the short attention span of the world?
[01:05:27] I think very lost. I think very lost which is why I guess I wanted to try to put it at least together as
[01:05:35] one cohesive unit. The attention span is short but I think it's always been telling foreign
[01:05:44] stories has always been difficult. I talked to journalists covering walls in the 90s with,
[01:05:51] with Bosnia or in other places and they said the same thing. It was Princess Diana did something
[01:05:55] and it would take the headlines. And then for me it was sort of something would happen,
[01:06:00] Kim Kardashian breaking the internet and that would take the headlines. And so I think it's always a
[01:06:05] thing where no matter what error that you were in that foreign news unfortunately isn't going to
[01:06:13] always be at the top but that doesn't mean we don't report on it. That doesn't mean we don't give
[01:06:18] it resources. That doesn't mean we don't tell a story. And for me that was what I was drawn to
[01:06:24] was the stories that I felt needed to be told. Whether they have an impact or not that that is
[01:06:32] out of my hands but those voices deserve to be heard. This is a good segue into this section
[01:06:42] which is entitled Don't Forget Us. Early one morning I ventured further north to visit a
[01:06:53] Yazidi camp stuffed into the wedge where Syria, Iraq and Turkey converge. As it came into view over
[01:06:59] hilltops, a wash with a midst of equity. Err, I ascertained a sense of something profoundly exhausting.
[01:07:07] What struck me most was that unlike other camps where people animatedly voiced their anger
[01:07:12] and wailed about the lack of water sharing conspiracy theories about who was really behind ISIS
[01:07:18] and detailing what had happened to them in the flashes after they realized they could no longer stay.
[01:07:23] The Yazidis were so grieved that they said very little. They did not complain. They just looked at
[01:07:32] me with wide eyes that could brand even the most stoic of souls. They all spoke softly,
[01:07:40] repeating that they all they wanted was for their family members to return and for the chance to go home.
[01:07:45] Every single person had either lost a family member to death or disappearance or had been
[01:07:51] mained when ISIS assaulted their village less than a year earlier. It did not make sense for
[01:07:56] them to complain to complain would be a waste of their precious energy. I was escorted into
[01:08:06] a tent where a thin woman had burrowed herself into the corner, weeping silently into a black
[01:08:12] scarf, shoulders trembling. She was a survivor of sex slavery. She was alive but she was hardly
[01:08:21] living. More girls and women tipped toad into the tent behind me, nobody wanted to speak of this
[01:08:27] ordeal the notion of being touched. The term sex slave is a controversial one, many to cry,
[01:08:35] that it should not be used that it was not politically correct, nor accurate, an argument which I
[01:08:41] hear and understand. But I have chosen to use it because it is a term that many of the survivors
[01:08:45] and families use and because it's blunt and embedded in the reality that is not the reality that we want.
[01:08:53] Speaking of rape was taboo that terrifying within the closed and staunchly conservative Yazidi
[01:08:59] community, although the silence was slowly shifting. But there inside that suffocating space,
[01:09:07] the women held each other up, their embraces reassuring each other that they were now safe,
[01:09:12] if only for that moment in time. And at that moment in time I understood that the most valuable
[01:09:18] thing I owned was my 99 cent notebook with which I could try to capture the plight of these survivors
[01:09:24] in hopes that somehow they would not tumble from the world's oblivion. It was with my notebook
[01:09:30] that I could recall and write things these women taught me what it meant to be extraordinary.
[01:09:35] What it meant to be brave, what it meant to lose everything and still find the internal spark
[01:09:44] to go on.
[01:09:45] We'll get into more of the Yazidi treatment. I mean it's just a genocide slash.
[01:10:06] I mean the ISIS viewed them as Satan worshippers. Yeah devil worshippers.
[01:10:17] Other end of the spectrum. This section stood out to me. One evening I met emerging
[01:10:26] pop star, Haley love for tea and hookah in the lounge, hookah in the lounge of an ups of the upscale rotana hotel in
[01:10:35] Urbio. She was dolled up to the nines with long, perfect bleached hair extensions, fake eyelashes,
[01:10:41] red lips and strappy stilettos that clashed with her camouflage military pants and loose fitting white
[01:10:47] top. By recording techno-driven energy boosting tunes to increase morale and filming music
[01:10:53] videos in the direct line of fire, Haley was doing what she considered to be her part in the fight,
[01:10:59] standing vehemently with the soldiers and their will to win.
[01:11:03] Much had been said and speculated about Haley's personal life.
[01:11:07] And I wasn't quite sure what to expect but what I found was a true girl's girl. Underneath the
[01:11:11] hairspray and larger than life persona, Haley was a self-assured young woman who sought only to use
[01:11:17] her stardom and musical talents for something more than milking the Hollywood machine.
[01:11:21] I mean, some say I used to be, I used the Peshmerga to further my own fame but people were always
[01:11:27] complained she said bluntly in her sharply accented English, flicking a perfectly manicured hand.
[01:11:32] My country is bleeding and my weapon is my voice and my music and for those who have had their
[01:11:37] voices shot, I felt this was my only way of bringing their story, the story of the Kurdish people
[01:11:42] to the world.
[01:11:43] Haley love. I love Haley's love. She was born in Iran, became a refugee, ended up in Finland,
[01:11:56] from there, got put into a music school of some kind and then the lower of Hollywood got a
[01:12:05] holdover. She says this very quickly, I saw the E so she ends up in Hollywood. She literally
[01:12:11] was living in Hollywood. I think she got signed to one of the big labels, I think dream or one of
[01:12:19] those big producers had signed her and then what happens is you often get sort of shelved away
[01:12:25] and then she really really shelved away. The labels will sign you and offer you a deal and then
[01:12:33] they actually just don't you never get kind of to actually release and so once the contract is
[01:12:38] out, you can kind of move on. So I think I'm not sure of all her details but I think she
[01:12:42] was sort of brought over here and it was sort of starry eye and then nothing kind of moved and she
[01:12:47] really saw the end of the belly of of water what Hollywood was.
[01:12:51] Yeah, she said that she said I met some producers and realize that what they were offering
[01:12:55] an exchange to promote me was a lie. It was all about sex. It was shocking to me. I gave up
[01:12:59] on almost everything. She ends up cutting a couple songs over there. She says straight away,
[01:13:10] I received death threats from radical Islamic groups and the mollows at the mosque were insisting
[01:13:14] I was a bad influence and should be stoned to death. My life changed. I was the lying girl. I
[01:13:21] had all these fans and all the success but I had to contend with this too. You can watch
[01:13:25] your videos on YouTube and I'm definitely recommend checking them out. Yeah, something else, right?
[01:13:32] Even echo channels would be proud because she has a lot of explosions and she's filming
[01:13:36] notes. It's like, yeah, I literally I remember she was filming me and getting you know controversial
[01:13:41] some people agree some people won't but yeah, I says this is five miles or something down the road
[01:13:45] and she's filming a music video. Yeah, how cheat and you, this is one of the things I don't
[01:13:53] really trace but you trace the rest of her story. You go back and visit her at some point. Don't you?
[01:13:57] Yeah, so I went back and because yeah, I always wondered and I really, I really love telling
[01:14:02] when I met her and so I went back when I was in a meal and her name came up with a friend of mine
[01:14:08] there and she'd opened a beauty school or a sort of big beauty salon and everything's very
[01:14:14] pink and all the young girls go there for their, you know, their equivalent of the prom and get ready
[01:14:21] and and I think she'd really settled into that kind of life of being able to, to be in, you know,
[01:14:29] with her people and to do things in a really different way than she did in visions. So yeah,
[01:14:34] that was her way of, I guess, giving back in a new evolution was to sort of be the, the,
[01:14:42] the motivated for a lot of the, the young girls in sort of the next generation. Yeah, I thought
[01:14:46] that was, that was awesome. It's like she, she like, you always hear people going back to your
[01:14:54] roots, you know, go back to her, she straight up went back to her roots and she lives there now and
[01:14:59] pretty awesome. Yeah. Then she does have some pumped up videos. And she's gorgeous.
[01:15:08] I'm going to fast forward up to 2016. This brazen attack struck deep when no one was ready for it.
[01:15:18] There have been no intelligence warnings and ISIS suicide bomber detonated a checkpoint outside
[01:15:23] a small town called DB's near Kirkuk on November 3rd, 2015, allowing three fellow fighters to sneak
[01:15:32] through and temporarily commandeer a local government off office. The men were sentenced to hell
[01:15:39] and all died in the attack, but the ISIS bomb expert whose handy work sent them to their maker did not.
[01:15:46] Jacim Mohamed Atia was being held in a high security prison near the oil rich city in late
[01:15:55] January of 2016, the guard's let Jacim blindfolded into the room to meet me. What I did were
[01:16:04] terror acts Jacim, the 22-year-old said, matter of factly sitting handcuffed in the small office
[01:16:11] in the urbule headquarters of the of Asaya. It was my duty. There are infidel infidel's and there
[01:16:18] is instruction in the Quran to stop this and to fight all infidel's. The Kurdish security forces
[01:16:26] had nabbed Jacim weeks after the attack that slaughtered 14 Kurds and left scores more wounded.
[01:16:33] Three ISIS fighters had used the checkpoint bombing as a diversion to enter the city,
[01:16:38] then briefly hold themselves up in the mayor's office. The standoff ended when they opted to
[01:16:43] blow their own bodies to bits as police forces closed in. While that attack served as notice that
[01:16:49] ISIS was able to strike outside the territory of controlled, the one thwarted by Jacim's capture
[01:16:55] would have been devastating by comparison. The Kurdish security officials told me that Jacim
[01:17:00] had been preparing to rig a powerful truck bomb bound for urbule when he was arrested by intelligence agents.
[01:17:06] Jacim had cried like a big baby when he was seized. One intelligence officer recalled smuggly
[01:17:12] and had cried that all of them would be mad at him. The authorities relished any opportunity to
[01:17:18] take away the perceived power of ISIS members to bellow that these fighters were nothing more
[01:17:23] than pathetic, delusional con artist. The exact number of deaths caused by the exact number of deaths
[01:17:30] as Jacim caused, whether directly or indirectly remained unclear, he repeatedly gloded about
[01:17:36] conducting operations that killed and harmed scores of people, including the fighters he
[01:17:42] outfitted with suicide vests or put behind the wheels of vehicles rigged to explode. He was
[01:17:48] proud of his monstrous work and craftsmanship, but he was by no means ready to be a martyr himself.
[01:17:54] When I asked if he would have strapped a vest on of his own. I never thought of killing myself.
[01:18:01] I'm not convinced to kill myself. He said on apologetically, actually, I would leave or escape if
[01:18:07] they gave me this order. I wouldn't explode myself. That is another level of faith.
[01:18:14] He was unconvinced by the Mullahs' routine, espousing the paradise replete with 72
[01:18:19] virgins that don't menstruate or defecate. It's our leaders that make decisions Jacim said.
[01:18:27] Our scientists are scientists say that there are infidel people in Kirk Cook. It's not my decision.
[01:18:33] We are students and we listen to our teachers. If somebody pledges allegiance to ISIS,
[01:18:37] they must take orders and do whatever orders they get. They have to do it.
[01:18:44] I asked about the scientists and their theoretical determinations of infidel blood,
[01:18:48] but he didn't seem to know. Jacim had been taught not to question the scientists. If the
[01:18:52] scientists were really scientists. But at the top of ISIS of the Heises hierarchy was Abu Baker al-Baghdadi,
[01:19:00] who Jacim described as a good leader who lived as a simple soldier and who was just like everyone
[01:19:06] else. He had never met or seen the elusive self-professed ISIS Khalif.
[01:19:13] That's dangerous to meet him. No one can see him Jacim said. His eyes widening in surprise
[01:19:17] that even suggested such a question. It is prohibited for anybody to see him.
[01:19:22] Alternating between Bravado and circumspection brought on by either remorse or the presence of a
[01:19:28] watchful jailer, Jacim caused that he would have to be convinced not to go back to ISIS if you
[01:19:33] were released. Before I went to prison, I had no problems killing people. Now I have a bit of regret
[01:19:38] that maybe some people don't deserve to be killed. How long would you sit in a room with these guys
[01:19:47] for? I really depended. I think with him it was around about an hour or two hours. So...
[01:19:53] How would you select who you would you say, hey, who do you got?
[01:19:59] Yeah, I would usually talk to the gods about who was there, who was willing to talk. I always
[01:20:05] wanted to make it very clear to them. I was a journalist and their stories were going to be
[01:20:12] as they told them and they needed to be. It was difficult because in some cases they hadn't been
[01:20:18] brought to trial. So, you know, when they're saying these things, you know, and you haven't been brought
[01:20:23] to trial yet, you are incriminating yourself to a degree. And so I always wanted to be very
[01:20:28] fair and very clear that my journalists and what you say is going to be printed. So their willingness
[01:20:34] was obviously a big factor in them coming forward and telling this stories.
[01:20:39] Yeah, he also said it's better if they join. We want to go to America. We want to spread our
[01:20:48] ideology all over the world. You talk to another guy.
[01:20:56] I hear Sahib Jamel by his count, he had killed dozens of uninvolved men, women, and children.
[01:21:12] He says at the beginning, I says, told us we would all go to heaven. But now that I'm in prison,
[01:21:15] it means I am going to the fire. I am going to hell. The indoctrination was self-fulfilling
[01:21:21] fantasy script was evident, but any sign of real remorse was not.
[01:21:37] Real quick, when you interview these people, you mentioned that that one guy was blindfolded.
[01:21:44] You see blindfolded during the interview as well, are they? They take it off. Yeah, they
[01:21:49] blindfolded them and they bring them in so they don't really know where they are.
[01:21:53] You know, specific office or whatever they are. They take it off normally.
[01:21:58] I mean, he was, he asked a lot of articles on, but they took the blindfold off.
[01:22:04] That way you're just looking at them in his eyes when he's telling you all this stuff.
[01:22:08] At first it is. There's a little bit of a Walmart process and I found in a couple of the
[01:22:14] situations where my fixes would get very angry and I would have to ask them to leave or,
[01:22:19] you know, because often, you know, it's their relatives, you know, people that are being killed
[01:22:26] by these people and they're hate is so strong. Sometimes I felt that I'm not going to get a
[01:22:31] greeting if you're right now because, you know, you can feel that animosity and the reason I'm
[01:22:37] trying to get them to open up here. So, you know, there was that barrier I had to do with a little
[01:22:42] bit in the beginning and then I think as you sort of move into what you kind of get a,
[01:22:46] you build that rapport to a degree. They realize you just that to talk to them, to have a
[01:22:52] conversation, it's not, it's not my job to, I'm not there to interrogate you. I'm not there to, you
[01:22:58] know, to stick it to the man. I'm just there to find out the information. So, once I think they get
[01:23:06] used to me a little bit and then, you know, I get used to them a little bit, then it can
[01:23:10] become a little bit more of a conversation after that. Is it meant? Would you compare
[01:23:15] you know, like the doctors, like a surgeon or something like this and they got to cut some
[01:23:19] body open for you. Yeah, like for a normal person, they'd be like, oh, no, if I can't cut this
[01:23:24] person open. But then, if you're a doctor after a while, it becomes less of, oh, I'm cutting this
[01:23:29] person open more like this is like a, you know, like a specimen that I have to like work on kind of
[01:23:34] thing. Yeah, I think, I mean, there is, there are certain degrees of, that you have to
[01:23:38] can't compartmentalize. I think for me, I'm always very cautious of not wanting to do that too much
[01:23:45] because I think my, you know, what I'm trying to do is to, to really bring a different level of
[01:23:52] understanding on all sides of it and I don't want to be too distant. So, it's a fine balance.
[01:23:59] It's sometimes, you know, and sometimes I make it better than others, but, um, yeah, it's really,
[01:24:05] it's just listening. Often it's just listening. That's what it comes down to.
[01:24:09] Seems like after a while, this, like, all these stories might kind of jam you up.
[01:24:14] Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did get to that point a little bit, but I'd set boundaries on myself
[01:24:20] to recognize that I think, and yeah, I did get to that point.
[01:24:25] When you say you'd set boundaries for yourself,
[01:24:28] we'll get you a lot of the pieces that we could use in boundaries. So, I had, I had set
[01:24:33] markers on you for myself really, especially because I was, you know, spending so much time in the
[01:24:38] stories, we'd just get heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier and I would just be living in it,
[01:24:41] and I'd be living on a floor somewhere, and I didn't have a team, I didn't, I didn't have people around
[01:24:46] me beyond, you know, my fixes and who I was very close to, but I just knew that I, I wouldn't be
[01:24:54] able to do my work effectively if something, or I was hearing things that were really
[01:24:59] tragic, or something tragic had happened, and I didn't feel anything. And, and that, I think that
[01:25:06] moment didn't really come from me during this particular book. I had a couple of moments where
[01:25:12] I just, I felt very broken a little bit because I felt so helpless, and that happened during that,
[01:25:17] but I still managed to feel, you know, everything affected me, and I wanted it to affect
[01:25:24] me to a degree. And then when I realized I really need to take a break was sort of several years
[01:25:29] after, and it was in Africa and East Africa, and I'd interviewed a woman from the Congo who had
[01:25:37] had, you know, sexual violence, and she'd had these babies out of rape, and just what she went through,
[01:25:42] was so horrific, and she'd been shunned by her community, and she was running, and she was just
[01:25:46] the most extraordinary woman, and she was so, the name was Nancy, and she was so strong and amazing,
[01:25:51] and I just remember sitting with her for hours and with these babies, and having that feeling of,
[01:25:57] oh my god, I don't, I don't even feel this, I don't, I don't feel anything right now, and that
[01:26:03] really bothered me that I didn't feel anything, and so after that trip I went home, and I,
[01:26:09] I didn't go anywhere, I don't think for about six or seven months, because I just felt that,
[01:26:15] yeah, if I'd got to that point of just not reacting, that was not the point that I wanted to get to,
[01:26:20] and that's when you just have to take a break, and that's it. But I think, during the process of this
[01:26:27] book, and I talk about a little bit in the book, but it's often, you know, as a as a writer,
[01:26:34] I think it's an advantage because you're telling stories, and so it's almost cathodic, so people are
[01:26:41] telling you terrible things, and you have a way to release it out of your body, whereas I know a lot of
[01:26:48] my colleagues who have photographers or videographers sort of in combat, I think that they suffer more
[01:26:55] to be honest, and I've heard this from other journalists, because maybe they're not getting
[01:27:00] that same release that I get as a rasha, you know, may or may not be true, but that's sort of my
[01:27:05] experience with it, but I know, and I talk about in the book, and it's not always the most obvious
[01:27:10] things that I use the word break you, but it's not always, you know, digging up the mass graves,
[01:27:16] or seeing somebody be killed, or, you know, they're horrific things, but for me, they want the things
[01:27:23] that, you know, shattered me, the things were, and there's one that really sticks out for me,
[01:27:29] and that was in, in Xinjiang, in the city, and it had been completely destroyed, and a few of these
[01:27:34] very poor people had moved back to live in these houses where there was no water, no electricity,
[01:27:40] there was nothing, and because they couldn't afford to live at Camp Seven, and so I remember being
[01:27:47] there one day and there was a young father, and he had two young children, and he was just living
[01:27:50] in his old bummed-out house, even though there was nothing in there, and he said that he, they
[01:27:57] were easy, and he said that he's why I could be taking the children's mother, and that the
[01:28:03] captured her cold team and said if you give me X amount of dollars, it was several thousand dollars, then,
[01:28:09] you know, I would turn her, so this poor guy for months walked around and around the village,
[01:28:15] and everybody was trying to give him money, and he's selling his furniture, and, you know, doing
[01:28:20] whatever, and he finally comes up with the money, and then he calls the the captor and says, hey,
[01:28:25] I've got the money, and he says all of the prices doubled, and at that point, the man just gave
[01:28:31] up, he just gave up, he said, I can't, I don't have that, no one else was going to give me any
[01:28:35] more money, and so he's sitting over these kids, and I just, and that was the story that really,
[01:28:40] really cracks me because I felt so helpless, and I thought I can't even give you money, because
[01:28:46] I would be labeled as a, you know, giving, financing a terrorist regime if I did that, because
[01:28:52] they're paying ISIS to get their women back, but to him, that was, that was his wife,
[01:28:57] that was these children's mother, and just the fact that she's probably not even alive now,
[01:29:02] because he just could not come up with that money, and he didn't have the resources to do that.
[01:29:07] It was just, it was such a helpless feeling, and I, I couldn't help him, and
[01:29:13] yeah, that was the moment for me that I was like, this is, this is just insanity.
[01:29:18] This is ridiculous, and there's no reason that this should be happening.
[01:29:22] I think when you talk about the fact that writing the stories is an outlet, and it's something
[01:29:30] that I talk about with, even with, from the leadership perspective when I'm talking, the leaders
[01:29:35] about how to make decisions, I say, look, when you write something down, you are detaching from it.
[01:29:40] It's literally on a piece of paper outside of your head now, and now you can assess it from a different
[01:29:45] perspective. So I think that I totally agree that writing is therapeutic because you get it out of
[01:29:54] your system, and now you can see it on the page, and you can relate it from a different perspective.
[01:30:03] You know, and it's weird, you also talked about the, you know, at a point where you
[01:30:08] were in Africa, and you're interviewing this woman, and she's been through this
[01:30:15] absolutely unimaginable horror, and she's pressing on, by the way, and she's caring for it,
[01:30:21] and you feel like empty, and that's, you describe the Yazidis at many points, at many points of
[01:30:28] being in that zone where they just have no more emotions left because they've just gotten
[01:30:34] crushed at every single turn. And there was, there was one point there, and they're telling
[01:30:41] me the stories and showing me the pictures of these Yazidis babies that were being burned, and I just,
[01:30:45] I lost it, and you never want to lose it. You know, especially the journalists, you never want to
[01:30:50] cry, you never want to break down, and I just, I, I broke down, and I was just bowling in this room,
[01:30:58] and I just remember I looked up, and if somebody was handing me a tissue, they were all men in
[01:31:03] the room, Yazidis men, and was with one of their religious leaders. I just looked at everyone of
[01:31:09] those faces, and I thought, they didn't even want to just look at me, and he said, we just don't
[01:31:14] react anymore. And I just thought, this is just, it's such a, it's a place beyond a place that I
[01:31:21] can, you know, thank goodness, can never imagine getting to, or hopefully never would, but
[01:31:27] the depths of what they'd endured, the thousands of people from their community that had been taken,
[01:31:32] and, and just, it was so hard to even now to wrap my head around, but for them, it was just,
[01:31:41] there would be on the point of even reacting to any of it anymore, and they were just so lost,
[01:31:46] and so, so broken by it all that I just, nothing was triggering them anymore, and so
[01:31:53] here was I feeling terribly unprofessional and crying, but I just, I, I couldn't, I just couldn't
[01:31:59] stop, and it was just, yeah, that was a, probably the only time I've really done that, but that was,
[01:32:07] yeah, it was just a moment for me, of realizing that here I was feeling terrible, and they weren't even,
[01:32:14] as upset as I was, and then I had to really realize that they were suffering in a much different way.
[01:32:20] Yeah, you also mentioned in the book that at one point you felt like that, and then you kind of had to
[01:32:26] say, I'm a volunteer here, like I'm here because I want to be here, I can be sad, but they can't
[01:32:33] leave, this is it for them. Absolutely, and there's always a guilt that comes with that, and it's
[01:32:38] still something I grapple with. So I can go in and I can spend, however long I want to spend there
[01:32:43] months, weeks, whatever, and you get their stories, and you, you tell their stories, and then you get
[01:32:50] to go home, I get to get on a plane, I have an American passport, Australian passport, I go home, and
[01:32:58] they don't, they don't get to go home, they don't get to, they don't understand what, what that,
[01:33:05] that in itself being such a luxury, and there's a guilt that I, I feel with that sometimes,
[01:33:11] in just, in being that, and they don't view it that way, they view it as,
[01:33:16] why, you know, what a gift it is that someone would want to even come in and tell their story
[01:33:21] and would leave their comfortable home in their, you know, families and come and talk to us,
[01:33:28] and that's how they view it, which is lovely, but for me, it was always, yeah, a sense of
[01:33:36] of just filling a little bit of guilt about it, and I always tried not to be a vulture, I didn't
[01:33:40] want to go in and have somebody sort of open up and tell their story and then I, and then I take
[01:33:46] that story and I leave, and I don't know that it's ever, it's ever going to change anything for them,
[01:33:52] I don't know that it's ever going to do any good for them, so yeah, that's something I, I set with.
[01:34:02] What about the son ladies, tell us about the son ladies, because this is a cool story.
[01:34:05] It's a story extraordinary, so yeah, I heard about them and we went to sort of, we went for
[01:34:11] long drive to meet them and they were these extraordinary, easy women, most of them had come from
[01:34:16] Xinjar and, and so when, when I just came in in 2014, these, the easy, these had to flee up the mountain,
[01:34:25] because there wasn't anywhere to go, it was all surrounded at the bottom, and the tragedy of it was,
[01:34:30] so many of them died on that mountain because they stopped to death, it was a middle of summer
[01:34:34] and a rock in the summers, something else, but they stopped, and if they were describing, you know,
[01:34:40] having to throw children off the mountain, because that was going to be a better way for them to die than to,
[01:34:45] to die of stovation or dehydration, and that was really what's put in America to get back involved
[01:34:51] in Iraq was the Zidi plant, and the fact that of what happened to them was just in there was no,
[01:34:58] it was so hard to get aid and anything to them, so the women that survived that
[01:35:02] formed their own unit that they called the Sunlades, the first of the Sunlades, because they wanted to,
[01:35:09] I think, was multiple reasons, but they wanted to, to aid find their women that was still missing,
[01:35:14] and be they wanted to be involved in that in that liberation of getting their towns and villages back,
[01:35:20] and they were just really really extraordinary women.
[01:35:24] They also wanted vengeance.
[01:35:29] Yeah, as you would, as you would.
[01:35:34] Yeah, no, it's a very cool section in there that you talk about, and they also had
[01:35:43] real, real situation, I mean, I'll just go to the books, we have a lot of our women in
[01:35:52] Mazuel being held as slaves. Their families are waiting for them, we are waiting for them,
[01:35:57] the liberation might help bring them home, so they're in the situation, they don't just want
[01:36:01] revenge, they have actual people that they know, their friends, their relatives that are actual slaves,
[01:36:09] and they can go help them, and that's what they're trying to do.
[01:36:16] You say this when you're talking to them, but what I also had come to learn about the
[01:36:22] Yazidis was that when ISIS had already taken away their hopes and happiness,
[01:36:28] they would now allow them to take away their sanity too. The Sunlades were strong,
[01:36:32] always sitting upright, a few tears were shed, but hastily wiped away as the morning melted
[01:36:37] into afternoon. ISIS had abducted Yazidi girls as young as eight, trading them at the market for
[01:36:43] a few dollars. I learned of one young mother who was pregnant at the time of capture,
[01:36:49] she'd given birth in the back room of her overlord's home, but was not permitted to fruit feed
[01:36:54] her newborn son. The baby cried and cried. The Muslim militant beheaded him.
[01:37:06] The depth of the prairie video was hard to swallow, and we all sat and clouded quiet to it for a
[01:37:12] small period. It's important to us to be able to protect our dignity and honor a 19-year-old
[01:37:19] son lady named Mesa finally said, softly shattering the wencing silence. My family is very proud.
[01:37:25] They encourage me to join. I'm very proud to protect my people. After all that has happened to us
[01:37:32] Yazidis, we are no longer afraid. And as brave and stoic as the son lady seems to
[01:37:42] me there was one thing that did frighten them. The notion that Yazidi boys who had been kidnapped
[01:37:48] from Mount Sinjar and presumably drugged and brainwashed by ISIS were now fighting their mothers
[01:37:54] and sisters under the block flag of ISIS. We now have terrorist Yazidis something that never used to be.
[01:38:13] So, we hear about child soldiers throughout history, but this idea of which happened where they
[01:38:20] would capture these Yazidi kids that are 7-8-9-10 years old and brainwashed them and abuse them
[01:38:29] and turn them into extremist ISIS terror kids. And that's still a really big problem for them.
[01:38:43] Even, I guess, given the lack of resources, so a lot of the boys that are coming back are still
[01:38:51] still very radicalized in many ways. And I remember being in a refugee camp or a displacement camp
[01:38:58] for Yazidi's once in hearing just a horrific story about how one of the, you must have been probably
[01:39:03] 66-67 years old and he'd been rescued and brought back and tried to be a head-ease baby sister.
[01:39:08] Yeah, Zed, this is name in the book.
[01:39:29] Back to the book, one blazing summer after a night travel, the bumpy road of couple hours
[01:39:33] north to the office of kidnapped affairs. It was perhaps one of the saddest structures I ever entered,
[01:39:41] not because the building itself painted a bright sunny yellow and standing indomitable in the
[01:39:45] middle of a city sprawling, but rather because of what it represented. The office had been established
[01:39:51] with support from the KRG Prime Minister after the ISIS eruption of 2014 to help find thousands
[01:39:58] that had gone missing. I would visit that office many times in the months to come into every time
[01:40:03] it would get Saturn. You're talking to one of the individuals there, Zaina. Zaina explained
[01:40:12] that it was her neighbor's Muslim families that had lived side-by-side with for generations who
[01:40:16] ended up turning on them. One morning she said our neighbors came for us. Zaina, who was 32 years old,
[01:40:23] had spent more than a year as an ISIS sex slave. When ISIS came, they said they didn't want to
[01:40:28] fight us. They told us to give them their weapons, our weapons. She said telling me her story
[01:40:34] all over again, but this time faced a face where it felt cruder and more inescapable. We gave
[01:40:39] them everything we had. These were our Muslim neighbors, but so many of them had become ISIS and we didn't
[01:40:45] know. Zaina went, went as she recollected the day ISIS assaulted her village at the foot of
[01:40:52] Mount Sinjar. The elderly who could not run faster far enough were some of her executed.
[01:40:58] Men and women separated with older men dragged off to mosques to be killed. The females,
[01:41:05] including girls as young as eight were loaded onto cars and trucks and bound for Mosul.
[01:41:11] ISIS took me, my sister, my brother's wife, and my little sister. For 13 days we were putting a
[01:41:18] school. We didn't know what would happen. There were about 50 people, women, and children squashed into a
[01:41:24] room. There was no water for us to wash ourselves. The children were sick. Zaina had lied to her
[01:41:31] captors telling them that she was married, hoping somehow it might spare her from their evil intentions,
[01:41:36] that somehow it would save her from getting robbed of the one thing she could never get back.
[01:41:40] Her captors, however, were undeterred. She and dozens of others were taken to a heavily guarded
[01:41:46] building in the ISIS controlled Iraq City of Tallahafar. Yazidi girls under the age of 14 were
[01:41:51] whisked away and sold at auctions. The remaining women were handed off the ISIS fighters and told
[01:41:58] they were henceforth their property. When a fighter grabbed Zaina and Carter were off to
[01:42:05] into a dust storm fear paralyzed her from head to toe. In its official propaganda materials,
[01:42:12] ISIS justified killing, raping, and enslaving Yazidis calling them devil worshippers,
[01:42:18] and linking them to their mandate to re-institute, re-institute slavery.
[01:42:24] Raping them, those unbelievers, had become a core tenant of their theology.
[01:42:42] Zaina's angry impounders threw her into a prison cell. Days later she was transferred to another
[01:42:47] facility in Tallahafar and forced to convert to Islam onto the front of death. Zaina had already
[01:42:52] witnessed a dozen fellow Yazidis being executed and called blood as punishment for their escape attempts.
[01:42:58] She was not ready to die, but she was not ready to give up on finding her freedom. Zaina and her
[01:43:03] another Yazidi woman were sent to live with a gehaunist in the ISIS stronghold of Mazul.
[01:43:10] He took me to this place. They were flats, small tourist flats. It was a tourist community.
[01:43:15] He raped me. For the next five months Zaina remained inside Mazul and was handed off to another
[01:43:27] militant who locked her in a small room. This is how the game was played.
[01:43:35] Raping always been a weapon of war that thrived on silence, but the Yazidi community was
[01:43:39] bravely and gradually changing that notion. They were collectively bucking the mortification and the
[01:43:45] fright and all the repercussions that came with it to speak out and tell the world that they
[01:43:50] would not be muted. It's a tough situation Zaina admitted with a shrug, but I am still here.
[01:44:11] I am skipping giant chunks of the book as I am going through with different details.
[01:44:28] Evil. I think I write a fair bit in the book about sexual violence because I think it's
[01:44:36] something that doesn't. It's very uncomfortable to talk about and it's something that even now
[01:44:41] we're seeing ISIS fighters and not, no ISIS fighters are being held accountable for that.
[01:44:49] And there's still this mentality of the terrorist, they're killing people. So what do we care
[01:44:55] about that for? We need to start shifting that perspective. They need to be trialed for those crimes
[01:45:04] as just as important as every other horrific crime that they've committed because that's something
[01:45:10] that needs to change. I think for so long, I mean, it officially became illegal in 98.
[01:45:19] Sexual violence in wartime. It's something that's still relatively new. There's a lot of work
[01:45:26] that needs to be done in that topic and within the international community that needs to be looked at
[01:45:31] and how can that be sort of brought to justice? Otherwise, you do have that impunity that's
[01:45:35] going to continue. And what so many of these women go through, have gone through and in so many
[01:45:41] different conflicts, I think it really deserves a lot more attention than what it gets. But it's
[01:45:47] uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to talk about.
[01:45:50] Fast forward a little bit here to Fouloujia. The city is damaged, but nothing like the other cities
[01:46:05] where ISIS has been dislodged, explained in Iraqi. I tell intelligence officials, we work closely
[01:46:10] on the Fouloujia campaign. This was a well-planned operation led by Iraq's Golden Division. The
[01:46:15] Golden Division was Iraq's special operations forces. It ultimately had been created
[01:46:23] by US-led coalition forces after the 2003 invasion and had received top-notch training.
[01:46:34] This is a local talking about the push through the city. And he said, if the decision was mine,
[01:46:42] I would have made a statue for every fighter in the battle against terrorism. Those heroes are
[01:46:47] examples of courage when faced with Daesh. It was awesome for me to watch, it was awesome for me to
[01:46:55] watch, as all this stuff was taking place. Obviously, I retired in 2010, but when we worked with the
[01:47:01] Iraqis, a lot of times, the Iraqi soldiers, they weren't very determined. And they would have a
[01:47:10] lot of hard times sticking to the fight. And we had an entire battalion one time leave the battlefield.
[01:47:19] And so that was not a great look, right? And so when I started getting reports back from my friends,
[01:47:30] that were in Missouri with the Iraqis and the Iraqis, we're fighting. They were fighting. And
[01:47:35] not just in Missouri, but in Ramadi in Foulouza, the Iraqis were fighting. And it was, it was so,
[01:47:41] that's kind of why I mentioned that. Because I had worked with some of the troops that trained
[01:47:46] up the Iraqi special forces, the Iraqi special special operations forces, and they did take the lead.
[01:47:52] And it was awesome to see their courage and that they were going in. They were fighting. They took
[01:47:59] massive casualties in Missouri. They took massive casualties. My friend told me that in the first few
[01:48:05] days, they thought to themselves, we're not, the Iraqis might run out of troops because they
[01:48:11] are taking so many casualties. I can tell you, when we were in Ramadi in 2006, they wouldn't have
[01:48:15] taken that many casualties because they wouldn't have continued to fight. They would have run away.
[01:48:19] And so here, they were fighting for a cause that they believed in. And it was awesome to see that
[01:48:25] taking place. And I really noticed also just in between 2014, 2019, just that trajectory and how
[01:48:32] much over that time, I guess that they were willing to win was really compounded. But yeah,
[01:48:40] by the end of it, they've seen some of the most terrific combat that you can begin to imagine.
[01:48:46] I mean, just the level of what they've experienced for those that have gotten through it is really
[01:48:54] remarkable.
[01:49:10] You know, I can't, there's some of these examples that you give
[01:49:14] of who this enemy was. I just, I just have to read them. Every day for three months, they
[01:49:25] tortured me as you're recalled from where he sat, stranded on the Syrian side of the shutter
[01:49:31] Turkish border. But after a while, the torture just became routine. He was one of the thousands
[01:49:38] of prisoners arrested by ISIS for so-called crimes like wearing Western jeans or smoking a
[01:49:42] cigarette. But he was also one of a select few who had managed to claw their way out of the terrorist
[01:49:47] groups, dungeons with all those limbs intact. Short of jail, liberated by opposing forces such
[01:49:54] escape were considered rare.
[01:49:59] And there's another one, Nazra, another former captive. ISIS told us we'll give you safety if you
[01:50:15] give up your weapons. But they lied to us, they took our weapons and they arrested us.
[01:50:22] Many of Nazra's fellow soldiers had since been executed, but many remained incarcerated. There was
[01:50:29] no rights or to attorneys do process trials or even a phone call. He estimated that as many as
[01:50:34] 2000 Iraqi armor soldiers had been slain since succumbing to ISIS over the past two years.
[01:50:39] He also estimated that 5000 at that time remained in prison battles across the country.
[01:50:48] The cages were so small, Nazra said that their tour sows were marked by the folds of
[01:50:52] skin and their limbs tinge blue from the hours of crouching, curled like a fetus in the womb.
[01:51:05] Women arrested by ISIS typically disappeared behind the prison's exterior held separately
[01:51:09] from the men and were often never seen again. Children are not exempt from the torment either.
[01:51:16] A large number of children have been arrested by ISIS. My friend, Hussom,
[01:51:22] a member of the Syrian activist group, Raka is being slaughtered silently. He explained
[01:51:28] the most common charges are insulting a law and cooperating with apostates. They are being
[01:51:34] tortured just like men and some of them have died under torture. They torture children too,
[01:51:38] mostly flogging, beating on the hands and feet and psychological torture.
[01:51:44] I was administered with electric shocks. My bones were broken. I was hung by my feet from the ceiling
[01:51:49] and beaten with my hands tied behind my back, said Ali. A professional in his mid-40s who had
[01:51:54] been arrested in the early days of the terrorist onslaught on suspicion of being an atheist.
[01:52:01] They swore on a Quran that I would be cut to pieces.
[01:52:03] You make a note here, you can take a life without killing. That's what torture does.
[01:52:25] Between the summers of 2015 and 2016, ISIS had been on a specially vicious rampage to
[01:52:31] compensate for the loss of seasoned soldiers and had taken to drugging those that radicalized
[01:52:36] or forced into its lair. ISIS is using special tablets. The fighters take drugs and they don't
[01:52:43] know where they are or what they are doing. They are just shooting and fighting. One Kurdish intelligence
[01:52:48] official explained. They lose their minds. Some can be shot 20 times before they go down.
[01:52:54] That ominous drug was known as Captain Gone. Is that right?
[01:52:58] A meth anthedamine like variant of the band pharmaceutical, threatened, threatened of falling.
[01:53:07] It was manufactured in copious quantities primarily in Lebanon and neighboring Syria,
[01:53:11] where it was sold to ISIS through middlemen. They removed any barriers you would have the fighting.
[01:53:21] There is no second guessing they just go out and kill.
[01:53:24] It's still a very common battlefield drug. Often comes from Lebanon, on Osseria.
[01:53:33] It's unfortunately, it goes beyond ISIS, but it's a very common drug that a lot of
[01:53:41] militias and even government soldiers are being given to give them that sense of invincibility to
[01:53:47] have them go out there and do whatever they're told. I think it really game prominence under ISIS.
[01:54:01] With little kids. Yeah. It's drugin' them out.
[01:54:09] Among the ranks of captured brainwashed and drugs, drugged were scores of Yezidi boys
[01:54:15] whose minds had been twisted to turn against their own people. They had been propelled into training
[01:54:20] regimes that included Islamist indoctrination and weapons instruction. They had been forced into
[01:54:25] learning the finer points of beheading forced into becoming suicide bombers and into serving as human shields.
[01:54:56] Did your perception of evil change while you were there?
[01:55:16] I think in the beginning, perhaps had a little bit more of a black and white
[01:55:22] perspective on it, especially in the US, we tend to sort of think
[01:55:33] which I think is completely wrong, but it always comes down to a religion thing.
[01:55:38] That always is often painted as the motivating factor. I think what I really learned
[01:55:44] was for people that were joining ISIS, it was really one of five things or one of 10 things
[01:55:53] that was motivating them to join. I think the complexities for me really grew in that
[01:55:58] because I suddenly started to see ISIS's absolutely evil and that hasn't changed for me.
[01:56:04] But what I started to see was the complexities of how they got to that point and why they joined
[01:56:11] and it wasn't so black and white really and that majority of them were joining more out of
[01:56:18] a necessity for survival than it necessarily was some kind of religious extremism.
[01:56:28] However, there was a difference between the ones that were coming far and as were coming
[01:56:34] and they were often a lot more extreme in that respect. What I found for the Iraqis in particular
[01:56:39] that we're joining was that a lot of them is ISIS had come in and taken over their town or their
[01:56:46] village and they still needed to feed their family. Those kind of complexities grew for me and
[01:56:55] it was a lot harder to look at things in such sort of black and white terms.
[01:57:00] Yeah, I think you're right that America definitely misses the point on that a lot.
[01:57:03] It was always, I still have conversations with people that will talk to me about or they'll
[01:57:12] come at me about, you know, we had no reason to be fighting the Iraqis and I was like,
[01:57:16] hey, we were fighting alongside the Iraqis. They were literally going into the same buildings with us.
[01:57:23] That's what they were doing. We weren't fighting against the Iraqis. We were fighting against the
[01:57:28] insurgents that were there. Same thing with the what you mentioned about, you know, how am I going
[01:57:36] to feed my family? There's plenty of 14, 17, 19, 22-year-old young male Iraqis that wanted money
[01:57:47] and how are they going to get money? Well, there's someone over here that's going to pay them
[01:57:50] $50 to go shoot NRPG at the coalition forces and that's what they're going to do and they weren't
[01:57:55] geodas. They were little hoodlums just like a little hoodlum in America. That's how you're going
[01:58:02] to make them a living in America in some crappy city where you don't have any opportunities. Oh,
[01:58:10] I'm going to be a drug dealer or I'm going to be a gangbanger because somebody's going to pay me,
[01:58:13] you know, to go and carry this from here to there. It's an economic decision more than anything else.
[01:58:19] And even when they're talking about, you know, if it's a religious thing, well, can't be a religious
[01:58:25] thing because we've got it's the actual Muslims fighting against the Muslims. It's not like there's
[01:58:31] there's it's not about that. And what the other crazy thing is, you know, when you talk to people
[01:58:37] and, you know, I would explain, well, you know, we were working with often times of majority,
[01:58:43] she, uh, army and it would be hard for them to interact with the Sunnis and people have no,
[01:58:48] but they don't understand what we're talking about. And that was a big bit, but you know, with
[01:58:52] ISIS, you know, you disband and, and entire, you know, the Sunnis were very dispensed and
[01:58:58] after a sedan and yet they still had their weapons in there out on the street and feeling, you know,
[01:59:02] persecuted by by the government and so what are they going to do? They're going to band together.
[01:59:07] There was the same people. It wasn't anything you. I think ISIS just sort of looked at as
[01:59:12] this group that came out of nowhere and dropped from the sky. Well, no, they, they were always there.
[01:59:17] Yeah, um, they just kind of came together at some point. When you mentioned Baghdaddy,
[01:59:25] Abu Bakr Baghdaddy, Al Baghdaddy, um, we, my task unit in Ramadi in 2006 went to go and
[01:59:35] capture a kill him, got a mission to go capture kill him and didn't get him. It's actually the,
[01:59:40] it's actually the opening story, life, life, bab and was the ground force commander on that
[01:59:46] operation. They got into a big gunfight because there was security there, which means he was probably
[01:59:50] in that vicinity. But you, you're right. Well, it's not, these aren't, they didn't drop from the sky.
[01:59:55] This was a guy that had been there and fought as an insurgent and was on the run and constantly
[02:00:01] trying to maneuver. And so yeah, these people didn't drop from the sky. And, you know, the other
[02:00:08] crazy thing that you can compare to a lot of bad situations in the world where what they want
[02:00:15] is there to be problems. So what the, what the insurgents want is to create division, right?
[02:00:20] Division and they would go and bomb she-a-mosks just to get the she-as to lash out at the Sunis and
[02:00:26] then the Sunis, they were, they were trying to create a civil war. And it was very, very hard to
[02:00:33] walk that line and make sure that you're doing this in a proper way. And even when we, in Ramadi,
[02:00:40] when we got there in 2006, I thought we were just going to do a big sweep through like we did,
[02:00:44] like like the Marines did in Flusha. Just go and rubble every building and just run through it.
[02:00:51] And Maliki, the prime minister who is a she-a knew that if he did that, it would be bad.
[02:00:58] It would be bad. And so he said, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to do it in a more
[02:01:02] sparing way as with minimal force required. And that's what we did. There was still force required.
[02:01:06] But it was a lot less kinetic than Flusha was. So yeah, I'll tell you, but all that being said,
[02:01:17] I, the, the, the evil that's perpetrated is just absolutely horrific and you capture it in this
[02:01:24] book. And what scares me the most about it is how easily people are swayed towards, it doesn't take
[02:01:33] much to push somebody over the line from being a normal person to be heading children,
[02:01:40] which is, which is horrific. And you know, I, I did one podcast on the, on the Me lie massacre.
[02:01:49] And there was roughly 500 old men, women and children, no military age males there at all.
[02:01:56] 500 murdered raped mutilated. And the reading the interviews with the guys that perpetrated this
[02:02:06] and you read their backgrounds and you read where they came from and you read what they did,
[02:02:12] you can't, it's, we have to be on the lookout for this kind of stuff because these guys
[02:02:17] committed heinous atrocities, equivalent of ISIS atrocities and the were Americans that had
[02:02:27] crossover the line. Absolutely. And I really think, you know, this is something I found in Afghanistan
[02:02:33] in Syria and Iraq and a lot of other places that we, when I say, we just don't give enough attention to
[02:02:40] and that is government corruption and how much of these things are a symptom of that.
[02:02:45] You know, if you have to pay someone every time you're going to go through a checkpoint,
[02:02:51] so that some policeman can line his pocket. If you have to, if you see your leaders rolling around
[02:02:57] within the, in these fancy cars and big houses and Rolexes and, and, and you're not, you know,
[02:03:03] you can't get by a sweeping industry and still not getting any services. Then at some point it's
[02:03:09] going to make you angry and when you're angry enough, I also think it's a big factor for, for joining
[02:03:15] a lot of these groups to sort of rise up against their own governments and I think it's something
[02:03:20] that when I talked to officials about it, they'll often took quick to throw up their hands,
[02:03:24] we can't do anything about that. That's just a systemic problem. Okay, but you're always going to be
[02:03:30] dealing with terrorism as a systemic problem from that problem because corruption is just such a huge
[02:03:37] driver of it. In every way, shape of form and I just think it's something that gets belly any
[02:03:41] attention when it's such a big reason why these groups exist and continue to exist and we'll
[02:03:49] continue to exist. Yeah, you have that, you have that little bit of anger in the back of your
[02:03:54] mind that you're being oppressed and then someone comes along and says, hey, you can fight that
[02:03:59] oppression with us and I'm in. Let's do this. Yeah. Fast forward a little bit. What does war look like?
[02:04:13] It isn't just blister buildings and empty brass casings and displacement camps. War looks like wounds
[02:04:19] and soldiers who don't resemble fierce fighters but are men in unfathomable pain.
[02:04:24] Soldiers belong to someone. They are mothers child. Someone created them and brought them into
[02:04:31] the world only for the world to rip them apart and for what was it worth it? It was always the
[02:04:39] question in my mind but ever the hardest to ask. Soldiers in medical staff, you're going to
[02:04:49] into a hospital. Soldiers in medical staff face a fight of a different kind. No money and no
[02:04:55] medicine to treat almost 9,500 that have been seriously wounded. The tiny hospital, if one could even
[02:05:01] call it that had no MRI equipment or CT scanners, it reminded me of poor clinics of a Soviet time in place.
[02:05:10] There were thousands of open, unresolved case files, several soldiers, young faces, old faces
[02:05:14] and with body parts gone gone, came forward to outline their predicaments and pain to reconstruct
[02:05:20] the blows to their bodies. I feverously jotted down all I could in my friend notebook.
[02:05:29] And you go through just talking to soldiers and their horrific wounds that they're
[02:05:36] you know, Powwana ishmail. Been defusing a roadside bomb for Teshmerga on Christmas Eve in 2014
[02:05:44] when it exploded. His two comrades died, much of his body was burned and his thigh skin had been reduced to
[02:05:49] ash. Carwans side 37 years old, proudly dressed in his soldiers uniform. He's one of the victims of the
[02:05:59] ISIS chemical attack. Kiter Merckor 42 years old, 25-year-old Peshmerga servicemen,
[02:06:08] ambushed by an ISIS vehicle, around from a PKM machine gun cleaved below his left ear
[02:06:16] and lodged a few millimeters from the top disk in his back. The round remained there infected
[02:06:21] and inflamed. His hands were numb. His head ached persistently. Bazaar who sane, 32-year-old,
[02:06:31] been working on the front lines, struck by a sniper's bullet in broad daylight,
[02:06:40] reduced from a strong able-bodied man to an almost infantile, physical and mental state
[02:06:45] who sang could no longer control his legs. Nor could he control his head. And I movement
[02:06:49] occasionally he could speak slowly other times. His eyes just swelled with confused tears as the words
[02:06:56] would not come out.
[02:07:01] These men had been robbed of bones and body parts that could not grow back, some had lost their
[02:07:19] minds, but none had lost their self-respect. They were heroes who did not look like conventional
[02:07:25] heroes, but constituted what the Hollywood depiction of heroes should have been.
[02:07:38] And once again to your earlier point, Hollywood, when you read 40 were wounded or 12 were wounded
[02:07:46] or 7 were wounded or a thousand were wounded, the way you did and I just breezed through those.
[02:07:53] I didn't go into the detail that you go into some of the backstory, but every one of those little
[02:07:58] statistics is a person.
[02:08:11] Going back to Tallah Far. This is a, uh, here's a tactic. When the people came, when the people
[02:08:20] from town heard that Kirkuk had been taken over by ISIS, many came out to the streets to celebrate.
[02:08:25] So this is what we're talking about. You got people that you got the Shia power and you've got
[02:08:31] ISIS taking over Kirkuk and now the Sunnis come out and see, yeah, let's celebrate and then what
[02:08:36] happens. With all the families out in the street, ISIS members then executed their scheme and had
[02:08:40] the trucks ready and filled them with young boys and imported them to the front lines.
[02:08:44] ISIS has used all sorts of tactics and human shields many times before.
[02:08:53] ISIS was using the young boys for three main functions, functions on their fate full front line
[02:08:59] as direct fighters as human shields and as suicide bombers.
[02:09:06] One soldier showed me a video of the remnants of a cotterized truck and told me the three
[02:09:11] inside were just kids taken from the Tallah Far streets just a day earlier.
[02:09:24] What is war? War is the reason you wake up. There is no life outside of the conflict.
[02:09:28] You eat and breathe. When you're in it, it is impossible to have a life outside or even to if you
[02:09:34] attempt the rich willistic movements of daily life. The soldiers I met may have had their family
[02:09:41] but war always came first. It was not a choice. They had no option but to live it and breathe it.
[02:09:48] They had all abandoned their studies or deserted their livestock or quit their jobs to defend
[02:09:53] their people for a poultry paycheck, a paycheck that often did not come on time if at all.
[02:09:58] There was no time for anything but war. How often are you going in and out of country during this time?
[02:10:19] L.S. counter the amount of trips. Would you normally stay for a month?
[02:10:24] Yes. Some points in a trip for a few weeks. I often left it very open and depending on
[02:10:36] getting what I needed. I would go to other countries in between it all. I was going to
[02:10:45] cover other conflicts at the same time and then I would go back. I'd spend a chunk of time
[02:10:51] back in the US and then go back and spend a chunk of time. I would just whatever I could get that.
[02:10:57] I felt I needed to go back for and then it was a very obituary to how long I thought I needed to be
[02:11:07] there. Is there any of your work driving this? Is there stories that you owe or anything like that?
[02:11:16] Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. No. Nothing sort of pragmatic in that sense. It was more
[02:11:21] or yeah. It was more just trying to develop it as it needed to be, I guess, in that very organic sense.
[02:11:31] We've talked about the sun ladies. We've talked about some. I think we've talked about some of the
[02:11:36] other Peshmerga females. There are females on the other side as well.
[02:11:43] Females of the Caliphate. I got 15 years one plump 54-year-old woman said flopping onto the office
[02:11:55] couch for being an ISIS terrorist. I wanted to be a suicide bomber. You refer to this female as
[02:12:04] KS. KS wanted to tell her story in a jagged timeline, a biography bound by battles. She was the
[02:12:10] daughter of an Arab father and a Kurdish mother. She grew up speaking her grandfather's language of
[02:12:16] Turkmen. She ended up in ISIS after her marriage fell apart. I wanted to divorce. I was very poor.
[02:12:23] I have schizophrenia and was just diagnosed with blood cancer and my only daughter wasn't treating me
[02:12:29] well. I was borrowing money from people for the treatment KS lamented. I was welling. But then I
[02:12:35] grew desperate. In the obscure days after Mosul, I was snatched. Oh, after Mosul was snatched by ISIS
[02:12:42] in June of 2014. When the terrorist group was quickly capturing territory across Iraq,
[02:12:47] she had detailed her situation to a cab driver named Machmood in her home city of Kerkuk.
[02:12:54] He offered her a solution. He was ISIS instead of I joined they would treat me well and pay me.
[02:12:59] I said I would join on one condition that they make me a suicide bomber and get me out of my misery.
[02:13:07] The only thing I was seeking was to be bombed and die. So again, you were pointing out
[02:13:17] who becomes ISIS and why? And there you go. Here you have someone that skits a frenic has all these
[02:13:22] problems in their life and you see the same thing in cults in America. You take someone that's
[02:13:28] been abused. You take someone that's down on their luck. And that's who cults actually go after.
[02:13:33] They go after people like that for the most part. And this is a classic situation.
[02:13:38] Psychological issues, divorce, being treated bad by her daughter, there you go.
[02:13:48] Yeah, and she, you know, in the when I was sitting with her and she's sort of
[02:13:51] vacillating between this laughing and crying and it was all, it was all very bizarre but I talked
[02:13:57] in length with one of the guards that was in the river at the time when she was telling me
[02:14:02] her story and you know, she sort of panning herself to be this very innocent person but
[02:14:07] as two sides to the story and the other side being that she was really evil and she was one of
[02:14:13] the people that was taking these easy women and helping facilitate them to be sold and
[02:14:19] debating them and things. So, you know, it's just a very complicated situation in that.
[02:14:32] Colonel Marwan, sobriety of the Yazidi, Peshmergobitain recalled that in March 2017,
[02:14:38] a disillusioned American, moving from females. This is to Westerners amongst the ranks.
[02:14:43] A disillusioned American surrendered himself to the Peshmergobitain. He had begged them not to
[02:14:51] shoot him. That fighter turned out to be 26-year-old Mohammed Jamal Kuis from Virginia,
[02:14:59] who was later deported to Virginia's eastern district for indictment.
[02:15:02] A 20-year-old jail sentence handed down October 2017 awaited him. And you go through some of these
[02:15:14] other Westerners, males, females coming in from first world countries, coming in from America,
[02:15:23] coming in from parts of Europe to go, giving up as crazy. Crazy.
[02:15:28] They were their recruitment campaign for foreign as was pretty extensive.
[02:15:39] Moving forward into the book, all tools in the war against ISIS had eventually pointed to
[02:15:44] Mosul. It was the ISIS-Bredden butter, the head of the snake. I learned that many Mosul civilians,
[02:15:52] innocent souls who had managed to survive over three years of ISIS occupation were slaughtered
[02:15:58] in retaliation as Iraqi forces around the city. To have made it this far, just to be taken out
[02:16:05] in the twilight of the fight jarred me. Their body parts were strewn across dusty streets.
[02:16:12] Tiny bodies cracked open, left to die after their fleeing parents were gunned down,
[02:16:17] some hiding underneath the bloody corpses of their family members, orphaned and forever traumatized.
[02:16:23] I remembered the house of a broken woman. Her little daughter had been lost for days,
[02:16:31] until she was found with nothing but a gaping black hole where the back of her head used to be.
[02:16:40] Suicide belts are strapped on to helpless civilians, including women and children by ISIS,
[02:16:44] a crime of the Iraqi counterterrorism forces conjectured. This was a big dilemma. We didn't know
[02:16:54] who a bomber was and who was not many of our men died from these people forced to be bombers.
[02:17:03] This is one of the things that when my friends were over there and they were reporting back,
[02:17:09] they'd have these kids, women, children, men coming to checkpoints with strapped with bombs.
[02:17:19] The predicament that they were in, but then also the great lengths that the Americans made
[02:17:27] to try and spare the lot. You normally do with a suit. Obviously a suicide bomber. What do you
[02:17:33] do? You can kill them. What do you do with a roadside bomber and IED? You blow it. What we do?
[02:17:40] We call it blowing in place. You just go put a explosive charge near it and you blow it up and then it's
[02:17:44] safe. What you don't want to have to do, you do have to do it sometimes, but you don't have to go
[02:17:49] there with whatever, like an action movie with a pair of pliers and a wire cutters and actually
[02:17:56] disarm that thing because it's dangerous. By the way, the way they build those bombs often times
[02:18:01] when you cut one wire, it's rigged to blow up and that somehow causes detonation anyways.
[02:18:07] So what they had in many of these cases were these kids or innocent people that had these bombs
[02:18:13] strapped and go walk into the checkpoint. It's not like complicate and it's
[02:18:23] that there's no easy solution to that. Yeah, you know we talked about on a few podcasts ago,
[02:18:29] we talked about the idea of total war, which is at the far extreme of conflict, right? Total war.
[02:18:36] We will do absolutely any. And you asked me echo Charles, you asked me,
[02:18:40] give me like as any examples of total war and I said, ISIS. There was no boundaries,
[02:18:46] zero boundaries to what they would do. I mean America, pretty much always operates in some
[02:18:53] there's some cap. Now you could say World War II, once we dropped the atomic bombs, it was like,
[02:18:59] hey, this is total war and we are going to do whatever it takes to win as quickly as possible.
[02:19:04] That's how you can make a decision to say, hey, we're going to drop these atomic weapons.
[02:19:11] But other than that, you know, there's always rules of engagement, there's always Geneva
[02:19:16] convention, there's always all these constraints, but if you want to talk about just total war,
[02:19:19] we will do absolutely anything to and stoop to any level of barbarity to try and achieve victory.
[02:19:26] This is an example.
[02:19:34] Female ISIS members were said to have stoop to weaponizing their own babies, seemingly harmless
[02:19:40] mothers carrying their babies had been trained to enter areas thick with Iraqi soldiers only to blow
[02:19:45] themselves up their young and their liberators around them to bits.
[02:19:53] An enemy is most dangerous when on the defensive or when they are fighting for survival.
[02:19:57] This was not an easy fight and ISIS was not the JV team. ISIS did not care for rules of
[02:20:03] engagement by which the West was taught to fight. ISIS did whatever it would take to achieve
[02:20:08] its strategic objectives regardless of the consequences. There you go, you and me on the same page.
[02:20:18] President Trump gave a free hand to his then defense secretary Mattis who in May stressed military
[02:20:25] commanders were no longer slowed by Washington decision cycles or by the White House Micro Managing
[02:20:30] that existed with President Obama. As a result of the new approach, the fall of ISIS and Iraq
[02:20:36] at least in terms of territory came even more swiftly than hardened US military leaders expected.
[02:20:42] It moved more quickly than at least I had anticipated Brigadier General Croph said,
[02:20:48] we in the Iraqi security forces were able to hunt down and target ISIS leadership,
[02:20:52] target their command and control.
[02:20:56] So I kind of heard that a lot from the leadership when I was interviewing them,
[02:21:01] I think that was in the end of 2017 and that was sort of the recurring theme was that they
[02:21:07] were given a more of a free hand and they were sort of able to push forward. I could look at that
[02:21:12] in hindsight in many different ways and how that could be interpreted. But that was the narrative
[02:21:21] on the ground that the end of 2017 was that they felt that they were given more support than they
[02:21:26] had been in the past. Yeah, I think that and it's also very interesting when you look at the fact
[02:21:32] that this is General Mattis, right? This is General Mattis who's saying this and obviously
[02:21:39] General Mattis and President Trump in the end were not friendly, which it shows you how
[02:21:47] very caustic Trump's leadership could be or could become if you, you know,
[02:21:53] caustic. And it didn't start out that way clearly. You know, at some point they were seeing
[02:21:59] out of why. It's what I love about this and what I what I, is this is decentralized command.
[02:22:06] This is saying, okay, listen, I'm the president. There's bad guys there. I don't care what you do.
[02:22:11] What I want them, I want them gone. I want that that problem solved. Commanders on the ground.
[02:22:16] Okay, we're going to go solve it. Yeah, that's what I said to go solve it. That's, that's a great
[02:22:21] sign, right? That's a great sign. And obviously, I guess the disease of victory is General Patent
[02:22:28] used to call it meaning, hey, we won this thing now. Everyone should just listen to me more. I mean,
[02:22:34] that's that's what you have to watch out for. You can't let your ego make you think that just
[02:22:38] because you made one good decision, you're going to make all good decisions. It doesn't work that
[02:22:43] way, but this is just again, very revealing of how confusing Donald Trump's leadership could be
[02:22:53] that you could have that he could have completely empowered General Mattis to go and solve this problem.
[02:23:01] And then, a couple years later, General Mattis leaves. Yeah, and I think it really started that way
[02:23:09] with a rock with Afghanistan. Go do what the job needs to be done. And my understanding from
[02:23:14] talking to different people at the White House the time was that President Trump, you, he's not,
[02:23:20] you know, he is the commander of chief, but was the commander of chief, but isn't a military guy. So he
[02:23:25] kind of, he gave that job to the generals to do. And then at some point, I feel like that shifted.
[02:23:33] And the love that he sort of had for the men, then somehow sort of changed. I'm not entirely
[02:23:40] perry to what happened there, but there was definitely a shift at some point. Yeah, it was all very
[02:23:46] strange to watch from the outside. General McMaster is another guy that was on his staff who is
[02:23:54] from everything I understand I've never met with him. I've never we've covered some of his stuff
[02:23:57] on this podcast because he's very risk from everything I've understood. He's one of the most
[02:24:05] respected guys. He worked up in Tallah Far. My brigade commander when I was in Ramadi had relieved
[02:24:12] him in Tallah Far. He had done an amazing job in Tallah Far. Bringing stability to that city. We
[02:24:18] use that plan in Ramadi. So McMaster is just a very well respected and he was gone. General Kelly,
[02:24:29] same thing. I mean, just a Marines Marine, whose son was killed in Afghanistan. And he ends up.
[02:24:40] So you're sitting there. It's causing a lot. It's very, it makes it, it's obvious that it's very
[02:24:44] hard to logically track the fought patterns of President Trump. You can't really just, there's
[02:24:54] some inconsistency there that you just, it's just confusing. But at this time, it was very clear.
[02:25:01] This is another great, on another thing that is very positive. It says here, we really had one mandate
[02:25:07] and that was tenable for Iraqi security forces to defeat ISIS militarily here in Alambar.
[02:25:15] I feel we have achieved that mission. Folsom said, I never felt constrained in a lot of ways.
[02:25:21] I felt liberated because we had a clear mandate and there was no questioning that.
[02:25:27] We were able to focus on what our job was without distraction. And I think that goes a long way
[02:25:32] in what we were trying to accomplish. So that's another thing. It was a very clear mission.
[02:25:38] And I'm sure General Mattis drove a lot of that to say, okay, what do you want us to do?
[02:25:47] Because if you don't have a clear mission, well, I mean, I do, I mean, say anything.
[02:25:53] If you don't have a clear mission, what are you trying to do? Yeah. And that mission was
[02:25:58] defeat ISIS and it became very complicated, I think, because everybody wanted to argue,
[02:26:04] well, what does defeat ISIS mean or people thought, well, if we leave Syria, then that leaves
[02:26:10] it open to all sorts of other things. But in Trump's mind, I think it was clear. It was defeat
[02:26:17] ISIS militarily at least. Not defeat the ideology. I'm not necessarily, I think that's going
[02:26:22] into a whole different rabbit hole, but in terms of territory, arguably yes, that was something
[02:26:31] that was achieved. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And killed a lot of them. Tens of thousands of ISIS fighters
[02:26:40] were killed. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. You talk from everything, like I said,
[02:26:53] you're effort to capture many different perspectives and one of the one of the perspectives
[02:26:58] that you capture in here is of the Iraqi Christians. And I had to read this part, because just
[02:27:04] because it's very moving. Scores of Iraqi Christians in the region who earlier fled in fear,
[02:27:11] neighboring countries such as Jordan Lebanon, Turkey weren't much better off. Father Afram said,
[02:27:17] I'm going to send that name right Afram. They had waited years for visas to Western nations,
[02:27:24] only to be rejected. Now the refugees were stranded. They did not have money or the Kurds to
[02:27:29] resettle in other pockets of Iraq. Those fortunate enough to have been granted visas had to watch
[02:27:34] their families be split apart. Some members lived in the US, others in Europe, and still others
[02:27:40] were strewn across the Middle East. What is war? It was options, almost all bad.
[02:27:47] This war ever bring about options that could be considered good. That sense of helplessness
[02:27:52] hung in the air. During Sunday's service, women in aphodic,
[02:28:00] mantillas, saying and prayed, and the men stuck struck candles to elume the dark in space,
[02:28:06] while tiny children played outside in the cold sunshine. Icists destroyed all the crosses,
[02:28:13] crosses that have been made 150 years ago. Father Afram said,
[02:28:18] but I said to my people, make new crosses. You note in here, again, you have a couple modes,
[02:28:33] and I'd say 10% of the book is sort of history, slash facts. It's a gift's context around one of
[02:28:41] the history lessons that you give us is that in 2003, as the Americans invaded for the first time,
[02:28:51] into Iraq, there's 1.5 million Christians. In 2019, there's 200,000 Christians in Iraq.
[02:29:03] Yeah, and there's two sort of very different schools of thought. I think in that is that
[02:29:06] one being a lot more effort should be made to ensuring that they do stay. That's the land,
[02:29:15] that's their homeland, Iraq essentially. So that all the second thought being, they're going
[02:29:22] to continue to be persecuted, regardless of whether it's ISIS, whether it's government, whether
[02:29:27] it's an al-Qaeda, irrespective of that their lives are in danger. So everything needs to be done
[02:29:34] to sort of bring them out and have them resettled in Europe or the United States. So this two
[02:29:40] kinds of skism, I think, in that community because there's just two very divergent thoughts on what
[02:29:45] the better alternative to that is. Help them stay or help them live.
[02:29:50] Oh, hold section here, ISIS wives, infighting jealousy and regrets. And this is where, you know,
[02:30:04] you started, I didn't dive too much into it. You said, you were talking about the recruitment
[02:30:10] system that they had in Europe and I kind of moved past it. I didn't mean to ignore that, but it's
[02:30:15] just that you addressed a little bit more here. Lena Frisler was a 28-year-old blue-eyed
[02:30:22] blonde with milky pale skin from Hamburg, Germany. She was once an aspiring business student
[02:30:27] with European dream of money, travel, family, and success. In 2012, she married converted to Islam
[02:30:33] and left the comforts of her home for Turkey. She said that she had made the abrupt decision
[02:30:38] after being cordured and encouraged by a known radical solifist in the Hamburg area. She called
[02:30:44] him Pierre Vogel, who urged others to rise up and fight against the Bashar al-Assad Syrian regime.
[02:30:52] Her husband also came under Pierre's spell. One day, my husband came home and told me he wants to
[02:30:58] go to Syria and fight. Lena told me matter, faculty as she nursed her one year's old son,
[02:31:05] her second child with an ISIS fighter. And that goes back to what I said earlier with the government,
[02:31:13] the corruption, how much of this is the symptom of that big problem that we tend to ignore.
[02:31:18] And that's what I found a lot with these women and these fighters that was especially the foreigners.
[02:31:23] Yes, some were going very specifically to join ISIS, but there was a sort of whole group that
[02:31:28] went before ISIS was even a thing. And their mandate was to go and fight Bashar.
[02:31:34] And so I think that sort of we tend to overlook how much of a symptom, you know, it is of a government
[02:31:45] problem. Another germinated of a stunning raven-haired 26-year-old named Heidi Raufi told me she
[02:31:56] spent most of her day as alone in the 10. She said she had fallen in love with an older boy in 2009,
[02:32:02] then several years in a relationship he informed her that he was going to help the people of Syria
[02:32:07] that were suffering as a result of the war and Bashar al-Assad. Love struck Heidi ditched her
[02:32:12] social network, her social work studies for a life of a Jihadi wife in 2014.
[02:32:20] Her beloved Korean later died on the battlefield. She remarried.
[02:32:25] Here's the remarrying. It was an easy process. There was just, there was an ISIS man.
[02:32:28] We all knew with a laptop and he would just ask us what we wanted and bring us guys to choose.
[02:32:34] I met three but chose a man from Kosovo blinded by Shrapnel because he wanted to go to Turkey
[02:32:38] for an operation. That was my out. So she was trying to get out now. She never made it across the
[02:32:44] border. Months dragged on. She wanted to return home to Germany. I wasn't love. It was on the stake.
[02:32:52] And often in these women when they tried to get out, they'd get money. Someone from home would
[02:32:56] send them money and they'd pay what they called a smuggler or whatever to get them out.
[02:33:00] This smuggler would just take the money and drive them around and around and a few circles and drop them back.
[02:33:05] It sort of became this hotel California. You go in but you can never leave.
[02:33:12] So that was sort of the recurring theme with the women. I found too that even if they wanted to,
[02:33:17] they couldn't. Colah Ahmed, a 43-year-old, departed Karachi Pakistan with her husband,
[02:33:26] and children of fight for the Syrian people. My husband was distraught after seeing a unicef
[02:33:31] documentary about the war in Syria. He wanted to go fight Bashar. My husband sold our house and
[02:33:37] all our things for us to leave. He used to be a normal man, work in telecommunications,
[02:33:42] but he saw that documentary and he made it mind to change.
[02:33:47] And like you've been saying, that's what kind of underlying issues were in his head.
[02:33:59] What's going on? Could he not get ahead at work? Was he not getting the support that he needed? What was going on?
[02:34:07] You have to add in all these other factors.
[02:34:09] Another one. This is a male born to Moroccan parents and the idyllic countryside just outside
[02:34:24] of Brussels. Homsa was well known in his community, revered for soccer and boxing skills. His last
[02:34:28] job was with DHL, delivery service. Homsa admitted that in 2011 he became more militant in his
[02:34:37] ideological views after being introduced to a solid fist group called Sharia for Belgium.
[02:34:44] The group called for the overthrow of democracy and urged young people to join ISIS abroad.
[02:34:49] Almost two years after he headed, he did the call and set out for the battlefield. The
[02:34:53] organization would be formally designated as a terrorist group by the Belgian state.
[02:34:58] Homsa was first place at an immigrant's location in the opposition
[02:35:02] bastion of Idlib where he was housed alongside several western fighters. After two weeks he
[02:35:09] spent, he was sent for 40 days of training. Weapons, fitness, religious doctrine. After that he
[02:35:15] was deployed to the northern city of Alepo to fight. I just wanted to give people some kind of
[02:35:23] indication. Homsa, particularly remember the ISIS celebrations after the 2014
[02:35:30] be heading of American journalist James Foley and how leaders used the gruesome event as motivation.
[02:35:36] It was to say, look how we are fighting the Americans. He continued underscoring that ISIS
[02:35:42] initially gained momentum after the formation of a coalition of over 60 Allied nations designated
[02:35:48] to defeat them. Designed to defeat them. The coalition's creation was spun by the ISIS propaganda
[02:35:54] machine to show how strong the militant group was against such a massive force. Homsa repeatedly
[02:35:59] emphasized in the interview that the ideology driving ISIS was not going to stop and had permeated
[02:36:06] some circles so profoundly that it would be next to impossible to defeat. He also said each new
[02:36:13] incarnation of the group brought a school of thought even more rigid than its predecessor.
[02:36:20] A central tenant of ISIS brainwashing of new followers was its singular focus on the United
[02:36:26] States. Homsa said in what he described as an obsession with America. It was the big enemy.
[02:36:45] Got to have somebody to fight against. I've got to have a bad guy.
[02:36:48] Where the good guys you got to have a bad guy? America makes a very nice bad guy for a much
[02:36:57] of the world. There's always going to be a different cause. That's what I always found to
[02:37:04] is that I'll use the example of Gantonamo Bay. You could close that down but they're going
[02:37:13] to find another cause. There's always going to be a reason. I think we close one thing down.
[02:37:27] Create a Palestinian state. Whatever the reason is there's always going to be another one.
[02:37:30] That's something that I think people don't really want to recognize. When it comes to policies
[02:37:36] that you can't have these arbitrary lines between war and peace necessarily. Those days are long
[02:37:42] on. With terrorist groups like this, it's just something that I think we have to learn to manage
[02:37:50] to some degree and I hate saying that because I want to be able to say that it can be totally
[02:37:55] defeated but I don't think that's realistic. I think maybe I hope.
[02:38:09] Maybe I just hope but I always hope that human beings intrinsic motivation for freedom
[02:38:30] will rise eventually to a very positive place in the world.
[02:38:36] I hope so too. I really do. I'm not even sure I believe my own hope. That's what my hope is.
[02:38:48] I said I hope. And what's unfortunate is you see various places in the world where freedom
[02:38:57] rises and that my theory would be that once it rises it's going to move forward.
[02:39:03] Unfortunately we see it received. I ran to great example. The freedom in Iran in the 60s and 70s
[02:39:13] was completely on the rise and it absolutely receded.
[02:39:17] Totally. Maybe my hope is misplaced.
[02:39:21] I think in Syria and in the beginning with the revolution in the Arab Spring, there were freedom
[02:39:27] and there was a legitimate movement of wanting a better life that wasn't under the Bashar al-Assad
[02:39:35] dictatorship. But what happened was it got hijacked by a lot of these terrorist groups and
[02:39:40] Jahada, so then I guess diluted that opposition and then it became this very again. It wasn't
[02:39:45] black and white. It was an incredibly complicated mixture of opposition with a lot of them being
[02:39:53] good solid wanting to live a better life and then a lot of them being these awful terrorists.
[02:40:01] That in self was something I think was really hijacked and diluted.
[02:40:06] Yeah that story and you do a very good job in this of kind of showing some of those strange alliances.
[02:40:13] Very strange alliances that took place and what do you make of those strange alliances?
[02:40:19] Who are you aligned with and wait a second? What happens when we're done with this job and
[02:40:24] all of a sudden I look my person that just helped me and realized that they've got a whole
[02:40:28] other idea where they're heading?
[02:40:33] I mean around work to defeat ISIS too. And look at how the US policy is with Iran. I mean
[02:40:40] the friend of the friend is not your is your enemy or not.
[02:40:44] Yeah exactly that's what thing is that old saying is that saying just goes around in circles.
[02:40:53] You know I'm gonna I'm gonna fast forward past some of these wars. I'm gonna I'm gonna pass the
[02:41:00] past the battle. You know you detail some of the stuff of the musul and you definitely talk about
[02:41:06] rock and insuria and I'm gonna fast forward and again I'm just gonna I have to otherwise I just
[02:41:15] hit here and read this entire book and I don't want to have you here forever but we get to a point
[02:41:23] where the cleanup is now happening and this is at the end of the book and the cleanup is happening
[02:41:29] in the musule and in this particular case there's cleanup happening in in Tallah Far.
[02:41:38] And I'll just go to the book 40 miles west of musule Tallah Far had a population of about
[02:41:45] a hundred thousand before being captured by ISIS in June of 2014. The city was liberated in
[02:41:50] October of 2017 remnants of war were everywhere. bodies found around and under homes I learned
[02:41:56] were not uncommon neither was the smell of future-fied flesh. In many cases families living under ISIS
[02:42:05] rule were forced to bury bodies in their own homes and backyards as well as in local public squares.
[02:42:12] Sometimes victims were made to dig their own shallow graves. The 43 person emergency division
[02:42:21] was tasked only with removing civilian remains from mass graves. The larger 700 person
[02:42:28] nivina civil defense corps was in charge of sweeping up bodies from the streets and collecting
[02:42:34] them from individuals from individual from within individual homes.
[02:42:39] The first wasted life to be reached up from the sewage was that of an Iraqi soldier.
[02:42:53] His bones a blood-drenched uniform and a pair of handcuffs were exhumed.
[02:42:58] Then came seven more all dragged from beneath a home that had once served as a local headquarters
[02:43:07] of ISIS. Local officials who had been tipped off to the presence of the remains just a couple
[02:43:14] days earlier said the victims were likely held in the basement. Across the street at a second location
[02:43:22] another 12 decomposed civilian bodies were exhumed. Among the remains found were those of at least two
[02:43:31] children and dismembered heads without bodies. Each skeleton bore a thick black-blind fold.
[02:43:42] Most of the victims appeared to have been slain execution styles bullet-showered into the backs of their
[02:43:49] heads. It was a massacre. More and more of the same one police official told me.
[02:44:00] A police official always accompanied the recovery workers through their days work, a standard
[02:44:06] practice. It's never ending. The official continued staring out into the yellow fog which lifted
[02:44:11] into the bright sunshine as the day passed on. Officials had become all too familiar with the
[02:44:18] discovery of ISIS victims. Our duty is to the innocent people under the rubble.
[02:44:30] Said, how mighty Al Hussein commander of the Civil Defense Corps, emergency convoy unit he explained
[02:44:37] to me over cold tea the night before ISIS kills them and throws them into the sewage one by one
[02:44:45] and covers it over with cement. This is their way. After several grueling hours with small children
[02:44:54] watching from low-lying rooftops above 20 body bags were sealed and handed over to Iraqi federal police.
[02:45:03] Law enforcement took them to a specialized committee for examining the bodies whenever possible,
[02:45:08] surviving family members of the victims were notified. For DaWad DaWood Salam Mood Ali, a 44-year-old
[02:45:22] rescue worker from the zoo, considered something of a hero among his peers for excavating the
[02:45:27] bodies for 27 years. It was a job that never got easier.
[02:45:31] Sometimes it's five or six entire families all buried in one house. He told me after losing
[02:45:40] after hoating himself off behind the fire truck at the end of a shift in Tallahafar.
[02:45:45] As a father, especially when I see women and children, it hurts.
[02:45:52] I've had to pull out many pregnant women too.
[02:45:54] DaWood said he and his team had recovered 2,400 bodies since Missouil was liberated last July.
[02:46:05] With more than 2,000 of those coming from the old city on the west side in Tallahafar,
[02:46:10] they had recovered 640 bodies, many of whom were still unidentified.
[02:46:14] Another 500 bodies were discovered last year in a mass grave between the two strongholds.
[02:46:25] There wasn't just human recovery required of the dedicated team. Ali was also burned with
[02:46:31] demining bodies, sometimes those of ISIS fighters. I can tell straight away if they are ISIS.
[02:46:38] They are usually booby trapped and often have foreign passport strapped to them.
[02:46:42] We don't remove them. Our command after demining them is to leave them and authorities take those.
[02:46:55] I stood alone as the last of the lives were swathed in those big black bags.
[02:47:01] Their brains bursting through empty eye sockets.
[02:47:04] I tore off my surgical mask, heaving at the smell of rotting corpses in the unbearable heat.
[02:47:19] Iraq stood still at the fork between a potential future of death and one that would value life.
[02:47:27] It was a place that resembled a fractured mosaic that could only be put back together
[02:47:35] by young generation who knew little of life not maimed by the brutality.
[02:47:44] It was supposed to be a time after the war. It was supposed to be a time of peace.
[02:47:50] Only all it felt like was strange and sorrowful.
[02:48:00] I thought about that tried and true expression. We all tend to offer one another during hardships.
[02:48:08] Everything happens for a reason.
[02:48:09] No. There was no reason these young men and women had to die alone. Their bodies left to decay
[02:48:25] in the literal bowels of their country. There was no great lesson to come from that.
[02:48:32] No sense in that they had completed their mission on earth and no reason that it was there time to be taken by God.
[02:48:46] That is the lie we tell ourselves.
[02:48:54] A child from the neighborhood who had watched without flinching as the bodies were brought up
[02:49:00] peered over what was left of the bond-out fence.
[02:49:09] He looked through the gaping hole into my tearful eyes.
[02:49:19] Soon we stopped crying for the dead he whispered.
[02:49:21] But all we can do is cry for the living.
[02:49:29] That too was war.
[02:49:45] That is not quite the closing of the book but obviously it's the name of the book.
[02:50:05] Like I said we probably covered five red, plus than five percent of the book today.
[02:50:10] And these stories, every page, every story, just captures so much of this perspective that you are
[02:50:23] trying to convey.
[02:50:25] For me coming home from my experiences, for instance my first deployment to Iraq, we spent a
[02:50:47] lot of time at home. At that time the enemy would attack from bridges.
[02:50:56] When you drive underneath a bridge you would get a little stand by mode, get that little heightened awareness.
[02:51:09] So when I got back to America you are driving and around Baghdad and much of Iraq they look
[02:51:15] like highways in California. This is a big highway with signs.
[02:51:21] There was when I first got back you would start to feel or a vehicle would get close because you
[02:51:27] don't want vehicles close to your home, the convoy. You would see a vehicle coming close in for
[02:51:31] that split second. Why does this guy get close to me? But the approaching that bridge and get that
[02:51:36] little sensation of brace for it. So you have these memories I guess that stick with you.
[02:51:46] And I've got a bunch of those different memories that stick with me.
[02:51:53] What where are you at? What memories stick with you? Do you have trouble getting back to normal?
[02:52:01] Do you have trouble with going to sleep at night? I think this was a project I worked on a few
[02:52:11] years ago and I think there has been a little bit of distance from it for me. I remember being in
[02:52:18] the middle of it and when I was still riding and covering it it was an obsession to try to
[02:52:26] understand it to get the story right, to get the facts right and it was so all encompassing.
[02:52:33] And coming back it it always took me a couple of weeks to kind of readjust but one of the biggest
[02:52:38] sort of long-lasting impacts I was found in my experience was I think it was a sense of that
[02:52:47] feeling a little bit unsafe but I would be in New York or LA. I was in living in both cities at the time.
[02:52:53] And you get a fishing scam or something on your phone that everybody gets. And for me it was
[02:53:00] oh my god I'm being targeted who wants something from me and I always I couldn't separate
[02:53:07] and think of it as well everybody gets these. For me it just became this sort of I was convinced
[02:53:12] everybody was tapping into my phone or and for me it was more of the I couldn't see this sort of
[02:53:18] enemy and that took me a while to kind of let go of that a little bit and to be like
[02:53:25] you know you're okay nobody's coming at you now nobody's trying to hack into your emails
[02:53:30] nobody's trying to figure out who you're talking to on this particular day or maybe they were but
[02:53:35] you know it definitely was something I'd exaggerated I think in my head. So that's something I've
[02:53:41] had to have separation from and I think that I've done that but I still I think about it a lot
[02:53:49] I think about you know a lot of the people that I meant and think you know I try to find out
[02:53:56] where they are what they're doing I think today with all these you know what's app signal
[02:54:00] encrypted messaging you stay in contact with these people a lot and that's something that
[02:54:06] a previous journalist and different generations didn't have so today which is lovely you can
[02:54:12] still sort of stay in contact with them and their families and then but it also is that
[02:54:19] you do sort of feel helpless because there's not much you can do and I dedicate this book to
[02:54:25] it was a family that I stayed within in Syria and they live in a place called Cubani and it was
[02:54:30] sort of one of the big I sister-ung holds in the beginning and they you know they took me in and
[02:54:36] you create these immediate bonds with people because you know they were my immediate sort of family
[02:54:42] and they had two young sons and uh mezzles wife, Parashan was pregnant at the time and they said
[02:54:47] oh when I left and we gone through all these you know experiences and and when I left they said oh well
[02:54:53] if she's a if we have a daughter we're gonna name a holly and I just sort of smiled and I thought
[02:54:59] that was really endearing and lovely sure enough a few months later I get a message and a picture
[02:55:03] that she had a girl and they named a holly's fault the same as me and I was funny and I tried
[02:55:08] to sort of check in I can't even send them a copy of the book I can't send them you know anything
[02:55:14] but I tried to check in you know with them and it was really sweet because they said
[02:55:19] oh there's about five holly's in Cubani now so it's kind of this funny little trend and I was just so
[02:55:26] I was so undid by it and I think it's those moments in life where you create bonds with people
[02:55:34] and they want nothing from you they're not trying to get anything from you they're not trying to
[02:55:40] have their name and a newspaper they're not trying to to do any of that they just want to protect you
[02:55:46] and it's such a rare thing in this day and age to have those relationships that you know
[02:55:54] aren't transactional in some way other than it just comes from a place that is so pure and I think
[02:55:59] that's also why I was so attracted to the work because you're really meeting people in their
[02:56:04] most authentic state and I think that's just a huge thing I've tried to do in my in my life at home
[02:56:11] too is it's to really weed out you know what what doesn't serve me as a human being and and
[02:56:18] look for those authentic relationships and that's one of the biggest takeaways for me in working
[02:56:23] in those hormones. I remember when when I got back from my last deployment and then I retired
[02:56:34] and I you know we talked to guys and see stories about guys that would that guys that were
[02:56:41] in Vietnam more and they go back to Vietnam and then when I started doing the podcast we met guys
[02:56:46] that had gone back to Vietnam and I read more stories about guys that had gone back to Vietnam
[02:56:50] and then you know you can take it to the the guys that weren't World War II that would go back
[02:56:55] to the beaches of Normandy and and I remember thinking to myself as far as going back to Iraq
[02:57:03] especially when I first got home this is I don't want to go back there don't want to go back
[02:57:09] there no I'm never going back there only recently have I started to feel think to myself you know
[02:57:15] it would be kind of cold of a back and walk those streets again do where where are you at?
[02:57:24] Oh I was I was planning to go back just before I covered lockdown I read a reason ago and then I
[02:57:30] was approached to even go I think like in a couple of weeks to go and I had to sort of turn it down
[02:57:35] because for different reasons but oh yeah in a heartbeat I feel like Iraq is sort of just
[02:57:41] a yeah it's kind of a second home really you know it's been a little bit since I've been there but
[02:57:48] I have nothing but sort of a desire to still go there I don't I don't view it as a place that I
[02:57:56] never want to go again yeah I'm slowly getting through that maybe because I don't have
[02:58:04] a lot of things I don't really like my memories of it a lot of them are great memories that's
[02:58:10] what makes me start you know I used to say to the platoon guys like you're going through things while
[02:58:14] you're on deployment and you're mad about this and you're mad at that guy and you're mad at this other
[02:58:19] guy and I said you know what two weeks after we get home we're gonna forget all those bad stuff
[02:58:22] just remember the good stuff and sure enough as time goes by you just remember the good stuff so I think
[02:58:27] I'm getting there with specifically with the city of Ramadi and it was really I mean obviously it was
[02:58:32] heart-wrenching to see that when Ramadi got taken over by ISIS and the the the block flag of ISIS
[02:58:42] flying over the government center which I know so many people had fought so hard to liberate that city
[02:58:48] and it was doing so well and then it got smashed by ISIS I remember there's pictures of
[02:58:55] after after the Iraqi soldiers went back in they annihilated Ramadi they blew up so many buildings there was
[02:59:04] a neighborhood called Tamim on in Western Western Ramadi and they I saw pictures of it it was just
[02:59:11] leveled building after building after building because they just every building that they thought might
[02:59:15] have a mind they blew it up and guess what they thought about they all had IDs so they blew them all up
[02:59:20] but yeah I think you have a much better relationship with the land and the people and the memories
[02:59:29] than I do right yeah and for me it really is it comes down to the people it does it's it's the people who
[02:59:38] who I mean what a privilege it is to to for these people to just to trust you enough with some of
[02:59:46] these stories to be that vulnerable with somebody that they don't know you know at least initially
[02:59:52] and I think that's that's something I take as an honor really to be able to to be some kind of
[02:59:59] vessel in in telling that for me you know I hate to use the word voice when people say it's a voice
[03:00:05] of a voice let's say no they have a voice but but I think as a journalist you you're awesome kind of
[03:00:10] vessel that can can bring that back and and tell that and I can't do anything really beyond that
[03:00:18] I think that was also something I had to learn was that you want to be able to think that a story is
[03:00:23] going to make a difference it's going to change the answer you know some law makers mind somewhere
[03:00:28] and something's going to happen and you know 99.9% of the time it doesn't change anything but
[03:00:33] doesn't make it any you know less important to do and be once you take that weight off your shoulders
[03:00:40] it's so much easier to do your job because again it's that clear mandate you know what it is
[03:00:45] that you're doing and everything else after that is out of your hands and not in the description
[03:00:53] well that's a probably a great place to wrap this up because what you've absolutely done in this book is
[03:00:58] you have told their stories and we will pass these stories on to as many people as we can
[03:01:07] and I think like Haley love said you know you've got what your talent is right you've got your
[03:01:13] skill in life and Haley love can make videos and sing and and you've got this ability to write and share
[03:01:20] these stories and that's what you've done so echo you got anything I know Haley that we can find you
[03:01:35] well the book will be up on the website if you want to order the book on Twitter and on Instagram
[03:01:44] you are Haley I he is I don't weird spelling for him I he I guess it's it's slightly unusual okay my mum was having a moment
[03:01:51] Haley S McCann McCay McCay on and on Facebook there's no S just Haley McCay and you also have
[03:01:59] Haley McCay dot com yes so put it up there yep so people can go there and check out what you're up to
[03:02:05] which is next project be in the next so I'm working on a few different things so I have a couple of
[03:02:09] writing projects that I am nodding out the the basis on it's it's going to be quite a journey and I'm
[03:02:17] waiting for trouble to open up but I'm sort of looking a little bit more into the survival aspect of it
[03:02:23] so yeah so that'll be interesting and I am yeah just kind of focused on that for now and sort of
[03:02:31] doing a lot more sort of geopolitical stuff as well so it's kind of branching out.
[03:02:36] Do you write do you are you writing news anymore on a regular basis? I'm doing a little bit here and there
[03:02:42] but I'm really focused on my more long-term projects right now kind of getting down a little bit
[03:02:47] more to the new degree and the things that I I really see is important as opposed to the daily
[03:02:53] turn so I'm sort of taking a bit of a leap in that so it's nice. How is the book writing process
[03:02:59] did you like it? I you always have a love hate with you know but most of the time I really love
[03:03:06] it and I I love being able to to I hate being having to decipher my handwriting out of a notebook
[03:03:14] but beyond that I really love being able to kind of just sit and you sort of meditate on the
[03:03:20] details and and I try to remember colors and faces and places and and all those things and try to
[03:03:26] to put it into words and so it can be challenging definitely and it can be definitely moments that I
[03:03:31] just I don't want you to go into it. Did you take pictures? I did I took a lot of pictures. So we need to
[03:03:37] get those up on the web so yeah I'll get you pictures of whatever you need so a lot of these these people
[03:03:42] they have they have a basis and places and yeah the you wrote a novel. I did when I was young
[03:03:52] and what's up with the novel where it's a little I didn't I'm sure it's somewhere in Australia
[03:03:56] probably in my dad's garage. It was a it was a sort of a young teen fiction novel yeah we
[03:04:02] know he's going to that. I loved to write I was writing you know that's one thing aside from from my
[03:04:10] ballet from a young age I love to tell those stories in a way that I love to write and make up
[03:04:15] weed and wonderful things and yeah awesome awesome um anything else do you got anything else here?
[03:04:22] So I just yeah I'm thank you for having me here and you know it's obviously these things don't
[03:04:27] happen in isolation so I have a wonderful family back home in Australia my parents have always been
[03:04:34] amazing support my sister and my nieces and and then my I call them my American family which is really
[03:04:41] my you know close knit group of friends that I have in in different pockets of America that have
[03:04:46] really been such a backbone of support for me I had one good friend Miley Cadena's is a veteran
[03:04:53] and she came on a few trips with me and was amazing and another good friend of my Dennis Santiago
[03:04:58] who helped me with the editing so yeah they really my family and the US and then my my family and
[03:05:04] Australia. Well it's all come together for I mean I think it's very clear that this is a powerful
[03:05:11] book and I thank you for coming on here I thank you for letting jockel publishing put it out
[03:05:20] along with uh along with the angelo publishing our friends Sequoia so that's awesome and it's it's
[03:05:27] an honor for me to be able to help get this book out there to the world and get these stories shared.
[03:05:32] Thank you I appreciate it and I look I I hope I didn't come off as um crazy or arrogant or like
[03:05:44] a jerk when I was talking about the fact that we we do some crazy stuff when we're young and there's
[03:05:50] a certain amount of being naive but I don't care how naive you are or how naive you were
[03:05:58] for you to go into these places to capture these stories and I didn't there's there's plenty of
[03:06:04] stories in there where I know from being in combat myself how close you were to the front lines
[03:06:11] how close you how much danger you were in all the time so thank you for writing the book but also
[03:06:16] thank you for your courage and your bravery to go out there take these risks to capture these
[03:06:22] stories to capture the horrors of war so that hopefully we as a race of people in the world
[03:06:32] can learn to avoid it at all costs absolutely thank you Holly thank you thank you both
[03:06:42] and with that Holly has left the building and left us with an incredible book with some
[03:06:51] incredible accounts in it so definitely check out that book a lot of horror in that book
[03:07:02] a lot of horror in the world yeah yeah it's bad how like like she'll describe each detail and
[03:07:09] it goes along with kind of what we've been saying a lot where it's like yeah when you just individualized
[03:07:13] one thing and see their story it's like oh man it really opens up this perspective of like man
[03:07:18] this is bad yeah and by the way this is 430 something page book you know and I probably
[03:07:26] read 20 pages something like that so it's an awesome book and yeah check it out a lot of horror
[03:07:36] a lot of horror in the book a lot of horror in the world I kind of feel like we should do our best
[03:07:43] to bring some good in the world starting with our own lives trying to live a good life
[03:07:54] start there yeah kind of be appreciative to you know oh yeah I didn't bring it up Holly
[03:08:02] just you know um living on the floor of some random blown out building she's getting after it man
[03:08:09] she's getting after she doesn't she she talks about it but it's not that's what it's very
[03:08:16] humbly written story because it's not about her yeah yeah it's not about her it's about the people
[03:08:23] and so with that it's yeah yeah very cool yeah that says kind of a lot too but in author says
[03:08:31] they don't make it about themselves because she could she could oh this could 100% this could be a
[03:08:37] book about her yeah 100% I went here and I did this I did that it's not that that's not what the
[03:08:44] book is I thought my life in thought to be over it in fact I had to drag it out of her I had to drag
[03:08:51] out of her where she came from and how it started and how she got there she just jumped right into it
[03:08:55] and what you just said about I was here and I was there she'll be talking about it and I can tell
[03:09:02] what she means but a lot of people it's gonna you she said you know their explosion happened here
[03:09:08] you know what I'm thinking okay I know what's happening there there's gunfire going on
[03:09:12] that's not she just kind of puts it under the right under the radar kind of her ammo is to be
[03:09:18] under the radar so yeah so yeah yeah we do have to be appreciative for sure we're like even at like
[03:09:28] even if you're not involved in the war in these places even like a similar feather you are
[03:09:37] being appreciative of that yeah because like your day-to-day life here versus day-to-day life there
[03:09:43] even best case scenarios brought to different your worst kid your worst day here is better than your
[03:09:49] best day there for 99% of the population if not more oh yeah so yeah it's man make the best of it's
[03:09:56] one of those deals right anyway all right so yes let's not let our lives and capabilities go to
[03:10:03] waste in any way let's try not to how about that I can't you know intention is a big deal
[03:10:09] it is just knowing these things that's a that's a huge start you know like G. I. Joe
[03:10:13] and I'm going to G. I. Joe what they'd say knowing he's half the battle
[03:10:18] did G. I. Joe actually say that I thought that was Sun Sue and 25,000, 2500 years ago
[03:10:23] no yeah Joe that's probably what's on. This clear yeah sir so yeah so you gotta keep these things in
[03:10:31] mind did you work out today if you're like oh wait did I work out you gotta know these can't
[03:10:36] stuff and you gotta know whether or not you're working out tomorrow so you're saying working out is
[03:10:40] important definitely and yes I did work out today yes so you work out every day right
[03:10:45] I do like that's that's the that's the jam. Yeah I'd done recently incorporated that into my whole thing
[03:10:52] usually I'd have a five day and then to rest day situation who rest days back to back yes sir
[03:10:58] like usually the weekend because of my program goes five days at a time like week by week and that's
[03:11:02] just how it is convenient and it is convenient but it had that was it even before even before I was
[03:11:08] going to need a rest day's or nothing like that or had less one had less going on what I'm saying
[03:11:12] so that was the the structured program but I found that if you sort of spread it out little bit more
[03:11:18] and I try to go hard to on every single day like hard at least one thing hard you know some
[03:11:23] people that like oh yeah seven days but like this one or two days like it's like a mobility day
[03:11:28] well I might have depending on how I feel I can I can tell when I've beat myself down to where I need
[03:11:34] a co-op mobility day for sure oh you just try and break a sweat yeah like just at a minimum just you
[03:11:40] know at a minimum I'm gonna break a sweat yeah seeing that and you know there's there's a
[03:11:45] bunch of different effective philosophies in working out and working out programs so like again I'm
[03:11:50] not saying oh yours I know the few as good as mine I'm not saying that at all but I found and currently
[03:11:56] what I'm currently on is the to do something hard like hard where your body has to be like hey we
[03:12:03] got to recover from this whether be like a one small body part situation even like a met
[03:12:08] concentration like that just at least one thing I like that on these kind of one-off days you
[03:12:13] a normal workout day as hard it's it's gonna be a hard one oh you're saying on that easier
[03:12:18] day you're still gonna do one thing hard hard yeah I like it I actually do a very similar version
[03:12:23] of that not consciously but unconsciously yeah so let's say I'm going a little bit let's say I'm
[03:12:28] not going super hard metcon style but I'm gonna probably go heavy or if I'm going heavy or if I'm
[03:12:34] getting not really like feeling the metcon I'll have you somewhere yeah so I guess we're kind of in the
[03:12:39] same boat yeah it keeps your body there trying to you know to it trying to adapt adapt and get you know
[03:12:44] kind of rebuild itself as the new and improved version you know and so hopefully we can kind of
[03:12:51] take this philosophy and apply it to the our whole life hopefully same but here's a thing keep in mind
[03:12:57] we might need some supplementation from time to time you don't get you don't get
[03:13:01] nine hours asleep every single night you know you don't you don't max max molly nine hours
[03:13:10] because it's something everybody's different so you don't you don't recover max you don't
[03:13:16] maximize your recovery every single day okay once well you need some supplementation
[03:13:20] for sure you need some supplementation in fact you got a little supplementation routine boom
[03:13:25] you're gonna be on the track even quicker faster more effectively the worries jockel has some
[03:13:31] supplementation jockel feel so here it is you need protein supplementation got milk
[03:13:36] tastes like a dessert by the way I've been on that train for about a almost a month now
[03:13:43] I forgot I forgot the joy the glory so actually going rewind just a little bit so all this stuff
[03:13:50] you can be on a subscription yeah we mentioned it before but the subscription you will
[03:13:55] not have to pay shipping right you will not have to remember to take these less fun ones to
[03:14:02] take and I'll mean less fun like they're like anti fun I'm just saying the difference between
[03:14:06] taking a milkshake drinking a milkshake and taking joint warfare or super cruel oil like one
[03:14:13] has like a pleasurable experience one is kind of like okay you just sort of do it one's prolonged
[03:14:18] pleasure when you don't have joint pain yeah but that's the delayed that's the delayed
[03:14:23] great I'm just saying if you forget like it's a little bit more can be more of a thing anyway
[03:14:30] check you got a subscription you don't have to even think about that kind of stuff
[03:14:34] also do you get like a discount or something you get a discount or a little 10% discount
[03:14:39] oh so please subscribe yeah yeah and free shipping so then you combine those two things together
[03:14:44] we're in a good spot oh yeah so it's kind of a no brain wind yeah it's a no brainer if you're like
[03:14:49] if you're taking it consistently which you should be trust me the difference between even that
[03:14:54] taking it not taking it consistently night in day man so if you're doing it it's a win-win win really
[03:14:59] triple win triple win come on so joccafuel.com you can get your supplementation there which you
[03:15:05] apparently do need you do need and if you subscribe to it you get shipping free any good
[03:15:11] temperature up which is cool you can also get the drinks the go drinks at wall wall you can get
[03:15:17] all the supplements at vitamin shop so there you go or jockelfield.com yeah do what you want to do
[03:15:22] do you see something if you like something yeah something yeah also at orgenein.com
[03:15:33] you get jeans
[03:15:35] these all american made but all american made yeah all meaning all of them and all meaning the entire
[03:15:42] product itself is all american made. do you can you and i don't expect you answer this question but
[03:15:50] i wonder if you can find something that's not american made in the whole chain like if you go to
[03:15:55] one of the looms that they got could you find like a set of screws that are used in there you
[03:15:59] like hey those are made in you know somewhere you are going to be hard pressed to find something
[03:16:03] in your jeans that is not 100% American maybe yeah crazy. In fact the jeans i can tell you there's
[03:16:11] nothing that's not american made. The clothing 100% american. I mean and not always at 100% american
[03:16:17] made we know where it came from. We know where the the hide is that we're getting the leather from.
[03:16:24] We know where that is. Yeah. It goes deep. So yeah american made bunch of awesome stuff
[03:16:31] by a bunch of awesome people in farming can made. Yeah sorry orgeneus a.com sorry i said orgenein
[03:16:38] I'm sure you can still go to order to me. You can't put it. Let's face it. Orgeneus a.com's
[03:16:43] little bit stronger. We'll say it's stronger yes. Not the mains not strong but look
[03:16:48] with who'd rather fight a war against main or a marathon. You know what I'm saying? I believe in
[03:16:53] mains but yeah you're switching goods made. Right so i think we'll go with it. Well we'll go with
[03:16:56] origin USA. Yes you're home. I agree. So yes also jocke was a store as well jocke store.
[03:17:02] .com this is where you can get your discipline equals freedom shirts and hats and hoodies. Good
[03:17:10] all kinds of cool stuff on there. You get the shirt i'm wearing right now. Yeah. You can get the jacket
[03:17:14] that you're wearing exactly the jacket. Lightweight hoodie. You can get a lightweight hoodie that
[03:17:18] echo Charles is wearing right now. It's lightweight hoodie weather. You're over taking on and off
[03:17:25] your hoodie which I did. I'll do it just off. It's just off. Apparently it is. Because i'm
[03:17:29] more of enough you showed up with it on. I showed up with mine on. Fine. Came in here.
[03:17:37] Fine. You see I'm saying no. So all I'm going to tell you is that in the middle of the
[03:17:41] bell curve you're good. If we go outside the bell curve and either direction you're out of
[03:17:46] your luck. So if you get a little colder you're screwed and if it gets more hot you're screwed.
[03:17:52] Yeah that's true. So guess it looks like I'm right. I like the aesthetic value that this lightweight
[03:17:58] is. So you like some of us like this kind of stuff. Some of us are just over trying to win.
[03:18:03] None of the words about how we look. None of the last. These things are available for those of us
[03:18:08] who appreciate it. Speaking of appreciation if you can appreciate let's say one off designs or concepts
[03:18:16] we call them layers from time to time on our apparel that we choose to wear because it looks good
[03:18:22] and feels good. We have a little subscription situation as well. So it's the shirt locker. We've
[03:18:30] landed on that name with Elbavococos creativity. No that was not my creativity. That was a
[03:18:35] suggestion for the true book. I got your name the shirt locker because the name which I will not
[03:18:41] mention because I don't want to hear it that echo Charles's lack of creativity. Yes. Okay.
[03:18:47] Got us too. Well let's let's the name that will not be spoken. Shall not be spoken. Okay. Because now we
[03:18:52] got something good. The shirt locker. So that is a monthly thing you get a new and new design. They're cool.
[03:18:58] They're there. There's some layers. There's a attention and focus on the layers. So if you listen
[03:19:06] you know and you're gonna this is like a crazy for you to be all this. It kind of is yes sir.
[03:19:13] But yeah, check that out. And if that seems cool, then that one might be for you as well.
[03:19:20] Jococos store.com. That's where you can get those. Subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review if you
[03:19:26] want to. We also got other podcasts. We got the Jockel unraveling podcast which Darryl Cooper
[03:19:31] is in the house. We should be rolling out with some of those grounded podcasts. Again,
[03:19:36] working it, working it and the work your kid podcast, working it. I have some time coming up so we
[03:19:44] should get some of those done. You can also join us at the Jockel Underground.com. Jockel Underground.com.
[03:19:53] We have alternative podcasts with some amplifying information, some other subject matters,
[03:19:59] some behind the scenes. We got some Q&A that were working on where you can send in your audio,
[03:20:04] voice, video, thing and we'll put all that together. Also the underground, what I kind of notice
[03:20:10] when I listen to them and stuff. These are like, I mean, I think it all, even the Jockel podcast.
[03:20:15] Of course, like makes your brain like think and work and stuff. But it's like, I find myself like
[03:20:20] doing little brain. It's like exercise for your brain almost, you know. You start to think about
[03:20:26] stuff like, oh wait, do I do that? Oh wait, does that apply to me? Yeah, I would tell you that the
[03:20:31] subject matter in the Jockel Underground podcast are based on me going through daily life and
[03:20:39] recognizing the patterns and the maneuvers and the thoughts and the curiosity and, wait, why do
[03:20:48] it, why did that happen? Why do we do that? And sometimes it doesn't fit into a Jockel podcast
[03:20:52] because it's something about psychology or something about negotiate, whatever. Yeah.
[03:20:57] Yeah. And so, but it's very important. And does it, it's like a venn diagram. Is there
[03:21:03] some part of it that's leadership? Yes, there's some hundred that's the history. Yes, there's
[03:21:07] some psychology. Some sociology out. It's all mixed in there. But what it's what it is, it's all
[03:21:12] subject matter that will help you help to meet. It helps me. But it's me digging into and revealing
[03:21:19] why these things are happening. Why am I doing these things? Sometimes my instincts are good.
[03:21:23] Sometimes they're not good. But either way, I'm going to learn from it. And it's just the approach
[03:21:28] that I take in life to try and figure something out because like to Jitsu, you know when you
[03:21:32] change a Jitsu and someone goes, oh, put your arm here and you're like, okay, but then the next
[03:21:37] day you don't really remember that. But if someone says, put your, put your arm here and here's
[03:21:40] why you do it and you start to understand the concept. So I think that's a big part of the
[03:21:47] Jockel underground podcast is what's the concept behind what's happening here? What makes it,
[03:21:53] it like Jitsu obviously, a great analogy where like there's certain things in Jitsu and such a
[03:21:58] quintely in life or your day to day, whatever that certain things are not intuitive. In fact,
[03:22:06] they're counter-counted into like, you know, in Jitsu to turn your back, right? And like a
[03:22:10] full, like there's so many reasons in regular life to like turn your back. That's the best
[03:22:16] move it feels like it for moment to moment. Like if someone's mounted on you like turning your back,
[03:22:20] if you never trained you Jitsu, it's weird. Basically, I want to get away. How do you get away,
[03:22:24] turn your back and run away? Or you can't run into more than that ground. Yeah, like if you're
[03:22:28] mounting, you try to stand up the most powerful way you can stand up is to turn over and stand
[03:22:33] up with him on your back. You can't do a sit up with someone correct? You know, so it's like
[03:22:37] there's all these intuitive things that are incorrect. That is going to make you lose.
[03:22:41] And then it's the same thing with the like a lot of the weather, the cognitive biases or whatever.
[03:22:46] It's kind of the same thing. Yeah, it's real interesting. You kind of explore them and you're like,
[03:22:50] oh man, shoot out. And then you know what to do and what not to do. So that's the joccal wonderground.com.
[03:22:56] If you want to come and check that out, look, it's also us our way of having a contingency plan.
[03:23:03] In case things get wild, in case there's a bunch of things that could happen. Look,
[03:23:08] we could get a censored for something that some subject matter that we cover. We could get
[03:23:16] people could start to say, okay, well, now you're going to put our inject advertisements into your
[03:23:21] podcast. We don't want that. We just want to have a long advertising hit the end that echo talks
[03:23:27] for 48 minutes on. But we don't want that. So that's what we're doing. We don't want to be held
[03:23:33] hostage by a platform or held hostage by sponsors. And so $8.18 a month. If you want, you can
[03:23:39] you can join the joc wonderground.com. And and if you can't afford that, look, we're not,
[03:23:46] we're not trying to be elite. So if you can't afford it, no factor. Email assistance at joccalunderground.com.
[03:23:54] And we will take area. We also have a YouTube channel where you can check out echo Charles's
[03:24:01] legit videos where I, on the good ones on the assistant director on the bad ones, he kind of goes
[03:24:08] so low. So you can check those out. Lots of explosions. We have an album with tracks called
[03:24:15] Psychological Warfare. You can listen to that if you have a momentary, just a temptation that you
[03:24:23] need to overcome. It's okay. Hit play. Psychological Warfare on your MP3 platforms, flip side
[03:24:29] canvas, Dakota Meyer, flip side canvas.com cool stuff to hang on your wall. We have a bunch of
[03:24:35] books only cry for the living by Holly McCay. There you go. Check that one out final spin.
[03:24:41] A novel written by me. We don't even know if it's a novel. I don't know if it's a poem. I don't
[03:24:47] know what it is. But we'll see. I've been getting warnings. People are going to critique you.
[03:24:55] Oh, no, I'm like, what are they going to say to me? Your book sucks. Cool. Thank you. Carry on. Good
[03:25:02] critique. Thanks. Leadership Strategy and Tactus Field Manual. The code, devaluations,
[03:25:06] protocols, discipline, and crs freedom, field manual. Warrior kid 1, 2, 3 and 4.
[03:25:11] Get those for any kids that you know, Mikey and the dragons. Get those for the little kids that you
[03:25:15] know about face by hack worth. Extreme ownership and that I caught a mere leadership.
[03:25:21] Ashilon front is my leadership consultancy. We saw problems through leadership. If you
[03:25:26] need help with leadership in your organization, go to Ashilonfront.com. We have EF online,
[03:25:32] which is leadership training online, which means you can get it for everybody that you know.
[03:25:36] Everyone inside your organization. And whatever problems you're having inside your organization,
[03:25:41] the problems get solved through leadership as I just said, well, there's nothing better than
[03:25:45] getting everyone on your team aligned around the same principles of leadership. It's
[03:25:51] insane to think you would even try and run an organization without having everyone aligned
[03:25:56] around the same principles of leadership. So go to EF online.com and start taking some courses.
[03:26:02] Go through the program. Come and do Q and A's. We have a live gig that we do. We're doing
[03:26:09] three of them this year. Go to extremownership.com if you want to come to those. EF
[03:26:12] over watch if you need people inside your company to help with your leadership that you want to
[03:26:19] hire. Go to EF over watch.com. And if you want to help service members active and retired,
[03:26:24] you want to help their family to want to help gold star families check out Mark Lee's mom,
[03:26:28] mom, Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved,
[03:26:32] go to americasmightywargers.org. And if you want to continue this conversation,
[03:26:38] we're on the interwebs. Once again, Holly is on Twitter and on Instagram, Holly S,
[03:26:45] Mk, it's H-O-L-L-I-E-S, Mk, MCK, A-Y, and she's on Facebook, Holly Mk, and she also has a
[03:26:55] HollyMk.com and of course Echo and I are also on the interwebs on Twitter on Instagram, which
[03:27:04] Echo only refers to as the Graham and Facebook. Echoes out, Echo Charles and I am at
[03:27:09] Jockawilling. Thanks once again, too. Holly Mk for taking risk, for showing courage and for capturing
[03:27:18] these stories to share with all of us. And thanks to all the military personnel out there all over
[03:27:24] the world who stand and face evil like ISIS every day. Thank you for keeping that evil at bay.
[03:27:31] And right here at home, all the police and law enforcement fire fighters and paramedics and EMTs
[03:27:37] and dispatchers and correction officers and board patrol and secret service and all first responders.
[03:27:41] Thank you for keeping us safe on the home front and everyone else out there.
[03:27:48] You heard it today. There is a lot of evil in the world. It's everywhere.
[03:27:55] And it's up to all of us to fight against it. That doesn't mean you have to pick up a gun.
[03:28:02] Doesn't mean you have to pick up a weapon. Doesn't mean you have to go overseas. But you have to fight it.
[03:28:10] And we have to make sure we keep it up bay by making sure we never forget that it's there.
[03:28:16] And then what we need to do is go out every day and do good and bring light into the world.
[03:28:28] And until next time, the Zekko and Jako out.