Combat Story (Ep 16): Thom Shea Navy SEAL | SEAL Sniper | Silver Star | Author | Entrepreneur

i got blown into a room i'm laying on the ground and i'm dazed and confused and believing that i'm dead and i rallied and in the process of rallying i go up next to this window that i'd gotten blown through and one round just misses my eye by like an inch and a half i'm like so i i'm in the room i hold up actually it was a bucket and one round right through the middle of the bucket and i'm like okay due to the angle of that impact that's that hill that i've been watching the whole day i'm like damn 635 yards away okay okay he knows where i am but i now know where he is so can i get to him before he gets to me the only time i've ever felt fear is in that moment like i was crippled like i couldn't get my heart to stop welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugent and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear the combat story of tom shea retired navy seal sniper and senior chief who led seals in multiple combat tours from kosovo to iraq to afghanistan including brutal fighting in helmand province for which he was awarded the silver star he was also the officer in charge of the famed seal sniper course since leaving the navy tom and his wife stacy conduct intensive leadership events for fortune 500 companies and he has written two books including an incredible memoir unbreakable that gives a first-hand account of the life of the seal in combat his books in this interview are chalked full of lessons for leaders and soldiers alike if you enjoyed todd opowski's interview you're going to love tom's story and way of life hey tom thanks for taking the time to share your story with us i appreciate any opportunity to to improve somebody's life so thank you and i can tell i just wrapped up unbreakable uh one of your books and just as a as a note as i interview folks i try to read through at least one of their books and i'll take screenshots on my kindle as i'm reading at night and circle things that i want to go back to as i prepare and usually i get about 10 or 15 pages and in yours i had 45 screenshots uh no joke i think there's a lot i can't spell i get it i didn't see a single typo time so i was very impressed with that um in all seriousness i think it was chock full of not just your experiences in combat but like life lessons lessons for soldiers for leaders family um across the board couldn't recommend it enough so i'm really eager to dive in i want to start out with something that i read in the book about one of your jobs as a kid as an outfitter and your role your experience hunting as a child just because i think we see people in the special ops community the seals rangers delta and this there's this thing that comes to my mind having not been in that community that you just grew up with a weapon other people i've interviewed were not that way but i think you may have just had a slightly different path so please talk to me about that yeah the a lot of questions that uh can be answered there i grew up in southern indiana in uh like a farm town there was either alcohol or what i mean you didn't get the choice so you drank alcohol and you played football or you were in band and and you hunted whether you were male or female and i say that because in this in the 70s and early 80s that may have been the greatest time to be a kid in america you could carry a knife because you never fought with a knife like i had a knife on me from until like even this morning and i would never draw a knife to fight somebody it doesn't occur to me to do that and when i was in high school we literally had our muzzle loaders bow and arrow shotguns rifles in our cars and everybody did it and it wasn't taboo and there you know people used to carry guns and that used to be okay and so i grew up during that time and it was about the only period of time maybe it wasn't by choice and i don't mean to stumble through this when i was nine in the winter time there was nothing to do it was cold and my buddies and i ran a trap line trapping mink muskrat raccoons fox and coyote when i was nine i remember getting up at four o'clock in the morning and dad didn't know what the hell anything was so if you want to do it you got to do it the right way and you got to pay for it yourself and so we i'd get up at four run my trap line come back go to school at the end of the day go back and re-affirm the traps and and clean this and skin that and that's what i did and i remember making six thousand dollars when i was nine years old running running trap no way and so i grew up outside constantly shooting and i i probably killed birds they didn't need to die but kids do that you know and and uh it it it let me be very comfortable with the shooting killing side of what i think or was and you're right i 50 and i trained a lot of snipers and a lot of seals and 50 of them had never touched a gun until they got to the seal teams but i enjoyed it i loved hunting and when i had had my first screw-up having failed out of west point i went up to canada and i was a canoeing and fishing guide for a summer season that's the outfitter at an outfitter yeah got it yeah jeez and i grew up outside so i never felt uncomfortable out there and it to me it's relaxing to get away from everything and and my my sons uh are becoming closer to it but uh the bugs and i never i never had any trouble with bugs i must stink or something i don't know but i'll sit right next to you and you'll be covered in mosquitoes and i won't get a bite they just know better the price of being is an operator or a warrior is you you know you have a stink that nothing likes you probably when you were a kid and you're out hunting what's one of your more memorable experiences at that time like were you typically on your own it sounds like or was your dad taking you out sometimes probably both but the most memorable experience is the i still have that and i took that into being a a uh a seal leader is the inordinate amount of time you have to wait in one position and uh i remember waiting because i used to be a stupid hunter i would wait and never get out of the woods like i would stay there and in my brain i'm like if i if i outweight them they're going to make a mistake and i remember i think i was 16 at the time deer hunting in indiana and it was probably 20 degrees outside and i had got in the woods at five in the morning and by four o'clock at night so 4 p.m i peed and maybe had a drink but i remember being so cold i was miserable and in that last minute right before i was about ready to quit and called in and one of the biggest deers deer i've ever killed walked out and uh and i taught my seals that technique of sitting and waiting and sitting and waiting and and i don't know if that answers your question but yeah me and my brain hunting is about who's going to outweigh who yeah oh that's fascinating so i don't want to lose this one thread that you mentioned earlier and it may be appropriate later on but you mentioned as you were training snipers in the seals 50 about 50 percent came in without any experience with a weapon did you notice is it better to come in with some experience or is it better to have somebody who's starting fresh and you can just teach them your own technique from from the get-go it's better to have no experience in your shooting skills but they cannot teach you how to hunt and they can't teach you the uncomfortableness of killing so if most of the guys who were good at i i may not sound weird i mean it probably sounds weird somebody's saying killing uh but that's the business of the you're in the seal teams you're there to kill people and and a lot of world the world looks at that as toxic masculinity or whatever the hell that thing is so uh i all the great shooters that i that i trained had not touched a gun so they did exactly what you were teaching them to do the old guys like me they had imperfections that you couldn't train away but you're still good shooter but you're not technically a great shooter like chris kyle was not a good shooter he wasn't he if you like i could teach you to shoot better than chris because he just wouldn't listen he wouldn't listen he didn't need you telling him what to do he had a lot of imperfections in his form and how he pulled the trigger and his bra breathing patterns but he knew where to go to hunt and he had no trouble squeezing the trigger when it was a bad thing and a lot of guys can't be trained to do that so the difference is uh if you want to be a really great shooter go have a coach that's the best in the world which were the seals and have them teach you and you're going to be the best shooter in the world yeah you may not ever pull the trigger because you may get scared you can't teach not scared you know yeah so i'm curious about about your father you mentioned him um did you come from a military family tom like is that in the family background or how did you find your way in you mentioned west point so curious horrifically military from the civil or from the revolutionary war i don't think there was a war that i know of that our family wasn't in either from my mom's side my mom's side comes from the custer family through through uh tommy custer which is george's brother and i named after him and uh he ended he he was what the end he's the one the indians hated george george was just a buffoon i'm sorry he was a buffoon but tommy was the real killer and he'd he and uh so we can i come from that line my dad was a west point grad class of 59 and i i knew so all my mother was the last of 11 kids and everybody all the males were in the military my couple of my aunts were in the women marines so we we sat around the table talked about talked openly about combat battles being in the military and so uh it wasn't it wasn't a big quantum leap for me to go and into the military was your your dad must have done significant time in vietnam i would imagine if he said no he got out he broke his he blew his knee out oh jesus west point got injured was in the artillery battery in hawaii and uh i think you may have post graduation been in for two and a half years and then they're like bro you can't move very well and uh as much as he wanted to stay in they wouldn't let him stay oh man yeah i grew up going to west point every year just going back because because of his affinity for it yeah it was a big transformative time for him for me i hated it when i went as a student and yeah but big thing for him i think it was his way out of a bad life and uh took him five years to make it through and and all his friends were great men and great generals that i got to grow up knowing and we went back to every not every football game but to watch a football game every year and i grew up wanting to play football at west point and you get what you asked for so i went there to play and uh i never remember dreaming of graduating that was my problem yeah well so you mentioned that kind of going into the military was almost something that you would just expect it sounds like in your family but certainly going to west point big deal for you to to not make it through what was that like for you and the family dad didn't even want me to go to west point because uh growing up uh he he did but i was uh an ass dad's like you're never gonna get along in the military and i agree with that wholeheartedly and uh so and then when i flunked out it was uh more devastating on me than it was mom and dad they're like well it's okay you'll recover i didn't feel like i was ever going to recover and it felt like the end of the world and what am i going to do and and i said hey i need time away from uh what i should be doing and so i went to canada i didn't mean to go to canada but it was the only outfitter that would hire me and uh so i literally spent the rest of that year living out in the woods with people that appreciated the outside and and mentally recovered but my mental recovery was i want to go be a seal where did that come from i wanted to be a seal uh more than i wanted to go to west point and i grew up with a guy named pat tomlinson who was my dad's battery commander who had been when he was 17 was in the uh scouts and raiders which were the precursors to the seals he was the first guy on on iwo jima when he was 17. geez and so i grew up every summer hanging out with this guy and all his buddies that were of that vintage and their i loved their brains and what they talked about everybody else hated them but i i liked the comfort that they had with talking about killing people and i don't know why that was there for me and then i said dad i want to go in the seal program and if you everybody doesn't remember this this was before cell phones or before computers and there was no information on anything if you didn't know anybody you didn't know anything about it and i couldn't find any information enough to tell my dad about it other than he knew that it had about a 90 drop rate and all the people he knew that had been in it he thought were bad dudes you know and i was like i want to do it out of high school and he's like no that's not going to happen you got to go to school so when i hit rock bottom i'm like the best choice now is to go pursue that and and i tragically didn't know how to swim when i signed up for the seal program and then it was just a series of uh learning through fire hoses and it didn't work out for me then it took me five times to make it through seal training and so actually i wanted to to mention here one thing that's great about your book is that it takes a little bit of the stereotype that people have of a uracil you've never failed you've got to be this perfect specimen no issues ever and you really lay out that you had some difficulties and then it's mixed in with some incredible work that you do when you're downrange the way you build a team and what you've done since so i certainly don't want to take away from that and i'm really glad that you brought that up because as you said it's 85 90 percent dropout rate it took you five times hell i didn't even know you went there when you couldn't even swim so um you know you have the west point washout you you try to make it in the seals what are you doing in between each time you go and recycle back into the program uh well so out out of west point go to canada find out that i can't stop thinking about it didn't know how to even sign up other than go to a recruiting office go home to dad mom after my canadian experience of chasing girls and you know how that never works out you know what i'm saying now i'm home again what am i gonna do uh he goes well you need to complete your college degree or i'll give you twenty thousand dollars make your choice wow and i'm like [ __ ] what am i gonna do with twenty thousand dollars that's not gonna be helpful and uh so i went back and completed my degree in sports medicine at ball state and my senior years when i i determined that i wanted to to go to the seal program and i'd found out enough information to think i was confident in doing it so i signed up a year before i could actually show up because there was a delayed entry tragically that's how the teams are there's so many people that want to get in that you sign up and then a year later you show up which leads out a lot of people inherently so i and i figured out when i signed up that i couldn't pass any of the tests upon signing up and they gave me the first test and i i failed three of the five skills and all it is the push-ups sit-ups pull-ups run swim i could run and i couldn't do the pull-ups and i couldn't pass the push-ups and i couldn't pass the swim and i passed the sit-ups i think something like that i'm like dude i got a long road ahead and so i went to the pool realizing i needed to learn how to swim like you couldn't gut that out that had to be technique and uh for a year i went to the pool every day jeez and uh i there was a female uh lifeguard that took pity on me and can i teach you how to swim this is embarrassing and since i'm watching you totally embarrassing and uh so she taught me the right technique and once i figured it out it became simple and then uh then i showed up to seal training and it's a great thing for youth to understand what happens when you show up to your dream and i try to convey this when i talk and even leaders when you transition here's what happens reality will stick it's like when tyson said it's a great plan until somebody breaks your face open so i show up to seal training and the class that i was in was getting big so when i showed up there was 85 people already waiting to start and then there's first phase which had green helmets there's second phase which had blue helmets so you could distinguish them by walk by looking and third phase and third face had red helmets so when there's 85 kids without helmets prepared to start if my introduction to that was seeing the third phase class and there were eight people left i'm looking i'm like god there's a lot of studs 85 dudes here and there's eight guys remaining in training six months later and i'm like well this ain't going to be what i thought it was i thought it'd be a warrior training and it had no it did not care about what i thought it was going to be and so we i started with class 1 8 195 and uh it was a beat down they didn't care about you they didn't care about your parents they didn't care about your background they didn't care if you were hurt what you thought about nothing and they make it overwhelming from the time you start until the time you graduate and i made it to hell week in one 195 and got a concussion and then they said okay when i woke up after my concussion they had told me i had quit and for me to sign a piece of paper and i'm like i don't think i quit uh they're like well don't waste our [ __ ] time with this sign this piece of paper because you're done anyway nobody ever recovers from this and you're so far in training that no no no idiot would ever start over and i'm like well i'm not gonna quit and they're like okay you get two weeks off and you get to start at the beginning of first phase again and so i had a two-week vacation and i went home and the first thing my parents and friends said is oh you failed again oh i was going to stay home for 14 days and i ever all everybody was sad and whoa tom we feel sorry for you and i'm like i can't take it i'm leaving and so i went back to the training command so that i could be around guys that wanted to be there and uh and it was helpful mentally and so i'm like okay start 196. and that was tragic start uh the it was 10 times harder because i had something to compare it to and the first day of training the instructor staff didn't like the students and they took it out on the students and we had 32 people quit the first day because it was hard i mean they they make it hard hard enough for an adult man to go i i confess i'm out you know i i make it to hell week in 196 and dislocate my shoulder and so i'm sitting in the hospital and they and a guy named mike mayer who is a chief in training came over and said uh we're not gonna we don't think you're gonna quit we don't think it's possible to recover from your injury so we're gonna give you a whole class to physically recover so instead of two weeks down we're gonna i think it was seven weeks that i had to recover and so i recovered and started and uh 198 was a winter an october start and if anybody's been in san diego it's cold like the water is just it's relentlessly cold and we i started made it to hell week and got pneumonia and they pulled me out two weeks two two hours before the wednesday forward cut where if you make it to wednesday night and you get an injury you have the potential rolling forward and they were even telling me bro make it to wednesday night because we know you're not going to quit but you just keep getting injured all the time i couldn't make it i said i'm done i didn't quit but i just couldn't keep going and they pulled me out of training and they put me in the hospital and i had five uh so i had pneumonia i was declared you know dumb ass with pneumonia and then they they said well here's the deal due to the timing of the next class the next class starts on monday if you want to start you don't have to take the interest test but you have to start monday i'm like oh my god i can't even do anything it was easier recovering from uh a dislocated shoulder than it was pneumonia so i get to 199 was my fourth class with pneumonia i'm the worst student there like i can't do anything and they don't care they beat you like they're gonna make you submit if you fail then they they really try to make you submit and i failed everything and but i was allowed to go into hell week again and i was suffering and suffering woke up in the hos i had passed out woke up in the hospital and they had kicked me out of training like you don't get it you have scar tissue in your lungs and uh you won't ever be able to pass the dive portion of training because of your lung tissue and you're gone see you i'm like oh my god what am i gonna do and uh i had a two week medical leave that i could go on instead of going home i kind of went to some places that i thought were cool to hang out and uh it wasn't helpful to go to these places because it doesn't make it doesn't encourage you you know and so i went back and i called my my dad's friend pat thomas and told him what happened and i said i want to come down and see you and when i saw him he goes hey here's the deal either quit and never ever go back and never talk about it to anybody else ever again or try to make it back i'm like dude it's a two-year wait to get back and he goes who cares what anybody says do do what you want to do because if you're sitting here regretting it you're going to have the worst life ever i know i don't mean to make the story longer but uh i decided at that moment in time i was gonna every day because i got a job at the hospital because i was a medic and uh every day i went to the admiral's office and sat there with a chit requesting access back to the seal program and i got written up sorry tom you you would just go sit there like hey i want to get back in here's lunch lunch time i sat in the admiral space an official request piece of paper called a chit requesting orders back to seal training and i only were i think it was a four day shift uh it's because i was doing i think a 10 hour shift in the emergency room or something like that and i would go during my lunch time and sit there with the time that i had and uh he threw the chain of command had written me up four times because he said i'm not gonna sign it the navy won't let you go back for two years that's what he showed me this piece of paper you know blah blah for two years the navy has you because they need people too and you can't just keep going back to these programs and so i sat there and i went from e4 to e3 because i lost rank because i was disobeying a direct order every freaking day and so uh nine months in uh and i was training like a fool like i was the best shape in my entire life ever and uh like literally i was i was blown all the times away a fast swimmer i could do 48 pull-ups without getting off the bar and i was ready and tom sorry you were in coronado coronado yeah so you're like watching seals come in and leave yeah and a lot of guys i still knew because you know they're still around and i became friends with some of the instructor staff because they're like nobody's as stupid as you nobody ever does this four times and and so i'm sitting there one day not really dejected but knowing that he's not going to sign it he walks out grabs a piece of paper and signs it and says okay if you want it bad enough i'm not going to get in the way damn besides a piece of paper like the next day i have orders and i remember report reporting and the instructor staff knew me and they didn't say word to me they didn't we're not going to yell at you they said hey if you have any questions about what to do be up to hell week just ask him don't come to us because we're not going to tell you and uh but i had a bitter resentment to anybody that was doing well like if somebody's doing well i could [ __ ] hate you man so that was class 207 and uh formed up we started with 111 guys and graduated 11. jesus christ yeah all right it's crazy it's still the same problem oh man all right i have a lot of questions and i'm gonna i want us this is a perfect segue now in the book you really talk about that last deployment you have 2008 2009 i think it is yeah nine but you reference previous deployments you just don't dive into them so i want to get into one of those or really your first combat experience tom but first i think this might be a good time to talk about this internal dialogue one is could you just explain what that means to you because it comes up in the book a lot and in the context of what we just talked about did you recognize that at the time as you were going through this cycle of hell several times over or did you did it inform you at the time and it later became apparent that you have this voice talking to you it's it's two things one is i recognized inherently when you do really hard things it's not the difficulty of the thing that you do it's how you beat yourself down mentally so that's how i referenced it for a long time but when i when i became clear that there was something learnable there i was because when you're in the seal teams you actually are told go out and seek professional help if you're a bad shooter find the top shooters in the world and get better at it and when you're in charge of a program you get the authority to go and talk to the best of the best so in that process of learning from the top people in the world in whatever category they all process things as whatever you tell yourself becomes true i'm like what do you mean whatever you tell yourself becomes true and then i'm reflecting back on what it was like to go into hell week five times and why didn't i quit when other people were quitting and why do people do really well in things and why do people suck at things and the you know is it genetics is it training and all that stuff and i came to the the realization that none of that was true and the truth of it is you've got to get really good at how you mentally and verbally process things so if you say you can't that's a truth you cannot and your body will go yep i cannot do that if you say there's one more step you'll pull off another step if you say you can shoot something that you cannot see you'll shoot something that you cannot see and having taught snipers everybody understand this at a mile you can't see the thing visually you can't see what you're shooting at you're just telling yourself if i do x y and z the bullet will go where it's supposed to go and you can't see anything and but the top people in the world were only processing language which is what i call internal dialogue and the definition is what you say to yourself drives everything that you do and it's learnable and you probably should be doing it often to be specific yeah and tom you you kind of just i guess i'm wondering did you learn that when you were running the sniper program because you were talking to these elite performers or was it something you just understood after a deployment or two when did you realize this was going on uh no you get inadvertently taught it and seal training by uh one is by observing and the other one is by a couple of the instructors are good dudes and they all say it's mental okay we're going to take the physical away from you we're going to make sure physically you're not capable of doing anything that you want to do then what you're going to do mentally will make all the difference and don't quit on yourself just stop quitting on yourself and one of them came up and said stop telling yourself anything turn off all the noise all the chatter it's never helpful and it never will be helpful and when i heard an instructor say that like what the hell did he mean don't listen to the noise in your head and now i look at that is be careful what's going on in your head because it will take you directions if you let it take you it will always do the worst thing you can possibly do but if you direct it it will take you places that you weren't capable of of achieving without learning language like language the structure of it and what became true in analysis and interviewing a bunch of people the structure of successful language always begins with i am and whatever you fill in there you become and then when you look at the human condition you hear it everywhere probably probably in pilot training too people don't think they're a good pilot you'll prove it very quickly we can't fly in that storm that means you say you're a sucky pilot there's a dude up in alaska that i can guarantee that's a wcw-05 that'll fly through this storm like it doesn't exist and so i started learning that and trying to figure out how to to to like teach myself it and and give it structure and give it an education and then it then it became lethal got it all right let's let's then jump to your first experience in combat that you certainly have been waiting for for a long time with the way you described growing up trying to get into the seals you're finally there can you just kind of put us time and place like where were you what year was it um what what role were you in at the time i was an e5 uh seal team two sniper and we were in the adriatic sea and the air war in kosovo had just kicked off that day and we're like wow what the heck's going on we didn't know anything was going on and because there's always planning missions we had done some missions lead that theoretically were going to lead into some invasion but that goes on 24 hours a day 365 days a year everything's always going to erupt but it never does so we're all of a sudden the air war kicks off and we were called in to do uh the embassy rescue across the border in macedonia so a guy named christopher hill who was the ambassador to macedonia had they lost contact with him and so they spun us up because we were the only direct action force that had the ability to do something like that the marine fast units are theoretically supposed to be able to do that but they can't really so we went in as the the ones that we're going to secure initially secure the embassy grab the ambassador and leave and then let the fast unit come in and do that and so uh that day that we're so we're probably 9 30 at night going to be picked up in civilian clothes by a ch 53 which is a navy helo that drains oil 24 hours a day like most helicopters and so i'm watching the ship come across the or the aircraft come across the horizon and thinking oh wow this is it this is what it must feel like and our platoon chief walks out and looks at us all and he goes i doubt if we're all going to survive this i love you guys and then sat down i'm like what the [ __ ] what does that mean did i do something wrong and uh so we mounted up the bird and it was just a comical series of the dumbest things that could possibly happen and uh we got picked up by the british sas at the airport in scopier and they put us in a flatbed truck and drove us about 200 yards away from the embassy which was ablaze and dropped us off and out mates we're out of here so we get off and there's no planning you don't plan for any of that happening we thought we were gonna fast rope right into the compound and it changed and then so uh we get there to the compound take it over get in the building couldn't find anybody then we didn't know what to do we didn't know there's no there's no playbook for anything was it defended no everybody was gone oh man there's nobody there but there was a vault downstairs and nobody told us about the vault they didn't tell us about the bona fides or the code to get into the vault so we realized oh my god there looks to be a space here in the wall and one of the new guys opened up the door and it was a downstairs uh stairwell we get down there and there's a red phone on the wall and we grabbed the phone and picked it up and somebody on the other end picked it up i mean it's really that way like man this is going to be the greatest movie that was ever written because there was nothing going on in the world like this was combat and it was interesting and but we didn't fire any rounds and but we saw the atrocities of war because if people don't remember this uh the serbs were going into kosovo to kill all the ethnic albanians which were the muslims and they lined up on these border camps all everybody was coming across from kosovo into macedonia there's big border camps and we went as a an element without the ambassador to look at these border camps and we're up on a hill over watching them just to see if it was safe because there was no u.s presence there it's just people bib whacking on the border and then trucks coming in bringing food but no no u.s presence there at all so two of us went to watch it and uh saw the guys line up all the fighting age males and shoot them in the head no way oh really oh my god this is serious and you don't plan for anything like that so my my my first experience with combat was the most demonstrative one not the violence of it but if you're gonna succeed as an operator you gotta only succeed to the level which you can endure a plan never working out and which is a travesty in the seal teams seals hate to plan because we know five sec once i load on your bird it's never going to work out because you're going to land wherever the hell you want to land and it's going to be tragic and we're probably going to wreck on landing and not everybody will make it there and and so uh it became the mantra of the seal teams that i still carry with me is adapt and who cares if you're not going to give up you'll solve it so who cares what the real plan was supposed to be ask for forgiveness didn't work out boss we're doing we're doing something else yeah that was my first experience so and you mentioned you were a sniper in like that was kind of your role and this is going to be an ignorant question so please bear with me as you describe in the book you kind of go through the different people in your team in 2009 and they each have different roles medics snipers and then you talk about breachers and i've noticed the more i talk to operators there's almost like a is it like a rite of passage to become a breach or is that a a mark of you've exceeded some expectations in some way is that a harder role to get on a team uh no everybody's a breacher so uh just due to the the fact that you have demolition skills and you're paid to be demolished and expert as a seal green bray i think get the same pay so everybody gets a basic skill set and understanding of the breaching world which is explosive or mechanical breaching like i want to blow up a door a wall or do i want to cut it down with a saw or blah blah blah but in combat breaching takes on a whole different understanding and because you have to have the ability to give to your platoon or your boss because you get limited of how you can access a building the breachers make everything unlimited oh this thing's in the way and the breacher's got to come up within three minutes and solve it either ladder over top of it blow it up and so the the breachers became uh like angels and they have an unlimited brain their brains like in the united states i can't blow that [ __ ] up you know what i mean but overseas they're i mean thank god seals don't ever unite and become bank robbers because there's nothing that would stop him and so i i have an affinity for the mindset of a breacher in combat because he he no longer has a limit he said you're gonna let me get away with that can we do liquid explosives sure just don't tell anybody don't tell the helo pilots we have this on because they're never gonna let us on man very cool all right can we fast forward then to the first time you had a trigger pull i don't know if it was the same deployment or or if it was post 911 but what was that like especially as a sniper and the background that you had uh first time it's not that i can't say anything about it it's uh it was to me rather insignificant it was in kosovo the second deployment and we were doing stuff and it was a border mission and a guy was shooting at us and it to me it was just all standard mundane bang no emotion to it it looked cool because i remember seeing like everything you know 65 i know that i executed i remember 65 of them and uh the first one was odd because it felt easier than shooting a deer like it was a lot harder to work up to get to the position and outweighed a deer then oh my god the guy's shooting at us okay let's maneuver he's still shooting at us okay bang shoot him and uh but i still think it's much harder mentally and and emotionally uh and you i probably need therapy for this but to kill an animal animals are much harder it doesn't seem like humans want to survive they want to die very quickly in my opinion yeah and i certainly don't mean to like glorify it it's just more of you've been training for this for so long and you in particular have this background where you've been shooting from a young age um i was just curious kind of like after you have that first trigger pull you're like all right this is where i'm supposed to be in this world i'm doing this job i'm supposed to be doing that comes in so the first uh one two three deployments were i squeezed the trigger it was training to me it was the same as training the only time it became holy shenanigans was in afghanistan in iraq we were in khan we did like 85 combat missions in iraq shooting getting shot at oh it was it was cool it was scary in afghanistan it went from cool and scary to what the [ __ ] just happened my brain can't process what's going on and there was a you know i i'm i think i'm void of emotion stacy says i'm pretty you know sociopathic and uh but afghanistan was a was a bear it was a it was a trigger pulling bear let's jump into it because i mean that's that is the unbreakable book and telling that story and i will just say as another um shout out for this book i i don't think i've read about combat experiences in that type of detail the emotions like the camaraderie maybe since like black hawk down quite honestly like the number of missions i read the first one i was like god how did you guys get out of that and just thought that the rest would be like much easier in comparison and they just like they just roll from one hellacious shootout to another so there's one in particular that i want to ask about but i'll save that one if maybe if you could take us into either one that comes to mind take it any way you want or the first one that you had that first mission where you're really in a difficult scenario but before that if you could just share the role you're in at the time and it seemed very special like the group of people you'd waited a long time to be there if you just talk a little bit about the context and then jump into one of the hairier moments you recall so 2009 i was a e7 which is a chief in the navy and i had just completed a successful uh platoon chief assignment at seven in iraq and i got the authority or permission to do another platoon chief slot which is rare it's hard to do two and i don't know why it wasn't because there was a few chiefs or whatever i said like hey do you want to stay here and do another platoon chief slot i'm like yeah cool love to and the option was to take a senior platoon of operators who had never worked with or take this group that [ __ ] hated each other like literally they hated the guy that they had worked with and they hated each other and i'm like i want them and they're like dude you understand you can get fired if you don't do well as a platoon chief you get fired and i still think there's a 50 percent uh fire rate as platoon chiefs in the seal team geez because if you don't have a good platoon chief everybody's going to die like you will die and you'll have problems drinking alcohol and drugs and sex and all that stuff if a platoon chief is bad you have problems and i'm like dude i understand their mind they just have never had an opportunity to fight with somebody who wants to fight and they've never had anybody love them like want to go to war with these guys and uh and i still say that that's rare that you ever get a group of guys that want to be with each other bad enough to sacrifice their life so i said hey i'll take this platoon but i i need uh some choice i need some guys uh to pull with me and uh one of the guys uh that i had met in passing i say this because uh it's it's important not only in the business world but for operators or for people in the military to understand this and i'd never hear it said very well i'll screw it up but uh you have to recruit people and leaders have to top leaders have to give their junior leaders the ability to recruit people and i had told my master chief i said hey i want to go to the medical hold area where all these guys are injured and disillusioned and pissed off and i want to recruit somebody so i went there and there is a guy sitting in the corner that yolked out cauliflower ears scars everywhere neck bigger than his shoulders hands probably three times the size of a bear's paw and he'd been in a fight and detached his retina and problem is he'd been in a fight with two other seals at a bar so alcohol related junior guy hadn't even gotten his trident disillusioned and i'm like dude i want to see if he's got fire in him and i walk up to him and i said hey here's the deal i'm recruiting a guy to be my machine gunner uh and he'd been a marine before and uh he looked at me and he goes here's can i say something chief and i go sure are you going to go to war like i've been to war six times i think i have a big track a good track record and i intend to go to war this time because i'll do whatever you want only if we're going to war if we're not going to go to war i'm getting out of the teams because nobody likes me over here and i have a terrible record and i'm not this guy that i look like on paper i came to fight and i've never been in a fight before and i said okay and he was a wizard so in the book he's uh salty and uh he's he was a combat wizard he was the greatest guy ever and they all became that so we all did something for each other and we ended up doing pretty well in situations that uh we should not have done well in but you know i don't whatever story you would like me to tell they're all to me very uh visceral stories so well i guess that's how it reads by the way when you're an author you don't go back and read the book it's i'm sure i've never read the book no i'm dead serious i mean it reads like black hawk down like the intensity you understand the different players because you lay them out really well and you move from mission to mission um and i would just before we jump into that why did you want to go and recruit someone from the medical hold what was the desire there because if you can give somebody the ability to do what they really really want to do because having been in medical i became crystal clear of what i really wanted having been injured many times i was crystal clear and had somebody offered me a hand up i would have said oh well here's the deal if you're not the badass i'm not interested like if you're just looking to have another drinking buddy i'm out because i was crystal clear in my mind having had tough times of what i wanted to do and how i wanted to do it and i just it was a attempt in the dark is somebody here in this position so i interviewed eight guys and the seven guys i interviewed i wouldn't walk across the street for wow they were disillusioned they blaming everybody else for their problems and they wanted out and they blamed somebody else for their injuries and i asked you know salty about it he goes oh no i i got in a fight i said do you like fighting he goes yeah i said so tell me about the fight he was i took out two guys in a bar i'm like why did you fight him which is the reason why i liked him is because they offended my girlfriend that means he's fighting for somebody else he's not a dumbass you know and i i was right at least on him i've been wrong about a lot of people but he was a good dude okay well why don't we certainly like you come out of this deployment it and it's just fight after fight after fight so why don't we just jump into the first one i think it's a mixture you're within the odas and they separate your team and mix you in with the odas and you kind of have to make it work and it's still a brutal fight right like i think uh it was not much of a fight it was a leadership issue and i'm glad we learned it there and the leadership issue is equality which is a big conversation today uh i the senior leaders had convinced themselves that seals and green beret are equal in reality they're not i don't think anybody just because you wear a uniform should be in a conversation called full integration with each other like i love the marines i would never operate in their unit because i don't know how they operate they think different thoughts so we had positioned ourselves to be fully integrated and at equal basis with guys we'd never ever trained with one of you one of me one of you one of me it was tragic and i saw it 10 steps in so i pulled all my seals out let the green beret they're awesome green bay is awesome but you can't put apples and dogs together it's not orange and orange apple red apple silver apple it was apples and dogs we function well separately even in the same battle space we functioned well but at the time we made a tragic mistake called uh integrate full integration just because oh cool you're in the military yeah it doesn't work out that way so i pulled all my men out we're gonna do it our way so we're just gonna stay close to each other and there was actually no real firefighting there except that we when we were cascading off target two of the afghani commandos stepped on a pressure plate and blew four legs off a couple of my guys were within six feet of them and got bone fragments embedded in their face and uh from a leader's point of view i had that written in stone full integration causes problems we'll never do it again so what it was not i wanted to i put that in the book for my kids because that was the first mission and with the intent uh be very careful what you believe in in the world i i don't know how it gets edited i did read the book several times during the editing process but uh your right there was to share openly with my kids the tragedy of leadership and and i should have mentioned when i started talking about the book that it's written in an interesting way in that you are writing it as a lesson to your kids ins to some effect right like these are the things i've learned i want to share them with you and so it kind of has this very unique way of delivering the information that makes it stand out yeah i wrote it for my kids because each mission wasn't clear i was gonna come back and with the intent like lesson one if i don't come home please learn how to do this lesson two please learn how to do this and then i came home and sat on the shelf in crayon and and and different you know email chains and uh with no intent that every any human being ever read it but it was solely to my kids and to my wife and now that i'm thinking of it you describe a a large multi-force i guess an air assault like 200 operators going in in one case that's the third mission so let's let's talk about that one because there's a complexity aspect because you are working with other teams and it's hellacious like let's talk through that one then also you and i are going to now make a lot of enemies and i'm all about it i love it so i g i got the silver star for another mission and in that other mission it's chapter nine in the book we got overrun by taliban and i had to call a 2 000 pound bomb on our position and we ran out of food water and ammo and we were we were screwed so i'm like hey kill them i'm not gonna become a prisoner so i ended up getting a silver star for that uh that was not the most difficult mission that was just overwhelmed you know what i mean when you get overwhelmed it doesn't matter how tactical you are your experience means [ __ ] you have no no ammo and so i had just fought till weird had nothing left and got my guys agreement we're gonna drop a 2 000 pound bomb on us with the intent that we're going to die we didn't die cool so here's your award it was written up as a navy cross got downgraded to a silver star because nobody died except the enemy and uh i heard a lot of people say dude that should be a medal of honor i'm like i wouldn't take it that's that's embarrassing but anyway uh so the third mission that we're on uh was to me the uh the military mission of the century in my brain coordinated impactful historic biggest drug bust in u.s military history and uh it was supposed to have strategic effect which it did so we're going to take we took over the capital i'm sure there's some taliban listening now here's my address and phone number so we were to take over the capital of helmand province which uh all the marines in the world that have been over in afghanistan know and they're scared when that word comes up because they know it's fighting for for days take over the capitol helman province a place called marjah and after the drug buyers bought all the black tar opium from the farmers so everything's centrally located in one position the marines couldn't get there they're they're they were beaten back every time the mission was to six uh mh-47 helos loaded the bear land on the x and the x means within 150 yards of target and uh take over the capital and the only way to do it was to land everybody all six helos in a field on the eastern sector of the of the capital in theory we were supposed to be there for two days so we loaded up for firefight two days and knew that we were going to get resupplied at least once and i got two days we don't need any sleep cool and you don't really you can stay you can sustain yourself for at least three days in in in stress and and so we know no notion we went in there for two days we landed on the eastern sected sector my job was to secure secure a building maintain it blow up the road put a machine gun down there to prevent vehicle traffic from coming in and we landed at four o'clock and we all weighed we were all carrying 280 more pounds which is tragic so it's so tragic that you can't do anything with it so we get off the helo drop our gear 100 yards from the building because you can't move move up next to the building take down the building a guy in the building had a nest vest on was carrying two kids had to shoot him his s-vest doesn't go off but we had to have eod go in there and secure it and meanwhile all the green bray are waiting for this building to be secured finally get all that to happen the clearance now happens to secure the village i had no idea i was just to stay in that eastern sector building with my nine operators on nine seals and so what we did then was uh damn the only place to see it was either through the walls or put up a sniper position so we put up two sniper positions within 20 minutes which is sandbags because that's all you could do three sandbags high for what is caved in the roof so three sandbags high which means if you know the height of a sandbag that means you're laying down by 5 30 we were taking our first rounds at us so my snipers were up there shooting meanwhile we're trying to knock holes in the wall so that everybody else could afford themselves an opportunity to shoot at somebody and the first tick was over by 6 30 and my snipers had killed 11 guys i'm like wow this is real and we're like hey guys don't shoot at anything you can't kill we don't have enough ammo like the first time it had occurred to me in my life it's not training you can't go over to the truck and get more i'm like dang we're loaded we knew we were going to be here for two days but we were three to one ratio three shots for one impact and i was like hey guys slow down and so we mounted a 50 cow machine gun in a room and knocked the wall down so that we could port the gun we ended up shooting in three days 5850 cal rounds and because we were in firefight four times a day for the first three days every two and a half hours we're in a firefight on our position shooting where everybody was mounted and shooting and each day we ran out of food water and ammo had nothing like i had and i was a chief trying not to shoot and i had ran out of rounds every day and personally during that five-day adventure i had i killed 12 guys and i wasn't even supposed to be doing it my snipers were like making names for themselves i'm like oh my god guys and what i found was interesting during that period of time is every minute was an hour and in that minute everybody was living the last moment of their life and in those last moments that you live you become very uh affectionate not weirdly but very open with the guys around you and the only reason that you stay there is because they need you and that concept of being needed by another human being keeps the fight alive in you because you got nothing left the first night which was cool we ran out we survived first night it's dark it was 140 degrees the whole day 140. jesus and i ran out of water at nine o'clock in the morning i'm like we're gonna die of dehydration well before anything else that happens here so we were drinking the dirty water out of the yellow buckets that were in the compound it could have been pissed i had no idea it was horrible like i'll die of dehydration before infection and uh so we were all drinking curdled milk and whatever the hell they had there and so the nighttime comes it cools down to around 90 degrees however we have to get resupplied and the resupply landed right out in that field that we've been killing taliban 100 yards from us so it's scattered from 400 yards to the left 500 yards to the right 18 i think 18 pair bundles were dropped and it took us from dark to dark to get them all so now we're and people don't understand this about operators in combat and you as a pilot know that you don't get sleep prepping for a mission you guys get sleep more than we did yeah i was like 24 hours before mission i'm prepping so now we're 24 hours into the mission so i'm we've all been awake for 48 hours that night we're still awake going into the next day with no sleep and tired and now we're angry going god damn i hate all this stuff i don't want to be here anymore i mean that's really what you think about and the sun comes up and we're in another tick and it's big because now the taliban know where we are they're pissed off that we got all their drugs and five o'clock like 5 45 second morning we have 18 platforms above us and by the grace of god we get two a-10s on our side and i mean i don't know why anybody ever get rid of an a-10 they're the greatest combat machine in the history of combat machines and they actually look like they're enjoying themselves and so we had an easter east west running road and they would strafe that road with their with their main gun problem is we were right under their main gun so we were getting the brass right on us and they'd they would drop like a hundred feet every time they would shoot i'm like god he's coming to drop right in our compound but they were killing a lot of guys that we needed to affect that and they were dropping bombs and and uh we winchestered 18 platforms jesus and just for those who are listening who don't know what that is winchester is going you're out we made sure they all left clean and ready to go home and take a nap and so now we are the big game in town so every everybody was cycling out there we had probably another 15 or 20 18 miles out you know ready to come in different grids and i wasn't coordinated i was just coordinating my guys i was hearing it in one ear oh my god who was that and so we got some some you know really affectionate apache pilots that were female ugly zero one and zero two were their call signs which was so cool and uh so they became our our our combat partners for the next six months out of that trip to marsha and so at the end of five days we had uh killed 212 taliban jesus and the guys were done they're literally going you know what i've done i've played in the super bowl and i don't care about anything anymore so we i knew things were going to go south so we all all the leadership said let's take seven days off let's not talk about it we have to write reports on it but after that let's talk about girls boy whatever but let's not talk about combat for seven days and uh but uh that was uh the most brutal fire fight that i'd ever witnessed in my life so i want to touch on a couple things here first of all that super interesting to hear that perspective just off the cuff there's a quote from the book that i think is in this moment where you're looking up you're on a ladder you're kind of looking out into the field you turn around and a-10s coming in to do a strafe run and you say i knew i was where i needed to be and had spent my entire life training and waiting for the happy chaos as as shell casings are raining down on you and you fall back on the ladder and land like on your body armor basically um what really stuck out to me and i didn't have this experience as a pilot because everything we're doing is so dynamic we're just moving all the time you don't have to place someone in a position and then talk to them and then come back to them and talk to them again about what they're doing so a few of the things that i found really interesting to hear was the human connection aspect that you touched on especially the first time someone's shot someone else you talk about going and just getting eye to eye with them to make sure that they're still connected basically yeah uh so by then i had been in gosh over 200 different combat engagements there were guys in my platoon who had not uh seen or witnessed or done the the killing side of the business and i didn't know how it was going to play out and and the that mission in marjah it played out everybody got some a bit of piece of that loving whether they wanted to or not and i was like man this could go south you don't know how you don't know what's going to happen to the mind it's cool if you get a day of doing it but five days in my brain on day three i remember thinking if we don't make this a human experience i'll tell my lieutenant this if we don't make sure they're okay they could just shoot themselves because you you the human brain can't deal with can't process oh my god i got another two days of this so i literally checked in with everybody with the intent to bring back some human factor of hey what's going on and the only way i could process doing that is the way that people did that with me when i had been shooting deer my uncles and my friends and they're like make it human and the only way to do that is you got you got five senses that make you human and dude hey how did that look to you not how it felt because i don't know humans can't deal with their own feelings well you know how do you feel about that [ __ ] i don't i still hate when somebody asked me that and uh you know how did it look tell me how that looked to you and do you did you smell it and then they're checking in with gosh you know i know i've lost my sense of smell and then they would panic and uh just i i just kept making simple conversation with them and what i found out uh the greatest form of leadership is when they don't really need you to tell them tactics they just need you to remind them that everything's alive and they'll tell you what they want and what i was such a weird phenomenon for me is i was i thought it was going to be a profound thing hey dudes what do you all need like you know hey we need bullets we need this dude can you come up here for a second yeah and a guy would be like uh hey remember that girl that i was dating i was like what the [ __ ] dude what do you what do you need he didn't need anything but he had lost his human thing like i could do this shooting all day long but if i don't have anything to go back to in my brain i'm going to lose it so i was just we would be up there talking about beer or girls or you know i you know whoever's listening they would want to talk about boobs i didn't write that in the book it got edited out they're like man i remember that one girl and i didn't know her okay it's cool and then a guy that ended up tragically dying in another deployment was my great greatest guy in the world named nike or in the book it was nike nike but in uh in reality his name is mike tatham i can say that because he's dead so uh he and i just talked about uh life in the middle of firefights and he got so tragically bent that he didn't have a can of copenhagen i thought he was going to lose it so we're fighting i mean we're in the moment of fighting up on a roof there's three guys to my right that in his field of fire there's two guys in mind they're shooting at us within a hundred yards and maneuvering on us and we're taking rounds like crazy so i got my two guys and i'm looking over there i can't quite get my gun over to shoot at his and he shoots one and i kind of peek over and i see him go down there's two other guys now that were within 50 yards and they're running towards us open i'm like man i should pop up and shoot him and he comes up to a knee and he goes i'm done like mike get down he goes i need a can of copenhagen and i want one right now and i'm fumbling around trying to find mine and i find it and i like to have the most wimpy throw in the world and lands in front of him and he's like dude really you could hand it to me and he's calm and calm and demeanor when he's saying this and rounds are going right by his head and i'm like oh my god what what do i do like i didn't know what to do as a leader i'm like hey you can have the whole can if you want because i figured that's what he wanted to talk about so he put literally put the whole can of copenhagen in his mouth and he calmed down and then calmly raised his gun and shot the other two guys and i'm like this is the weirdest situation i've ever experienced they didn't need me to lead they didn't need that they needed to know i was there and their next step in their life was gonna be okay like if we go back am i gonna be okay and can i talk to human things because when you kill a bunch of people you you actually think that you're like am i gonna be okay with this guy says my girlfriend that i've never met going to be okay with this and those are the conversations that we had in marjah it was to me it was the weirdest phenomenon i i tried to express that in the book and i don't know how well it went no it comes through and i just think there's such good leadership lessons for somebody in a platoon a squad team platoon level such good lessons about just checking on people when they need something get it to them right away you know like if they're rolling off and they're tired and you're relieving them like get a survey of the battlefield like all these basic things that i i'm sure you learn in training that you finally apply and you just see it in this real world environment that makes it unique and i wanted to ask you mentioned your lt and you have a comment in the book where oh god i think you say he's he he's the only officer i've known that i admire and see eye to eye with and yeah here we go this is where i'm going to lose a lot of friends but go ahead all right well ahead please no i guess my question is and i'll put it this way for a young officer out there whether they're a seal they're in an army platoon or marine and you're taking up a platoon leader or company command position to win the trust of someone like you how like what was it that he brought that you had an affinity for or that worked with you uh so i had put him through training when i was an instructor and he was a demonstratively great athlete which isn't rare most of the academy guys because of the prep time show up to training really ahead above athletically and when he came to the platoon we had our initial meeting and uh i i let him meet my wife first and he goes don't you think we should have a like a leadership meeting first i'm like nope first meeting is i want you to come over and we're gonna have dinner so he comes over it wasn't uncomfortable but he gets to meet my family and met stacy and then we went on the back porch and i literally said this here's the deal this is just my experience of it the whole thing is between you and i it's all about you and i it's not about them it's about you and i if you and i disagree on something i'm going to win this isn't about you your career this is about you and i figuring out how to agree if we disagree i win by the way you may it's true i'm going to win and if i ever win you will you will lose sight of your career the men will lose sight of themselves and people are going to die so let's not make it about being you being right or even me being right let's make it about our our desire to be with each other he was what do you mean i said so what did you do at the academy because i was on the triathlon team i said that ain't a team you all didn't demand each something from each other you pushed each other which is cool so here in the seal platoons it's about each other you cannot ever let somebody down and they're going to [ __ ] everything up they're going to screw up everything in the seal teams it's about how much you can screw up and get away with it not how pristine anything is he's like what do you mean we're here to make mistakes it's going to look horrible to you it's going to be terrible guys are going to make mistakes then you spend time with them they need help you don't go home and thank god he wasn't married but i said we're here for them i'm not here for the skipper i could give a [ __ ] less to what he thinks he'll fire me if he wants to i don't care if he does i don't care what my master chief thinks of me i care what you and i think about ourselves and about them and i said you got to get to know them not by the i don't ever recommend letting them call you brian sir lt bro is okay in the teams you know what i mean yeah but you need to get to know them what drives them go get to meet their girlfriend their kids and i said this when they die you [ __ ] show up because what do you mean they could die and then you have to go talk to their wife about the fact that you're alive and he's dead he brian's like what the hell i'm like this is serious business man the serious business from the time we start until we disband it's all about these simple things that a lot of people don't like to talk about and we got along and he let me do my thing and he let us fail without and we failed a lot but we failed so quickly at things we learned and i said don't cover this up you can cover it up you know on paper but don't cover this up and never hold a grudge somebody [ __ ] it up go hey cool love it let's go solve it they could screw it up again that means they screwed it up the first time even though it's the second time and he goes a god that's a terrible way to be i'm like remember these guys they're not academy boys they're people that probably should be in jail and that you want them to push and fall and pick themselves back up and know that you're going to be there and you're supposed to be there when they don't want you there because they'll they're going to fight you too and it's okay to fight with them it's okay to push them and be in a pissy match with them and then put your lieutenant bar back on and go okay this is over this is what we're going to do and oddly we never had those skirmishes that happened quite a bit uh and we didn't argue about anything the whole time until the very end but uh we and i i truly enjoyed him as a human being too if this might be unfair to ask i don't know how you approach it but if you didn't have an e7 like yourself who came up and said that and you are a young officer how do you have that conversation with your platoon sergeant or your chief your e7 if the chief or the the senior list guide doesn't bring up bring it up first oh man i don't know how it would be directed top down like i don't know if it's possible because that would be so inauthentic for a guy that's not done he's only done one platoon to come up with this is the way things are you know dude you're still [ __ ] and wiping with you know your anatomy stuff on you know and that would be like a a pilot that just i don't know and my daughter's now at rutgers going through pilot training and i know uh some some warrant officers reason why i articulated alaska the best pilots i've ever met on the planet are up there i have no idea why what the [ __ ] are you going up there they still don't know why they can do things that you can't teach and when they say something there's learning you can't get a captain to go to a cw05 and go hey warren here's how things go um so a lot of things have to happen sequentially and the sequence of great leadership in the military has got to come from experience sometimes colonels can have that but by the time you're a colonel you're not a tactician so you're never going to be talking to the e567 you know whatever yep uh but uh that that's the i think it's also the tragedy of uh of the military system puts too much weight on junior officers and not enough on the senior enlisted tactician like this the israelis do it the opposite they put they all their experience would be called a sergeant or or a chief they call them officers so their leaders are ranked officers in our military they would be enlisted guys yeah and i think the airport does it that way too the us air force you know they're all officers as they're flying and so it's a different dynamic as you advance you you know in rank you advance in in that leadership role as well so that's a little different okay um mindful of time i had one other combat experience i just wanted to talk about i don't know if it's on the mission where you get your silver star but it's when you go up against this foreign fighter who is also a sniper um and as i recall reading in the book it's kind of like you're this u.s sniper you got this guy on the other side who's got you kind of he's got you ranged out at like 700 yards i think in in a small area and i was just wondering it was the mission the silver star uh trying what got us in the position where we were pinned down is they had the high ground the entire time and we had the low ground but we couldn't change that dynamic at the end of the day of that fighting we had dropped our guard and they didn't so we got initially hammered with big barrage of rpgs and bullets and machine guns and i jumped in through a window into this room where the conversation happens or this this i was pinned in a room conversation so i i got blown into a room i'm laying on the ground and i'm dazed and confused and believing that i'm dead and i rallied and in the process of rallying i go up next to this window that i'd gotten blown through and one round just misses my eye by like an inch and a half i'm like oh it could have been a ricochet you never know so the only way to test that is you got to hold something else up there to see what their abilities are so i i'm in the room i hold up actually it was a bucket and one round right through the middle of the bucket and i'm like okay due to the angle of that impact that's that hill that i'd been watching the whole day i'm like damn 635 yards away okay okay he knows where i am but i now know where he is so can i get to him before he gets to me and i'm like okay i've done this in my brain a million and a half times so i i'm in the room now and everywhere there's blankets because they're afghani blankets guys you know afghan has blankets so i put a blanket over my head or it could have been a rug and i cut a hole in the in the blanket and poked my gun barrel through it and cut another hole so that my scope could see through so i'm thinking the only thing he could see is this blanket and if i move slow enough it will just look like a blanket it won't look like a you know a ghost moving in the space so i'm laying on the ground trying to position myself so i can see this hill so i'm moving around in the shadows of the back of the room and i finally see the right side of the base of the hill and i'm looking through the window up at an angle i see the right side of the hill and i'm just watching and because at 600 yards it's still hard to see detail and i'm not seeing anything and not seeing anything not seeing any muzzle flash no puffs of smoke no nothing so i eat my way right a little bit more and i see him more of the hill and i do it again see the hilltop now ain't on the right side of that hill and i'm watching and watching and then nothing is on the right side of that hill as i come out a little further i'm like okay there the light coming through the window is two inches more as i come right i'm going to get into the light where he'll either see more of me or he'll see my scope reflect or some shenanigans and so i still can't see anything but i have a little bit left of the hilltop and i remember the left side of the hilltop there was a rock out cropping on the left side i'm like [ __ ] i know that's where he is because that's where i would be like dude the only way to see it is now to go into the light and i'm like okay here it is this is this is the moment and it's like orchestrated okay here's here here's the deal tom you're going to move out there you better see him so i'm going through my shot sequence there's i'm pressing my trigger back already i move out a little bit i don't see anything calm down again two more breaths i move out there and i see a helmet and a gun squeeze my trigger and a bullet hits my helmet and embeds right below my right next to my gun in the ground and i'm like oh he hit me i'm like well i've never been shot it probably penetrated my head because my helmet's gone and i'm laying back down staring at the ground going oh damn this must be what it's like to be shot i can't feel anything and then i put my hand up on my head i'm like and i pulled it away there's no blood and i'm like wow man he missed and i'm like ah and i'm processing it going [ __ ] the only problem is i don't know if i shot him i haven't solved any problems except now he knows exactly where i'm shooting from so that i had to do it again the only scared only i'm not scared the only time i've ever felt fear is in that moment like i was crippled like i couldn't get my heart to stop and my i felt like my eyes were going like this like i couldn't get him from crossing i'm like i can't i can't figure out what's going on my hands weren't shaking but i couldn't get my body to process it and i'm like i gotta do this again so i started breathing and got the gun under me and pulled out there saw the helmet again sent another round and in the process of that round flying my brain started processing it again and i'm looking at and there's blood all over the rocks behind him and he's humped over his gun and i see that round hit so i sent like four more rounds and i know two rounds hit him the other ones they could have been out in china i never saw where they went and so i stood up in the back of the room and i was like holy christ and i started shaking and had i had anything in my bladder i probably would have pissed and then the rest of the 35 minutes that were left it was me rallying the guys and we ran out we threw grenades over the wall we threw uh 40 mike mike over we shot 38 uh 60 millimeter mortars ran out of everything b1 bomber checks on he drops a bomb and uh crushes the enemy and and we all survived god all right super interesting story especially the way it's conveyed in the book and how you just told it and just so that you have the rest of your day back there i'm going to wrap this up with just a couple things and if someday tom you allow me to interview you again there are certain things i'd like to touch on because i feel like they deserve more time including choosing the right spouse for this role and i think like your description of the relationship you have with stacey and how you how you were able to like immerse yourself in this environment and succeed is a great lesson that a lot of people should learn when they're younger and then allowing people to make decisions and figure it out when you have these experts around you like you and the lt don't have to figure everything out these guys will figure out a solution the way you've alluded to before with a breacher but just so that you can have your day back i want to jump to some of the work you're doing now i know you have a new a newer book uh three simple things is that right yeah if you if you just want to share a little bit about what that is and how it evolved from unbreakable uh so three simple things is a process and method that i've designed that i took from the seal teams to uh improve your life uh your health your ability to make money your ability to have great profound relationships your spiritual connection and your ability to learn so i call it five areas and it's a process and in the past six years i've trained 290 some executives by following this process and the process up until this year took a year and i was just training executives or professional athletes to follow a really simple process that makes you lethal and it 2x is those areas of your life now it's a nine month or a 90 day process and before it was a year tragically because i was stupid and but uh and i the book is just straightforward i re it was written uh because a bunch of my sealed buddies were committing suicide and we're sitting around a table talking about what would happen if we all did something stupid and killed ourselves and i'm like god man i just designed this beautiful process to make life better because i proved it 200 plus times they're like hey once you write another book about it i'm like [ __ ] then i won't be able to teach it they won't have any secret anymore and they're like man one of the guys the seal that i have been working with he goes the shit's so hard anyway it doesn't matter if you put it down so yeah so three simple things leading during chaos however i want to if anybody survived the first hour and a half of this i want to say something uh the book unbreakable was titled spartan wife and it didn't make it through the publishing debacle because they didn't think that was going to sell but i wanted my kids to know that women make men and i've never ever seen that not be the case bad women make bad men and i had come out of a even though i take 100 ownership in my first relationship it was 100 me not her it was bad because i was a dumb ass when i met stacey i'd finally met somebody who wanted me to be me she didn't want to change anything she wanted more of it and allowed me to be better and better and better and better and better at my craft and we even though we weren't together often we were very close and very intimate and loving each other and i loved everything i still love everything that she does and that can happen to anybody everybody should have that experience in their life and i see that in the great executives that i coach that if they don't have it i don't coach them like the only thing we're going to work on is this it's easy to make money it's easy to get you in shape but if you don't have a good wife or a good husband in some cases everything that we're going to do is going to fall apart and i try to make a more profound statement about that in the second book but women are the key and nobody's saying it i've seen greatest warriors in the world not have strong women and they're they're tragically they can only do one thing good one time as opposed to 25 30 years of being a great you know dad or warrior it comes from the woman and i wish somebody would help teach that women women are tragically not doing it damn it i feel like it should be reading at the academies maybe like hey as you're making these big decisions they don't want anybody to be involved they want them to love the army or navy you know it's going to happen though yeah so you may as well do it right that's true yeah okay yeah i i always try to ask just two questions they're pretty quick tom yeah one is was there anything that you always carried with you into combat that had sentimental value a talisman good luck charm something like that no i was the opposite i took my ring off and took any attachment to human life away from me for the time that i was in combat so from the time i was a junior guy i would take anything that reminded me of of life uh away until i got back so i tragically was the opposite of that i didn't believe in having any attachments and i went out on every mission not anticipating that i'd come home which i think makes you better yeah and then pretty sure i know the answer to this but i like to ask it regardless you know you go back you went through buds five times which i can't even imagine the one time um the experiences you've had the people you've lost in these fights would you go back and do it all again i would have done it out of high school like the value of what i went through and and uh the great experiences i wish i had to started earlier but there may be a meaning for failure sometimes it's good to [ __ ] [ __ ] up so often that you appreciate it better when you finally get it because i know a lot of guys they make it through seal training as an 18 year old and they do well on the teams but they don't have any they don't know how rough things can get and uh so they're a different type of operator or leader and they're less human related and less affectionate to various things but would i do it again uh yeah when i couldn't do it anymore i stopped like i didn't want to cling on and just be that dude in the teams that like what the [ __ ] is he doing here when i finally put down my gun i said it's not worth being in the teams being a leader without a gun is not something that i want to do yeah well thanks very much for the time tom the the book's great um we'll definitely have links to it for people to get a hold of and then obviously uh three simple things that they can look at as well um thank you for the time and the sharing these stories with us sure thank you i appreciate what you've done

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 90,603

Rating: 4.8890357 out of 5

Keywords: Special Forces, Special Operations Forces, Squadron, Operator, Scout Sniper, NCO, Non-Commissioned Officer, Iraq, Afghanistan, Thom Shea, Navy SEAL, SEAL, Ball State, Sniper, SEAL Sniper, Silver Star, Author, Unbreakable, Three Simple Things, Helmand Province, SEAL Team 7, SEAL Team 2, BUDS, BUD/S, Admiral, Team Chief, Senior Chief, West Point, Annapolis, Academy, Taliban

Id: BD_o-W6S53A

Length: 106min 32sec (6392 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021