Combat Story (Ep 20): Jeff Depatie Tier 1 | Canadian JTF2 | Sniper | Special Forces Experience

this was the first time i had a danger closed bomb a 500-pound jade dam it was just like we're in the back it was off to the right it must it was close it was really close when it hit that that crunch and like the whole ramp and the vehicle just shaking intense but that wasn't even the fun part [Music] welcome to combat story i'm ryan puget 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 interviewed 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 jeff depatsy a retired jtf2 sniper and assaulter for those who aren't familiar jtf2 is canada's tier one military force jeff deployed multiple times both as an infantryman and the regular canadian forces and again as a member of the elite jtf2 after leaving the military jeff created a company called the special forces experience which is a highly tailored process designed for men who have achieved their own version of excellence but want to know how far they can really push their limits in this episode we not only dive into some of jeff's combat experiences but also spend time hearing jeff draw on his lessons learned from that tier one community and all the research that's gone into creating the special forces experience surrounding human performance i hope you enjoy his stories as much as i did hey jeff welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to share your story yeah thank you ryan thanks for having me so i've done just a little bit of homework on your your website what you're working on and a little bit of the background from what's out there on you thus far really excited to dive in and what i like to do is starting out with kind of how you grew up from the people i've interviewed there seems to be a pretty good it seems like some of them the door kickers which i would put you in that category grow up with a gun in hand some do not i'm very curious what your youth was like and how you kind of found your way to the military so please let me know what that looked like well i was uh born in northern ontario so you know just on the edge of civilization if you will there's not too much north of where i was there's some pockets of people but not a ton and i i lived out in the sticks and loved being outside you know you've heard the story i'm sure but uh hunting fishing you know all that kind of stuff yep guns were in hand even at like a little wee age toy guns were in hand and it was all maple leaf i wouldn't say that i knew i was going to be a soldier only because you know at that age do you really know what something is and you know some people are able to stick with something for you know that 20 years whatever you know say i was eight years old and 20 years they're able to be like this is what i'm gonna be um the only reason i say that is because soldier's such a broad term right am i going to go down this path this path you know into flight but what what is soldiering um but looking back yeah growing up definitely gun in hand and me versus nature for a long time and i i like to live on the edge you know when i had atv snowmobiles and the very first parachute i had i think i was 11 years old and we had this double tracked snowmobile and we rigged up like a paraglider uh paracel behind this snowmobile just like flying up and then slamming into the ground because it was a round shoot with no venting or nothing so it would just like catch air and jam us into the ground but it was always those kinds of things um you know that's awesome so was this like your family would they take you out hunting or out into the woods or was it more of a hey just get outside and get out of the house so my dad was into the outdoors well actually my both my folks were you know camping fishing snowmobiling that kind of stuff so i had a little bit of a taste of it yeah there was definitely that age where it was like get out of the house go explore and uh here's some stuff to do it with and you know have fun with it and i definitely did geez so what um was there a military background in the family or did you just kind of find your way there on your own my grandfather was in world war ii he was one of those guys who uh was in north africa so he was a scotsman he was in the british army started off in north africa spent pretty much from 39 to 45 in europe yeah working his way up the boot all the way in and never broke the rank of corporal so you know he was that kind of guy he was a guy who could get you stuff and obviously he had a big old rack of medals a lot of stories to tell which unfortunately i never got to really hear them from him he died when i was really young so there was that in my blood for sure i definitely have the soldier blood from the scot side but as far as my immediate family no not really no one really on my dad's side actually at all for a few generations and then yeah my mom's dad but i wouldn't say that um not uh we didn't condition me to move towards the military was just my attributes as i felt them out it was like oh i can only do this in so many realms you know maybe policing a little bit maybe a little bit of uh you know you know outdoor guide kind of stuff in a way but as far as moving on and as i grew and put it wanted to start hunting people if you will um there's only so many places you can do that right so right actually moved me and my i was pretty on the edge and luckily i found that route because then it gives you a natural healthy place to vector your energy when you're that kind of young man you know was there any discussion with your folks since they didn't have that background about getting in and what that would look like yeah yeah they my parents were always supportive they were the kinds of parents who weren't gonna really say no unless it was really gonna either you know not that i i'm just kind of extrapolating here if it was to hurt others or myself they would be like no you know but it was always okay if that's what you want to do go ahead that's what i want to go do they were a little bit more hesitant at the time because when i first started applying i was actually applying to the american military i uh i was i was unaware that canada even had a special forces unit so i was like okay well that's that's where i want to end up you know by this time i'm getting close to 20 and know a little bit more about what i want to do and i had my paperwork in and then 911 happened and then the american military stopped taking foreigners i guess understandably so my paperwork got pushed aside so it was like now what so i turned went to the canadian military and it took a little while to get myself in there you know life can happen you know i had to take care of my dad's business for a bit and a few injuries those kinds of things came up finished up a little bit of schooling so it wasn't till i was 25 that i actually once all the paperwork got processed that i that i was in fully jeez yeah it took a little ways yeah so did you enlist is that how it worked with the canadian military or did you go some other route to get in yeah you know i enlisted in the reg army so um did my homework found out you know the best route to the unit i wanted to get to was through the infantry through the airborne you know hard on your body harden your mind really and then uh grab some relevant experience and then get on selection and then go into uh um an sf unit and that was something it sounds like you kind of knew you wanted to do from the start um was like that sf side of the house yeah once i like i said when i was really young i was just you know here's here's what i'm playing with and then as i oh okay this is what uh the military consists of all these players and this is what a soldier can be from clerk to something else you know and uh yeah as i piece it together it was definitely the sf realm at the time when i first started learning about in canada we had a you know actually it's more i'm sure right now it's the old airborne unit it was disbanded after africa and i think the 80s or early 90s from rwanda but then yeah then we didn't have an sf unit once they were disbanded there was you know the dark ages of the canadian military when it was they thought peacekeeping was going to be the way to go and uh yeah so it was until later on but the us had you know seals green berets delta steel team six even if you consider rangers sf and like a whole pool of thousands of potential opportunities right so but then after that shutdown happened after september 11th i went into the recruiters and they kind of closed the door and they're like okay well this just came out and it's the paperwork now that they're they were looking for people more actively right from the recruiting side before they're just kind of pulling from the military keeping it really hush-hush and then uh yeah and i was like well there we go let's start training and yeah then took a few years to get there a couple things uh came up along the way like a tour and a couple setbacks but uh yeah once i knew what it was it was definitely the special force for me pretty much yeah 2001 that's when it kind of forced forced us out a bit because i would say that some of it was accidental in a way uh you know we were assigned the prime minister volunteered for the panjuay which i think he had no clue i don't think anyone really had an idea when it first kicked off like the aos you know what's really going on because you know people yeah we're gathering intelligence but we understand that ground truth really is quite a bit different um yeah man and i was just thinking if you know a lot of the units you just referenced in the u.s green berets and rangers and delta and those works um i mean they've just been around for so long so the people i've talked to who end up in those units are learning from folks who've been doing that for 10 or 20 years i was curious if that was kind of the experience you had or if it was because it was so fresh it was kind of people who are learning this at the same time early on or drawing on lessons from the 80s as you described it yeah well what i would i would say so just like kind of a little more backstory on say jtf2 joint task force itself it was started in the early 90s so our equivalent to the fbi the rcmp didn't want to handle this portion of the counterterrorism mandate anymore and it was handed over to a military unit so they ran a selection and did all the work-ups and then handed over to the military then the military's like okay well what do we got here you know started getting some traction uh did some deployments in there throughout the 90s up until the 2000s and one thing that i think is a huge help is if you look at our allies like you said um in a whole our military is no stranger to combat but our sf was now renewed you know even though some of those airborne guys did go to the to jtf2 the guy the disbanded unit um but we had we had the sas to draw from the american tier one that's just exponential learning right when you don't have to learn our lessons uh the hard way yourself when you go to teammates so that that helped massive amounts throughout that's one thing about the coalition is the the speed of learning what can be bounced around right you know when you have multiple units from multiple countries learning multiple lessons and uh it's all being shared to for a common good goal it's fast learning yeah that's true so if we if we go back then you're 25 you just enlist basically and at our age now 25 sounds young i'm sure at the time it didn't but were you kind of like the old guy joining up at 25 years old you know let me let me do a little audit here in my mind surprisingly no just coincidentally no because when i went to my basic training we just i because of timing so my sister was getting married and i asked if i could just come in to my basic military qualification just after she got married so that moved me from so we have bmq which is your basic military qualification and then because i was going to infantry you have your dp1 which is your infantry trade i wasn't on a bmq with infanteers i was on a bmq with you know cooks and air force people not pilots you know navy people like it was a hodgepodge but it just happened to be the oldest group they ever ran through basic military qualifications yeah the average age was really really high um so i was not around young people and then when i went into dp1 into my infantry training surprising enough i would say i was probably middle of the road actually we don't have as many super young people joining up like down in the us that's what i think anyways uh yeah they're usually a little bit later after school generally instead of before post-secondary so no i wasn't really the uh the old yo guy oh god you know it's kind of it was just fluke you know i'm sure on a normal day i would be getting on the older side yeah so that's the honor so you you mentioned uh bmq dp1 these are all new terms to me but is that kind of like your basic and what we would consider maybe ait like your advanced training dp1 yeah so bmq think everybody who joins the canadian forces goes through that it's ran a couple different places but really there's one big place we call it the mega in in jean quebec that everybody who whether you're going army navy of course everybody goes to it and it's it's to get you ready for the canadian military it was uh 13 weeks 14 weeks when i left they they are they're always adding and you know adding new things taking off things that don't work but it gets you kind of ready to fire a weapon you know gas hut how to march around all that good stuff and then i went off to my dp-1 which is my infantry training so that's another part of me there's actually another thing in between there when you go to the army you do your bmq and then you do a soldier qualification i believe you still do that so that's a few weeks that's everyone in the army and then after that i did my few months three months or four months i can't remember what it is now infantry training and then then i'm deployed to a company okay and when and when do you do airborne then so the way it works for us is there's a few different times you can do it depending on what's going on you know how it is like some things aren't cut and dry right oh yeah same yeah same for us it can get pretty convoluted so for me another just one of those things kind of a lucky stroke the unit i wanted to go to three rcr the third royal canadian regiment um each of the third battalions holds an airborne company or the airborne company and the one i went to most of the people who were in the airborne company went to starting up canadian special operations regiment which is kind of the other part of cansoffcom so we got joint task force two and seesaw so it was like an empty house so that they they knew that my whole dp1 pretty much was going to go there and they were going to go right onto their jump course so pretty much i think within a month or so i was on my jump course getting slammed into the ground nice yeah so i'm removing static line jumps at that time oh yes yes yes so um yeah most in the army usually you still do static line round shoot then you'll go up in qualification to static line square and then you'll go up to like an accelerated free fall kind of thing you know you can climb your way up like that um i don't know why oh it's probably a nato mandate i think aren't you supposed to have like a certain amount of airborne like round dopes on a rope you've got to keep qualified to be part of native or something like something like that because it doesn't make sense it's like why are we doing this this is crazy it's it's a good time um definitely hardens you up but it's like are we really gonna be doing this we're not really going to be using this yeah i hear you um yeah i interviewed a guy who was in a guy named jordan becker he's still in but he was sf at the time he was just a regular infantry guy in the 173rd and they jumped into iraq early in the war and you know like they jumped into a secured airfield the way he describes it is kind of anticlimactic even though it's technically a combat jump static line um so yeah i'll say this okay i'm i'm familiar with what you're talking about i don't know all the ins and outs but i know what up you're talking about yeah there's a few other ways you could have skinned that cat but i think good on you is for doing it too like yeah sometimes every now and then just because you can you should you know um just to keep that alive but yeah oh yeah he was he was saying like just a funny anecdote as they were jumping there was an air force colonel jumping with his company and uh the guy had no rucksack or gear he's just jumping in like board shorts on yeah ready to go man um so i i i just want to ask this i am sure i'm going to ask you this question and you're like god every american asked me this but like is it just unbearably cold training when you do this um up in canada the the infantry training world there like for us if you go to fort drum in the infantry up at upstate new york it's going to be pretty brutal or alaska but i would just imagine in canada that's just everybody's going to get exposed to that pain yeah i would it gives me just yeah where the main uh infantry battalions are and just it's right in that jet stream of super cold you know uh minus 40 is is not an unusual winter um yeah i i don't know how many times you're out there with the toboggan and snow shoes and you're like set up your ted's and they're just full of ice and it's freezing and you got maybe seems like 20 layers on just to try to stay warm and then you start walking and you're down to your t-shirt and then you stop it um so yeah it can get cold for sure the uh the trick is though is we do lots of training down in the us okay one because well for the last what is it man it's been like 19 years i know it's crazy it's been a desert war you know so there's no point in um really prepping in the snow too much and there's just certain things this is better to do in the warm you got to be able to do it in the cold sure but to get it done quicker to learn it faster and then you come back and then you apply it because you gotta think in the infantry you're shooting sometimes with mitts on it's so cold so okay how do you do that you have to drop the trigger plunger like it's just a whole new game right and then survival totally changes when you're living out of your ruck and uh mother nature's trying to get you every turn do so you just brought that up i just want to dial in on that a little bit like if you're shooting in the cold weather like that obviously i was a pilot so i haven't had to experience that pain but is it just like a cut out on the finger so that you have like access to like flesh on the air on the uh on the weapon like how do you handle that so there's a few options uh once it gets a certain level of cold you have to wear minutes unless you're really moving if you're moving you can survive with gloves but at a certain level of cold especially as you move towards the arctic you have to wear mitts there's just no way and there's no way you can put skin on steel you know if it was a combat situation sure you know you're willing to sacrifice some skin but actually on the gun right where the trigger is you can drop the plunger and you can shoot with a mitt huh it's kind of cowboy-ish but um you can yeah so we have that on our gun so you can drop it down shoot with admit we do have some mitts with like single fingers and stuff like that um but that's for like the regular infantry you know i mean if you're doing high speed ckp or something you're going to want to really go down so you got a good trigger finger on there okay man that's cool all right so you're 25 when you sign up you go through this training how long is it until you're you're deploying i guess that first time you know life's all about circumstances isn't it right uh when we got in or when i arrived finally my unit had just gone so i had to wait for that you know deployment cycle to come back around and then there was a second thing that started to happen so when we first were in afghanistan there was a lot of you know driving around in jeeps well oh man what we call iltus's things like that super light skin not cut out at all for ieds and uh you know the recluse rifles anything like that it was they were just getting eaten alive so we started to armor the light infantry battalions and uh we mostly with the lav the lab 3 i think it's striker it's probably what it goes by in the u.s you know and then it's got multiple variants most of ours were the one with the 25 millimeter bushmaster cannon on there so we had to also go from light infantry living out of iraq to mechanized so we had to get all these vehicles we had to get everyone trained up you know drivers gunners all the jazz right get the mechanics qualified so that our battalion can go over so that added a little bit more so it was probably by the time i was in the battalion it was like two and a half i think gears almost almost three maybe yeah before we go from the time you enlisted or from the time you got to your unit by the time i got to my unit oh man all right yeah enlisted it was it was three years i think yeah okay got it and man people who listen to me i i asked this question often because it weighed on me when i was i arrived to a unit that was deployed at the time um oh 304 there in iraq and you know i'm like the new guy they just redeploy you mentioned that you arrive the unit's gone um did that weigh on you like oh man i might miss this this war or i'm gonna be the new guy everybody's gonna be a combat vet yeah there was wasn't that something in the psyches especially after 2001 everyone knew what they were going to get into there was two well-developed war zones so you were going for a reason and yeah that uh that thought of not going i don't know if it actually there's always the questions to the guys who got to go you know hey what's it like yeah tell me all about it and but there was no doubt that we were gonna be going just the pace like there was no i don't even know if canada started talking really man it was well after 2010 2011 before the chat of even pulling out or it might even yeah when i was just drilling down and started happening so it was like yeah there was no issue of not going it was just more like it was a prolonged okay what's gonna happen when i do go i think there's some pros to that though where you get to think about it a lot more and and i do believe you know it's not the only tool out there but deep visualization of what you're going to get into you know you're getting all these intel reports back and everyone's like you're kind of developing that battle space before you even go so it helps your psyche prepare for it helps your unit prepare for it because we were um well man it must have been seven years in by the time we went um our strategies had changed and developed and our capabilities grew in order to meet the demands um that the enemy was throwing at us so that that was a pro to it but also you know waiting's the hardest part sometimes right yeah now for sure actually interesting you mentioned the deep visualization a few of the other folks that i've talked to dale comstock tom shea folks talk about this also tier 1 operators did you develop that early on was that something you kind of learned through training when you're at jtf2 um where'd that come from that that specific part i i was always one of those dudes who's on a knowledge quest right how to sharpen my own nature you know build up my body and my mind so that one i'd already kind of had in my bank it was honed later on as i moved into the sf world you move into a whole different realm of tools and access for that capability but no i ran through it a lot i wanted to um make sure that if you know when i got to kill someone i was ready to do that when you know women and children um are running and screaming i was ready for that when people were dying when your brain you know your buddies are dying or getting shot or whatever the circumstance the only one that i really never i'd be lying if i said i fully wrapped my head around it was you know getting on an ied i was okay with dying like i'm still like i'm not uh i don't want to die but i'm okay with the concept of death but losing a limb i was never able to be like okay yeah i'll i'll [ __ ] bounce back from that so i always got to hand it out to those guys girls who come back and like start help like just own that [ __ ] and do really great stuff with it because that's a tough one you know that that one's uh it's like okay well this isn't part of the norm you know so yeah visualizing all that stuff i remember dreaming about it and prepping and but that's that's what a i think good soldiers got to do when you're a soldier you gotta focus on soldiering which kind of you know could suck for the family a little and all this but in order to really make sure you come home to them or to make sure you psychologically come home to them you gotta be in that pocket really good you know if you don't mind spending a second on it a little bit longer jeff i don't know if this is something you work on um with the company now but for the visualization like what did that look like for you when you did that um maybe pre-deployment during a deployment what how did you approach that when it comes to any moment in time any moment in time i can conceive of i'd break it up into three parts before during and after what i do before during and after they'll have similarities and through lines but what i do before during and after is going to be a little different take afterwards after something happens that you may not have like fully conceived of you have to get it out you have to express it can't stay locked up in here you know we can't have your amygdala fired up and bringing those deep into your hippocampal memories and creating bad habits afterwards so what you do after is a little different what you do during is a little bit different during you're usually maybe breathing to keep calm if you're not calm but you're there doing the business right one thing i think that people may not uh fully not that they don't get it but the modern military in the west is well trained soldiers are well trained for what they're usually coming up against doesn't mean they've uh bumped into every scenario that can happen every outcome every probability but they're well trained so when you're in the moment you usually have your like algorithm of do x y z of z's happening right you know um but yeah running through in your head in a more contemplative state i like to get a little bit more i guess we'll call it theta so you know beta alpha waves um delta our theta then delta basically that means from like high concentration high focus thinking upper cerebral areas and then kind of bring it down a little bit more to where it's like daydreaming that's where i like to do my contemplating it helps bury those memories a little bit deeper so you're not like trying to focus in those memories but you're not quite like meditatively releasing all thoughts you're just dancing with it in between there letting it happen to you you know letting it accept it feeling out the emotions and then kind of programming in your new reactions to it and you would use that like you're getting ready to go on a mission and and you kind of go through that sequence obviously the before during and then after but that the before is more of the thinking through all right we're gonna roll in in this type of vehicle we're executing this operation and you're kind of thinking through that so i'll expand on before a little bit i think as atomic structures you know you got to make sure you're atomically sound your physiology is good your psychology is good eating good healthy foods sleeping properly you know emotionally expressing working out all the gamut of holistic health that we know to give your neurons the best chance when incident happens everything goes into overwhelm you have the best chance to set up for that so all that's going on because that's just as important if i'm say i'm drinking and i'm you know i'm sleep deprived all the things just happen to be a little military but um yeah you know and then you're over there and you're eating rations like that's why you gotta train because your body's gonna be in a bit of a deficit right already just by the nature of war you can't be having uh in combat outposts you don't always get fresh meals if ever you know so you're eating high sulfite foods with tons of nitrates and stuff like that which doesn't really help your sleep so you want to maximize those things but yeah then whatever whatever the op is right so you get kind of mission briefed up how much time do you got to prep whatever sometimes you gotta roll it really quick if you don't have that you know you do what you can on the fly the uh yeah so back to visualization whatever the new op is how does that how will i react in this so it's a bunch of like if then contingencies too if this happens i'm gonna do this and be thorough you know like look at how the flying for example i i got my pilot's license when i was young you know how you got your checklist if this happens you have this whole checklist to go through if this happens it's got to be that thorough and that way there what happens is and i'm not a pro on this but when your brain goes into overwhelm it goes and it checks your upper cerebral functions for answers if you've just visualized you may not have done it but if you visualize the answers can be up there and that helps keep you out of overwhelm keeps you from going into fight or flight and then later on it helps keep you from moving into those post-stress kind of situations yeah oh man it's amazing just so many of you guys in this community it's i just assume that at a certain point it's like a psychologist is working with you all on on this the way elite athletes do so it's very interesting to hear that you just brought it up to so thanks for sharing that yeah if i can expand just like please there's a whole so sports teams bring in sports psychologists and everyone they can and they keep it isolated so that their other team doesn't have those advantages or the military's like let's bring in all the civilian experts so let's bring in all the professionals let's bring in the military experts what did you learn aars like think about uh even in flying how much information from lessons learned is being jammed in there so you just get to a certain point where yeah it uh it goes down to some factors it's big it's got a lot of breath but you you got to talk about them because the soldier will burn out especially as you move up into the tier 1 realms your pace is so so high that you know you you burn out and if i can poke a little we don't have pilots hours so yeah just kidding we love those hours and actually just before we jump into some of the experiences you had on the visualization when you mentioned the after portion so kind of like releasing or letting the emotion out you know i guess when you were in maybe a leadership role in some of these areas would you try like was that on your mind with with the other soldiers trying to get them to talk about what just happened like how do you get somebody else to release it if you know that that's something you should be doing but maybe they don't understand it the way you do yeah man so many factors there but one yes a lot of soldiers when they're in the military naturally do this already right you know smoking a joke that term has been around for how long and that that's what happens right you go on mission you're smoking and joking and hopefully those things are man when that happened and this happened and this happened now that's not always going to get it right because if someone's in overwhelm they're going to be going inside and the first one of the first things they do is they start to socially isolate so if someone's in a leadership role to help prevent some kind of operational stress injury as soon as someone's socially isolating when everyone else is like high-fiving you know or not high-fiving you know you just lose someone yeah you gotta move into laughing you gotta move into talking so um thoughts emotions and impulses you know they're all neuronal functions but they're a little bit different right you can control your thoughts a little more and you can control your emotions and a little more you can control your impulses but you need to regulate them and express them and a great way to do that is talking that's that's the first simple step so as a leader yeah gentle nudges help pull them out help them in the cycle and i won't get into the depths of what that cycle is when they're in that overwhelm but you have to help break it because what you don't want to do especially in the first two days is allow it to build allow that memory to stay hot stove red hot you know what i mean you need to start to loosen it you need to they kind of call it i think demyelination of the emotion from the memory if the memory stays attached to the emotion then that's where it's going to be dangerously locked away if we can start to move that away and then just if there is leaders listening if there's shame attached to it i should have did this i could have did this one the situation is gone and that's you gotta just move on now so figure out how to make sense of your new reality or adopt a new reality of who you are it's that simple because if you try to hold on and you try to put circle into the square into circle it's not going to work yeah man no that's very interesting so so then jeff if we jump to maybe the first time you're in combat could you just put us where are you what year is it kind of like what is the the mission set you're doing and then take us out on your first mission what it felt like for you you know the first time was not like a glorious mission it was literally we got into afghanistan and i'll back up in a second and we just had to move to our combat outpost it wasn't like hey this is a big objective 10 moving parts air stacks and stuff it was very relatively simple so we got into um our platoon flew into afghanistan i think it was late september 2008 i believe late september sometimes and normally moving into the winter months in afghanistan it kind of quieted down yeah they didn't like to fight in the cold or whatever um but this this actually turned out to be the worst winter and one of the deadliest uh whatever summer winter cycles there was it just they were like nope our strategy high note is not working um so as we did we flew into kandahar airfield we uh spent i think two nights there what we were doing is just getting our labs ready to roll out up uh highway seven and then we were heading into the panjoy and our first stop was a mountain combat outpost called massimgar just by the edge of the arghandab river so we went we're driving out and you know a lot of people say these kinds of things there's culture shock and then there's like culture shock right when you step into the panjoy it's a different place it's a different realm they've really held on to their past pretty strong and you know so we're going through there and just quick side story as we're moving in this is when they're building highway one so highway one goes from kabul they might actually go around the whole country but for sure from kabul to kandahar and then kind of back up to the north of afghanistan it's kind of like a ring road but it was it was ied alley was its nickname and what they're doing is they're fortifying it right pouring cement asphalt cement so that people can dig in or it was very obvious that someone had just laid in an ied and we were going and you know we're all on edge because this is literally our third day in country and we were in canada airfield which really was like you know it's like a suburb some suburb no not a suburb but yeah like it's pretty chilly yeah it's not too high intensity there so this is our first time out and we're like okay this is the real deal um we see these construction workers you know on edge and uh they're acting a little bit funny what they're doing doesn't add up and then anyways we we you know kind of mark and record head to msg massimgaard that's on the side of a mountain it was the worst place thing there was turns out we go we reported the ops watching it to dig in one of the biggest ieds that was found in that area that's what their that suspicious activity was it was like hundreds and hundreds of pounds of uh whatever the molding nitrate or whatever they were using just uh that you know that's that's day one get to the msg it's on the side of a mountain and they're just like mob rockets at this thing you know you know how like they're not looking to stand and fight they're just like launching in things and getting out of there next day we load up um pack up all our labs we had uh some a tank escort uh some leopard tanks similar to the abrams you know a big guy um what else do we have i can't remember if we had drock but we definitely had some eod assets with the the badgers which is another like former tank with the rollers with the whip change like the whole thing i didn't know what we were getting into what we were doing is as soon as you leave the mountain there's a row but then we were hopping into the riverbed it's dry at this time of year and no one's been up or down it it must have been years so they knew there was going to be some stuff in there and it seemed like we left and it must have been like even eight minutes later first contact so mortars start coming in and then the recoilless rifle like just missing like this giant convoy there must have been like 15 20 vehicles you know we're all spread apart and stuff all everyone's armored and we're like okay what's going on here and within minutes we are gunner so we're in the lab i'm not a gunner i'm i was in the air century or driving when i was but you got a screen in the back so everyone can see what's going on and we pull up beside this broken down wall and there there they are i think it was three of them lobbing mortars but they didn't know we saw and the lab has two guns on it one's a 25 mil um bushmaster and the other one's a it's an fbn gun it's a 762 but it's just like that's crazy anyways just mows them down so this is the first time i see people mowed down like it was like it was i always felt like what are you guys doing you're so out of your league here everything we have technologically not to mention our will it's just just let it be for a bit you know um anyway so that's the first little bit and i was that was within no time jeff in that case so were you you're sitting inside the lab watching this happen and you're kind of observing at this point you pull up you see these three guys they're taken out move on yeah so unfortunately what we did at that time is we just stayed hatches down so we really wouldn't have been much good up top just blasting our small lines oh man yeah now i then shortly after right from like the same area you know yeah i know i remember it was the first time i seen a tank shoot a group of people with i don't even remember what round it was it was crazy it was crazy just to like where there was a group of people now there's nothing it was it was intense uh and that was like that was pretty much the same engagement yeah so we're still hatches down but we're driving we still got this must have been like mile one of probably 15 miles of riverbed that we got to do and it was honestly i'm not even kidding it was like that all day small arms fire from so the riverbed's quite wide when dry uh and they're all on both sides of that right the panjoy and then uh well just north you got the hellman kind of crew pushing down um small arms fire some more mortars that kind of stuff coming in no one i don't know how the hell no one got no vehicle got hit the the batters and rollers were blown off iads i think there was four of them that went off and then as we got closer we kind of got pinned down a little bit more not a super pin down like we could have just punched out of there when i say pin down i mean like okay we gotta deal with this pin down um some guys and this was the first time i had a danger closed bomb a 500-pound jdam it was just like we're in the back it was off to the right it must it was close it was really close when it hit that that crunch and like the whole ramp and the vehicle just shaking it was intense but uh that wasn't even the fun part so we're still going we had to drop off a few guys at one of the combat outposts along the way [ __ ] [ __ ] something i can't remember what it's called and ours where we were headed for the next month was up the ways a little bit and we get in and of course we're under contact the group that's there like we don't even have time we're like almost high-fiving outside the vehicle it's going to be no time to chat got to get out of there because we get in and we're being mortared and it's hitting around hitting around they were pretty decent water team so you could tell when it's a season mortar group versus uh some noobs these guys were pretty seasoned because they actually hit inside the cop and uh but we ended up calling in artillery i believe it was that night it was either artillery or a hellfire but i think it was artillery that got them so for a little while every time we got mortared there they were all over the place they didn't know what they were doing but that would that was that was quite the first day it was like okay so this is what it's gonna be like huh okay yeah dude i don't know why you're saying this was like some nothing mission i mean i don't know i mean contact day one on your first move outside the wire sounds uh pretty hairy that's exactly how we were we were like oh yeah we're just moving to the combat outpost oh okay we're gonna get in our big vehicle and drive there and it was like oh [ __ ] no this is okay and and honestly it was a great prelude to what was coming it was it was pretty intense most of the tour while we were there so if i could just ask what was the sentiment like in a canadian force at that time you know like 2008 um and i can appreciate what you just said about the intensity in the winter months there like i was up in rc east at the time and october was a horrible month for us so in 2008 i definitely know what you're talking about but just in general like what was the sentiment from a canadian force there at the time yeah what was it about october huh because i remember that there was there was lots of death and a lot of stuff going on in that month um i would say morale is high from my point of view it you know if this is just discussionary because none of this is fact it was kind of there was moments where it felt like are we fighting the taliban or al-qaeda you know i i can't help but feel like or is it just people who don't want us here they don't understand you know that we're actually you know by that time i think there was 6 500 new schools you know women weren't able to go to school so there's so much good the afghani their their money had gone up like 49 cents or something when i say we obviously the coalition so there's just they may not have known right here they are growing their grapes in the middle of the desert they might not know so there was a little bit of that sentiment but this is like the every soldier would ever say this once once bullets are whizzing it doesn't matter you are trying to kill me you're trying to kill my buddy that's it all gloves off you know so it didn't matter so there was a bit of that not much though we felt pretty good we we were coming into that rao had kind of um there was there was a good range where they the the battle groups before us weren't really engaging a lot but it started just if you don't get in there they're gonna start nesting in there you know and they'll start doing their thing so that kept us busy and kind of away from all the politics of everything and what was going on so i would say morale was pretty pretty good and and you know knock on wood right we we lost people but we were very fortunate we managed to like do a lot of work out doing a lot of business and we we we busted our humps we did change one thing if i can add this remember i said we rolled in mechanized as soon as we hit the ground and we went back to walking and we weren't just walking on roads and stuff we were walking the most adverse paths and places that they wouldn't put um bombs and couldn't really corral us and it paid off paid dividends because now they didn't really know where we were coming from so we were able to start squeezing them and uh yeah we started pushing that uh east end more and more to the pushing them to the uh to the west at the time towards mushan and it was a lack of shar or something like that exactly you know kind of pressing them along the reg desert to the to the west the panjoy you know everyone's got their thoughts on about rate and zangabag which was in the panjway which is part of the green belt of the arghandab when it flows so if you look at a map of afghanistan there's a big desert the reg desert at least it was called the reg desert at the time and then just north of it there's this green patch where the arghandab river runs down along it and uh that's the pandora the pandaway kind of valley i guess in a way you'd call it because it's pretty much a valley it's got some hills and stuff in there but uh it's about starts about 15 kilometers outside of kandahar city and then runs about say 30 40 kilometers not maybe maybe 25 miles and it's just above the desert there but it was uh you know that that was the birthplace of the taliban really so okay perfect so if you can then in that outpost and god that that outpost you're describing sounds like so many that we supported up in all these provinces in rc east um you know just kind of like a smaller unit up in the hills getting mortared all the time we'd fly over everybody's gone pop back up um could you just talk through maybe one of the more difficult missions that you had there at the time yeah yeah uh i will say this just you know as because i think it should be said um a lot of the the kaiwa and cobra pilots were in there the apaches were in and around they were usually just say more in high profile stuff but you know those guys were because they're patrolling that a lot right and they're just waiting for something in the balloon to go up and something to happen so i did i wanted to mention that for the helicopter pilot out there they were they were integral you know shoot the pistol outside the door yeah i loved it it was this was so cowboy it was a wild west it was great um [Applause] you know there was ones that were more taxing and longer you know big humps in um people shot lots of contacts you know there was one we went on it was it was multiple days it was just morning and night of contacts um but as far as difficult goes because to me difficult is when you leave it you're not you're it's like [ __ ] that wasn't really that good it was one where we pushed pretty much to the farthest west of our ao which was an area called mushan and we flew into mushan and then we went north across the river uh yeah we flew in we took the chinooks flew across the desert it was pretty cool and we went in and we were it was near the end of our tour and it was one of those ones where it was like what are we doing here this just feels like someone's got us doing something almost just to do something we're oh yeah we're out of our depth here and i know a lot of people know this exact scenario i know this um like you know someone's sitting in a talk being like this could be an easy one and um there wasn't like a ton going on we patrolled you know there was some little ticks and stuff like that but it was uh we lost a couple people well we lost one person and someone lost their legs it was the same guy a guy sat on an ied killed him and then a guy lost his leg um not massive casualties it was just the fact that everybody was like what are we doing here you know we just we're so close to the end and we just did all this great work and relatively the the infantry guys the couple companies that were there um you know did really well gotten a lot of fights you know left a lot of hats on the ground and pushed the a out like really pushed them back out so when we came back from that one that one was a little bit tougher because now it's like i can't really make sense of what just happened there the sacrifice doesn't meet what the task was and and i know that happens quite a bit out there and uh those are those are not those are the harder ones as far as difficult in my mind as far as like feeling like you're uh in the movies it was definitely not that um but yeah [Laughter] no i hear you um how long was a typical deployment in in the regular canadian forces [Music] it varied a little i was there about nine months nine months okay yeah with an r or no yeah with an r r so we developed i think was kind of modeled off with uh obviously rnr has been around for a while but the marines started doing one more i think of the marines where they'd send troops away for a little longer you know a couple weeks um a little bit a little bit more than an r r um i went to costa rica uh yeah but mine was right at the beginning of the tour so the you know the first month two months really flew by but the next whatever six months yeah you know what i i jokingly said i i remember getting on the chinook flying out of uh the fob we were at bob spurnger and the hatch the ramp was open and we were all kind of like really looking out the back really melancholy you know because we were leaving it became like a pretty special place to us yeah oh man so did you career-wise did you end up going back in did you redeploy in the regular forces or did you then move into the sf realm after that deployment i moved into the sf after that i got back did my training once again circumstance and fate kind of stuck it to me a little bit so what happened is they revamped our what's called the assaulter course that's our special forces course for jtf2 and that backed it off so at its predictable time when it normally kicks off in january it moved um down into september or something like that so it kept me kind of stuck in the battalion a little bit longer because by this point i was like okay i i you know i milked this cow had a really good time very fond memories there but it's time to move on so yeah i did i started doing all my physical training on my you know just augmenting it doing all the recommended stuff and then when did selection and then you had to wait almost a whole year after selection which normally it's only a few months yeah it was especially because they didn't hand out the acceptance letters like right away normally you get it within a couple months so now you're just sitting like okay what's going on here just yeah what they have you doing in the meantime well i was i was lucky um i moved to [Music] they knew what my intentions were so once i went through selection they moved me into a different company and i was i was like two i see of you know better longer better term like a motor pool or something like taking care of vehicles or something it was just like really it just gave me tons of time to train uh it was it was one of those places where they put people hide them out as they're moving on to different things which i did really appreciate but as you can imagine those are also the things that make time go really slow oh i'm sure so if you can then within the canadian special ops special forces community you've mentioned jtf2 how does that how does that fit into the larger sf community there so broad brush think of something like maybe well at a time so calm or something and that's our cans off com so it's canadian special forces command similar thing different branch from uh you know the uh the army navy air force or marines in your case in there you have a special forces aviation unit we have our uh you know what's called c gyru which is like our nuclear biological chemical defense dudes and then seesaw which is our tier two unit and then jtf2 which is the tier one unit and then it has its headquarters of course um yeah so that's kind of broad brushwood and so when you assess do you assess to go to you know what you can share jeff obviously but like do you do you assess to just get into that world and then they decide where you go next are you assessing for a specific unit for a specific unit yeah so i'm not exactly sure how it works for the helo dudes uh i know that they're all seasoned pilots they don't take you know first year guys um for that pool also is a little bit smaller so they got to work with what they got not saying like you know the wrong pilot show it's just it's a smaller community um yeah so if i want to go see jairu i would go do their selection if i wanted to go c-store i'd go do their selection i don't want to go jtf2 i go do their selection yeah and and then i guess just the selection phase is it as brutal as you hear people like going through buds for seals and delta selection that sort of thing just a taxing uh grueling experience i don't want to downplay its physical difficulty or psychological difficulty but if you remember at the beginning i said we took over from the rcmp and the rcmp had started developing a really really psychological approach to selection based on character attributes so something called directed data mining where you go through scenarios over and over and either you meet those checks in the box and carry on or you don't of course there's a high level of fatigue of course there's low sleep there's all the physiological demands that are squished um but i i've never done buds i have sealed friends that i've spoken to about it you know i've never done um whatever the beres training is i kept the q course you know in their selection i just have buds that we've talked about time-wise ours is shorter it's seven days so that does a few things it's less taxing on the unit for forced generation yeah i would say that the product on the other end is similar yeah it's similar for sure but ours it just has this little bit of a different flavor that i can't really articulate in words because it came from the policing world versus a long lineage of just military um that has a few different little things in there but like i say it it's it's difficult it's physically difficult a lot of people don't make it just based on that and uh and it's psychologically difficult and a lot of people don't make it based on that but most people no i won't say most but a lot of the people just don't get picked up because of attributes they just um their traits just don't match up yeah it's interesting it sounds a lot more like um what i'm what i experienced at cia as opposed to the military more the psychological certainly not physical at the cia but definitely more on the psychological side of things one of the things i've noticed talking to especially folks who are in delta is their selection heavily weeds out people who can't operate as an individual but then they put them in a team environment so i've always find found this pretty interesting where they're really like honing in on how do you how do you make it through selection individually and then we're going to pop you in a team um was it something similar for jtf type selection or the the process itself where they're looking for somebody you can make these decisions out on their own then they drop you into a team environment as well yeah a group of individuals who work on a team right so as you move up the echelon you work in smaller groups and that group could be you so you've got to be able to be a one-man whatever or any team whatever you want to say you got to be able to function independently 100 but then uh most of the work is done in a team debt level size so you've got to be a little function on that and like back when i said directed data yeah with the trade attribute it's not these five traits right it's thousands of traits and what happens in there is you have like whatever personality brand you want to call it is over here and then you have this guy you know he's over here and this guy's here and this guy's here and you don't want one homogenized blob when it comes to problem solving you want a group that has different perceptions with obviously some traits very high perseverance the you know physical tolerance psychological tolerance phobia tolerances all those kinds of things have to be a check in the box right but then you want those different perceptions and yeah you got to be able to function on a team i mean when you haven't uh slept in days and you're rolling out real quick back home you know something could be going on um and uh you know you know things are just not lining up and you go oh you got to be a cohesive team you got to know that when someone gives you that squeeze or that person is with you you need to understand that they're there with you at that moment um and not everybody can deliver that and that's super crucial i probably why i i didn't know what to expect because who really knows what to expect until you're in right um one the like the gi joe juice monkey thing doesn't happen too often because they're so busy your pace is so high that it's almost impossible to keep up that kind of physique you know there are some guys who put a lot of effort into doing it and they really have to time manage so that's kind of one of the illusions but everybody there has high physical output check everybody there can work on a team check everybody there can work independently um but it seems um and you know my experience with other uh tier one units is very similar they're they're always very hungry to learn and very capable of adapting it so something that people probably don't realize is the open-mindedness if you look at uh like the five-factor scale in psychology um and it's uh yeah not the mbta it's flipping my mind but openness open-mindedness is one of the traits you have to be open-minded you can't be close-minded to be in these groups because everything changes so fast you know what was relevant yesterday is not relevant today and so on and so forth right so people hungry to bring in new knowledge and with that it created this really beautiful culture of uh like we called it the relentless pursuit of excellence backed by a few other things but man it creates this really beautiful cycle and you know it took me a while when i moved out of the military to find people like that the corporate world doesn't work like that it's not generally they think they're results driven but they are not results driven they just don't have the culture and selection tools to do that really um so i would say that's one of the things i don't think people really can think of when they think of an operator at that level of someone who's so open-minded and flexible adaptable obviously is a word you hear but yeah open-minded so i feel like that kind of leads into the special forces experience and i would just ask if um if you can answer this jeff great if not we'll move on but if there's if you could talk a bit about without going into like where you were that or mission set but the first time you were on a mission with jtf right or or a mission that comes to mind like some of the differences that you experience with a with your regular forces um what that felt like for you at that level and i guess just briefly how long did it take from the time that you made it through selection until you're deploying with that unit so selection and then our our salter course our operator course is a year long and then we're doing tasks within or i was doing tests within probably months if if that yeah so pretty quick yeah usually the idea is after that that that course your force generated to be deployed um and difference wise it just the caliber of tools and tech and money um can help a lot yeah um but as you shave that ice cube you know and people who move up those in anything i would imagine the same thing in the cia you're gonna get a certain kind of person in some ways that is just not better not worse but just a different caliber for that job and that always surprised me you know every dog had his day there right where you'd show up and whether it was competitions shooting competitions whatever like you know everyone's competing for this and it just creates this like um really interesting atmosphere because most people don't sit at the top you know like it's like an ebbs and flows which is kind of neat too and it keeps driving that uh that pursuit you know some something that you just mentioned reminded me uh speaking to tom satterly who is a delta operator and then this guy greg coker who i just uh spoke to who was a uh little bird gun pilot in 160th which for me as a gun pilot is like can't you can't get any higher on the pinnacle than that but both of them and other folks i have interviewed have shared like when they're at once you get into that culture the community in the tier one world there's this like every day you feel like you're being evaluated and could could be asked to leave if you don't hold up to that standard did you feel the same thing in the canadian side of the house yeah the term and maybe you've heard it but is selection never ends yeah i jokingly say that to my wife too but uh yeah uh no but that that is the culture and it has to be you know every you know some people are gonna have down days and that's totally different and maybe even need to take a little bit of time off to recoup from certain things but you gotta you gotta show up every day you know that's just how it works the the risk the stakes are too high uh to not be that so for sure i would agree with that sentiment yeah and just quickly how long did you end up staying in the unit i was there eight years i think it was last night was it pretty grueling like taxing on you physically yeah yeah yeah physically like if i just like take a quick look i have i broke my foot fast roping um luckily my knees are good i don't know how the hell my knees survive i have this like huge clicking in my hips i have a parasite that i picked up somewhere that is a little gift with me my hearing's all messed up uh broken tooth oh yeah i got a couple of tires in my shoulder not bad enough to fix i got arthritis in both shoulders and uh i have some tbi uh yeah i have to say some uh because i i refuse to be like i got a ton of it which i'm working through i'm doing some therapies for that mostly self and through a bioengineer friend um and then some doctor stuff like that and there's a few other things that like you know it stacks up so physically very taxing very very taxing that's that pace the the juice that they're able to squeeze from operators is pretty impressive to say the least and uh and then psychologically i'm i think i fared pretty well i was always as you move up usually people are a little more psychologically stable usually that's the idea of you know psychological testing and then the training that helps um make that a little bit more robust and i avoided a lot of things that could lead down the path of not so good you know like i didn't leave the military uh disgruntled i didn't leave the military and start drinking you know i moved out with purpose and stuff like that so um that helped all that um you know i got divorced it was a little hard on the old marriage that seems to be the ammo there like i say it's one of those things you kind of fall in love she's a she's a cruel mistress at times but also an amazing place i'm sure you're similar where you wouldn't change that which i um you know give that experience up for anything i just i can't i wouldn't yeah so funny bring that up so let me we let's jump to what you're doing now i'd love to hear about the transition you made out of the military there's just two questions i like to ask everybody before jump to that if that's all right jeff the first is was there anything that you carried with you through your time in combat that had sentimental value to you or was it good luck charm something like that uh yep i two things one of them i don't know what the hell happened to it but uh on day one when we landed in afghanistan our warrant officer gave all the troops in his platoon a little uh st michael's pendant the patron state of paratroopers i had that for a lot of years i don't know what ended up happening to it or that around my neck and then my sister given me very early on a little a little uh disc that said i'd love you on it and i carried that in my boot i still have it in my shape kit like it moved from my boot to my evolutions kit but um yeah that was always there because once you get a little deep in there you got to be a little superstitious you know it's just a little stitches because hey this has been working i don't want to mess with this right yeah so those are things i carried that's right now i can totally relate to that um and you almost you pretty much answered this other question but i like asking everyone just everything you went through the pain psychologically family would you do all of that again and it sounds like it's yes but i still like to ask everyone yeah um it is a yes it's a resounding yes um i just you know how it is like you get a whole bunch of flashbacks of things and it's like yeah it's always it was a yes i i like i said i considered myself fortunate i didn't have any major injuries i was always able to keep myself uh you know in my head organized yeah divorced when i was overseas in afghanistan actually my wife lost she was six months pregnant she lost her baby that was right after two days have been getting an intense off um so that that was like when i was like oh okay that wasn't part of the plan you know so those moments but that was nothing to do there's nothing i could do if i was there yeah i could support her a little bit for a little you know but i didn't nothing i could have did so i didn't have to hold on to that so yeah a big resounding yes i got to meet amazing people from all over the world and the military if it's one thing it can give you is a perception that you can't get anywhere else and you'll see and do things you can't do anywhere else yeah it's funny i don't think i've ever mentioned it while talking to somebody but i have said this to friends where there's a lot of things that money can buy but one of them like you can't go back and do that again like what you've done money isn't gonna buy it like you gotta you gotta earn it and it's a very select few who get to do it so that's very cool um so let's talk about what you did when you transitioned out you just described kind of like you couldn't find like corporate corporate america i would say corporate private sector doesn't quite um look at things the way that you may have when you came out of that tier one community was that kind of a driving force for the business that you started and where did that come from what was your transition like [Music] transition it's transit so i i did a little bit of uh special forces reserve time so i was still able so i was a jump master you know so i was training on the hey ho on the shooting courses all the things that were really like fun to do i was still doing that so i kind of had my beak wet a little bit and it was all volunteer not volunteering pay but i went when i wanted or didn't go so in between there my wife and i dabbled with a few things we started up we bought real estate with some commercial buildings and some residential or multi-unit triplexes sixplexes things like that you know to invest in and we opened up a co-working spot that was one of the things where we started dabbling with community all the while on the back we were brewing up the special forces experience which yeah it played in a little bit so i don't normally say this but kind of selfishly i i pull in all these what i call high achieving men um to come out to the experience but also then they're part of our network afterwards and it's been really fruitful it took a while to get to developing what the program is the process but it's been a fun experience you know we did research okay what am like dove into more specifically what do men want what are men missing you know adventure excitement but how does that work with their hormones and their cognitive traits and stuff like that and how do we create an event that puts them up against those walls that you know the military is really good at doing the military is very good at developing soldiers so we use some of those methodologies to never develop people because that's not our role i would never be like hey this is what's best for you the idea is that they're they come up against it and their personality either shines or doesn't and then they get to see that feedback through team stuff individual stuff or of course our persecution so could you just share more about the experience for people who haven't heard of it um i mean you just touched on some of it but in a nutshell what is it doing then so in a nutshell anyone who wants to develop their nature you know shift their perception polish their steel make their brain better improve their cognitive functions handle stress better push their psychology physiology to the max just as like a a litmus if they want most of the time that's not what it is guys chasing um things to put on their mantle don't do so well here um it's not it's not a strong enough why to pull you through but as they go through what we do is we assess all those cognitive traits so everything they do is made to put them up against it to put them in different scenarios while going through uh i think a pretty awesome experience so we call it like a heuristic approach where they're experiencing learning but being observed and then we unlike other places we will push those observations back in to see you know is this actually working for you what you're doing is this actually working you know especially uh you know not everyone's a great leader so you know that could be finagled back in because we don't have an agenda on the other end there's no like we're looking for this that's not what we're doing it's an experience for men an adventure and uh it's been it's been pretty pretty great it's kind of i'm starting to branch in ways i never expected now we're starting to dabble with the mental health side of things so we've really mastered a lot of things like i said about before during and after because that's what we did we the process is spread out over [Music] generally about eight months and it's multiple phases right so phase one kind of all the interviews and stuff but we do their initial personality assessments then they move into phase two which is a whole bunch they gotta you know mentally prepare they gotta do all that kind of stuff they gotta train physically but then we have them combing through their lives past present future dig out um try to find those like we'll call them childhood i don't like things from their childhood that are built deep down in their brain that may not be serving them you know in their new value systems because this is a big part of this is finding your values your purpose or honing it a little bit more or testing it so then they work up and then they go to the eight days which is phase three and uh that that like as a broad brush it kind of looks like uh like a selection if you will but it's not it has we use guns and stuff like that but it's not a selection it's it's it's so they experience they can really test who they are and you're forced to grow in order to overcome every moment of it because most people don't go through these kinds of things and then afterwards there's decompression and all the tools they need to not have their environment force them back into their bad habits if they have some i think most people have some habits or impulses that you know we're constantly honing as human beings like you don't reach enlightenment overnight you gotta you gotta work towards it so um it gives them a really good chance and then when they're done if they make it through which on the last hero no one made it through we send up the profile of everything we learned on them we send it to them we don't you know present anything as a strength or a weakness it's just like here's what you showed up and this is what we've seen and this is the feedback and this and this and we have some really cool esoteric stuff and some really cool scientific stuff in there and then uh yeah anyways that program now you know we've been kind of starting to dabble with ptsd stuff in different forms uh prevention or afterwards with some other programs and then just recently not to ramble on about it but uh something i think is gonna be really cool is we're doing uh it's called ultra long range shooting ultra lrs lrs.com it's an online e-course it's nine videos all about an hour an hour and a half and it's designed for anyone who wants to really start shooting a rifle or is already shooting a rifle and wants to get very proficient but delivered in a really non-polarized you know way of shooting we don't have any opinion we don't talk about kit or anything and really the reason i feel kind of obliged to mention it ryan is just right now with so many people buying all these guns um as soon as someone owns a gun and doesn't know how to use it they're way more dangerous than if they know how to use it so yeah it's a little bit of that that's going on because i don't want to see gun culture go even though i'm canadian so i have no sit down here in the u.s but it's happening up in canada as well and um as long as people are responsible with them it's hard for the government to get rid of it right yeah did i hear you correctly jeff did you say nobody made it through the last time uh yeah yeah nobody made it through uh cause it's it's that difficult huh yeah so one thing that's um there's a lot i i keep saying one thing there's a lot of things that are different than it being a selection if i could get rid of the term special forces experience i would but just because i left that realm and if i would have put jeff the potty's experience people would be like who who are you yeah yeah who cares about that so um that's just the start place but yeah no one made it through what's different is we can adapt things if we see those little chinks we can we can put more salt in those wounds until the lessons are learned and um that's where it gets a little trickier because it adapts a little bit more like it is it's templated of course but uh and then also i do have this theory that i like to kind of throw out there but i think with covid um so that was october last year i think covid has just rocked people's psyches a little more than they think because right now there's this great unknown that's put over our societies we don't really like what am i gonna be wearing this mask forever like what's what's the plan here what's the long term is kobe gonna get us all is it not is it real there's so much unknown and the old neural computer can't handle tons of that so even though lots of people are still functioning pretty good i think it's there and i think it was an extra psychological weight that they had coming into it it's just a thought um no one mentioned it i just it's impossible for to not lay on people it's so it's across the globe it's everywhere it impacts almost every day it's got some kind of impact you know so yes it is so it's just a thought a little theory i got also it's just it's a hard course sounds like it and you mentioned something there about people trying to find their purpose and what might be missing um from having done this for a while do you do you tend to see similar purposes surface from from the people who go through this what they find as a part of this let's i'll just define a little so that we're making sure we're sitting out the same sheet i think purpose for every human being is the same to physically psychologically try to be the best high vibrational uh most considerate human being you can be you know constantly crafting your own body and as you do that through the years you'll pick up skills and stuff like that and that moves into what i like to call life's work what you move into more and more usually in some form of service usually as people homeless where they feel like they're giving back in some way so in that i would say there's similarities as far as other similarities you know a lot of them had some military interests obviously you know they have some kind of survival style interest but as far as that life's work on the other side or purpose as you're calling it no no i bet some guys have like gone home and wanted to just burn the whole thing down and restart and move in this direction you know it's pretty interesting that way because we just shock what's called your default mode network and your brain so much that it just forces a new perception it takes off veils and forces a new perception a new lens we are doing a documentary on what we're calling the art of adversity i think that's more of the way i'll contribute that way yeah you know tbd it should be about another maybe eight months before we're all done that but it's the idea of it is is um before during and after what did people do you know uh one woman from bangladesh who was imprisoned you know political prisoner you know being lost her whole family that kind of stuff what did she do now now she's in washington and she's heading up this organization a charitable organization how did she do you know those kinds of things um just to put it back out there because i think a lot of people are getting locked up um and in uh but i'll call not such a healthy way that's my opinion um yeah and i think a lot of it is fear locks them up and they're unable to move out and spread beyond their comfort zones and i think when human beings don't move out of that comfort zone that's when you get bored and you stagnate and i think that's a huge cause for depression like there's a lot of environmental causes for but i think it's a big one and then if if somebody wants like if they're hearing this and they say you know that that's interesting what's the type of person that you think this experience is geared towards so the process itself um we do make sure a few things one um there is some stability psychologically or stable so that's part of all the interview stuff uh age i don't want to put an age on it because i've interviewed some 18 year old guys who have like they don't have it figured out because no one ever does but they are so put together um that they'll add something through osmosis to the group and then you have a few guys i don't really like to go too deep into the 50s although i've had some people be pretty insistent and uh that they didn't it didn't work for them because just the the amount of physical strain they would be amazing men because now uh you know they've been these are these are people who are growth-minded right so they've been chiseling away they've been working their armor for a long time their minds are much more stable their perspective is really good they bring a lot to the table but that's just not how the process is put together so there's kind of a wide range of age and then as far as when we pick the people who come out we don't want that you know we were talking about earlier that same homogenized bland blob you know we want people from as much background and so that we can all grow together that's the whole idea every time i see these people i um i'm always amazed now we're at the point where we're feeding back in so those guys who have made it through from zero one uh a few of them been invited back against cadre and they work and we keep that cycle going just to continue on and kind of spread the good news yeah oh very interesting so i have last thing i promise i'll let you get back to your day but you mentioned that you got a pilot's license when you were younger what was the impetus for that and do you still fly so no i don't fly right now my my medical has expired but my plan is is to get back in the saddle this year so i'll just send you that one first yeah when uh well how old was i i was like it might have been 19 when i started i just loved all that kind of stuff and uh yeah started off and then at a certain point like this was before remember i was saying about the american uh going to the american army yeah i went into the recruiters and they were like yeah yeah if you get your pilot's license before you come we'll reimburse you that was like i'm not even like paraphrasing here i think those were like the exact words so yeah i didn't know i was like okay yeah i'll do this because i did at that time um i was still figuring out did i want to go the pilot route or this old infantry route so i ended up started getting it and i got it pretty quick actually and then i uh that was just my my ppl and then i did uh my multi-engine and my ifr and a few other ratings like ski and float and did a bunch of course yeah yeah it was cool i i enjoyed it what's that yeah okay i have been i'll be honest i've been kind of having the itch to pick up something new and i've been thinking rotary it's just it's pretty damn expensive but uh yeah it is awesome it is yeah if you do jeff you got to let me know i want to hear what it's like learning to hover after you've flown fixed wing because obviously everybody i know has gone the opposite direction so i i'd be interested to hear when that happens oh yeah yeah it's a chance i right now i'm working on i'm trying to pull some strings to the seat to make it more manageable mostly it's just it's it's time but uh yeah i think i think it'd be a blast especially up north getting like a little chopper with floats and you know man you can go a lot of places with that be cool well really appreciate the time jeff thanks for sharing all this uh special forces experience sounds awesome although very challenging so uh i'll have links to all this so people can find it so really appreciate your time yeah yeah all right thank you ryan it was great to be on

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 55,729

Rating: 4.9571538 out of 5

Keywords: Delta Force, The Unit, Special Forces, Special Operations Forces, Delta, Squadron, Operator, Todd Opalski, Citadel, The Citadel, Force Recon, Marine Recon, Scout Sniper, Marine Scout Sniper, Marine Sniper, Marine Corps, The Marine Corps, Hoora, Devil Dogs, NCO, Non-Commissioned Officer, Zen Commando, Camp Zen Commando, Ranger School, Ranger, Army Ranger, Costa Rica, Iraq, Afghanistan, CIA, paramilitary, 1st SFOD, Grenada, Kurt Muse, Panama, Strategic Outcomes, American Badass

Id: iHBzn_3-oZo

Length: 89min 26sec (5366 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021