Combat Story (Ep 22): Beau Wise (Marine) | Jeremy (SEAL & CIA) | Ben (Green Beret) | Three Wise Men

he saw the guy running through a window and knew that he would as the guy on the inside of a compound ran past the window he realized that it'd be running through a door and he saw the exposed door and drew on it and waited and dropped him as he passed the door and got him in the head about 40 50 meters i didn't give him props a whole lot because we're brothers but i was like holy that's a hell of a shot for a heavy 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 a heartbreaking yet inspiring set of combat stories of three brothers as told by the only one to survive the post 911 battlefield former marine beau wise while serving in afghanistan his brother seal veteran and cia contractor jeremy wise was killed in an al-qaeda suicide bombing that devastated the u.s intel community as you'll hear in this interview less than three years later his other brother green beret ben wise was fatally wounded after volunteering for a dangerous assignment during a fire fight with the taliban ben was posthumously awarded the silver star while jeremy received the intelligence star and a star on the cia's memorial wall which i can attest to our guest beau is the only known american service member to be pulled from the battlefield after losing two brothers in afghanistan this was a challenging interview but one that i'm eternally grateful that i was allowed to do the account you're about to hear is detailed in the incredible book three wise men written by beau wise and tom celio enjoy bo thanks for taking the time to share your story today hey ryan thanks for having me on brother honor so this this is probably going to be the hardest one i've i've ever done i am one of four boys i'm the youngest like yourself um i have three sons myself so reading through your book was very challenging well-written great just such a well-done piece but it was very hard to read as as a brother and as a father so thank you very much for taking the time to do that to put everything you did into the book and represent uh jeremy and ben the way you have i can't take full credit uh yeah i can't take a whole lot of credit honestly thanks to tom for for putting it all together i'm an amazing co-author i wouldn't change it for the world so i wanted to start out with just one quote from the book um something you bring up and and i circled it as i was reading i was like this is interesting and it was talking about your mom who was a first of all i think a mother of three sons just in general has a special place in heaven especially after what has happened um but it said uh my mom was a walking encyclopedia of american conflicts yeah where did that come from what was that all about you know her her dad was a it was an art it was an air force it was a army air corps as it was during world war ii and he was a world war ii veteran and he was a history buff my my father's dad was an american history phd and so i don't know it's just kind of something that we grew up with in our family but the civil war in particular she had the bio on every single general you know from stonewall to sherman she knew it all but uh so we that was just kind of what what we grew up with you know if that era if anything came up in history you know math or science you go to my dad history you go to my mom and would she just kind of sit there at night and talk like at the dinner table she just talked about some of these folks yeah i mean it you know here and there i mean it i don't even remember how it came up you know but it was just you know the most random of places that was something that she was enthusiastic about but civil war to world war ii um not not so much world war one which is ironic because um our marine legacy started in world war one and uh you know with one of the the dough boys marine dough boys but um but yeah it would come up in the in the odd places but typically you know nine out of ten categories my dad was a surgeon so we would go to him for a lot of things you know whenever homework came around but history we always went tomorrow that's very cool all right so i i'd like to because ben and jeremy are such big components obviously of the book and your life and as we talk more we'll get into more about them i'd like to take a minute just to share to have you share a bit more about them now maybe as kids like your personality traits the way you describe it in the book is funny because my my boys are they actually fall into the same type of personalities so i'd love to just hear you kind of describe as you were younger the age gap and then what each of you was like in turn uh so jeremy the firstborn uh my dad was uh an intern or a resident i think at the los angeles va and that's when jeremy was born shortly thereafter they moved back to arkansas which is where the family the family roots my granddad was a razorback and um so jeremy was 10 years older than myself been seven and heather uh iv i believe um jeremy the classic a-type personality very demonstrative uh used his hands a lot you know like talladega nights like i don't know how to do my hands and he's very uh you know um he had it kind of he had two two senses of humor very dry when he was being sarcastic and you didn't realize that he was taking a stab at you and then when he wanted like the whole crowd he was very animated like chris farrell ben was dry 90 of his delivery a little bit more quiet a little bit more middle child introvert um and uh you know heather more like jeremy and me i'm kind of a violent clash of all three of them i think that'd be a good way to play it i suppose got it who um who was kind of like the rule breaker and the rule follower ben was the more conventional rule follower you know fall in line uh jeremy was definitely the rule breaker uh when i was a kid uh we stole a big construction um it's like a saw horse but a road construction road closed we went to this private school there was one drive in and one drive out and jeremy put this road closed sign in front of the school uh shortly before graduation so kids couldn't get to school uh that that was very the typical shenanigans of jeremy growing up and uh um you know climbing out on the roof whenever the teacher left uh she would climb out the window to go get a football or something like that kind of playing football in class when the teacher wasn't there like we always heard the stories of jeremy shannon um if you had to pinpoint the time where you and your brothers either all three of you or two of you got in the most trouble as kids what would that moment be oh well it's a short window just because of the age game i was in i guess uh first all right first grade when jeremy left for west point um so i mean i i guess when i was like about five or six you know uh but there was a couple windows where they were both living to get where all three of them were actually living together in little rock and in pensacola florida so we would go out to visit you know we would have like a week to get as much trouble accomplished as we could uh but you know early on uh you know with his friends and high school friends who he would drag along and he would convince them into multiple different things but um but i i was you know like because he never felt threatened by me so i was kind of like a pet i got taken everywhere and so i got to participate in a lot of stuff or at least observe and which usually got him in trouble if i was there but what about with ben because you guys were close still a seven year age gap right but a little bit closer in age any dangerous antics or uh serious troublemaking amongst the two of you not so much with ben ben ben just kind of he went i mean he had a wild sense of humor but he was pretty mild his personality he didn't really he was never a loud guy and you know whenever the crowd roared he would just kind of sit back in the corner you know what i mean um so you know with with ben we were close enough in size because he was a little guy he was you know five six five seven somewhere around there and um and as as i started to like you know hit kind of the same kind of gross perk that jeremy had that ben never had all of a sudden me and ben were rivals and uh things got within things might you know little ticks would get physical more often than they did with jeremy but when did that end for you guys because i think there's a point in time where brothers are just constantly at each other and then at some point it's like all right we gotta we gotta move on here there was there was a moment it's actually it's in a book and it's it's one of the most uh i that shaped ben and myself more than anything else as far as altercations between any of us where ben and i got uh pretty physical and he threw me into an armoire and this the mirror that i got thrown into was like this oval shape suspended in this door of this arm wall thing and it came loose and i i think we rigged it so that my mom didn't know at least until jeremy was out of the house but um anyway the fight got you know you know pretty bad as brothers do you know it's just going to happen and jeremy was all about it when we were just roughhoused you know he was just kind of like sitting there on the bed like yeah you know and then once he realized that it was kind of going to the next pitch he stepped in and removed then from the room uh pretty quickly and pretty forcefully and afterwards then came back to this day i had no idea what he told me um but he came back and he was you know talking to me and he said uh and he had his arm around both of us and he said look we're old we're fat and fault you know our wives might leave us we might be bankrupt our business might go under whatever it is we're always going to have brothers we're always going to have each other you know this is the one thing that we have to protect you know for from here until we leave this earth so that was kind of a shaping moment and i noticed a difference and then after that ben treated me a little bit differently like you know a little bit more responsibly like i need to protect this relationship or nurture a relationship we didn't really have one at that point but and i would say that would be the defining moment i i will say i was hoping you were going to say that um that was one section i just wanted to read it because it was really powerful for me um where he says someday this is jeremy speaking someday we'll be old we might also be fat bald and broke maybe our wives will leave us and we'll have absolutely nothing left in the world but even then we'll be lucky and you know why we'll always have each other no matter what happens you always have two brothers to lean on man it's i can barely say that without crying right now um god it's heartbreaking so let's let's then help me understand how the three of you picked different branches of service right so we got jeremy who goes into the sea like tries the army it's not right goes back to medical school and then it's uh then he just decides look i'm gonna be a seal ben is just an oda sf door kicker and then you decide to go to the marines so if you could kind of break them down one by one like what made you each move to those areas i'd love to hear it so with jeremy was very very deliberate very specific he would not accept anything other than buzz matter of fact when he got rolled back he was offered um man i haven't talked about this in years um it was something like kind of cool like training dolphins for the eod guys or something like that they you know what i mean like he got injured 242 and he like pounded every door he could to include congressman zinke or it wasn't congressman of course he was the bud's commander and he eventually worked his way to zinke's door i was like please it is buds or bust i have got to be a team guy but in that transition he was offered like all right you know he did good got injured whatever and he's like no i'm not taking this job i don't want any of the job then buds and that was the mentality that got him a second shot and rolled him back to 244. so that kind of gives you like an idea where jeremy was it was there was nothing else other than the teams and clt for ben it was i don't think it was so much deliberate i i think i mean it wasn't so much like the job or the mos per se i think is he just wanted to serve and he wanted to be in combat arms uh so infantry based whatever and he wasn't and and he would have been the first to tell you years later that um looking back he wasn't prepared he didn't do it deliberately like he should like jeremy said in in the book um funny it kind of helped ben grow up i mean he went airborne infantry and um he ended up not making uh ranger selection early on back in 99 or early 2000 and that was one of those oh man i screwed up i should have done this and so later on you know he went with a second infantry division he took a step up and went to a scout sniper scout sniper unit and he just you know kept making himself better when he got back he just decided on you know in the broad scope having been exposed and done a 13-month deployment looking back he was like okay now i know what i want to do and where i want to go and i'm going to make a plan and i'm going to get there and sf selection was it for him and he you know always said that he thought that later on he said they thought that the green berets were um you know they have a little bit more maturity to them you know the culture is you know it's not as strange as it used to be but you have to be an e6 or higher e5 waiver bowl i think you know to get in so most of those guys are combat proven and it was just a community that appealed to him and then myself um i you know i heard growing up i heard stories about college in the military i was never envious of them when they talked about college and the more and more they talked about you know their their job on a daily basis the more it appealed to me and i was kind of torn army navy marine corps you know the marine corps heritage which was always a big part of our childhood growing up and then you know a young navy seal and a combat proven green beret so i had a lot of different perspectives and you know at the end of it you know sitting down or talking with both of them and then saying what is it that you want to do specifically like don't tell me what uniform you want to wear what job do you want to do i love guns you know you know you know they're like you don't have to jump out of planes to kick down doors and shoot people in the face dude okay uh and eventually we settled on marine infantry and um i was kind of unsure of it i think the first couple of years but as i approached re-enlistment i was like you know i i uh saw recon up close and um you know the other different facets in the marine corps but my i finally picked a 20-year goal and it was being a marine gunner that was where i wanted to go i wanted to be a warrant officer of instrument kind of like the great librarians of the marine corps and after those four years in the marine corps that was my long-term plan so we didn't plan it that way long story short um but just how it worked out and if i recall correctly from the book you've got jeremy is actually second in to the military i mean he goes to west point first but ben is really the first one in so you kind of have the middle brother who gets in first jeremy is pissed right that ben is is going in he hasn't thought it through right jeremy's had like this plan in place for a long time or at least he believes he has but then i found i found it odd because i think the same thing happened to you when they come to you and you're like i'm going in the marines and ben is getting on your case right yeah you know i one of the reasons i think that they were both upset is that i didn't i never finished college you know they you know have a bachelor's and that was like the sermon that my dad had you know from the get-go like look if you want to go to the military area i support it i will support it but have options get a degree and then you know go from there and you know that way i mean you have the option of being an apache pilot or a grunt or whatever else you know and you know you can figure out whatever you want and i'll tell you the truth i'm going to give the exact same advice to my kids if they ever say the same thing about military just degree first you know that's that's it i'm i'm serious that's what it's going to be in my house that's great all right uh i gotta ask this because some of the other folks i've interviewed have had similar stories and the comments we get back from people are like they remember this happening to them can you please talk through how your mom reacted when you came back after signing up for the marine corps she she wouldn't talk to me she wouldn't pay me she she refused to cook and i'm serious like it was a bluff it was a bluff and it lasted like a week and i wanted to i stayed at my buddy's house so i could eat and uh and she and she eventually called and uh she apologized she was like come over she's like i'm still mad at you but come home and so you know life returned to normal and i think uh you know as proud as my dad was you know he shared the frustration like i remember and he you know southern baptist deacon he did not swear ever and uh he remember him saying like i will have one doctor damn it you know you know jeremy leaving medical school been you know going on a natural science degree and then uh and i didn't finish my basics i think they were kind of you know but was he looking was he looking to heather for that uh the doctor in the family no i think heather heather was was dead set she was at a bible school and uh and we were all very proud of her he didn't want her to deter from that that was like her calling was uh you know being a christian christian family you have a kid in the ministry you don't determine from it but man that's funny um okay great if we could then bo could we jump into the i want to get the timing right because i think it's really important for this story by the time you're in the marine corps where are jeremy and ben in their military lives at the time like if you could and sorry to put you on the spot you could like what year is it as you join up and and where is jeremy and his his work and where has been at that point so jeremy is uh so i enlisted in uh gosh september 2008 and jeremy had left the steel teams in august of 2008 and that's when he went through z and uh grs or whatever it was at the time was picked up by the central intelligence agency so he was on his way um you know as far as you know like getting trained up with his team uh to deploy the coast province um and ben would have been in afghanistan his oda was already uh you know in theater and uh uh luke his his son was born so he was on uh paternity leave in uh in fort lewis um so he was back home for a couple weeks and it was it if luke hadn't been born jeremy and ben and i would have all been downrange in afghanistan roughly about uh three weeks apart from insertions in between insertion all right so with that in mind let's jump in to your experience in combat to begin and then we'll jump to maybe a more difficult one for you and then we'll talk about ben and jeremy if that's okay um i'm going to ask something i know i'm going to get this wrong and i'm probably going to take a lot of heat for it later so just you've touched on it already but the the mosses i'm used to are army mosses so you are you say is it a zero three three one or is there a different way of saying it everybody says o two three one but it is a zero actually yeah okay oh three three one right so what is that like what did that mean to you because you talked about a little bit earlier but that was your role what did that mean to you and what was uh what was kind of your responsibility going into your first deployment um so i was 03 means in the marine corps is the code for infantry and the specialty mos uh lebanese rifleman 21's recon 31 machine gunner etcetera and watermen and all that i was a machine gunner and uh machine gunners in the infantry are kind of i would say jack of all trades they can excuse me work in any facet of the infantry and wine company or weapons company or whatever [Music] we i was part of an anti-armor team uh i was placed in the lead vic the lead vehicle for uh the first section of our platoon uh cat two one first battalion third marines so whenever we had mounted ops i was in the front turret whenever we were on the ground i was either the saw uh which is the squad automatic weapon 556 or the 240 on patrol something we rotate i mean there's you know in a weapons platoon like that there's a there's a lot of 31s available so anybody can carry you know one of the big guns you know if i want to pass it off to somebody what is is there any rivalry between like the one ones the two ones the three ones or any uh the rivalries are in your regiment so if your first battalion third marine regiment the rivalry is going to be two three or three three got it and your sister battalions and um because they most often exchange aos and at the left seat rides seat comes with one of your brother battalions your sister battalions or whatever um so the question is who does better with the ao than the other town so that would be our rival awesome all right so take us if you can to your first deployment right so you're all trained up you're ready to go you deploy where are you deploying to what year is it and and what is your role in that so first battalion third marines was uh part of the um i believe it was oef one or two maybe maybe two uh we were there for a couple of or two or three different phases i think um or two anyway it doesn't matter uh so we deployed uh late 2009 and we were there until uh spring of 2010. we were part of the invasion of marsha of asian uh marjah was a big talent and stronghold in helmand province if afghanistan is you know uh it's about the southernmost point in afghanistan the southeast is kandahar and hellman like balkan ohio and something else but um so not too far from the pakistani border um the pashtuns uh rain hillman uh it's a costume controlled territory so pashtun walla is uh the the code the culture of the climate very very conservative primitive lifestyle by modern standards and in marjah was becoming a stronghold we were part of the team that was going to be the picket line for the invasion on the east side of the city um and uh just west of us was first battalion six marines and third battalion six marines and they were i believe the spearhead for the invasion for the most part uh particularly three six i think they were dropped into the middle of the city um and it was a pretty kinetic ao for for some places you know um being part of an anti-armor team uh whenever we were mounted that the fight tended to run away taliban knows what heavy machine guns are mark 19 which is fully automatic grenade launchers 50 cal so they tend to run away from us whenever you know they got a heads up and even in a primitive place like helmand everybody has cell phones there was an engagement while i was gone i missed it and i was pretty pissed about that when i got back and i heard about it when i got back to our little patrol base all our positions were named after south park names and ours was casabanita and so um yeah that was i mean it was there was always something ahead of me behind me left or right but i you know i'd call it good luck bad luck grace juju whatever you want to call it i it just wasn't really kinetic wherever i was you know so i i think it's worth mentioning as you as you said like something kinetic happened when you were gone the the reason why you're gone is very important so let's we'll jump to that in just a moment but i do want to anchor the point of how big a deal marjah was for those who you know aren't as closely aligned to the military who might be listening to this like that was a massive offensive in in the time uh army marines like full on some brutal fighting um so i'm sure the marines getting dropped in there were amped up to get into that fight no doubt and then something catastrophic happens so why don't we talk about that both if you're okay with that yeah um so uh weeks before the invasion um we were actually supposed to be the first platoon into mars or one of the first platoons in the march and my anti-armor team had been called up and with tennis barn lieutenant barnes our platoon commander took one section up north to a company fob where they had been taking contact just about every single day bravo company and fox spinning guard and we got briefed on what we were supposed to do the following day that we were going to escort bravo we were going to try and uh everything that was bleeding out of the city east the effort was to push it back and hold it there until the invasion kicked off um and then in the middle we were we were supposed to be up you know long before dawn and then every one of us woke to sunlight like kind of confused there was no rebelly um you know so everyone was just kind of you know what are we still doing here and then eventually lieutenant barnes comes in and he gives us the word that the operation had been kinked or cancelled and he said we're going to go back i i forget how he worded it exactly he was like we got to go back to geronimo battalions got some for us and this is a guy who gave like a five paragraph order for you know like a security patrol like a full fledged five you know you always had the meat and potatoes of everything very thorough so all of us were like okay what just happened you know we get to geronimo and i i didn't take like you know i didn't take my a point i forgot it and um all i had was my kevlar and so i was like all right i didn't know we were going to italian fob you know whenever you're away from the the brass and the stars and stripes you tend to get a little you know uh uh anarchists but whatever anyway so like i'm i've got this mohawk and i was like sitting in my truck and i'm like praying that you know he doesn't need me for anything i don't have to get out of the vehicle and i'm not gonna get in trouble or whatever and then he walks straight up to the front vic calls me out of the turns like i need your help with something like you got to be [ __ ] and so but as we're walking like i'm not thinking about that anymore and i eventually kind of started getting paranoid like why the hell is he calling me to go to the coc i'm the lance corporal at the time at e3 and we start deviating away from the main door the main entrance to the coc and i was i'm trying i didn't you know know where we're going and all of a sudden the door came open it was the battalion chaplain and i walked in and i sat down and um and then got the word that jeremy had been killed by a suicide bomber um whatever his first name is al balawi and uh as you very well know one of the deadliest days in cia history and jeremy was one of the seven that was killed inside pop cabin and uh yeah and that um just for those listening um beau and i were speaking beforehand and um you know i don't share a ton of what i did at the agency because we're not allowed to i joined after that event but it was a ever-present feeling at the agency constantly discussed especially for ct work that you have to listen to the experts and a guy like jeremy who is in the teams and is an expert and says we got to search somebody you search them you know like there's no overriding that anymore um and there's a there's a phenomenal book on how this goes down triple agent it's terrible to read through but um god that's a seminal moment for uh for the agency they're a huge lesson learned and though i shared it with you and i would share it here i think that i wouldn't be unfair to say that you know i'm safe today because that happened and people learned a hard lesson from it so for whatever that's worth um so you're in the tent in in rc south basically you get this news um and ben is in country is he not at the time and not yet not yet his oda is his team is up north and uh ben was back home uh with my parents in washington and um yeah shortly uh um yeah i get the news and within a few hours i'm on an osprey headed for uh the air base in kandahar and uh catholic he was and um or whatever uh geronimo to bastion bastion to calf um but once once i get home and we have the memorial service for about two weeks and then ben and i leave about 20 i think around 24 48 hours apart and get back to our respective units so god the the book itself is great and we don't need to dive into the memorial services but it's pretty impressive the way you describe them like the seal community that comes out i mean he's a contractor at the time working for the agency um but you still kind of have this brotherhood that comes and speaks about him and it's like that alone is worth reading the book um but if we if i could ask like what is your mindset at that time after the memorial service like how are you wrapping your head around going back into the fight and how long is it until you get back in uh my mindset was not in a good place and i know ben struggled as well but ben came out of it by the end of the deployment i think he had um adjusted emotionally spiritually and in the way that one should and uh i did not adjust very well i i almost got myself in trouble and it probably would have been a whole lot worse if i didn't have guys looking out for me you know johnson green and lolo were in the same truck same fire team and lolo especially you know just always kind of seemed to have one eye on me even if i was just on post you know in the patrol base like you know just like where's wives what's he doing and uh not not like he was like looking to get me in trouble he was just trying to like protect me from myself i think and you know it's it's a hell i i didn't do a great job adjusting you know knowing what i know now i would try and do it a lot differently but i was reckless and i let my temper get the better at me a couple of times and you know one time specifically i almost pulled the trigger when i shouldn't have and that something something inside me knew like this you know it's sketchy but he doesn't deserve to die and i was thank god i was able to kind of hold myself um but then on the other hand was you know i had this borderline agnostic you know being raised religious and i still am religious but i was just kind of ignoring my faith ben on the other hand was diving into it and reading his bible every single day or every available opportunity and you know bible studies and other things just to kind of keep himself you know sharp on an even keel and you know it's helpful thing to do to deal with grief but to do it in a stressful environment it's not easy so if we could for a second what was it you would do differently or or was it the spiritual aspect that you would do differently because i mean the people who are going to deal with this in the future have just dealt with it certainly not losing a brother let alone two but um losing somebody close to him in in a combat environment what is what are some of the lessons you've learned that you would pass on to someone else who is going going through that well like you know i mean the spiritual dimension yes you know if if you know the service member that we're talking to happens to be religious then yes but also i mean one of the things is you know looking at every every scenario subjectively and ben taught me that you know time and time again even when i didn't want to listen you know when i saw this teenager that was um spotting for a trigger man for an ied you know what i mean i didn't want to think about the fact that he might have been coerced you know those were things that occurred to ben and he made sure that you know he put in you know he was thinking about a scenario what the people in balkan ferrari kush wherever he was what they were going through you know what might be behind why they're doing what they're doing um so approaching situations subjectively having that kind of clarity in combat situations and unfortunately i mean i was lucky that i made it through two deployments without ever having to pull the trigger and uh in helmet especially in 2009 10 and 11. yeah yeah i i don't know to this day don't know that happened and the guys in the second deployment where we were just wasn't that kinetic very much but um the first deployment was it just wasn't for me and even in my own platoon it was kind of a joke like i would get put on uh patrols that were going west you know i would go to a different squad so that i could go west towards margin and go get some it wouldn't happen and then my old squad would take contact like back right outside the patrol base i'm like what the hell man and just the way it worked out uh you know you know in the book you talk about the the reception you got when you came back same with ben where there it blew my mind bo cause i cannot imagine having somebody else come back and it seemed like people were irritated that you got time off but it was to go and bury your brother right like i i don't know if you could just talk about that for a minute to me it was incredible that people would treat you that way yeah it's um you know you got you're not going to think clearly i guess on you know a deployment maybe back here back in the states you might think that that's judgmental of those guys the roles are reversed i might have been the same way i suppose uh the first time i left and we we left with you know the assumption that jeremy was going to be buried at arlington and then as we kind of learned out like the restrictions or were the requirements of what it you know takes to be buried in arlington we realized this was going to be a long fight and eventually we just gave up and um so belongs to i mean between the memorial service between the time that jeremy passed and the time that we actually did bury him being months apart when i left for the second time that's when i got the biggest judgment and i almost didn't go and then i had conflicting you know opinions i asked both my opportunities between commander and my commander was like if if i didn't go and bury my brother i think i regret it yeah i was like all right i'm going so when i went and i buried him came back and then there was a there was a little bit of a cold shoulder from a few of the guys and i didn't argue with it i i kind of felt like i understood it because part of me felt guilty for going and um and i know it sounds weird but i i was scared that something was going to happen while i was gone and i dealt with that fear of the first go-around then i was dealing with the second go around and you know what if i that was one of the things i thought about like what if somebody's you know i didn't get the opportunity to say goodbye to jeremy what if one of the guys one of my marines is going i never had the opportunity to say goodbye or be there for him or prevent it from happening you know what i mean so like and i don't know we got over it because nothing happened i i i still think about that quite a bit actually man okay so um so so you're back if we could jump into this this experience that you have with lolo and you touched on it i think i think you were alluding to that just a minute ago but um with an ied in the road could you just talk about that experience that you had yeah um so i think uh i it was probably the wee hours in the morning when i spotted this guy we're we're the picket line for the mars invasion it's the road is uh uh route olympia i believe is the name of it and it goes straight into this major intersection on the east side of marshall called five points and um we're monitoring this road the uh the invasion the main effort is going to be moving towards us west to east or at least one element of it was and we were supposed to catch what got flushed out basically and so we're lined up and um um i'm it's it's my shift i'm in the turret i've been there hours and i don't know how long and i have these uh optics called vectors and uh which can mark the range the binoculars they have a rangefinder and i see these guys digging in the middle of the road at night now there's uh poppy farms puppy fields both on the south and north side uh north on the north side is the wadi irrigation system and a field inside of that yeah yeah so anyway i see this guy digging in the road you know you can't shoot him just because he's got a shovel um he could be a farmer that's trying to access water from the wadi into his poppy field you know you know you never know so you kind of have to see so we call it in um and i'm like this he's digging in one spot not digging across the road and i you know every every alarm like my my spidey senses are tingling and i'm just kind of you know calling up i want to kill this guy and i'm denied um not because he might have been sketchy i think they you know battalion sent a sniper to go put eyes on them and uh but because unbeknownst to me there was marines beyond my line to fire um that was they were holding in place which is where it was cop riley was supposed to be built and so even though i couldn't see them they were out there and the only weapon that i could reach them with this is a 50 which is a pretty long max effective range and they want to take any chance of that so i was denied next morning combat engineers are rolling through i give them a heads up i saw a guy digging i marked a range here it is and um i was like you know get out sweep don't stop until you get to five points um they did everything i told them to except they got back in the vehicles early and then they rolled right over the top of it and uh i kind of lost lost my mind um during all of this a kid gets shot through the chest he was the spotter for society and i i observed it with pleasure i you know be the first to admit it i'm not proud of that looking back but i was as honest as i could be with tom in the writing process in this book and my poor response to grief i think can serve as an example of what not to do this contrast you know between that example between the way ben responded i thought it was it was very important for me to be as honest as i could be so that people could see that contrast you can see an example of somebody who bodies the warrior ethos like ben and even in the face of grief and still just keep pushing and trying to keep your soul in check and the way that i did it and so yeah that's pretty much it in a nutshell god well i don't know how most people would handle that anyway i think ben was kind of a superhuman to begin with but uh i don't think many people could fault you for feeling that way though um i wonder if we could jump to and just for those who haven't read the book the the amount of research that went into this i mean i can't even begin to imagine having to track down the teammates of a seal and a green beret who are probably scattered to the winds on deployments quite honestly but you do such a great job in that of bringing out the experiences that they felt in combat and again those stories alone are worth this book but i wonder though though if you could tell a story that comes to mind about jeremy's combat experience and then we could do one for ben yeah um well first of all let me just say the uh i all i did was kind of uh network for tom my co-author tom saleo and just kind of connect him to the right people and you know with seals that new seals the guys that i hadn't even met before and i lived with jeremy in virginia beach and so once tom you know got connected to the right people you know um once we were in takeoff mode everything just kind of you know and that's i mean i i got the right guy to help me work through this project he's been absolutely amazing uh but you're you hit the nail on the head starting off with deployments that was huge um a lot of the guys some of the especially the seals were downrange regard it it kind of shocked me because coincidentally i mean green berets have a very kinetic um pretty heavy deployment cycle 90 of the guys that we wanted to talk to were home on ben's side and so we were able to access information a lot easier on that but um i'm not sure if i should say some of the names of the team guys but you know they were off in another country doing what they do and uh some of them i mean anyone that could helped and they we had guys that were reaching us from thousands of miles away that just wanted to help out and share what they could to put as much of the jeremy and chapters together in the bin chapters together so um and the marines uh we i have a 20-member check text chain from the guys of cat 2 that you know helped me and supported me during this project and a lot of fact checking because there's some things that you neglect um you know especially when you're looking back through you know 10 years of trauma like things that i completely erased from my memory there were even good memories and i was like man how did i forget that and uh so those um big shout out to everybody in tattoo that's been helping me out like you know fact checking me make sure that i had everything remembered everything correctly because especially traumatic memories tend to be like jigsaw's puzzles they can just get talked upside down so it's great having that brotherhood and that network help you piece it back together i'm fortunate to say that i have three amazing brotherhoods that have been supportive of this project and then so which of those stories comes to life for you for jeremy i guess though so there were there was one that we the only one that i know of that was um it was present for this uh was not around we was downrange while we were writing it so and we had so much between jeremy and ben we we had enough cool stuff but there was one that i always really liked uh training in combat the training one he's an intel school and he's in bud select or pre-buds or whatever it's called um they're doing leg levers uh flutter kicks uh hello dollies and you know the the sexy six-pack stuff that you do you know to walk around with some suit and buds um and anyway there's this guy next to him an officer and he's uh they're they're having to maintain you know six inches off the deck keep your heels off the deck six inches and uh the guy's hurt and jeremy knows it and he knows that the whole squad's about to get punished if his heels touch the deck and right before his heels hit the deck he feels something underneath his feet lifting him up and jeremy had lifted his leg underneath and picked him up and was holding he just reaches over and smiles he's like i got you brother and so he's in iraq and he runs out the back of the chinook and they're getting heading for this target building uh i believe after in search of some hvis and then um he looks up on the roof and there's this guy with an rpg and he just real quick thinking he just reaches up and fires a ham repair and the guy you know darts or jumps away or whatever and he thinks that he missed and uh after they take the building you know one of the guys i think the chief comes up to him and says hey did you fire him repaired a uh rpg gunner on the roof on the rooftop he said yeah he takes him over and he shows him this guy that was on the ground that had two shots like a hammered pair that was so tight running that it uh snapped his forearm in half but it was like that's that's the tightest group running i think you can achieve so it's pretty cool story but uh you know he missed he missed the the fatal shot but hey you know you can't fire an rpg anymore at least not right-handed yeah especially with the chinook sitting there and guys coming off of it i mean what a shot geez yeah all right um if we could then if we could jump to to a story that you remember from ben and there are many in the book that you share like yeah that guy was in some serious fights and i will say there's a picture in the book of him in all of his gear he's got his glove on he's like in in country just looks like a badass like in his element i think he's a medic right who's got these sniper skills but he just looks like a door kicker it's a cool shot anyway what comes to mind for ben uh um this one i got uh via email from ben he got a guy um it wasn't uh it was within a hundred percent a great range but it was with the scar heavy or the scar 308 or 762 the nato round and um he saw the guy running through a window and knew that he would as the guy on the inside of a compound ran past the window he realized that he'd be running through a door and he saw the exposed door and drew on it and waited and dropped him as he passed the door and got him in the head about 40 50 meters and uh that was something that i got from wherever he was from bulk to helmand province and i was like i wrote him back and i didn't give him props a whole lot because we're brothers but i was like holy [ __ ] dude that's a hell of a shot for a heavy that's great um if if you can think back to some of the some of his uh oda team teammates that you interviewed or that tom interviewed and you talked to um how did they tend to describe him on deployments what was he like in a fight goofy uh so some of some of the uh the uh um oda guys were playing again you know if it became we haven't you know you know i don't know if it's going to be a movie or not but they're playing like this game of who would be who would portray ben and three of them have you said unanimously it must be chris pratt so if that gives you any idea how goofy ben's personality actually was um and he uh i mean one of his teammates clay is uh you you might want to edit this out later i'll let you decide but one of his teammates clay was asian and ben would get on the pa at uh this this fob where they were at and he would he would go cry you got a phone call craig and and if clay would get mad at him he would say why you not rub me cray oh man and uh then you know he would get would be he'd be very very very very subtle and he would just do something that was just way out of left field that uh but everybody wants to go to war with a felony guy you know what i mean and you know there's no hard feelings in iraq or afghanistan you know how it is yeah so so but that sounds a little different than the way you described him growing up though like this kind of i'm not sure if you call him an introvert so i don't want to put that word out there but he was a little more reserved you know he was but i i mean he has his moment and they're they're much more rare with ben than they are with jeremy but it's because of that reason that it it just everybody loses it when when ben makes it because nobody sees it coming and but he had his goofy side but it's but you're right it wasn't really very stereotypical of him early on just and uh you know maybe just being around brothers all the time just kind of brings it out of him but he has to be comfortable you know god so i i'm going to avoid having you tell the story about when ben is is taken but i strongly recommend people read this in the book i mean it is kind of somebody taking it to the last moment and like incredibly selfless but just so that i don't end up crying i'm going to bypass that one but i do want to ask bo if you can after that happens the how are you told that this has happened and what happens next uh so uh um you know after we said goodbye and um i sent the family home we're in landstuhl germany at the hospital the family we send the family home from fisher house they fly back to the states and um myself and a fellow green beret eventually to stay behind for uh guardian angel and post-mortem autopsy and all of that and i was all totaled i was in germany for about two weeks and um once i get back um we get to dover and we're at the air force base and just fish your house in dover and um found out you know commandant's on his way and never met the commandant before and this was you know a hell of a first meeting um but he came long story short he came and he got down with me and he talked to my parents and he said um he's not going anywhere for a long time so immediately it was um ultimate devastation like i felt like i had not just lost my brothers now i had officially lost everything i thought immediately that that meant that i was going to be kicked out of active duty fortunately it didn't i was allowed to stay and just wasn't allowed to deploy so i'm glad i wasn't kicked out of active duty because i moving on um you know until i got to a point where i could communicate with my wife again with my family um the only really marines were green berets or seals were kind of the only people that i could talk to so um but initially it was it was pretty devastating in just about every way so so this is the the commandant like the the number one marine telling your folks bo is never going to get harmed i'm not going to let it happen basically so bo just in the interest of time here i want to get you back to your day there are a few things i like to ask everybody and uh there are two questions in particular and if if you can i would love to hear the answer for yourself and what you think ben and jeremy would have answered in this case if you're comfortable doing so so first one is was there anything that you carried with you in combat that had sentimental value or good luck uh yeah it was a this personalized dog tag from my dad and it was i i still got it and um uh i lost it for a while and uh a week after my dad passed he uh suffered from parkinson's and um when he passed uh years ago i just i was like cleaning the garage like organizing just for no reason and like chuck a box you know against the wall like stacking boxes this dog tag falls out of a box and i've i've kept it you know pretty close ever since but um yeah you know um i kept jeremy's uh shooter id um delta four six on me through the deployments and then uh when i got home um i got an attitude on me and then um and i got his yeah so um i i keep their call signs pretty close those are the call signs that they were wearing when they uh they were the last call signs in the seal teams and uh benzodia when did your dad give that to you and what was the significance at the time uh he gave it to me when i left in 2009 and uh um you know between uh my enlistment in 2008 and when i settled into k-bay um he let his pride shine through he was proud he was always proud and same with my mom um but they they had like okay we're not talking him into college it's not gonna happen um and uh you know that's when they you know like well we've got to deal with it now and and he was very very proud and he talked about us all the time and um uh i it was like uh and i you know i've got it in a box not not a moving box but i've got a little treasure chest and um and i just said uh you know my heart's with you and that effect and damn yeah um it had a date on it and i i think i got it um when i was in afghanistan i got my we you know a lot of people talk about getting mail like once a month they're lucky we were we didn't get nail the px train the first time the px train came was way after the margin invasion and one of my buddies indeed with a pop-up flare and the px marines just about shut their pants like guys it's not that bad out here but anyway when i when i finally got uh my mail that was in it and um yeah oh wow what about do you know for ben or jeremy if they carried anything with them then carried a bible and um and uh it was uh yeah and the uh the bible that was used by ben and a fellow green beret kevin fleick um and you read the book and just so you know kevin is doing phenomenally um at harvard law i think he's actually graduated now and um he is had had not been for covet i think he would have run boston marathon i mean he's running i mean he has made a strong recovery and he has bounced back and um anyway uh the bible that uh kevin and and ben um recited saint michael's prayer and uh said their prayers before they went off you know on ops is is uh actually buried with him um jeremy uh i don't know if he carried any kind of uh tokens or you know anything anything like that but um i would imagine it was probably a picture of dana and ethan if anything else yeah you know the heart and soul of jeremy ben is uh the family i've tried to kind of live in that example as best i can and then the uh last question i'd like to ask everyone bo is and i'm always curious how people will answer this and never more so than right now so um what i like to ask is after everything you've been through you know the the heartache the deployments the loss that you've had in particular and then how you dealt with it afterwards which is incredible as you describe it in the book would you do it all again absolutely absolutely and i really think that jeremy and then would do the same thing and you know i mean in virginia beach um after jeremy's uh after we bury you jeremy um i was approached by one of your counterparts uh worked with central intelligence agency that said i wouldn't be here for one for jeremy and since then i've i've talked to greenberg seals soldiers you know they said i wouldn't be here before for jeremy wouldn't be here for work for ben you know i mean we're coming up on 12 years and i keep hearing that and so you know i think tom did as good a job as can be done as far as focusing on jeremy and ben's effort for the preservation of life not just you know you know we talk about pulling trigger you know being door kickers and that's awesome you know being prepared to do it when it's necessary and not being you know not hesitating but the reason that you don't hesitate is you know protect the guys left and right and the end status is preservation and they were most certainly masters of the craft so so i want to round this out it the the book again like i can't say enough about it it's really well written and actually both there's somebody who um who reached out to me and said this book is incredible you got to try to reach out to beau and see if you can interview them so i know there are a lot of people out there interested in this i might just ask what is going on now for you um obviously making sure people get a hold of the book is there anything else you're working on right now no um you know i uh no i mean writing no um there is uh uh a lot of questions that i have um i don't have any answers to those questions as of yet if i did maybe that'd be something i might talk to tom about in the future um but he's doing uh some amazing work right now and i don't want to if if you want to interview tom in the future i'll let you two talk about it but he's he's uh got some pretty awesome things on his plate and i'm looking forward to seeing those published um but no nothing on the works except just looking forward to preschool and take care of that little stuff you know the quiet life and small business small town [Music] so thanks so much for the time bo this has been this has been great um thank you for putting the book together and and sharing it the way you did with tom and the partnership there it means a lot and god it hit me hard when i read it so i'm sure it will for other people thank you thank you so much for sharing ryan and thank you for having me brother [Music]

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 28,167

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, Devil Dogs, NCO, Non-Commissioned Officer, Ranger School, Ranger, Iraq, Afghanistan, CIA, paramilitary, 1st SFOD, Strategic Outcomes, navy, SEAL, TFBlue, SEALTeam2, DEVGRU, developmentgroup, sealteamsix, threewisemen, beau wise, three wise men, tom sileo

Id: zi0OIvRtbrs

Length: 64min 56sec (3896 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Catswagger11]

This is a solid podcast series a lot of Jocko listeners might be into. This episode is about the Wise brothers, two of whom were KIA.

Episode 19 features John Stryker Meyer.

[u/travisnabors]

Was their dad a Demi-God?