Jocko Podcast 64 w/ Andy Stumpf: A Debt That Cannot Be Repaid. The Value & Cost of Freedom.

2017-03-01T16:58:15Z

Join the conversation on Twitter: @jockowillink @andystumpf77 @echocharles 0:00:00 - Opening: "A Debt That Cannot Be Repaid" 0:08:48 - Intro to Andy Stumpf 0:18:04 - New Guy at the SEAL Teams 0:22:18 - Deployments 0:26:38 - September 11th / Learning through experience. 0:40:49 - Iraq, Afghanistan, and Getting shot. 1:00:12 - Recovered and Getting Back After it. 1:23:02 - Andy's Retirement and Life after the Teams. SEAL Foundation, Base Jumping. 1:40:13 - Support, Cool Onnit, Amazon, JockoStore stuff, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book) and The Muster002 1:51:59 - Closing Gratitude

AI summary of episode

But so that learning curve was fast, but then it, but I also to kind of emphasize what you're saying and I look at it, when you said, you know, your first like platoon, you know, like 20% and then your second platoon, you know, for me, because I have four kids, it's very similar to what you learn with kids. Some of them are like, hey, for myself, you know, kind of like what you were saying like, I feel like I, I can't do it. And so the, you know, like I put my officer package in, but let's say like 20% of me was like, you know what, this is just a means to it So yeah, if you don't know, it's, you know, when you have moments of weakness, if you're what, getting up early in the morning, tired, tired, on a press, news or whatever, or you're going to, you know, you're about to work out, but you'll skip the workout because you're not feeling like it. But I mean, it was, I mean, I looked at these guys who had been in SEALs for like five, six, seven, eight years or there was like a Vietnam vet walking around like you're just, I just wanted to breathe the same air as those people. You know, it's weird to you as an, and I, you know, for guys that like you and I that are full on institutionalized in the military, it's almost like, when I was in, I didn't understand other options. You know, uh, so I went through the last, you know, the troop commander from that troop was like, hey, we're, you're going to come over. You know, that you talk about that mental judo thing, which, again, this is one that's going to be hard for civilians to understand how much, you know, it's like a bureaucratic force that exists in the military and really you have to be, you have to be able to to navigate through that. And so for us, all of a sudden, in a very quick learning curve, you know, you spend two weeks on deployment, you had more combat experience than, you know, than anybody else in the sealtains at that time, you know, other than the guys that were deployed right before you, but you had that's how quick the learning curve was. Like, I don't know how many times you have to go and not only present the brief that like talked to the guy who's going to say yes or no and develop that relationship. It is, it is like, for most guys that come in on a high school, because we're in your high school, you know, even if you're working at Wendy's, yeah, like I did, you're only making whatever 425 an hour in that amount. But you know, I know I could tell you exactly what rolled you for filled, you know, as a leader, but I don't know where you would have broken out on an orc chart. But yeah, that like you said no doctorate, then finally we had, you know, the trade at East Coast West Coast and, you know, sharing information and coming together and lessons learned and all that stuff that I think largely professionalize the force from a paperwork perspective, but has impact on the battlefield as well, too. I mean the platoons would count or like, you know, the SEA would be like, hey, we failed in warfare where you come out to Nalum with us for the ORE. I mean, it's awesome when guys that were experienced would come through like yourself, you're just so good to have guys like you coming through, especially because you were super experienced, really good tactically and super humble. I mean, like, where, I mean, where the, I did 20 years, one of my buddies is like, I said, hey, man, yeah, It wasn't like you were out there like, no, you were like, oh, this is awesome training. And history, just, like, like you said, the Vietnam guys, like they were just timed out. My body, like my ankle, I almost had to medit back my self out a couple of times, like roll my ankle extremely bad on an offset patrol in, like laying on target with my foot up in the air. And so we all realize, you know what, you're going to have to use that battery and keep track of how long you're using it for, because you don't want it to fail, but you're going to get, you know, 12 or 15 or 25 uses out of this thing. I know, I know we haven't really seen a bunch of each other in the last few years, but I think it's been like five years. I would say somebody commented, because I said the other day on, I, I forget, I don't know if we had someone on the podcast, but I was saying that, like, when I'm flying in an aircraft in a commercial airliner, I think if this thing crashes, I'm going to live. You know, it's from, like I said, going from conceptual shooting at paper targets and training hard and realistic to to be in on a two-way range for the first time. It's good waves, but like when you're 150 pounds, you know, in your 17, 18 years old, I've just really wasn't into, you know, fighting for waves. Like, ever, I've heard you say before, and I know we have the same position, like the default move should be aggressive, drive forward, not away. You know, when you look at the various reasons that a person could choose from, why you said like, you know what, I'm not done. I'm, like, at the 18 year mark, I told one of my close friends, I'm like, yeah, man, I'm, I'm going to retire at 20. You know, I'm like, yes, like I'm so happy to hear that. Yeah, it like we were going back and forth over text, I think took off like wildfire. Because friends, you know, other guys that we both know that I've talked to, they have, you know, various reasons. There's the ways that you got to play, you know, mental judo, you know, and interacting with people and to see these young guys who had no experience and afraid to, afraid to not probably the best word, but has it tended to make decisions.

Most common words

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jockel Podcast number 64 with echo Charles and me, Jockel Willink. Good evening,
[00:00:07] echo. Good evening. In a country that most people would struggle to find on a map,
[00:00:17] in a compound that few possess the courage to enter, men from my previous life took the
[00:00:27] fight to our enemy. In that compound, they found men that pray five times a day for your
[00:00:38] destruction. Those praying men don't know me, they don't know you and they don't know America.
[00:00:49] They don't understand our compassion, our freedoms, and our tolerance. I know it may seem
[00:00:59] as if some of those things are currently missing, but they remain at our core and always
[00:01:07] will. Our capacity for them is boundless and is only dwarfed by the hatred in those men
[00:01:17] hiding in that compound, the hatred they have for you. Those men don't care about your religious
[00:01:27] beliefs, they don't care about your political opinions, they don't care if you sit on the left
[00:01:33] or the right liberal or conservative pacifist or warrior. They don't care how much you believe
[00:01:41] in diversity, equality, or freedom of speech. They don't care. I'm sorry you have never
[00:01:53] smelled the breath of a man who wants to kill you. I'm sorry you've never felt the alarm bells
[00:02:02] ringing in your body, the combination of fear and adrenaline as you move towards the fight,
[00:02:08] instead of running from it. I'm sorry you've never heard someone cry out for help or
[00:02:16] cried out for help yourself relying on the courage of others to bring you home.
[00:02:26] I'm sorry you've never tasted the salt from your own tears as you stand at flag draped
[00:02:32] coffins bearing men you are humbled to call your friends. I don't wish those experiences on you.
[00:02:45] But I do wish you had them. If you had them, it would change the way you act. It would change the
[00:02:57] way you value. It would change the way you appreciate. You would become quick to open your eyes
[00:03:06] and slow to open your mouth. Most will never understand the sacrifice required to keep evil men,
[00:03:16] like those from that distant compound away from our doorstep, but it would not hurt you to try and
[00:03:23] understand. It would not hurt you to take a moment to respect the sacrifices that others make
[00:03:30] on your behalf, whether they share your opinions or not. It would not hurt you to take a moment
[00:03:40] to think of the relentless drain on family, friends and loved ones that are left behind.
[00:03:46] Sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, sometimes forever.
[00:04:00] Ideas are not protected by words, paper and ink may outline the foundation and principles
[00:04:10] of this nation, but it is blood only blood that protects it. In that dusty compound,
[00:04:24] a man you have never met gave everything he had so that you have the freedom to think,
[00:04:31] speak and act, however you choose. He went there for all of us, whether you loved or hated
[00:04:43] what he stood for. He went there to preserve the opportunity and privilege to believe, to be,
[00:04:52] and to become what we want this country. Every single person living inside of its borders and
[00:05:04] under the banner of its flag, oh, that man, we owe that man everything. We owe him the respect
[00:05:15] that his sacrifice deserves. Saying thank you is not enough. We send our best and lose them
[00:05:29] in the fight against the worst evil this world has to offer. If you want to respect and honor
[00:05:36] their sacrifice, it needs to be more than words, you have to live it.
[00:05:41] Take a minute and look around, soak it in, all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
[00:05:56] You have the choice every day as to which category you want to be in, in which direction you
[00:06:03] want to move. You have that choice because the best among us, the best we ever had to offer,
[00:06:14] fought and bled and died for it. Don't ever forget that. Now, those words were in a piece
[00:06:40] that was called a debt that cannot be repaid, which was written by a fellow seal.
[00:06:52] And the friend of mine named Andy Stumpf, when he heard that we had lost another frog there.
[00:07:02] Chief Ryan Owens during a daring raid on an al-Qaeda compound in Yemen.
[00:07:15] Then it was a very fitting tribute, another fitting tribute.
[00:07:24] Yet another fitting tribute to yet another great warrior who sacrificed everything for us.
[00:07:41] One of the hardest truths is that I know we know
[00:07:48] that this will not be the last great warrior to fall.
[00:08:01] And those warriors still on the line, close ranks, to fill the void left by the fallen
[00:08:10] and they continue to march forward, into the dark and into the dust looking for
[00:08:21] and hunting for evil. And those warriors, regardless of what they come up against,
[00:08:35] they will not stop.
[00:08:49] In this evening, while that punt continues and while evil lurks out there in the world,
[00:08:58] I am lucky enough to have one of the good guys here with me, the man that wrote those
[00:09:06] powerful words and that powerful tribute, as I said, a friend and a former seal teammate of mine,
[00:09:15] Andy Stumpf. Andy Stumpf, welcome to the show, brother. Thanks for having me, man.
[00:09:21] There was a grab a piece and really was and thank you for writing. I think they got around
[00:09:30] and I hope more people get to hear it now and spread it and share it about that, another brave warrior
[00:09:40] down. Yeah, it like we were going back and forth over text, I think took off like wildfire.
[00:09:48] I was eating breakfast with my sons and had received the news from buddy before it had broken
[00:09:55] on mainstream media and it was just one of those moments where I couldn't get the thoughts out of my
[00:10:02] head, so I cracked up on my laptop, literally took one stab at that, one pass and just hit the post button
[00:10:08] and walked away, came back four or five hours later and my phone was just exploding and yeah,
[00:10:16] I mean, it was cathartic for me to write it and I do hope that more people can understand the
[00:10:21] messes and take just two seconds out of their day to realize what's happening all around them,
[00:10:26] all around the world at any given time. And he given time, it's happening. Yep. The sacrifices are
[00:10:32] there and it's you know, speaking of social media, it's been a lot of people been requesting,
[00:10:37] they've been asking, do you know Andy Stumpf? And Andy Stumpf, do you know Jocco? So, yes,
[00:10:42] we do know each other that is confirmed and they've been asking you to come on the podcast,
[00:10:46] so thanks for coming on, man. I know, I know we haven't really seen a bunch of each other in the
[00:10:51] last few years, but I think it's been like five years. That's ridiculous. And for all those people
[00:10:56] who've been asking, you can stop now. Answer is yes, I know Jocco. We know each other for a while and here
[00:11:01] we are, stop. We're gonna go. Yeah, but I really appreciate you coming on. So let's get into a man.
[00:11:08] Let's talk about, let's talk about, you know, give us your basic background, you know, tell us about
[00:11:12] going up and Santa Cruz, what's up Santa Cruz? Man, what a great place to grow up. I mean, Santa Cruz
[00:11:18] is amazing with an asterix. And that asterix is whether or not at some point in time in your life,
[00:11:24] you leave Santa Cruz because it's a bubble. But for me, it was awesome. I have family roots there
[00:11:30] from not only my father, but my grandfather. They had one of the first construction companies there
[00:11:34] built the high school that my father attended. Built a lot of the infrastructure and also had a lot
[00:11:41] of ties to like law enforcement and firefighters, which would help me out when I would get rides home,
[00:11:45] when I would get in trouble. You know, advantages that other people didn't have. But I consider my,
[00:11:52] I mean, my background is very generic. I mean, I played Waterpull and Baseball in high school.
[00:11:59] I'd give myself a C as far as being an athlete, like very average junior lifeguard, so comfortable
[00:12:06] in and around the ocean, which was a skill that obviously paid off in training. You didn't
[00:12:09] surf. Did you surf in Santa Cruz? I did surf quite a bit and I'm sure you've surfed up there as you
[00:12:14] know, it's extremely territorial. Good waves. It's good waves, but like when you're 150 pounds,
[00:12:19] you know, in your 17, 18 years old, I've just really wasn't into, you know, fighting for waves.
[00:12:25] Yeah. So I'd surf a little bit, a little long board stuff down by cows, maybe steamers if it wasn't
[00:12:29] huge. And it just played sports. Yeah. I mean, it was super casual. We're from my dad's construction
[00:12:34] company. Santa Cruz has a dichotomy too in it in the fact that, especially when you were growing up,
[00:12:40] there was mad. Like, okay, there's that basically, I don't know if you want to call it the halves,
[00:12:44] they have knots, but we're not talking about money. We're talking about massive drug use, right?
[00:12:47] Still exists this day. Yeah. And it's, it's like an undercurrent that not a lot of people know about
[00:12:52] Santa Cruz. Most of the people who live in Santa Cruz don't work there. The money all comes from the
[00:12:56] Silicon Valley. They go over the highway 17. I mean, the median cost of homes in Santa Cruz. I
[00:13:01] think is near $800,000, which is crazy, because the city was kind of built around UC Santa Cruz.
[00:13:06] I mean, it's a college. I mean, here's going to for that stuff. But in the surfing scene,
[00:13:10] I mean, that's where a lot of the drug, from my understanding, that's where a lot of the drug
[00:13:13] stuff started. And then it just pushed itself out. It still exists. It's really bad.
[00:13:17] Yeah, it can be, it can be your rods. You, you'd think Santa Cruz is nice beach town,
[00:13:22] but it can be a rough town. I mean, you make a wrong turn. Yeah. You're going to be in trouble.
[00:13:25] But men in the same can be true here of San Diego or anywhere you may want to show.
[00:13:29] So when did you hear about when did you hear about the deems?
[00:13:32] Yeah, you're going to get it on. Yeah. You know, so I come from a military family. My grandfather was
[00:13:39] in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. He was a twin 50 calagoner on the Mark once in Vietnam.
[00:13:45] The first squadron of patrol boats with the Chikuzi jets, what she said had a failure rate of about
[00:13:50] 90% that had to be fun. And of course, they didn't fail at the time. But you had won them, too.
[00:13:54] Like pulling away from the dock right here. Yeah, no, just a middle of a firefight, you know,
[00:13:58] complex ambush. You're trying to get out of it. So you can, I mean, I don't think, I actually
[00:14:04] had no for a fact. My father did that work with seals. That's yeah, that's how I heard about it.
[00:14:10] My father probably didn't want me to join the military. I mean, I don't want my sons necessarily
[00:14:16] too. However, I would never stand in their way, just like my father allowed me to pursue
[00:14:20] what I wanted to do. But I started working for him when I was 11 and learned some of the best
[00:14:25] lessons in my life with bricks in my hands. Because he was a Mason and I basically moved bricks
[00:14:31] for a long time. But it was hard work and it paid off later in life. And I remember we were driving
[00:14:37] back from a job when I was 11. And he mentioned seals. And with no understanding of what they
[00:14:45] are, just his description of what they did, how they, he was, it was like, you know, they were in the
[00:14:50] water. They would get them onto the boats. They'd drop them off. It was intriguing to me. So it led me
[00:14:55] to trying to search for as much information as I could find out about them. And in the early 90s,
[00:14:59] the internet was not what it was today. So of course, I found the book that almost every team
[00:15:06] guys read, the men with green faces, all about Vietnam. But it's an awesome book. So I read that.
[00:15:13] And then unfortunately stumbled across the Rogue Warrior series, which as I was saying before we started,
[00:15:18] I made a mistake of thinking that it was a nonfiction work. And find out until a little bit
[00:15:24] later that that was incorrect. But I was hooked. From that moment on, it was every piece of
[00:15:30] information that I could find. It's all I wanted to do. It was like a magnetizing force.
[00:15:35] I don't have the vocabulary to describe it. People who don't come from our worlds, it's
[00:15:40] very uncommon for them to hear that. But you know, as well as I do, the seal teams is full of people
[00:15:45] with the same narrative. Oh, yeah, I've just always wanted to do this. It was a calling. But yeah,
[00:15:49] I mean, the idea was sparked from my dad. And I was 17, still in high school, at Junior in high
[00:15:56] school. And I went to the Navy recruiter and brought the Navy recruiter home because this my parents
[00:15:59] had to sign for me. And I had my mom who was an army brat and my dad who was, like I said,
[00:16:04] served in Vietnam. And I'm sure that they were not extremely excited, but they both signed for me.
[00:16:10] So I enlisted actually when I was a junior in high school in the left just a few days after
[00:16:14] a high school graduation. That's so legit. Yeah, who's awesome. And then since I look back now, I'm
[00:16:19] like, why did I do that? Why did I enlist a year early? All I did was give a recruiter. I filled
[00:16:23] their quota for the month. I couldn't leave. I was like, yeah, you got to still got to wait
[00:16:27] until I turn 18 and graduate. But that mean the recruiter was happy. But I mean, I never took the
[00:16:32] SATs. I had no plan B. It's what I knew I wanted to do. And I never even considered it.
[00:16:39] So we did. I enlisted August 1st of 96.
[00:16:44] Awesome. Yep. And so then you show the buds. Showed up for buds. January of 97. Get some winter.
[00:16:49] Were you still 18? I was 18. Yeah, I got some, uh, got some winter class action on.
[00:16:56] And from Santa Cruz. So it was not that great. Yeah, I never really laid an ocean for extended
[00:17:02] periods of time without a wetsuit. But you know what, even the training was everything that I
[00:17:08] thought it was going to be. I mean, I was happy to be there. And it hurt every single day. And it
[00:17:13] was extremely hard. Um, but God, I'd pay money. I'd give you every penny I have right now to go back.
[00:17:19] If I could turn back the clock right now, I would make exactly the same choice. It was up until
[00:17:23] that point in my life. Yeah. Maybe they would change a little bit later on. But until that point,
[00:17:26] we're still going on the same road. Yeah, I just, I had somebody asked me that the other day.
[00:17:32] Some kid, I was talking to some school kids and one of them said, you know,
[00:17:36] what can I do to get ready for seal training? I was like, man, seal training is awesome. You get
[00:17:40] paid. You work out. You literally work out all day long. They feed you three. If not four meals a day
[00:17:45] of all you can eat, just get after it. It's, it's awesome, man. It's so fun. With the aggressive
[00:17:51] A type motivated largely personalities surrounding you. It'll get better as obviously the
[00:17:57] days and weeks go on and training. Some of the people who shouldn't be there, weed it out. But
[00:18:01] and then even the teams, it's like it's, it can be everything that you want it to be. Yeah.
[00:18:05] So you show up. So you get done. You show up at the teams. Your new guy. How's that new guy?
[00:18:10] Experience. Man. Well, I don't know the statute of limitations on some of the things that
[00:18:16] were done to me. But I mean, again, but it was awesome. I was surrounded by my heroes. I didn't know
[00:18:22] anything about anything. I didn't realize that at the time. But because of your head, because
[00:18:28] in our heads, we know everything about everything. I had been to buzz in airborne school before
[00:18:33] bending. I am the most highly polished soldier in the world. Yeah. And you just FYI for those people
[00:18:40] that don't understand when you get done with buds and airborne school. You know nothing. You know nothing.
[00:18:47] You know nothing. You know nothing. You know nothing. You know nothing. And it's pretty ridiculous. That
[00:18:52] that it's got the people called. Yeah. People call buds at school. And again, you got to air
[00:18:56] quote that because you don't, you don't know how to be. Unless another one I get all the time. You don't,
[00:19:01] you're not a seal at the end of buds. I always tell people it stands for basic underwater
[00:19:04] demolition seal with the emphasis on the beat. It's basic. Yeah. You can run and do pull ups and
[00:19:10] you look great with shorts on a beach. I mean, but you don't know anything. Yeah. So, I mean,
[00:19:16] I checked in, you know, pre-notta 11. Although they are better now. I just, I have to say that.
[00:19:20] They're way better now. I was talking to some guys that recent graduates that are now in the
[00:19:25] pipeline. They're getting trained. And I told them. I said, you guys are getting trained infinitely
[00:19:31] better than what we got infinitely better. Now, it has to do with the timeframe that you and I came in.
[00:19:36] Yeah. 90s. There was no, there was a few very few Vietnam veterans left. You milk what you could
[00:19:42] out of them, but you weren't going to get like now every single guy that's teaching every single
[00:19:45] buds instructor all combat veterans that have experience. So it's a different game now. And I
[00:19:50] say that we were taught infinitely better than the people before us. I'm glad to see that that
[00:19:54] cycle repeats itself. And then it's a matter of technology and understanding. And I mean, they've
[00:19:58] changed the pipeline a little bit, especially what happens after buds. Because I went to team five.
[00:20:04] And we did our own tried and bored. And we did our own trading. And then you could talk to the guys
[00:20:10] like down at team three, they're like, oh, yeah, we didn't do any of that. Flaw, which just means
[00:20:15] I'm better than you. Obviously, nobody. Yeah, there's no competitive nature of the teams at all.
[00:20:21] But I mean, it was, I mean, I looked at these guys who had been in SEALs for like five,
[00:20:26] six, seven, eight years or there was like a Vietnam vet walking around like you're just,
[00:20:29] I just wanted to breathe the same air as those people. And I mean, it's a you realize incredibly
[00:20:35] fast that you don't know anything. You realize that because you get taped up for your mistakes.
[00:20:42] Because you're, you're reinforced every time that you make a mistake. And this is like,
[00:20:46] I couldn't do anything right for like years. Because I didn't know anything. The biggest,
[00:20:51] it had been fighting an enemy. I would have been more of a danger to the people that I was with.
[00:20:55] Then the enemy that we were fighting, it just, yeah, I mean, I tell people it takes five to
[00:20:59] seven years, even understand what it really means to be a SEAL. And then probably at the 10 year
[00:21:04] mark, you're at the top of the bell curve as far as what you're going to be able to do operationally.
[00:21:09] But still, I mean, I was in heaven. I was in my, I was, I wasn't even 21 yet, living in an apartment in
[00:21:14] Coronado, riding a bike to the world. Well, until I got paid, yeah, I'm going to be the course guy
[00:21:22] today, it's after the. It is, it is like, for most guys that come in on a high school, because
[00:21:27] we're in your high school, you know, even if you're working at Wendy's, yeah, like I did,
[00:21:32] you're only making whatever 425 an hour in that amount. So you know, whatever, you know,
[00:21:36] you're making like 80 bucks every two weeks. You show up in the teams. And all of a sudden,
[00:21:42] they're giving you real, legit money. You're, they're filling your pocket every two weeks. You are the
[00:21:47] richest you are. Kid in the world. Not a few new guys, because you're paying for everything.
[00:21:52] By the way, you buy some beers. Buy some beers. I learned a lot of stuff in bars,
[00:21:58] over beers. Learned a lot of, I mean, you listen to a lot of history. You learn a lot of
[00:22:04] bouts yourself. You learn when you should keep your mouth shut, because they get shut for you.
[00:22:07] I've been taped up in a bar. Maybe. It's the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
[00:22:14] hazing was pretty good in teams back then. Yeah. Reinforcement. Less reinforcements. So you need a
[00:22:19] couple of deployments, couple deployments. Two pre-9 11 deployments. Uh, and you know, again, the
[00:22:25] life is a new guy is amazing. Like, here's a rifle. It's yours. And then my first department I
[00:22:30] worked in was as a secondary calm guy. So I think I had like a PRC 77. But like rotary, you know, rotary dials
[00:22:39] and whip antenna. I hadn't even been to comm school. But it's like, this is my stuff. And I got,
[00:22:43] remember going getting issued my first set of gear that I look back at now. And it's like, I couldn't
[00:22:48] sell it if I wanted to. So antiquated. But I was so happy to be where I was. And we, you know,
[00:22:55] we'd train for 18 months. And we'd deploy first six. But my first deployment was to Japan to the
[00:23:00] Kadina Air Force Base. And we experimented with how much we could drink and how much we could work out.
[00:23:06] Like, which ratio is best? 80 to 20, 70, 30. And we'd go train our partner forces. But I mean,
[00:23:13] we just, I mean, we lived life hard. It was exactly the brotherhood that I thought it was
[00:23:19] be. I was surrounded by my best friends. We all had the same drive. You could have told us that
[00:23:24] go build sandcastles. We would have had the best sandcastles in the world because we just go and
[00:23:28] go and go and go and go. And so we get it right. Surrounded by like-minded motivated people
[00:23:32] come back. Did another 18 month work up? Is like a kind of new guy, one platoon wonder?
[00:23:39] Well, a few will. If you will, again, you know about 20% but you think you know about 80. The ratio is
[00:23:46] just a skew. Went through the whole work up again and then deployed the Guam for six months.
[00:23:52] And then to the same time, we'd go to Australia for a bit. We train with the partner forces
[00:23:56] there. We'd go to the Thailand. We'd go to Philippines. And then we'd go back and we'd just train
[00:24:00] and talk about how awesome we were going to be when the big mesh. Remember the Golden Connide
[00:24:04] Sparks? Yeah. Big mesh in the Golden Connide. Actually, Lately, Lately, if I've talked about that on
[00:24:08] here, you know, back in the day, pre especially pre 9-11, we were all preparing for the one
[00:24:15] big mesh. And that was going to go down the big mesh. Yeah. And you know how- and what was interesting
[00:24:22] is because we didn't have any combat experience, at least from my perspective, we trained
[00:24:27] freaking hard because we thought like it was going to be even harder than anything we could
[00:24:32] imagine. We don't know how hard it's going to be. So we're just going to be like, it's not saying
[00:24:34] castles because we were to prepare for that hard too. But it's real. This is what we're prepared for.
[00:24:38] So we trained as hard as we possibly could in every arena. To be ready for whatever was going
[00:24:45] to come, which we had no idea. I don't know if I've talked about this before, but we finally got
[00:24:50] my first deployment. My first deployment deployed the Guam. Yeah. I'm ready for the big mesh
[00:24:54] bro. Totally. I'm ready. It's going down from where we get there. We get there and we have,
[00:25:01] you know, we get issued beepers. So you know, it's real now because you're getting issued beepers.
[00:25:06] Because this back in the day, the whole girl had beepers back then. Unless you, unless
[00:25:10] some shit was going to go down. So they give us the beepers and we're like ready to rock and roll.
[00:25:15] And finally, actually, I was surfing and I come in and someone's waving one of my buddies waving
[00:25:20] him in the beach like, hey, I run up. Let's go on. Hey, we got a page. We got a page. We got a page.
[00:25:25] We know we get the 911 page. Oh, I think. John, get the, but we get, get, get, get, get, get, get,
[00:25:30] get past the base. We get there. We get in the LPO sitting there. I look at his face and I go,
[00:25:36] this doesn't look like the kind of face I anticipated. And I've been in Guam. This is my first
[00:25:42] deployment. I'm two days into Guam. So I think, man, this is exactly like were you saying?
[00:25:47] Yeah, blue one. It's going to be like, of course, man. I just got on the boyman. It's going down.
[00:25:53] So no president knows that I'm on deployment. He's ready. Yeah. We're going to action that
[00:25:56] target. So what I failed to mention was that we were like our second or third day in Guam, the first
[00:26:00] day in Guam that we were there. We went inside and didn't know weapons. So we got a recall emergency
[00:26:06] recall 911 go back into base. Guess what we didn't do. We didn't clean up our brass. So I'm not kidding.
[00:26:12] We went and cleaned up our brass. They, they made it. They recall the emergency recall. The
[00:26:16] go clean up our brass on the range. After that, the beer's got cracked open and it went sideways.
[00:26:24] Real quick for the rest of that deployment. But isn't an amazing what used to constitute an emergency.
[00:26:32] Yeah, that was a rough one. Oh, man. So you end up, so those are your couple pre 9-11,
[00:26:39] the point where were you in September 11th happened. It's a station that's a team five still and I was living in
[00:26:46] the archstone apartments right by the Ikea in Mission Valley. Watch the second one, go in live.
[00:26:52] Yeah, I remember it was living with the buddy and my wife we've been married for six months
[00:27:00] and watched the second one go in live. And then you knew immediately. Did you know,
[00:27:04] did you think, do you think, were you thinking on the first one? Because I wasn't the first one.
[00:27:07] I didn't see the first one going live. I turned it on just in time to see the second one.
[00:27:10] But I think it caught most people. Like the first one they're like, oh, well, that pilot's probably
[00:27:14] in trouble. I'm going to be a lawsuit on that one. And then the second one there was no doubt whatsoever.
[00:27:19] And I didn't know, I mean, looking back, I didn't have the mental capacity to understand the
[00:27:25] difference that it would have in my life. But I knew that something was going to be different. I mean,
[00:27:29] I think I realized that we were passing from the conceptual phase to the practical phase of what we
[00:27:34] had trained to do for a really long period of time. You know, who didn't know that. So the
[00:27:39] deed, the officer, because I was going to college at the time. And I called the officer detailer,
[00:27:43] who is a friend of mine, who I knew, who I'd work for, who is an outstanding guy. And I called them up
[00:27:48] and I was like, hey, sir, I'm in college. Get me out of college. I'll finish online. I'll do something.
[00:27:53] Just get me out of here. Send me to a team immediately. Please. Yeah. Please. And he, and he says to me,
[00:27:59] Joko, don't worry. This war is going to last a long, long time. And of course, I didn't believe
[00:28:06] him. Yeah. But damn what's he right. He was, but I mean, I can only imagine being in your shoes.
[00:28:10] I would have been like, I don't really care. This is what my calling in life is to be. I don't,
[00:28:14] I don't care if I'm in line to get the Nobel Prize for something like we'll just put that on the show.
[00:28:18] Yeah. I'll come back and get it. Nobel what? Yeah. Like season war going on. Yeah. And
[00:28:23] so you get done with that. And then shortly thereafter, you ship out to the East Coast, right?
[00:28:29] Yep. Go out to the East Coast and did the vast majority of my combat deployments out there.
[00:28:37] And wow. I mean, what an eye opening experience. You know, it's from, like I said, going from conceptual
[00:28:44] shooting at paper targets and training hard and realistic to to be in on a two-way range
[00:28:50] for the first time. I mean, the first target I ever was on. I think my helicopter had 27 rounds in it.
[00:29:00] And the door going to got shot in the face right in front of me. And I'm in mom level four.
[00:29:05] Yeah, for those of you that are that's what that is. That's the chemical biological and
[00:29:11] radiological suit to protection that you wear and highest level four is you're wearing your mask.
[00:29:18] You're wearing everything. So it's it's horrible, uncomfortable, miserable thing to do. And we had a
[00:29:26] four hour 47 flight on the way to the objective. And 30 minutes out, we got all of our stuff onto
[00:29:32] include our gas masks and the blowers. The always going to say if you're the blowers. That does make it a lot nicer.
[00:29:36] Well, I'll push, push, weapon strap over those. I like it. Go on for days about mistakes. I've made
[00:29:45] it my life. So yeah, I was skip breathing and occasionally the glass would touch my eyeball. That's
[00:29:50] not a good and breathe. But I mean, this is my first real target ever. And it's, uh, we're hitting the
[00:29:57] number one, chem bio target in Iraq right after the war kicked off. And I was on the third 47 that
[00:30:04] came in and they blew the power grid. Uh, but an eight-end strike, uh, before we landed and then they landed
[00:30:11] the helicopters in between the fireball in the city. So we were backlit. So each subsequent helicopter
[00:30:16] that came in took more rounds. And by the time ours came in, they started taking rounds at about a minute
[00:30:21] out. I didn't even know what they were. I'm just sitting there looking through straws, you know,
[00:30:26] through my gas mask, through my night vision goggles, suffocating myself because my weapon strap
[00:30:31] is over the hose. It's supposed to be giving me the air. Uh, and, you know, there was some sparks.
[00:30:37] Nobody, nobody heard them bird. Not a single one of our guys shot. And then right before we touched
[00:30:42] down, the door gunner just falls over. And then, you know, the top of the head kind of came off and
[00:30:47] tied my, you know, tied my jacket around his head and they just took off. And away we went
[00:30:52] on our first combat operation. But the whole thing was just surreal. And that, that leap,
[00:30:58] I didn't realize how surreal was till the next morning when I woke up at a slight
[00:31:02] time. Man, I hope this is survival. Because that was just one of many in the target deck. And
[00:31:09] it continued for months and then years. And, you know, two decades now. Yeah. And it was,
[00:31:17] and it took me a little bit of time to get up and running to be, to be comfortable in that environment.
[00:31:23] But I, I developed a level of comfort in that environment. And if I'm being totally honest, I mean,
[00:31:28] I loved it. I loved it. It was, I mean, I understand that it's high-cost,
[00:31:36] quince, and that it's high-risk, and that there's matters of life and death and decisions that
[00:31:40] are being made. But that's where I want to be. I mean, I was like, yes, this is what I came to do
[00:31:47] to fight for the values that I believe in and to fight for people who can't fight for themselves.
[00:31:52] And it was awesome. Loved it.
[00:31:54] It's interesting how you talk about that transition from like, from training, which what we all
[00:32:02] lived, there's very few people that this is another thing that taught people, it's hard for people
[00:32:06] understand about, especially about the early days of the sea of, well, for us the early days, the
[00:32:10] sealtains is, there was so few people that actually had combat experience. And that went all the way up
[00:32:15] to the leadership, a lot of leadership had no combat experience. And so for us, all of a sudden,
[00:32:20] in a very quick learning curve, you know, you spend two weeks on deployment, you had more combat
[00:32:26] experience than, you know, than anybody else in the sealtains at that time, you know, other than the
[00:32:30] guys that were deployed right before you, but you had that's how quick the learning curve was.
[00:32:34] And things were changing. I mean, look at what we trained. I mean, we were doing OTV and exhaustion
[00:32:39] drag or dives, and I'm doing river and stream crossing in Nile and. But I'm not kidding before my
[00:32:44] first deployment to Iraq. I took my seal platoon. We went on board of an amphibious landing ship in San Diego
[00:32:52] and went and no kidding did lead line and slate beach reconnaissance at Camp Pendleton. That was,
[00:32:59] that was less than, it might have been a month and a half before deploying to Iraq to do operations.
[00:33:06] That's how, that's, that's, that's the lag time in the big bureaucratic machine in the military.
[00:33:10] Hey, you know, we got this big fleet exercise. You guys can go participate in one of
[00:33:14] one of our, one of my guys in that platoon. I come down and go, hey, break out your lead line
[00:33:22] and slate. So again, for those of you that don't know, there's the very prehistoric type operation.
[00:33:27] That was to excellent descriptor. Yeah. It's war. It came from World War II. It came after the
[00:33:33] battle of Tarolotaro at the battle of Tarolotaro, the Marines went in and as they went into the
[00:33:38] beaches in their landing craft, they hit reef and they opened the gates of the landing craft. The
[00:33:45] Marines got out and unfortunately the reef ended and so these, these Marines went out and they went
[00:33:49] into, you know, 10, 12, 15 feet of water instead of two feet of water and many, many Marines were
[00:33:55] to have the gear that was not buoyant, so it was not designed for swimming. It was, it was meant
[00:34:00] for beats landing not for swim. Anyways, that was kind of the one of the precursors to the UDTs and
[00:34:06] what, so what our predecessors used to do is go in with a lead line, which is a piece of string
[00:34:12] with a lead on the bottom of it and it's got little marks on it called buntings, little marks on it
[00:34:18] that tell you how deep it is and you go in as a big team and you drop these lead lines and you
[00:34:22] figure out how deep and your slate is a piece of plexiglass that's been sanded down and you
[00:34:27] right with a pencil on it, how deep it was in this particular location. So they're trying to do calculus
[00:34:32] with an abacus. So we are, you know, like less than two months from deploying to Iraq for the first
[00:34:40] time, none of us had ever been in combat, but not one single person, zero, not one single person
[00:34:44] in my siopton had ever been in combat before, including our task in a commander, no one. And so we say,
[00:34:51] oh, you know what we need to do right now is we're going to do a hydrographic reconnaissance
[00:34:55] officer called with lead line and say, but one of the guys might be, what are you walking,
[00:34:58] you do what are you talking about? And I go, bro, we're just going to do it and it was like,
[00:35:03] you've got to be kidding me, what is wrong with us? But so that learning curve was fast, but then
[00:35:08] it, but I also to kind of emphasize what you're saying and I look at it, when you said, you know,
[00:35:14] your first like platoon, you know, like 20% and then your second platoon, you know, for me,
[00:35:20] because I have four kids, it's very similar to what you learn with kids. Yes. Your first kid,
[00:35:24] you're like, oh, wait, what? You don't know how to do anything, everything is hard, you know,
[00:35:27] you're worried about everything. Your second kid, you're like, I'm pretty pretty much going to go.
[00:35:31] Your third kid, you're like, okay, you know, I think we're comfortable. Your fourth kid,
[00:35:34] you're like, I got this, what I was before. I was like, hey, first kid, go take care of your sibling.
[00:35:38] Exactly, which is really, which is really exactly what you're doing the teams, you're like, hey,
[00:35:42] you know, one cruise wonder, go show that new guy, what's up, because you don't have to do it anymore,
[00:35:46] and you want them to learn the experience. But that's the same thing with the combat operations
[00:35:51] that you do and over, you know, a period of a couple weeks also, and you go from being,
[00:35:56] you know, I'll give you another good example from my perspective. My first deployment to Iraq,
[00:36:03] when every operation we would go on, like the first, like, let's call it five or seven operations
[00:36:08] that I did. Every piece of gear that had to change the batteries, change the battery,
[00:36:11] my nonsense, my laser change battery, my flash, change every single bit. I need a brand new battery
[00:36:16] and every one of these pieces of gear. Well, I was doing it, because that's when we talked about
[00:36:20] the big mission, that's what we would think, you know, what I got to have this 100%. We realized
[00:36:25] after a week, if everyone does that, we're not going to have any batteries left in another two weeks.
[00:36:30] And so we all realize, you know what, you're going to have to use that battery and keep track of
[00:36:34] how long you're using it for, because you don't want it to fail, but you're going to get, you know,
[00:36:37] 12 or 15 or 25 uses out of this thing. But that's the kind of lessons that we learned,
[00:36:42] and that's the kind of comfort level. You got, like, okay, if my nods fail, I'll stop, I'll put a new
[00:36:46] battery and my nods and we'll move on. So those are the kind of things that you learn in that steep learning
[00:36:52] curve that all of us are whole generation went through that real quick. And you only learn that
[00:36:56] with time in the saddle, like it takes experience to understand like, okay, I can use this lithium
[00:37:03] battery that probably costs $9.00. I didn't turn it on the whole time, and I'm going to hook it,
[00:37:08] you know, I think I can use it again. I mean, but I mean, everything changed. The tactics changed.
[00:37:13] But you're changed. The way we trained change. It was amazing what happened post 911. All the
[00:37:19] stuff we thought was going to be crazy effective because it worked in Vietnam. Guess what?
[00:37:23] Doesn't work in the desert. Let me ask you this. When you say that you only learned it in the saddle,
[00:37:29] when you were, when you went through training, when I was, when I was running training,
[00:37:34] do you were able to convey a lot of that information of those guys, though? I tried.
[00:37:39] I think I think you were, and maybe you couldn't give me every single little tiny thing. But what I'm
[00:37:43] saying is there was no one to teach us that stuff. Yes. In for me it was in 2003, there was no one to say,
[00:37:51] hey, you don't need to change your battery on every operation. You're going to need those batteries
[00:37:54] you need to make them last. So we did get, we did get some fundamental knowledge back from, for sure,
[00:38:01] from those early times. And then you still got to add that experience, though. The people, I mean,
[00:38:05] like you can, you could read a book, and then go do it for real, and you need to combination of
[00:38:10] the two to have that confidence, and then you can impart it on somebody else. And history, just,
[00:38:15] like, like you said, the Vietnam guys, like they were just timed out. We didn't have access to that.
[00:38:20] And I, I look at the pre-None 11 training that we did. It was awesome. But it don't give me wrong.
[00:38:27] I loved it. But man, it doesn't work in Baghdad. Yeah. And then that we had a tactical shift again,
[00:38:33] and probably, 2006, 2007. It's, it's that, I think, is what separates our community from a lot of
[00:38:40] other ones. Like we're malleable. But we have leadership that's like, listen, this isn't working in
[00:38:44] real time. We need to create a solution for it right now. And we're willing to do that. We have just a
[00:38:49] little bit more control of the wheel. Yeah. Well, part of the reason is because we had no doctor.
[00:38:54] Yeah. We're as the other service branch as many of them have this beautiful, really well
[00:39:00] written doctrine on this is how you do this type of operation. And we didn't have that. So guess
[00:39:05] what, for us to say, you know what, that didn't work yesterday. We're going to change it today.
[00:39:08] They didn't have that capability. They were like, hey, this is the way we do it. Yeah.
[00:39:12] And we never really had this the way we do it. I mean, they came up before trade it. I was a team five,
[00:39:17] right? So we would go to Alaska and do coal weather training. And the team three guys were off
[00:39:20] driving DPV. I mean, there wasn't even talking in between the team. So there was so much skill set.
[00:39:26] And of course, I mean, if you were a team through, I wasn't telling you shit. I'd give you the wrong
[00:39:31] information. You know, because we're computing with ourselves. But yeah, that like you said no
[00:39:36] doctorate, then finally we had, you know, the trade at East Coast West Coast and, you know,
[00:39:41] sharing information and coming together and lessons learned and all that stuff that I think largely
[00:39:46] professionalize the force from a paperwork perspective, but has impact on the battlefield as well,
[00:39:50] too. It's not sexy and it's not fun, but it keeps people alive.
[00:39:54] No, there's no doubt about that. The amount of interoperability we would do as the different training
[00:39:58] departments was was awesome. It was awesome. And bouncing lessons learned in the feedback loop
[00:40:03] with that we got going was definitely far superior to anything. Then like you said,
[00:40:08] when we had the teams going all the different areas and not talking to each other.
[00:40:11] I mean, I got issued overwights at team five. They wouldn't issue us tan bdUs because we were
[00:40:17] a Southwest Asia, put you. And I'd look at the guys wearing the chocolate chips. My god,
[00:40:21] I'll get a pair of those. I'll trade you for these woodland cameras.
[00:40:27] It's just a different world. But I'm actually extremely grateful that I got to see both sides of
[00:40:33] the coin because if you never got to see that evolution, you're missing a huge piece of who we are
[00:40:38] as a community. And also I believe it would be easier that you would that we could let it slip back
[00:40:45] in that direction if we don't like we said capture those lessons and be able to pass them on.
[00:40:51] So how many then you got out of these course? How many departments did you do out there?
[00:40:56] I bounced back and forth from Iraq to Afghanistan for basically four years straight.
[00:41:01] It would be everything between three to four months. There were shorter in duration.
[00:41:08] So I ended up in my career I've been to Iraq three times and I've got to stand five.
[00:41:14] And at one point there, you kind of got a little setback.
[00:41:18] Yeah. Equated to going to Vegas and you can play crops for a really long time and you can be on a
[00:41:24] great heater and then a seven is going to come up in Baitje and hopefully you don't have a lot of
[00:41:28] chips on the table. Yeah, I got shot from about 15 feet away by a guy in a window that I
[00:41:38] didn't see and I was staring at that window for 10 minutes before I was sitting on a ladder looking
[00:41:43] into a courtyard where they were trying to determine which building was the one that we were actually
[00:41:49] going to make entry on. The determined that the building that I was looking at was the one we were
[00:41:55] going to make entry into. Actually, I get it back up a little bit. So we walked by this building originally.
[00:41:59] The lights were off because I was walking point at the time. So we went down an alley.
[00:42:04] You know, we're not always the best. And then just we made a little bit of noise. So a guy
[00:42:08] comes out of a house. We pursued him into the house and made additional noise while we were doing
[00:42:13] that securing that to make sure that maybe it wasn't the guy. We weren't exactly positive
[00:42:18] of the location. So maybe that could have been the guy. So it wasn't and we backtracked and went back
[00:42:22] down that alley. And the guys who were doing the they were fixing the target trying to determine
[00:42:29] which building it was going to be. They needed some time. So I threw ladder up on a wall because
[00:42:32] I'm not a huge fan of not being able to see over things. Climbed up on the ladder was just looking
[00:42:36] at the outside of a building. And the lights were on this time, which defeats a lot of the
[00:42:41] technological advantage that I have. So I was kind of just looking underneath my nods.
[00:42:46] And I could see plainly into the window. I never saw a shadow. I never saw a curtain move. I never saw
[00:42:52] anything. They finally gave me the go ahead, hopped off the ladder. And I remember being in the corner
[00:42:58] of the courtyard by myself for a little bit before two other guys came over with me. And I almost
[00:43:04] approached the door on my own because I had before. And it was dark and I had the shadows and it was
[00:43:10] kind of like an American house where there was like an L. The long end of the L being the garage
[00:43:16] and then there's that path that goes to the front door and then it breaks off and then there's
[00:43:19] that window right there. And that was the window I was looking at. And I was just going to go to the
[00:43:22] corner to set security for the breach. And I almost left the shadows. It's like, you know what? Not the
[00:43:28] day. So I waited for two more guys to come up. And right at that corner that I was going to post my
[00:43:33] self up on, there was a window. And I was going to turn my back on the window without taking at least
[00:43:37] a quick peek in it. And as soon as I turned my head to look in that window, I heard a crack and
[00:43:45] the round hit me high up on the hip and spun me. And then this is only time I've ever felt
[00:43:49] into my life. The truce sensation of time slowing down. It really, it was, it was almost like
[00:43:54] the movies. It's probably the only thing I can say was ever like the movies. But it slowed down
[00:43:59] and spun me towards him. And when it hit, I pushed off a little bit with my right foot. I think
[00:44:03] just instinctually, and I kind of pushed me down. And there was a vehicle in the driveway. And I ended up
[00:44:09] stuck underneath the vehicle. I had a shotgun on my right hand side and the bungee cord got stuck on
[00:44:13] the undercarriage. I'm laying on top of my gun. Can't get it staring at full auto fire from like
[00:44:20] 15 feet away out of a window. Guys, just up on his knees, just hoesing. And probably three seconds
[00:44:28] occurred. I expired. And obviously all hell broke loose from people on our side engaging the window.
[00:44:36] They made entry from the other side. End up having, I think it was eight American servicemen
[00:44:40] get wounded on that target alone. Some of it was our guys were too close to a breach. I mean,
[00:44:46] a lot of it was, it was some fog of war stuff from a unit that you wouldn't associate necessarily
[00:44:52] with the fog of war. But it, you know, it happens. I associate the fog of war with all units
[00:45:00] unfortunately. Yeah. But you know, it's a, some of them would, it surprises you at some levels
[00:45:04] more than others. And it was, you know, they were trying, they wanted to get internal. They
[00:45:08] want to get the breach on the door. Get the breach on the door. So we put a C6 strip charge up,
[00:45:12] which is a very large explosive charge that runs the length of the door. Put it on the hinge side.
[00:45:16] And when they set it off, there was a unit that had entered on the other side of the building without
[00:45:20] telling anybody standing about three feet from it. So there was some people who were shot on the
[00:45:24] inside. There were some people were shot on the outside. And then there were some people who were
[00:45:27] to hurt from the explosion. So they had little birds coming in, grabbing people. I ended up getting
[00:45:32] thrown in the back of a Bradley with a guy who jabbed me with a 14 gauge needle and hadn't
[00:45:39] prep the bag. So he pulled it back out and I told him at that point you're done with any medical
[00:45:43] treatment at this point. I'll handle my own stuff from here on out. Really like an army medic,
[00:45:48] he was just shaking. I'm like, you're good. I'm going to live, I think. So just take it easy. Take it
[00:45:54] easy. But I mean, I didn't do anything differently that night that I hadn't done before, hundreds of times.
[00:46:00] You know, I was on the wrong side of the bullet. And it it actually really rocked my confidence.
[00:46:07] It was I was young. I was my mid-20s where I wanted to be operating at the level that I wanted to
[00:46:13] be operating at. And I mean, I couldn't walk from a senior. I had hemopolizeia like paralysis
[00:46:19] of one side of my leg. I had dropped foot for a year. Is that because it obviously hit nerves then?
[00:46:23] They don't know if it, I mean, they don't know. It either hit the sciatic nerve as it went through
[00:46:28] or the shockwave short circuit either way. The result was the same. It fried it all the way down to
[00:46:35] my ankle. So when I was in the back, when I got to the hospital in the green zone, my biggest complaint
[00:46:39] was that my ankle felt like it was snapped in half. And like I still have never had a surgery,
[00:46:45] never broken a bone. Everything is still inside of my pelvis. They just wrapped the wound with ace
[00:46:51] wrap and drugged me out of the compound. I mean, that's literally it. And then they went back to business.
[00:46:55] But I thought that I was like my ankle has got to be destroyed somehow. So they cut my boot off
[00:47:03] like very gingerly and they're looking at it and they're like your ankle is totally fine. But that was
[00:47:06] by far the worst part of it was the the neuropathic issues for like a year and a half. Almost two
[00:47:12] years. I felt like my dip my leg and gasoline and just lit it on fire 24, 7. And so the Navy, I mean,
[00:47:18] I had like 14, 15 pill bottles. I mean, I was taken two, three, four ambient staying awake.
[00:47:24] Of course, then we went up that game as to combine with Captain Morgan, which I did in a variety of
[00:47:30] dosages. So I would sleep at wake up exhaust. I mean, it was it was rough. It rocked me as a person
[00:47:38] and as as a seal. I didn't know if I was going to come back from it. Where were you stationed at that time?
[00:47:46] Were you still out on the east coast or did you go to the east coast? I went to Buds
[00:47:50] as a basically a break to rehab myself. And I mean, like so I was even still today. I can't
[00:47:57] fill my left leg from the kneecapped out. I roll my ankle all the time. I'm just used to,
[00:48:01] I'm used to it. I know what you, you somehow compensate for the best you can. Yeah, I mean, I'm
[00:48:05] very, I don't do any like lateral stuff because if I catch my left foot to the outside, that's
[00:48:10] the role that I can't stop is the one at the outside. So I mean, I still train as hard. If not
[00:48:14] harder than I used to, I'm just super cautious with what it is that I do. And I tailor it all towards
[00:48:19] the stuff that I do now. But yeah, you want to talk about, you know, you watch all these movies where
[00:48:24] you know, guys are just getting drilled and they're running at it. Like, I'm going to be the biggest
[00:48:28] warrior ever and like, I was flat on my back. I mean, I was freaking done training. There's nothing
[00:48:32] I could do. Pinned under a car, needed a buddy mind to come over and pull me around in the middle of
[00:48:36] firefight to get me out of, oh, I got a harms way. I mean, I got super lucky. The belt, I was
[00:48:42] wearing that night has the second round that the guy shot at me. It burned the belt for like two
[00:48:47] inches and then the copper jacket is still in the belt itself. That's how close I got to getting hit
[00:48:52] even higher up in the hip. Like the pelvis, I don't think I would have survived that one if that would
[00:48:56] hit me because there's an AK from like three times the distance from me to you right now. It was spicy.
[00:49:03] So when you they're just, I mean, I'm not trying to say anything super negative about the care
[00:49:10] that you got. But they're like, okay, take this pill, take this pill, take this pill, take the ear
[00:49:14] and give us this pill. It was early. So I was, I got home about two days after it happened.
[00:49:22] They flew me. They met a vacuum to launch stool. I decided I didn't want to stay there. So I
[00:49:27] checked myself out and got a delta ticket and flew into New York. I got picked up by another plane
[00:49:32] and my wife met me at the stairs of the aircraft in Oshana, the Naval Air Station there with my
[00:49:40] son in a stroller and she was pregnant with our second child. And about a week after that,
[00:49:46] my arresting heart rate was sitting at like 150. I was sweating, profusely, in a ton of pain and they
[00:49:52] take me to the hospital. And I remember talking to like this, I think I was in E5 at the time.
[00:50:00] So I was talking to this little punk E2 corpsman who is checking me in. And he was like, you know,
[00:50:05] what's the nature of injury? I'm like, you know, gunshot wound to the hip and I kid you not. He's,
[00:50:10] he's like riding the stuff down. He stops. He looks him and he goes self-inflicted.
[00:50:19] And my wife sitting there looking at this, she's just like, what's going on? Like, she has very
[00:50:24] little understanding of the military medical system. I sat in the waiting room while they took
[00:50:29] people in with the sniffles and the flu for four hours before they took me in. And my wife finally
[00:50:36] just started losing her mind on them and like, you know, it was a training hospital as most military
[00:50:41] hospitals are they had never seen a gunshot wound? Because it was relatively early in the war,
[00:50:47] you know, given where we were at that time and they wanted to have all the doctors, all the
[00:50:51] residents come in, they're like, hey, can they come in and check out the wound? Like, we've never seen
[00:50:55] a gunshot wound. I'm like sure, if you bring a pint of morphine with you and juice me up for us,
[00:51:00] I don't care what you do. Like, I just couldn't sleep. I was in so much pain. The treatment that I
[00:51:06] got from the military was not awesome. It was frustrating at the time. But I-
[00:51:13] This is just to make sure this is 0.5, right? 0.5. Yeah, early 0.5. It wasn't awesome. They
[00:51:18] weren't used to seeing a lot of that stuff. Yeah, I got pills and I got sent home and kind of
[00:51:23] largely left to my own devices, which was not a smart call at the time. I mean, in my career,
[00:51:30] I felt like I was a race car in 5th year going around, turned four and then somebody dumped the
[00:51:34] training into reverse and there was just pieces everywhere. And I had to kind of put it back together
[00:51:38] myself and it sucked at the time. My wife still, I mean, she's pissed about the the treatment that I got.
[00:51:46] But I mean, the military did what they were doing at that time. You know, I don't hold them against it.
[00:51:50] I don't hold it against them at all. But it sucked for sure. And I do know we've made vast improvements.
[00:51:58] And you were one of the guys that the reason why there's been so many improvements, because,
[00:52:02] you know, guys will come back and getting the kind of treatment that they would definitely
[00:52:06] deserve better. You know, one of the worst things about the whole thing was actually the flight out
[00:52:12] of the mod and a C141 full of stretchers of people that were wounded far worse than I was just
[00:52:20] the noises that were being made on that flight from blood to landstool. I was very fortunate.
[00:52:27] I had a doc who was assigned to me. And I was just like, hey, knock me out. Right. Oh, I don't want
[00:52:32] to hear this anymore. And I had the guy just basically just juice me up until I fell asleep for the whole
[00:52:36] flight. But what an experience that you'll never forget, just a tube full of bleeding
[00:52:44] Americans, you know, on their way back to try to put their lives back together. People missing.
[00:52:50] I mean, I was right next to a guy who was standing in a turret of a humvy,
[00:52:54] when a suicide bomb or clocked himself off, and every inch of his body from Beltline up was just
[00:52:59] completely tattered. I mean, another guy who had his legs blown off. I mean, like, I'm sitting there.
[00:53:04] I'm like, I'm like, okay, I thought I was injured. You guys, you guys are way worse off than I am.
[00:53:10] It was a very sobering experience. How did you, so you go, you go kind of pretty far down the road of
[00:53:18] a losing pills. I'm okay. So you do some good recipes if you're interested. Three blues of red,
[00:53:25] two bottles of Captain Morgan. How did you, okay, we'll take it for granted that you went pretty
[00:53:31] far down there. I don't mean that, you know, you've got the team guy personality of, okay, I can't
[00:53:36] do this. So I'm going to, I can't do this to next stream. So I have two speakers. I have to go and stop.
[00:53:42] How did you figure out, okay, you know what, what was this lap in the face that made you say,
[00:53:46] you know, this is not where I want to be? I was in the car with my wife. So one of the pills that they
[00:53:52] gave me was Naurotton, which is anti seizure medicine for children, but it has a secondary or tertiary
[00:53:58] side effect, a side effect of a neuropathic pain control. It was an attempt to try to get that
[00:54:02] burning feeling to stop in my leg. And I kept signing waivers for the dosages, because they were,
[00:54:09] we were off the charts, like we were making medical history with the dosages that I was on.
[00:54:15] And another side effect of it is central nervous system suppression. And I remember going by the
[00:54:21] gasoline or, call by the gasoline, go by the gas station and looking at the sign for the prices of
[00:54:26] the gasoline. And my wife asked me a very rudimentary mathematical problem and I couldn't, I couldn't
[00:54:31] figure it out. And I'm certainly not the smartest guy in the world, but like I should be able to add
[00:54:36] two plus two and you know, maybe multiply that out a little bit and I couldn't do it and I recognize
[00:54:41] that in and of myself. So that night, I stopped drinking and basically started weaning myself
[00:54:50] off of the Naurotton, because you can't stop at cold turkey, because if you do, your propensity
[00:54:56] for seizures goes through the roof. So you had, you got to graduate yourself out of it, so it took
[00:55:00] me like six to eight months to get myself off of Naurotton off all the pills. And I just started
[00:55:06] working out like a maniac. And that's how I got myself. I did it all in my own, I didn't get on any
[00:55:11] protocol from the Navy, but I remember that moment where I just couldn't answer that question.
[00:55:15] I was like, okay, time to shift course. And you know, a lot of people always, a lot of people ask
[00:55:20] about, you know, when you're injured, what they ask me, what are you doing? What are you doing?
[00:55:25] I always say, hey, I do what I can do. If I got to blown out knee, you know what I'm going to do?
[00:55:28] One that gets crossed the other leg of my new pull-ups was at your attitude. It was like, okay,
[00:55:32] what's the end I do? You know, that's how I found CrossFit was through getting shot. That's what I
[00:55:40] used to, and you know, I could care less people get very excited about the term CrossFit function
[00:55:45] training, whatever you want to call it. To me, it was really new at that time. Like I was on the body
[00:55:49] builder routine. You know, Chester's rise and back and by the 90s team guy, totally.
[00:55:53] Yeah, or otherwise known as the echo routine. Are you run on Wednesdays? But yeah, so like,
[00:55:59] and I had never done squats before. So I literally held onto a pole and lowered myself down
[00:56:04] into a squat and I picked myself up. And I just, I just changed stuff. So I could do it. And I remember
[00:56:12] the first night of sleep that I had that was really good in my wife could probably point to it
[00:56:17] on a calendar because I came back from the gym. Like I had no responsibilities at work because
[00:56:21] my squatter was still deployed. So I mean, I literally was like, hey, coming on Thursdays and
[00:56:26] we'll give you some east up on your leg. That was that was the therapy. So I went into the gym and
[00:56:32] I just crushed myself, came home, I covered in sweat and just passed out, slept good and just
[00:56:38] continued that routine on. And you know, they were saying it would take me a couple of years
[00:56:44] if ever to get back on full-acting duty because they didn't know. I mean, because it was with
[00:56:48] nerves, they're like, yeah, you reach the end of the medical practice. And you start talking about
[00:56:52] nerves. I never had, I mean, the doctors with probably a decade of medical experience is saying to me,
[00:56:57] I don't know. I'm like, hey, doc, I don't have an MD and I could tell you that I don't know. Could I
[00:57:01] get a better answer out of you than that? Like, come on, man. But yeah, I mean, I worked my self-backed.
[00:57:07] I wasn't done. I didn't want to be done. And I worked my self-back to a point where I felt
[00:57:14] confident again that I could deploy and I was still continuing. So I left and went to
[00:57:18] Buds in 2006 as an instructor. Use that time to rehab myself. And then by the time I got to Team
[00:57:25] 3, it was about four or five years after that injury where I was going through training when
[00:57:31] you were the LIC to trade it. And also, you became an officer at that point when you were going
[00:57:35] to Buds. I did. I did. I didn't have a, it's not that I didn't have a choice. It was the best
[00:57:40] choice that I had at that time. So when I got shot, I was on my LPO tour. And for people who don't
[00:57:47] understand the military, it is a mandatory go, no go, wicked for advancement. And they counted it
[00:57:55] as me not successfully completing it. So to advance, so I was an E6 at the time. And I was trying
[00:58:02] to walk the list. Sorry for laughing. Yes. You're going to be that I'm going to evil bastard because
[00:58:05] I'm laughing. I'm not laughing. You're going to laughing at the old. It's just a ridiculous stuff.
[00:58:09] This is the stuff. So if you want to march your way from E1 to E9, you have to hit these mandatory
[00:58:14] career wickets. And the jump between E6 to E7 for the enlisting guys is the large jump from
[00:58:18] middle management to the sea suite of the enlisted realm. They judge you only by your service record.
[00:58:25] Unless you have these mandatory wickets, you're getting swept off the table. And so I submitted
[00:58:30] my chief package twice with a good, awesome evaluations. I mean, I was doing some awesome stuff in
[00:58:39] my career. I had good awards, good recommendations, good eve, awesome, everybody. And two years
[00:58:45] in a row, they're like, nope. And so finally I started calling people who probably shouldn't have told
[00:58:49] me the answer, I'm like, hey, what's going on there? They're like, oh, you know, your LPO tours
[00:58:53] getting counted against you. And I didn't want to be done with being in the military. And I'm sitting
[00:59:00] there and I'm like, okay, how what can I do here if I want to continue on and I want to have
[00:59:07] impact. So I decided I needed to maneuver. So I researched officer programs in Stombo across the
[00:59:16] limited duty officer program, which is traditionally for E7 E8s and E9s. And there had never been an
[00:59:23] E6 candidate picked up. And so I threw my package in the next year that it came up and was actually
[00:59:30] selected first out of the whole stable of people that were selected that year ahead of like five or six
[00:59:34] other chiefs who ended up getting picked up for LDO. But for me, I'm looking at I'm like, I want to stay
[00:59:40] in and I want to have an impact. This is the only way that I can do it. So that's why I submitted my
[00:59:45] officer package. It was never any burning desire of mine from like years before that. It was just
[00:59:50] that I need to do something to keep moving and that was my that was my route to do it.
[00:59:55] Did you when you were, so you get wounded, right? And obviously you could have said at that point,
[01:00:02] hey, you know what, I'm done. You know, when you look at the various reasons that a person could
[01:00:08] choose from, why you said like, you know what, I'm not done. Because friends, you know,
[01:00:13] other guys that we both know that I've talked to, they have, you know, various reasons. Some of them
[01:00:17] are straight up vengeance. Like, oh, I'm going to go back and I'm going to get after it. These
[01:00:23] people are going to pay. Some of them are like, hey, for myself, you know, kind of like what you were saying
[01:00:28] like, I feel like I, I can't do it. I'm supposed to do so. I want to prove that I can go back and do it.
[01:00:34] What was like the driving reason for you? If you had, if you had to pick one, maybe it's just all
[01:00:38] those things, which is perfectly acceptable answer to it. I mean, vengeance is certainly a part of
[01:00:42] it, right? Like, oh, I dare you. I'm the only one who gets to do that to people. You know,
[01:00:49] yeah, what a crazy, crazy thing to think like that. But you kind of do like you think you're
[01:00:53] invincible, right? So I needed to prove to myself that I could still do the job that I wanted to do.
[01:00:59] I was pissed about it. And I was at a point in my life where I was still very tied to what the job
[01:01:09] meant. I derived so much of my personality and who I was from that job, because it was all that I had
[01:01:16] focused on for the vast majority of my life at that point that I didn't, I didn't know who I would be
[01:01:23] without that. So it was a combination of all of those things that just kind of kept driving me
[01:01:29] towards going back. And there was, I mean, there was never a second hesitation. I like, I knew
[01:01:34] I was going to not stop. I just didn't know that the road, the road, which I was going to take to
[01:01:40] not stop. You know, it's weird to you as an, and I, you know, for guys that like you and I that are
[01:01:44] full on institutionalized in the military, it's almost like, when I was in, I didn't understand
[01:01:54] other options. But it wasn't like, well, I could do this. Like right now we can sit back, you know,
[01:01:59] Andy, you could have gotten out back then. You should have gone into it. It's so clear to see that now.
[01:02:03] But when you're in, you're just, no, no, well, if you can't do this, well, then there's nothing
[01:02:07] else that you actually can do. This is the only option in the world. And if we're being totally honest,
[01:02:12] a lot of that is by design. I'm sure it is. The military and especially the seal teams,
[01:02:18] what do we do to our buddies who want to get out? You know, like, I am thinking about getting out.
[01:02:22] I fuck you, Twitter, Twitter. I mean, like, where, I mean, where the, I did 20 years,
[01:02:28] one of my buddies is like, I said, hey, man, yeah, I'm, like, at the 18 year mark, I told one
[01:02:33] of my close friends, I'm like, yeah, man, I'm, I'm going to retire at 20. Been like,
[01:02:36] Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. But I think about the training from day one. It's
[01:02:41] about the guy to your left and right. And then you get back from admission. You take care of the team
[01:02:45] gear first. The last thing you do is you take care of yourself. So where you are the bottom of the
[01:02:50] priority list. The bottom of the priority list. Life is the bottom of the priority list. And that
[01:02:56] has secondary and tertiary effects when it comes to understanding what you can do or options that
[01:03:01] you would have outside of the military. I'm not saying they do it by a design, but the system that we
[01:03:05] come from naturally puts on a set of blinders, which I think is essential to make us as effective
[01:03:12] as we are. You're right. I think I think it is a complete secondary effect. It's not like there's some
[01:03:16] evil training person in the sky that's going, okay, the way we can get these guys to stay in.
[01:03:21] It's due to snow. The way that the seal team says evolved to be the best we can be in combat
[01:03:26] is to make this thing your number one priority, which I say that all the time, I got asked this
[01:03:30] the other day I was doing a working with a company and some guys asked me, how did you do your
[01:03:36] work life balance when you're in the seal teams? And I'm like, this isn't a answer. I shouldn't be
[01:03:40] giving. I'm not authorized. The only, you know what you do, you marry an awesome girl. And then you
[01:03:45] focus on your job. That's what I did. I married an awesome girl and I focused on my job. And my wife
[01:03:50] knew she knew. It wasn't like I covered up and said, no, no, babe, you're my number one priority. It was like,
[01:03:55] no, no, no, no, the teams. And then the teams and then the teams, then everything, then like
[01:04:02] you do and then everything else and then you're you're down here. That's the way it is and I'm not
[01:04:05] trying to be an asshole. That's the reality of the situation. And that's why, yeah, that's why
[01:04:13] another reason why when guys get wounded and they go, yeah, well, what else are you going to do?
[01:04:18] Yeah. So you get to team three. So what was your position when you? Because so by the way,
[01:04:27] so just so people understand this LDO thing, which by the way, I don't know if you know this, but it's
[01:04:31] completely gone. It's the other show to down. They shut it down. Yeah. It's one of the, if not the only
[01:04:36] way to get commissioned without a college degree. Right. I'm working on a high school diploma
[01:04:40] people public school education, barely Santa Cruz. It, but you showed up and like to this day right
[01:04:48] at this moment in time and I was quote unquote running the training, I have no idea what your job
[01:04:54] actually was. How awesome is that? That is pretty awesome. Well done. But you know, I know I could
[01:04:59] tell you exactly what rolled you for filled, you know, as a leader, but I don't know where you would
[01:05:04] have broken out on an orc chart. Well, you're actually a general officer for a task unit for the
[01:05:08] Seal team three in general. I was you were running an orc machine gun during work up because
[01:05:15] they would have failed their ORE. Okay. I mean the platoons would count or like, you know,
[01:05:22] the SEA would be like, hey, we failed in warfare where you come out to Nalum with us for the ORE.
[01:05:28] Isn't absolutely all come out in swing blanks. I mean, for one like I have, I have, I never
[01:05:37] wanted a desktop. I loved best job in the Seal teams and you know this is an E5 shooter. Absolutely.
[01:05:43] What I my first combat deployment, my responsibility was a sledgehammer and I moved up to Huli
[01:05:48] and then I moved to a shotgun and then I could do whatever I wanted to do and it was the best job in
[01:05:52] the world in like that's all I wanted to do. So although I was an officer, you get to be, by the way,
[01:05:58] you get to be a master with us like so or a master with a Huligan to it. You just become,
[01:06:06] it's your life, precise, efficient. And so the, you know, like I put my officer package in,
[01:06:12] but let's say like 20% of me was like, you know what, this is just a means to it and I'm going to
[01:06:17] figure out a way to get back on the battlefield because LDOs are not supposed to be tactical leaders
[01:06:22] at all. You're a line officer, but I should have never been, well, I should have never been by the
[01:06:28] letter of the law of the LDO manual in a tactical leadership position, which I eventually worked
[01:06:34] on my way to not by any kind of design. But I went to team three, it's a trading el, and, you know,
[01:06:42] they're getting ready to send people to Afghanistan and no one's ever said foot there. And, you know,
[01:06:48] this, the skipper wanted to send me there and then the troop commander had a great relationship with
[01:06:55] and they were short and officer here and there so I'd like, oh, maybe I'll just go out to sink
[01:06:59] my island for a little bit. No, maybe I'll get on the roof and throw some grenades in the window. It's hard
[01:07:03] to say what I'm going to do. And so I just kind of started going out there again and then like,
[01:07:08] when I went out to Nylon, when they won the troop failed their land warfri, when I went out with them
[01:07:12] and tried just to try to go and do smart stuff, they got them out to release some, give the leadership
[01:07:16] some distance space. Yeah, and it was awesome. I mean, it's awesome when guys that were experienced
[01:07:20] would come through like yourself, you're just so good to have guys like you coming through, especially
[01:07:25] because you were super experienced, really good tactically and super humble. It wasn't like you
[01:07:30] were out there like, no, you were like, oh, this is awesome training. Oh, yeah, this, hey, we need to do this.
[01:07:35] It was just, it was just so good for the troop to see that type of leadership out there.
[01:07:39] Plus, I like offensive maneuvers. And what I'm telling guys to move forward, they're like,
[01:07:44] oh, we can do that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. We can do that. And you should. And then just,
[01:07:50] they weren't because that, you know, you get a junior officer in a community full of eight types and most
[01:07:56] of the people that work for them have more experience than them. There has to be a call because
[01:08:02] they, we eat our own because they're the most voracious community ever. So they're afraid to make
[01:08:08] an offensive call when they should make an offensive call. Like, ever, I've heard you say before,
[01:08:11] and I know we have the same position, like the default move should be aggressive, drive forward,
[01:08:16] not away. Like, put your enemy on their heels. You don't need to be on your heels at all.
[01:08:20] Like, take their space in time away to make a decision, shorten their, shorten your
[01:08:24] root aloup and get in the middle of their, and just start wreaking havoc. But you got to have, again,
[01:08:29] time in the saddle to be comfortable making those calls. And a lot of it, I noticed was pattern
[01:08:34] recognition. Like, oh, I've seen this. Okay. Hi, grounds over there. Sure, let's get some guys over there.
[01:08:38] Hey, they're going to come around this building. Don't ask, don't, don't ask me not just kill
[01:08:42] or just set the security. Just go over there. Please, like, you can see it's pattern recognition
[01:08:46] from time in the saddle. And because I was exposed, awesome people throughout my career. And I
[01:08:50] watched them. And I wrote down what they did. And I just have always tried to be a sponge. You
[01:08:55] have to be a sponge and suck up knowledge. And so then you, you do another deployment. And you do
[01:09:01] end up in a leadership position. Yeah. Which again, good job. You said it was, which did you say was
[01:09:06] unintended or something like that? It was relatively unintended. Relatively. I like, okay,
[01:09:10] you've quantified it now, baby, because I was going to have to call bullshit on you. You know,
[01:09:16] uh, so I went through the last, you know, the troop commander from that troop was like, hey,
[01:09:21] we're, you're going to come over. I was supposed to be the opso on that deployment at a firebase
[01:09:26] that was in between the two platoons. One of the officers was having a kid. He wanted to stay back
[01:09:32] for about the first month, month and a half. And so they had no A, O, I see. I'm a minted
[01:09:37] O, one at this point, freshy butter bar. One of my favorite things to do, totally in the side
[01:09:42] was to put my candies on with my butter bars and I'd go to the op smetings over at group.
[01:09:46] Yeah. And I would let like E6 as an E7, so like talked to me a little bit. I was, I mean,
[01:09:51] I look relatively young and they're like, you know, later on. Once you got some time. And these
[01:09:57] these guys are actually guys that you would probably, or in many cases, had been in the teams longer
[01:10:02] than. Oh, for sure. Yeah. 100% and I'd be like, oh, tell me more. And like, and then I'd catch
[01:10:07] them later on in my cookies and they're like, oh, I got it. I had some fun as a butter bar as well.
[01:10:12] I got it. I mean, I just like, oh, that's awesome. Thank you so much for the guy. And so I
[01:10:17] hope one day I know as much as you do. And I just like, yeah, I told, I told the, I told the chief
[01:10:23] a senior chief actually that was kind of calling me out like butter bar and at when I was at
[01:10:28] team two. And I was telling him in front of my platoons there and they all, they all knew me. And I
[01:10:33] go, well, you know, you know, senior, you got to understand, and since run the Navy, and he, he is,
[01:10:40] he went the thick ways. You can see him turning red instantaneously into orbit. Yeah,
[01:10:44] instantaneously into orbit. He actually said, you know, you guys need to straighten this
[01:10:47] into now. And I said, hey, why don't you do it? I'll meet you out the milvans. Let's call it new.
[01:10:51] And I'll be out there warming up. You'll be had the buyers. So, oh, that was so good.
[01:10:58] Yeah. So, you know, the, the true commander was like, hey, do the last month, the training with
[01:11:02] which was the San Commandy block. So, went out there with the San Commandy block. The
[01:11:07] skipper was like, hey, go over there as the opso, but we're going to slide you out with this
[01:11:10] platoon. We're having some potential leadership issues with the OIC.
[01:11:16] Yeah. And man that I know you're familiar with. Because we experienced them largely together.
[01:11:23] And I think I think, and this is me speaking for why I think he did that I think he did me.
[01:11:28] He put me out there as a, as a safety mechanism. I don't know. I don't think he had anything else
[01:11:34] to do. So, I went out there and he ended up being relieved and then the skipper. I mean,
[01:11:42] I was an O1 wearing O3 and O4 when Scott wasn't paying attention because I would just take his
[01:11:48] color devices off and without whatever. Something like I'm going to know three either. So, I would
[01:11:51] just put on whatever color device. I could get my hands on. And good thing there's no kernel bars available.
[01:11:57] I didn't wear it. I could find some general stores that had been rocking those things. And
[01:12:02] I mean, it was one of the best deployments of all the stuff that I did while I was in.
[01:12:09] I think what I was the proudest of is a lot of the guys I deployed with for people that I had put
[01:12:13] through, but to see them overseas on their first deployment. And the only word for it is
[01:12:21] is afraid to do something because of the consequences. You know, there's, as you know, there's a lot
[01:12:26] of oversight. If you pull the trigger on somebody, you had better be able to articulate why you did that.
[01:12:33] You need to be able to conduct yourself over the radio. You have to be able to paint the picture.
[01:12:36] There's a correct way to brief. There's the ways that you got to play, you know,
[01:12:41] mental judo, you know, and interacting with people and to see these young guys who had no experience
[01:12:49] and afraid to, afraid to not probably the best word, but has it tended to make decisions. And then
[01:12:56] at the end of the deployment, just sharp teeth out, knowing what they need to do and I can just sit back.
[01:13:04] And it's not, and again, that that's a lot of that is them getting that experience. But I was just
[01:13:08] glad that I was able to be there to provide that buffer because I wasn't going to let anything happen.
[01:13:14] Well, I was out there to the best of my ability. Like, I always picked the most dangerous place to be.
[01:13:19] I always wanted to be in the position where there's going to be a decision to be made.
[01:13:23] Like, that's just the way that I want to be. Like, where's the most dangerous place to be?
[01:13:27] Where's the most optimal place to be? Put me in coach. I'm going to be right here.
[01:13:31] And then to try to teach other people to do that exact same thing and then to step back,
[01:13:36] that to me is probably what I'm the most proud of as the growth of the people that I was there with.
[01:13:41] You know, that you talk about that mental judo thing, which, again, this is one that's going to be hard
[01:13:46] for civilians to understand how much, you know, it's like a bureaucratic force that exists in
[01:13:53] the military and really you have to be, you have to be able to to navigate through that.
[01:14:03] And that was, that was the thing for me that I always look back and I go, I wish I would have
[01:14:09] done a better job of teaching that to guys because I had no problem teaching them the tactical side of
[01:14:14] things. And then if I really was close with someone or I really spent some time with them,
[01:14:18] I'd be able to get through the rest of it and say, like, okay, by the way, this is how you have to
[01:14:21] do this. This is how you have to walk this line. This is what you have to say in these situations
[01:14:25] and they'd be great. But some guys would catch like, some guys would catch the the surface
[01:14:32] jocco, right? Just like the surface jocco, which is like, kero, right? Which is, which is awesome,
[01:14:38] right? That's absolutely part of part of it, right? But guys that only caught the surface jocco,
[01:14:44] sometimes they get caught up later because they'd say, you know, all this guy was a, this guy was
[01:14:49] you know, a risk of earth. Like, well, you know, with years which got to do and you got to
[01:14:52] get on the risk of earth. So this guy's knee going over the years, which got to do and he's got to handle them. So
[01:14:56] that's something that when I had the opportunity at the time, but that thing, the other thing about it
[01:15:01] is there's no there's no training for that. That's just, you know, it's just going to bring us
[01:15:07] at all. Like, that is, there is no one that says, and it's hard even simulate because that means
[01:15:12] you got to stimulate some other human beings, rank and characteristics and personality. That might
[01:15:16] change half way through your deployment. That might change halfway through your briefing.
[01:15:19] You know, you can brief a guy that's all in a good mood and all of a sudden he turns because
[01:15:23] he solves you said something that you've got to learn how to deal with that and that political
[01:15:27] side of that's what it is. Basically, it's political and its relationships building those things up.
[01:15:31] That is so key. And once you get into the leadership position, I hate to say this. I hate to say
[01:15:39] once you're in the leadership position, that is at least as important as what you're going to do
[01:15:46] tactically. I mean, the seal teams have made their mark, kinetically, but we get our go-no-go off of
[01:15:54] power point. Absolutely. I mean, I've had briefs come back because the helicopter was facing the wrong
[01:16:01] way on the insertion slide. I've almost gotten the fist fights. I'm like, listen, it's hell
[01:16:07] vettica 12. Not 11. We're not doing times new Roman shit now. All right. You bad new bad
[01:16:14] house. Get out of my face with that time's new Roman son. The battle space commander said it's
[01:16:18] hell vettica. Bold sometimes only on the ex-field slide. But like, I mean, it's insane. Like we have,
[01:16:24] we can bring some of the most amazing combat power to bear, but only if the leadership can articulate
[01:16:31] and navigate what the battle space owner wants. Because we don't make sense to a lot of people
[01:16:37] who don't come from our background and you've got to learn to read what they're saying and speak
[01:16:41] their language and then you just get them a newver. I mean, that's the biggest thing is you got
[01:16:46] a maneuver and then then you can be so wildly effective. It doesn't matter how good you are,
[01:16:50] tactically. If you can't get outside of the wire, I mean, and it's truly if that tells people
[01:16:55] this all the time, you want to shut down the seal teams, kill Microsoft Office. We're done.
[01:17:02] We're done. Yeah, the whole military is actually very, you know. It is a bureaucracy. You said it's
[01:17:08] kind of a bureaucracy. It is the biggest, I mean, it's 100% bureaucratic. I mean, it's amazing.
[01:17:14] And as an E5, you're like, I just want to go jam my mags up and then make them empty. And
[01:17:19] you're like, yeah, that's awesome. I'm going to be up for 12 hours looking for the appropriate
[01:17:23] helicopter icon. And I may get sassy and have it move in with helicopter noise. It depends.
[01:17:29] Yeah. And then you got to be able to brief it, right? Because then there's a whole other skill. Like,
[01:17:33] I don't know how many times you have to go and not only present the brief that like talked to the
[01:17:37] guy who's going to say yes or no and develop that relationship. Yeah. You're selling your operation.
[01:17:42] Many are pretty selling your operation. Until you get that relationship, we're there coming to
[01:17:46] you and saying this is a, which is the best possible case. And I was blessed to end up in that situation
[01:17:52] where it was just a total mind-melde of, hey, whatever you guys want to do, what can you do here?
[01:17:58] Can you, that's, that's when you, that's when you just are loving life and it doesn't get any better than that.
[01:18:04] Good times with power point. Oh my god. So you got, you get to control key in the arrow. It only
[01:18:10] moves a little bit. Yeah, if you're need to move that icon, just to get it centered. I know
[01:18:17] so much about power point that I could never forget if I wanted to. So horrible. You, so that was
[01:18:23] it. That was an awesome deployment though. It was awesome for different reasons. I mean, don't
[01:18:27] give me wrong. I was as an O1. I was carrying generally my 300 one back and two travel
[01:18:32] missiles to high ground positions and coming back with them all empty. The majority of the time.
[01:18:37] So I got to have a, so yes, that does go in the awesome deployment box. Yeah. So I got to have a
[01:18:41] little bit of what we'll call a hoot. And then, but again, professionally developing for me too,
[01:18:47] because I didn't have any experience being an OPSO for a task unit. And you want to talk about
[01:18:52] relationships stuff, the sometimes, you know, the base that we were on, I just developed a relationship
[01:18:56] with their entry or S3. And in and up, I was selling myself. We had a great relationship. I could
[01:19:02] come to him the day before, but like, hey, we're looking to do a naces like yep, no problem. Let me
[01:19:05] know, it's line up a cure. And it just, it's so much pulling the trigger easy. All the stuff you
[01:19:12] got to do to get to that point is so hard. And it just doesn't make the movies because it's boring.
[01:19:17] Yeah, no, there's there will literally never be a movie or a book about that crap. Why can't
[01:19:23] have a movie about a 72 hour planning cycle? No, or sin. Where's this 3 meter imagery? God damn it,
[01:19:28] this is five. I heard one of my puttune commanders, not late. The other dead Delta puttune commander was
[01:19:33] telling someone. And he goes, you know, someone was like, oh, yeah, you guys got to me. And he said,
[01:19:38] jaw, I watched Jocco literally beat his head up against the wall for every single operation that we
[01:19:43] did. I was like, don't damn. And that wasn't the conventional side. Yeah, I was beaten up against.
[01:19:51] There was, you know, there's our chain of command, which is very, which can be very micro focused on
[01:19:57] little things from time to time occasionally. You get the broad spectrum of leadership inside of the
[01:20:03] teams, not all of it is good. But you, whichever, whichever game you got to play, that's what you
[01:20:08] got to play. And that's exactly what I did. And that's, you know, that's why I always say that
[01:20:12] had the same relationship with every ball set I'd ever have. Yeah, no matter who they were,
[01:20:16] what, how crazy they were, or how awesome they were. They trusted me. And they're going to
[01:20:20] give me what I needed to do my job. Yep. So that was your last deployment then. It was.
[01:20:24] And then you went to trade at trade at and I was gone. Uh, did you get there? Check. I got there
[01:20:30] in August of 2010. Yep. I was, well, I, I think the last time I literally saw you before today was in
[01:20:36] the hallway right by your old office. You were walking out and I was coming back from deployment. We
[01:20:40] like, I was up there. Yeah, later. Yeah. So like five years ago, that's not what you do.
[01:20:45] Actually seven years ago. What did you do that? Was the opposite? Okay. I think, I mean,
[01:20:49] did you get to go out at all? I didn't do anything. I augmented the leap frogs. Um,
[01:20:54] I'm not, I don't do good when I come. I mean, I did my job, but like, I'm not a paperwork,
[01:21:01] you know, ninja and all. And nor is there really, it's not really an opso much like the
[01:21:07] reddit guy is not the CEO. He's the OIC. So a lot of those positions. There's redundancy.
[01:21:12] There was a training warrant. Yeah. You know, it like there was, also it's fairly repetitive. So
[01:21:17] there's not like I'm at a team with the first time you're going to go through this and out to
[01:21:20] everything. You get through two or three cycles and it's like, okay, you could put this thing on autopilot.
[01:21:24] It's the same thing every three, six months, whatever it is. So I got medically retired. I was going to
[01:21:31] just get out of the military. I came back from that deployment and I was talking to the officer
[01:21:37] detailer about what I would need to do to continue my career. And she said, well, you know,
[01:21:43] since you haven't done your AOC or your OIC tour, we're going to need you to do is to back the back
[01:21:48] of the AOC OIC. Then you're going to do your, you know, your disassociated tour. I'm like,
[01:21:53] we can stop right now. Like my wife's not going to tolerate that. Like I think she's at the
[01:21:58] vast limit. I was at the limit. My body, like my ankle, I almost had to medit back my self out a
[01:22:03] couple of times, like roll my ankle extremely bad on an offset patrol in, like laying on
[01:22:10] target with my foot up in the air. It was just, I was, I recognized it like my time was over.
[01:22:15] So I researched what it would take for me to stay in and continue and it was not tentable. So
[01:22:20] I was just going to get out of the military and I was five days from my separation date and went
[01:22:25] to go get my physical and the doc is like, no, I'm not signing this right on. Good for him.
[01:22:31] They extended me a year. I mean, I had to go. I went out to the night go out and Bethesda did that
[01:22:37] as far as the kind of the horse power for the ride up. Got the whole full assessment done and
[01:22:41] up getting medically retired, which was a huge benefit to myself. All thanks to that doc who was like,
[01:22:46] no, I'm not, I'm not going to sign this. So yeah, that is awesome. And there's plenty of team
[01:22:51] guys that, you know, spend their entire career. I'm not going to the doctor. I'm not going to
[01:22:56] do that. And that's another thing that gets conditioned into you going through basic seal training,
[01:22:59] which is don't go to medical no matter what. I was in the same way. Even after getting shot,
[01:23:02] my medical record was thin. And you know, I was going through the questionnaire and the interview
[01:23:07] at the actual discharge physical and he's like, what? Like you couldn't find any of the documentation.
[01:23:12] And then I left Nike with like 300 pages. And if you read that thing, it's like this guy will never,
[01:23:17] I should be in a wheelchair right now with a straw. Like you read that thing. I'm like, oh my gosh.
[01:23:23] And then you know, get away. It's like the bureaucracy submitted a package to the Med Board in six
[01:23:28] months later. They're like, okay, you're out. And that was it. That was it. No retirement ceremony.
[01:23:33] I just was like, hey, I went and talked to the OSC. I was like, hey, it's almost lunch time.
[01:23:40] I'm going to leave now. And I'm never going to come back. How many years was that for you?
[01:23:46] One month shot had 17. Yeah. And so I literally went in. I was like, hey, it's almost lunch.
[01:23:50] I'm leaving. I'm not going to come back. And it's like, all right, cool. See you later.
[01:23:54] I had some terminal leave saved up at like 90 days. Where have I just gone? Never went back in.
[01:23:58] I think I went and got my DD2 14 or like my retirement ID card like a year later.
[01:24:03] Yeah. Just never went back. That's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. How you do that time?
[01:24:09] And then it's over like that. In a blink of an eye. I remember that. I was all big.
[01:24:14] The retirement ceremony did that. Came back. All my rest of my gear, which was all packed up in my
[01:24:20] drawing cage went up, grabbed it, pulled them back through it in the back of my van,
[01:24:23] grabbed out the gate. That was it. Yep. No more. Yeah. I just gone. That's it. Done. Never do.
[01:24:28] Never to be back. 20 years done. Yep. It's bizarre. So then you get into the afterlife. Indeed.
[01:24:38] Yeah. And what's that been? Like so what year did you, what year was that? That you retired.
[01:24:42] I got retired the last day of June 2013. Okay. So I'm coming up on this year. Before years.
[01:24:48] Uh, I had fortunately I was kind of double dipping on weekends. I had a job that I was doing on the
[01:24:54] weekend. So I transitioned to doing that full time. And I dabbled in a lot of stuff. I mean, I got
[01:25:00] the 3500 hours of flight time. I've typed rated in a Gulf Stream jet, a citation 525 jet,
[01:25:06] which gives me like five other jets. I could fly. I did. When did you rack up all those hours?
[01:25:12] What I do on my weekends is not. No. The business of the Navy. No.
[01:25:17] I flew hard. I mean, I was just flying a ton. I got my pilot's license on my own when I was in.
[01:25:23] And then all the rest of the licenses came in the two to three years after after I was in.
[01:25:28] But I was just was cranking out hours. I had a company that I was working for that was paying for
[01:25:32] all the training. So I could fly as much as I wanted to. So I dove into the bucket, both feet.
[01:25:38] I did charter flying for a bit. I mean, I was managing licensing and sponsorship deals for an organization.
[01:25:44] And it just everything kind of just morphed. I left that organization.
[01:25:50] Got back into teaching military guys a little bit on the jump side of the house.
[01:25:54] I've been passionate about jumping ever since the first jump that I did.
[01:25:57] How many jumps do you ever know? Just over 6,000.
[01:26:00] Which seems like a lot. Yeah. The tilley guys that have 29,000. Yeah.
[01:26:04] I jumped at Scott F. San Diego all the time. And if you work in the sport for any period of time,
[01:26:08] you'll be at 10, 15, 20,000. It's not, it's not uncommon. But in the military,
[01:26:13] it's just, that's the school bus to get to work. So it's an ancillary skill set at best. So I couldn't
[01:26:17] pursue it until I got out. But when I got, it was hard for me. When I got out, if I'm being honest,
[01:26:25] I got to a point where I couldn't watch the news anymore. You know, 2013,
[01:26:29] all the ground in Iraq that was sweat and blood and tears. If people that we know to gain
[01:26:36] was being eroded. And I described it like watching the tide go out and inch it at time until all
[01:26:41] the sudden it's gone. And I used to make the news. And now I'm sitting here on the couch watching it.
[01:26:45] And I had to turn it off and I really struggled with finding something that I thought mattered.
[01:26:51] And it's, it was tough for me. I didn't think a lot about what I was going to do when I was out
[01:26:55] when I was in for reasons that we kind of already talked about. It's a natural path that you take when
[01:27:00] you're in. But it took me like a year and a half to really get my head on straight and figure out
[01:27:06] what it is that I want to do. I still don't even know how I'm going to do it. But I know that I want
[01:27:12] to make a difference. I want to do, I want to make this country a better place than it is right now.
[01:27:18] I want to take the awesome stuff that I was exposed to when I was in the teams,
[01:27:22] from the people that I was fortunate to be surrounded by and make people better with that information.
[01:27:28] How I'm going to do that? I don't know. But that's kind of the circular path that I'm on,
[01:27:32] like half of my year. The other half I just dress up in a squirrel suit and jump out of
[01:27:37] my airplanes and off of cliffs. What is nice? It doesn't suck. I'm not going to do it forever,
[01:27:44] though. I mean, I look at it as something that's enriching for me and empowering for me. But
[01:27:50] there's a timeline for how long I could do it. I mean, I'm a bad landing away from not being able
[01:27:55] to jump anymore. And I take it very seriously. I have a very structured training protocol. I don't
[01:28:00] let myself get out of currency, whether it be jumping or packing parachutes or,
[01:28:04] I mean, I treat it like a military operation. It doesn't make it safer for me. But I try to pay
[01:28:09] attention more than anybody else who is around me and my goal is to never be surprised. Like,
[01:28:14] I don't ever, I want to understand what's coming and I don't like, and it happens occasionally.
[01:28:19] You'll jump off of a cliff or you're jumping out of an airplane or something will happen that
[01:28:24] surprises you and I try to avoid that at all costs. Because I find that that's when the
[01:28:28] catastrophic stuff can occur. But it's, uh, you got to find the next step. I mean, you and I both know
[01:28:34] people who derive their entire identity from what they used to do and it's tough to sit back and
[01:28:42] watch them not be able to depart from that because it becomes, it's self destructive.
[01:28:48] Yeah, because it doesn't last forever. It can't last forever. I mean, you're renting your
[01:28:52] trident. It's not yours. You're at best. You can move the marker in the seal teams, hopefully in the
[01:28:59] right direction. Maybe leave a little bit of legacy if you did, you know, the legacy that you should
[01:29:04] leave is making it better than when you got there. But that's the best you can do and then you
[01:29:09] got to put it away. Even if you do 20 years with the average lifespan of an American, you got some
[01:29:15] time left and the military retirement check. It's not massive. So you're going to need another J.O.B.
[01:29:23] But what I needed, I needed a purpose. And that's where I started doing, you know, fundraising for the
[01:29:27] seal foundation. That to me was huge teaching the military guys, which kind of felt like I had
[01:29:34] not a foot in the fight, but I had some impact again and just trying to shorten their learning curve.
[01:29:39] Because they expect these guys to know so much stuff. Yeah. But if you could just shorten their learning
[01:29:43] curve and give them a little bit of space to breathe, you know, to take the stress off.
[01:29:47] And that's stuff's real. Yeah. Like that stuff is real. And when you when you impart that knowledge
[01:29:52] on young guys, it is real. When you make that learning curve shorter and steeper and faster,
[01:29:57] that is real. That has a real impact on those kids that go out there. And it's those little
[01:30:03] lessons that they learned. I mean, I still hear that from guys that come back and they said,
[01:30:07] yep. Yeah. We did this. You know, cover move. You know, I'm like, yes, like I'm so happy to hear that.
[01:30:14] Because I know it's kind of like the early days of J.O. in the fact that we didn't really in the
[01:30:20] early days of J.J.O. that there wasn't as much knowledge as there is now. And now the first three days
[01:30:28] you go to J.J.O. you're going to learn about underhooks, you're going to learn about body position,
[01:30:32] you're going to learn about hip movement. I didn't learn no one taught me that stuff. Back back
[01:30:37] the day. No one taught you that stuff. You just had to figure it out. And if somebody teaches it to you,
[01:30:43] it's like you take a quantum leap. Yeah. And it's the same thing with the guys that are in the military.
[01:30:49] And they can get that quantum leap just by saying, oh, here's a perspective of leadership that
[01:30:54] it took me, Jack asked Jaco, you know, 14 years and screwing up a bunch of things to go, oh,
[01:31:00] this is what you need to do in these situations. So to be able to say, look, you don't need to be
[01:31:04] the jackass that I was. All you need to do is know this little bit tidbit right here in this whole
[01:31:08] thing over here. Yeah. And that definitely has a huge impact on those guys. And it's it is awesome to
[01:31:12] feel that. Yeah. And it makes them better to learn in the other stuff because they're less stressed out.
[01:31:16] They have a better understanding. And it's just, and at the 90% of the stuff I teach them, like listen,
[01:31:22] it's pattern recognition. I saw this so many times that I did this and it defeated that. So just
[01:31:26] do this. Just trust me and do this. And you'll be better. And then they do and they're like, oh, wow,
[01:31:31] that was awesome. Like, yeah, I know. That's what I told you. How about the, uh, you
[01:31:37] talk about the foundation? Yeah. What are you doing to found tell us a little bit about the
[01:31:40] foundation and how if people want to support the foundation, what's the best way to get that done?
[01:31:44] Yeah. Uh, so obviously, there, I think they're, I think they're last at I heard there's 40,000
[01:31:49] service-based organizations that help people prefer for real to the military. So there's a variety of choices.
[01:31:55] And if you're from an army family, awesome, go support an army charity, right? I obviously have a
[01:32:00] close DNA tie to seals. So, uh, a buddy of mine recommended, uh, trying some stuff skydiving.
[01:32:11] And the skydiving world to try to drive attention to fundraise for the seal foundation. Because just
[01:32:17] like, I've never had, I think, a unique thought in my entire life. I swear that every idea that
[01:32:21] we're had came from somebody else was like this one was his. But to me, that was the link to finding
[01:32:26] a purpose again because I realized that, okay, my, my day is putting my toes on the line or over,
[01:32:32] but there will always be people with their toes on the line. And the next best step is, let's
[01:32:36] create a buffer for the families to step in. Because I mean, you've seen it, it's a, I, the knock on the door
[01:32:43] is a tornado wrapped inside of a tsunami with a hurricane at the same time. And it is destructive.
[01:32:49] So let's try to do something that helps the families, uh, and that's what the seal foundation does.
[01:32:54] Everything from educational support to legacy preservation, uh, and everything in between. I mean,
[01:33:00] you can go, the Navy seal foundation has an awesome website. And there's people who do go fun
[01:33:06] me is, which is what I did or go to the foundation and donate directly because I mean,
[01:33:10] that there, you can look at their rating as well, too. It's like 96 cents at every book goes to
[01:33:15] what they espouse it's going to go to. It's awesome. Like, it's a great foundation.
[01:33:19] Uh, yeah, do some research on it, get involved and skip a latte one day, you know, and donate five bucks.
[01:33:27] And it goes to, it goes to a good, it goes to a good cause. I've been into some houses where, you know,
[01:33:33] kids are getting raised by a memory of a father and a picture over a fireplace and no money will ever
[01:33:38] replace that, but it maybe will make their life a little bit easier. They're not about that. What was the,
[01:33:44] what was the record you were going after? Ah, yes, the completely arbitrary distance,
[01:33:49] lateral measurement of distance in a wing suit. So I, that was the idea where all the good ideas
[01:33:57] start, which was in the bar over cocktail. You know, buddy, it was like, hey, man, you should go
[01:34:01] try to set a world record in your wing suit. I'm like, well, I don't even own one yet. So what are you
[01:34:05] talking about? I'll do it, of course, but like, what's the record? I mean, I've been to what is it?
[01:34:09] Yeah, what? I was like, I mean, yeah, obviously crush it. But what is it exactly again? And where do I get one of those?
[01:34:16] And it was trying to set the, for this distance, are far this distance, sorry. The far this distance
[01:34:23] flown in a wing suit. So I bought a wing suit and after jumping it for less than a year, which I don't
[01:34:32] recommend to anybody to do this ever. I got hooked up with a really good mentor to the guy who
[01:34:37] actually taught me how to pay his job. taught me how to fly the suit and we went up to Davis,
[01:34:42] California and I jumped out of a caravan at 36,500 feet, got into a lovely spin, which I didn't
[01:34:49] ever happen before. So that was a great experience of his new for everybody. And got out of it and
[01:34:54] then just flew the suit as far as I could and ended up breaking two world records one for the
[01:34:59] distance that you fly before opening your parachute. And then the second one is they tacked on the
[01:35:03] distance from when you open your parachute to when you touch the ground. So you keep flying forward.
[01:35:08] Yeah, and I had an on-heading opening. So it just opened up in that direction and I was exhausted.
[01:35:12] So I just laid there like a limp piece of meat and augured into the ground into a farmer's field,
[01:35:18] because I had no, I had like my landing zone was earth. I couldn't see the airport that I was,
[01:35:24] I had some visual indicators. Or was it like that, farwards? 18.25 miles. So I got out of this bird
[01:35:31] and I passed. Did you really get into a spin when you came out? Oh yeah. What happened? Just nowhere?
[01:35:36] I'm just not really good at an ointment. And I didn't have the requisite skill or confidence to be
[01:35:41] attempting what I was attempting. But it was a challenge starting front of me and I was like,
[01:35:46] of course I'm going to do this. I had, I literally had not been jumping wing suits. I did
[01:35:50] that jump in August. I got my first wing suit in December of the year prior. It's not a, not recommended
[01:35:57] for people. So I got in the spin and I got out of it, but I got out of the plane. I, I knew where the
[01:36:02] airport was and I knew I was going to fly in that direction. But I passed the airport at over 10,000 feet
[01:36:08] in the air and then I was just looking at fields and data. So I just put my head down and was flying.
[01:36:13] I didn't have an elevator on me. It was awesome. There was so many things that were just,
[01:36:16] I was eyeballing it, calibrated before I went. I was like camera one, camera two, camera one.
[01:36:21] All right. But I just come back from the base jumping trip to Europe.
[01:36:25] I think goodness I had because I'm flying. I'm like, those trees are looking really big.
[01:36:30] Oh yeah. Those, those trees are looking really big. I'm going to pull, you know,
[01:36:34] moderately low opening altitude, flew straight into the dirt and yeah, people like,
[01:36:39] oh, because it's been broken since then. A Marine did and people like, oh, you're going to go
[01:36:43] for it again. But no, never, never, never. Why? I got into the spin because the plane, the, the
[01:36:51] Sessner 206, the caravan, is not designed to be that high. Like it had a supercharged engine,
[01:36:57] a different propeller system. Everything was stripped out of there except for the huge oxygen
[01:37:01] bottle. It was just the pilot, the oxygen tech and me. And, you know, normally when you're
[01:37:06] skydiving, they'll pull back on the throttle to slow down. You know, they call it, given you a cut,
[01:37:11] a cut of the airspeed. Well, if he would have done that at that altitude, we'd have fallen out of the
[01:37:15] sky. So he's like, I just fist on the throttle with his foot on the dash, pulling back. And that
[01:37:21] opened the door and I stuck my head out. I was like, oh, no. Oh, no. I'm jumping like the biggest wingsuit
[01:37:28] on the market. And they're like their combination of a prom dress and a straight jacket. And I
[01:37:35] got out of the plane and it just inflated and, oh my god, boy, here we go. That's good times right there.
[01:37:44] Yeah, come on, atcha full speed. But you, you raised some money for the, for the foundation. Yeah,
[01:37:49] it's like 150,000 bucks for the foundation. And, you know, from that, I developed a great
[01:37:54] relationship with them. The sea hill of the foundation is married to my first troop chief that I
[01:38:00] have when I was at the East Coast. So there's a great tie in and anytime I go like I will. Yeah.
[01:38:06] But so anytime that they call me though, like my default answer is yes. Like, of course, I'll
[01:38:11] help out anything that I can do. And I mean, honestly, like, I won't say that it saved me, but it
[01:38:15] helped, it helped me back on the road that I should have been to have a purpose like that.
[01:38:20] And then, I mean, I bet you, I, I, I, I, I hypothesized that for you working with organizations and
[01:38:27] leaders and seeing the light come on, makes you, you know, I mean, it, it, it gives you a purpose and
[01:38:31] life again to have part of those lessons. It's exactly the same thing for me. So one built to the
[01:38:35] other that kind of got my feet in the, in the pool of interface and with people like that. And
[01:38:40] I realized that it makes a difference and it's important. That's awesome. Well, it's been awesome
[01:38:46] to do, uh, hang out with you. Yeah. I appreciate it. Once every seven years we should do it. Yeah,
[01:38:51] seven years will be being, and speaking of purpose, that controls, we know you have one purpose,
[01:38:58] and that is to kind of inform anybody that might want to support this podcast, you know, on how they
[01:39:05] might be able to do that. Just to clarify, oh, oh, there we go. My purpose to inform is part of a
[01:39:13] creator purpose. Okay. Okay. Understood. I'm disloosed for now. I understand. When you jumped out with the
[01:39:19] wingsuit, yeah. And you went into the spin, did you think that that was that for you? No, I never think
[01:39:25] like that. Straight out every day. I would say somebody commented, because I said the other day on,
[01:39:30] I, I forget, I don't know if we had someone on the podcast, but I was saying that,
[01:39:34] like, when I'm flying in an aircraft in a commercial airliner, I think if this thing crashes,
[01:39:40] I'm going to live. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm going to grab this chair seat and
[01:39:44] I'm going to turn it into something. I'm going to throw it in the water that's going to break the
[01:39:48] surface tension. I'm going to live. What? No, it's a question. Yeah. Okay. I mean, like, I'm not saying
[01:39:53] that it was going to work out great for me, but I'm going to die missing my fingernails because I'm
[01:39:57] clawing my way to a victory. Like, it's that the thought never enters the mind, like, okay, I need to
[01:40:02] get up now because it's over. Yeah. Not that you have that much of a choice. Yeah. But you're still
[01:40:07] fight period. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd probably be the same way. You know,
[01:40:14] it's going to, you know, finally, anyway. Uh, let's talk about some support. What that's do it. Let's
[01:40:23] talk about on it. You know, on it. You heard it on it. I do. Yeah. Of course you have everyone has,
[01:40:27] there you go. You're good. Perhaps just check out on it. How do I need this? Okay. Right. I need it.
[01:40:33] Anyway, on it, uh, got some more real oil. So I'm good to go baseline. Um, on it is a, what do you
[01:40:43] call it? My sponsor. Supportor. Supportor. Yeah. So if you want to support, uh, this podcast and
[01:40:50] or yourself at the same time. And you're in to supplements. You work out a lot. Um, we recommend
[01:40:56] on it supplements. Take on it's supplements. It's the only one. The best one. Anyway,
[01:41:00] you're going 10% off on it.com slash.com. Let's say you get the 10% off. Anyway, yeah, let's
[01:41:08] go to an, uh, the way the last podcast. Yeah. As people noted, yeah, we had Colonel Reader on here,
[01:41:16] you know, a Vietnam veteran. And I pre-briefed Echo, I said, look, this guy's flying in. He got
[01:41:20] up at three o'clock in the morning. He's coming in here at six o'clock at night to do a three-hour
[01:41:24] podcast. He's been in a conference all day. When it comes to, you know, time to go through your
[01:41:29] stuff, go through it quickly. And people were said, hey, did you have Echo on a leash? And I said,
[01:41:34] we just pre-briefed. We're just respecting the Colonel's time. So I've get the feeling right now.
[01:41:39] We could be paying for that. Right. Yeah, metaphorically, I didn't have a leash for sure.
[01:41:44] Get out there by the next day. I'm excited. Usually, usually I tell a cool story, because it's not
[01:41:51] like, hey, take a cruel oil and then I don't take cruel oil, or I take it in and I'm like,
[01:41:55] whatever this doesn't work. It works. So during the week, I work out and I kind of talk about my
[01:42:03] experience positive or negative, but in this case, never negative, because it actually works. It's
[01:42:08] one of the only uh supplement companies that you know will work. Anyway, I'm not going to go into
[01:42:14] any stories. I only worked out a few times this week and it's all the same story. Why did you only
[01:42:19] work out a few times this week? Oh, there's um, things. Oh, you know. Okay. I worked out today.
[01:42:26] What? Okay. No, I'm just making sure it sounds like there might be some slack. No. Echo's world right now.
[01:42:31] Yeah. Yeah. Maybe maybe not. Even if I told you this story, be a redundant story.
[01:42:37] Okay. You know what I'm saying? Like my joints feel good. You know, people know that are
[01:42:42] already taking cruel oil. That's what happens. Anyway, if you like these supplements,
[01:42:48] if you don't actually, if you don't know about the supplements, get them, make your own evaluation.
[01:42:52] You know, God of listening to me anymore. Anyway, let's switch over to Amazon. Amazon click through.
[01:42:58] So how that works is if you want to support this podcast, before you do your Amazon shopping, go
[01:43:03] to jocopodcast.com. Click on the Amazon banner. Then do your shopping. Support.
[01:43:10] I made the sodium in the water analogy. You know, you know, when you, it's like, it's not just sodium.
[01:43:18] It's like potassium. It's like heavy metals. I think it's called you throw them in water. Boom.
[01:43:22] Big explosion. I make the analogy that clicking through Amazon is a small action takes what three seconds.
[01:43:28] Right? Yeah. Maybe not even. And you think, oh, yeah. I'm going to, you know, click through.
[01:43:32] And I'm going to do a shopping that doesn't because of my action. My small action doesn't.
[01:43:37] It's not a big deal. But here's the thing. That's more action is a big deal. Just like sodium in water.
[01:43:43] It's going to be the sodium. If you want to support. So click through. Do your shopping. Boom.
[01:43:48] That's a good, good way to support podcasts. Also, subscribe if you haven't already. On iTunes.
[01:43:56] Leave a review. Jocca. I'm the monster. Stitcher. Google play not everyone has an iPhone.
[01:44:02] Yeah. I always ask somebody asked about some other thing to sound cloud.
[01:44:06] Sound cloud. So I'm not 100% sure of how that works. My explored sound cloud before.
[01:44:15] Unless it's like a separate thing. It does push your podcast.
[01:44:18] Let us know how to do that. Yeah. If we're missing on sound cloud, then yeah, I'm sure that should
[01:44:25] should be where we should be as well. Anyway, subscribe. Yeah. To whatever the one that you're doing,
[01:44:31] Google Play iTunes, whichever. Subscribe if you haven't already. Leave a review. If you feel like it.
[01:44:40] YouTube, we have YouTube channel. Subscribe to that one. Put more videos. I know before
[01:44:46] when you're watching, you were like, hey, these are just podcast videos.
[01:44:49] Right? Remember some good stuff. We do now. And that's the point. That's the point of making.
[01:44:54] So we put more videos on there now. Just made one. What yesterday? Yeah.
[01:44:58] That'll be awesome. Anyway, subscribe to that. If you haven't already, you'll get the other alert.
[01:45:02] There's a new one going to be out by two. Yeah. A few days. A new red.
[01:45:07] Yeah. Go Charles video. Yeah. It's more mellow. More cerebral. Oh.
[01:45:12] Stand by. Yeah. Yeah. I want you. It's cool. It's fun. I guess. Anyway, if you if you have
[01:45:20] the inclination to get a t-shirt as well, Jaco as a store. It's called Jaco Store.
[01:45:25] Or you are El Jaco Store.com. T-shirts, rashguards, patches, velcro patches as well.
[01:45:34] The delivery time now from purchase to delivery is quicker now. Know that.
[01:45:40] So yeah, go on there. Jaco Store.com. If you like what you see, go ahead and grab one of that.
[01:45:44] That's a good way to support it. There you go. Ah, but psychological officer.
[01:45:50] If you don't know what to you know psychological orifice. Yeah. Support it.
[01:45:56] There you go. See? How can you not really? I mean, that's a rhetorical question. Yeah.
[01:46:00] You're right about that. So yeah, if you don't know, it's, you know, when you have moments of
[01:46:04] weakness, if you're what, getting up early in the morning, tired, tired, on a press, news or whatever,
[01:46:11] or you're going to, you know, you're about to work out, but you'll skip the workout because you're
[01:46:14] not feeling like it. Moments of weakness. You get this album. You can download each individual track or
[01:46:20] the whole album. Whatever, Jaco will get you through it. It's like a spot.
[01:46:26] Makes you want to do the workout. Want to wake up early. Anyway, I tune psychological warfare
[01:46:32] search psychological warfare. Jaco willing. We're actually getting some requests now for other moments
[01:46:39] of weakness. Yeah. People like, hey, this moment of weakness, we need to track this moment of
[01:46:43] weakness need to track. So like what, I'm logging those down. Someone was saying, when I get tired,
[01:46:51] oh, right. In other words, it's 10 o'clock at night. I'm getting tired. I still have work to do. Yeah.
[01:46:57] I think I'm just going to blow off the work and just go to sleep because it's easy route.
[01:47:01] Yeah. Maybe we need to track for things like that. Yeah. It's possible. And because you
[01:47:06] do the whole thing biologically when you hit the wall, right? That's your body really in a way saying,
[01:47:12] like, hey, you're you're going too far. But nowadays in our environment going too far is beneficial
[01:47:19] because you have this like other goal that your body in a way doesn't really know about.
[01:47:24] So psychological warfare will help you get past that natural body and check exactly, right?
[01:47:29] Get your mind back there. It does. Yeah. So anyway, jump on that man. That's what that's one that's
[01:47:33] supporting yourself fully. Anyway, it has been number one since the day it was released straight
[01:47:42] up. That's pretty cool. I'm not mad at that at all. You know why that is? Why? Because useful people are
[01:47:48] supporting the podcast and that's yeah, that's pretty cool. So thank you for your time.
[01:47:52] Way less people skipping workouts, way more people waking up early. Obviously.
[01:47:56] There you go. And those are the ways. Also while you're clicking through Amazon,
[01:48:02] you can pick up the books that we review on the podcast, right? We just did my
[01:48:08] captivity and Vietnam through the Valley, my captivity, TV and Vietnam and it's a great book.
[01:48:13] But there's all the other books that we reviewed on there are on there, on here are on there.
[01:48:17] So pick those up. Extreme ownership. There's a little book. It's about combat.
[01:48:26] And it's about leadership. It's about combat leadership. Well, what else is there? What else would you
[01:48:33] want to read about? Jocquawaiti, a couple things. Jocquawaiti, some people call it Jocquawaiti.
[01:48:41] Some people call it the 8,000 pound deadlift solution. Yeah. Hell yeah.
[01:48:49] Some people call it community because apparently you're hitting Cameras very fast. Yeah, I get
[01:48:55] when you get the tea on. Also, I've heard it called problem solver tea because the problems that you
[01:49:02] have, a little bit of tea, also in problems you're getting solved. So you can do that. And by the way,
[01:49:11] it sounds like, oh, this is, I'm just being exaggerating or whatever, factual. 147%
[01:49:18] factual. Or tea. Amazon. You can also preorder way the warrior kid. And when people read this book,
[01:49:28] it's sort of like when people taste the tea. We're going to have a supply issue. I'm telling you.
[01:49:35] So just order it. If you order it now, that way you get a copy and that way you won't be
[01:49:41] wondering why all these kids are out there getting after it and you're going, what's happening? No,
[01:49:46] you'll know. You'll know why they're getting after it. Way to worry kid. And lastly, also, if you haven't
[01:49:54] signed up to come to the master number three, master in New York City, May 4th and 5th, do it,
[01:50:00] ASAP. I've been seeing a bunch of folks on social media. They're saying that they're going to be there.
[01:50:07] So look forward to seeing everyone. It's going to be awesome. Obviously, I'm going to be there.
[01:50:11] Life is going to be there. J. P. is going to be there. Dave Burke is going to be the event
[01:50:15] day of Burke yet. He's coming. I hear good thing. Oh, yeah, you're going to hear some real good
[01:50:18] things from Dave Burke. And if none of that really motivates you and gets you in the game,
[01:50:26] because not hard or enough, and you really didn't get nuts. Well, guess what? Don't worry. We got
[01:50:31] you covered because echo Charles is going to be there. Echo Charles is going to be there. Come on down.
[01:50:37] There's not going to be any hiding behind a curtain. There's no backstage divas at this gig.
[01:50:44] We're going to be out front with everybody interacting, solving problems, finding solution,
[01:50:50] and basically just getting after it. So come on down to the master. And if you want to give us
[01:50:56] feedback or comments or continue this little conversation that we're having right here,
[01:51:02] you can find us on the inner webs. That means basically we're talking about Twitter.
[01:51:09] We're talking about Instagram as well. And then again, we're also talking about that Facebook.
[01:51:17] So Andy, what are you on those? Oh, man. On the Instagram, it's my name. Andy Stomp 212. Very original.
[01:51:25] Okay. I think Twitter is Andy Stomp 77. All this original. And you're on Facebook. The book
[01:51:32] of faces. Yes. I'm contractually obligated to be on there. And Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at
[01:51:41] Jockawlin. Echo. Do you have anything this evening that you want to add to this podcast?
[01:51:48] Man, that's it. You know, usually I have some expound and some expanding question on
[01:51:53] but man, you know, you very articulate. Yeah. I use the words I understand. Two syllables are less.
[01:51:59] Yeah. Dang. Well, I'm saying thanks for having me. Great to meet you, man. I don't need to.
[01:52:06] Andy, any closing thoughts you want to throw out there? No. All I can say is thanks for
[01:52:11] having me on, man. So in 2024, we'll do it again. Now it's great to meet you Echo. I mean,
[01:52:19] I sit back and I love what you guys have going on. So just keep driving ahead, man. It's awesome.
[01:52:25] People need to hear it. Well, I appreciate the feedback you've been given me on the podcast. And obviously,
[01:52:30] thanks for coming on. Sorry. It took so long. Sorry. Everyone. It took so long to get you on. And you know what?
[01:52:34] Bullshit on 2024. We'll get you back on here and we'll do this again. Like 2020. Okay. Yeah.
[01:52:41] And you know, obviously, man, thanks for your service. Yep. And it was my pleasure. And your
[01:52:48] and your continued contribution to the teams and to and your country. So thank you for everything
[01:52:57] you've done. And you know, we started out tonight talking about a debt that cannot be repaid.
[01:53:06] And that is very true. We cannot repay that debt. We owe too much to those that have fallen
[01:53:20] for our freedom. But you know what we can do and what we must do is try.
[01:53:39] Try. Try to live every day with that thought in mind, that thought of the service and of the
[01:53:48] sacrifice of those that gave their last full measure for us, for our freedom. Freedom.
[01:54:07] This nebulous concept that can be so hard for some people to grasp of I will tell you,
[01:54:16] it is a real thing. And it's a thing that's hard to recognize until it is taken from you
[01:54:27] and the chains of oppression control your body and your mind. And then when your freedom is taken away,
[01:54:37] that is when you realize that freedom is the most important thing. The singular thing that gives
[01:54:49] each of us the divine opportunity that only freedom can give to think and to speak and to do as we wish.
[01:55:09] And to do all of those things beholden to no man. And yet while with that freedom,
[01:55:29] we are beholden to no one, let us choose. Let us consciously and deliberately choose
[01:55:45] to be beholden forever be beholden to those men and women who have relinquished their lives
[01:55:54] so selflessly upon the altar of freedom for them be beholden to them let us live
[01:56:12] with purpose and with passion let us live. Live lives worthy of their solemn sacrifice.
[01:56:29] Let us live lives worthy of the price that has been paid worthy of the freedom we are blessed with
[01:56:42] and worthy of those heroes we are forever be beholden to let us live for them.
[01:57:01] And I think that's all I've got for tonight and so until next time this is Andy
[01:57:18] Reneko Enjokol Alt.