Combat Story (Ep 26): Patrick Moltrup - SWCC | Special Ops | Marine | CIA | Savage Actual

i'm treating a guy that multiple ak rounds to his his femur and just gushing blood and the thing is like right off the bat it's hey stop the bleeding right that's the first thing you do is so you put a tourniquet on the guy wrench it down and he took like three ak rounds to the to the upper thigh you know 762 these things are beefy rounds i stuck my i'm start pushing gauze into it and it felt like it felt like you know when you break a glass in the you know the the glasses like the super fine shards that sort of felt like in his upper thigh his femur was just in shards welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugit and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear the combat story of patrick maltrip a former marine soldier cia and special operator who served as a navy special warfare combatant craft crewman or swick he served 25 years in the military much of it in the special ops community patrick was also a navy corpsman or medic attached to various units including gold squadron one of the assault forces for seal team six which we hear about in this episode after leaving the military patrick collaborated with jason lilly another former special ops warrior to create savage actual a youtube channel and brand where patrick and jason discuss games gear and the military they're now working on a video game themselves have been sponsored by a craft brewing company and more i hope you enjoy patrick's combat story as much as i did what's up yeah and i just like i was just i told my wife i was like i was like i'm pseudo-dreading this because like the the only conversations i've ever had i think in this in-depth like this about myself was like the va psych evals when they're like okay tell me about yourself like i know there's more you know it's just like i don't know this is for me this is very much new so that that's i'm actually glad to hear that because somebody else has asked to interview me and i'm i'm like i don't know if i want to be on that side of it it's easier sitting over here asking the questions yeah yeah it's this is definitely a first for me and uh it's weird and it's like and i was telling my wife i think it was this morning too is like i've had so many like my memory i was telling my buddy about it the other day i'm like man i'm like getting to the point where i'm carrying around a little notebook like writing [ __ ] down because my wife will be like hey can you put this somewhere and then two days later she's like hey where's the where's this whatever i'm like i have no idea i don't know where i put it it's like it's getting to the point where i like i think i've hit my head so many times like i yeah it's craziness so it's like man yeah but well man so as we kick off actually that was one of the things i wanted to start with was what i read was that you've done 25 years in the military right like special ops you can't be a day over 40 though man do you have some deal with the devil no i'm i'm actually uh i'm a year from 50. come on yeah i was born in 72 so january 26 72 i'm 49 right now it's funny the the funny thing is jason and i were we were shooting we shoot once a month you know we do like four or five episodes at a time and uh we were standing around and somebody i think our our production guy kelso said somebody said something about my age and i'm like i'll be 50 in january yeah i mean like this coming january i'll be 50 and they're like shut the [ __ ] up there's no and i'm yeah it's funny man i went to my 10-year reunion and i was working with the agency at the time and uh uh i just happened to be in new york and i got an email and i was like a couple hours from my home where i was born and so i was like okay yeah i'll go to my reunion and and my my friends are just like dude you look like the same as you did in high school so yeah especially when if i completely shave and my hair is short it's just like yeah so awesome all right we'll take me through patrick as a kid then you kind of alluded to it but did you like did you grow up on the beaches i know we're gonna go through the marine swick side but like what what was your childhood like that got you set up for that you know what i was pretty far from the water i i mean uh yeah we didn't it wasn't like i was a beach kid or anything like that i grew up primarily in upstate new york um uh kind of uh west of albany so like in the foothills of the catskill mountains i went to a super small school uh fond du fotonville central like right on the shores of the mohawk river and uh yeah i mean my brother and i my our friends man i grew up just like running through the woods like a crazy person and so it was like but the cool thing was it was my access to water at that time were where ponds and uh you know at one point at one point my my parents had a pool we had a we had an above ground pool because it's new york it's upstate new york so the ground gets super cold so they don't there's not a whole lot of in-ground pools around there and uh i remember we had a we had an ground pool and it was kind of funny one year my uh my mom used to always feed the uh feed the birds on the back of our porch and she'd get super worked up because these big huge red squirrels would get in there and like eat all the eat all the uh bird seed and she told my dad one time she's like you need to get those out of there you need to shoot one of those squirrels and show them what's going on my dad went up in the window and shot a 22 it went through the squirrel hit our pool and so now we've got a 22 size hole in our pool and this was about this was like uh late fall so when winter came and water had been pouring through that little hole it froze and then expanded it ended up splitting the aluminum siding around the pool and just destroyed the whole pool it fell apart in our yard and it was uh needless to say my my my parents were pretty unhappy about that but but he hit the squirrel his party he did hit the squirrel he did hit the squirrel so yeah you know me and my brother were always running around out in the woods and you know our imagination going wild and building forts and doing all kinds of crazy stuff and uh i remember one time my uh my mom had given us like she was gonna throw away a stack of old sheets i don't even know how she like 20 or 30 sheets we took them back into the woods and climbed up into this uh oak tree that was probably 60 or 75 feet high and like tied all the corners to the tied all the corners into this tree and made like multiple levels of sheets and we spent days up there like my mom wouldn't let us spend the night up there we really wanted to like spend the night in the tree but she wouldn't let us do it but i don't know how many times i'd be laying there like just my brother's like two levels up and i'm laying there and all of a sudden like one of the corners that we nodded up would give out and you tumble down a couple of a couple of levels it was it was pretty funny so we did we did stuff like that god i feel so bad like even for my own boys today that they don't get to do that like i grew up when i was younger i grew up in in southern africa and there was just no no safety nets at all you know like we went up 60 or 70 feet and did a zipline you were not connected to anything just your hands holding on to something there was no safety there man it was a different time it was like well there was the quote today free range children or whatever you know that's like that's what we used to be and i remember uh i don't even know what the hell i was doing i was down the street almost luckily across the street from my neighbor's house and uh i just climbed up in this tree that was way too small for me and i was the very top the whole top broke off and i fell probably 15 or 20 feet onto my back and landed in a bunch of slate and knocked me out i woke up to my mom and my apparently my the person across the street saw me fall called up my mom because everybody knows everybody in that area literally everyone knows everybody if they see you doing something dumb they're like i'm going to call your dad you know but uh they called my mom and i wake up to my mom and my aunt standing over me and my mom's like what the hell did you do blah blah you're an idiot get up you know i was like that was the kind of crap that we did you know so obviously you and your brother you're out there making forts it sounds like maybe you have this military imagination going on um was your old man in the military or your uncles and where did that desire come from for you there was there was no desire i had a very it was it was crazy so i i loved you know like i said running around in the woods and um i mean i i think at the time me and my brother like we you know we had the imagination about voltron and like whatever cartoons were on at the time it was that kind of stuff it wasn't really we weren't um i didn't really we didn't we didn't talk about the military that much we didn't think too much about it and it's it's kind of bad we didn't have a mic so my grandfather had been in the navy my grandfather had been in world war ii he um lost an eye on pearl harbor and that was like he was the big military presence in our family yeah uh amazing guy um i mean uh you know i mean just the size of fact my grandfather i mean i just had a ton of respect for him just a classic new yorker just uh you know him and my in my um grandmother met like you know prior to world war ii and all that and uh but just amazing guy and but my uncle had been a marine and my parents thought he was a little bit off and they were always like not his biggest fan so actually the whole time that i was going through high school i again like i said i was kind of into like the cartoons and uh well before the comic book thing ever got big me and my brother and my friends we all collected comic books i can remember when i was like five six years old my dad's taking me down to the corner store and i get like a mountain dew and a comic book and i love that stuff so i grew up very much into sort of that culture like the x-men i mean i had all the early co i mean all this i actually still have i probably have about 4 000 comic books in storage right now and i have like the original series of eastman and layered teenage mutant ninja turtles that's black and white i have all that stuff and um so that's kind of what i grew up and i i was drawing all the time i had a lot of people in my family that were very much like artists musicians and stuff my my uncle was a an amazing musician my aunt was a painter and and all that and so and that was when like video cameras and stuff like that started coming around and you know vhs tapes and all that and my parents had a me my brother used to make horror movies so we got big into horror movies when i was growing up so i had aspirations of going into special effects or doing something like that or or drawing comic books i mean that's what i kind of wanted to do to the point where so when i got into high school i had a really cool uh art teacher her name was miss la favor never forget the woman she she was just the most even keeled coolest lady that i've ever met and uh she was like you have an amazing talent she's like you need to put together a portfolio we'll send it to art schools and this is what you should do so i went through the whole thing like and at the time to submit for an art school for a scholarship you had to have this huge array of stuff in your portfolio um prints like to where you cut out the stuff and you actually create printing stuff uh i had to do jesus christ i had to do a uh um mural on a wall that's probably still in the school that i would think i don't i have no idea so i had to do this massive mural i had to do like black and white photography so i learned how to like at the time we had a a photography studio in school i learned how to like uh you know uh develop photos and do all so i developed this huge portfolio through you know freshman sophomore senior year all that my senior year and i submitted it to a bunch of places and i actually got a scholarship to the joe coobert school of art in new jersey and this guy was a uh joe cooper was a a big artist for sergeant rock the comic book he did a well conan torak son of stone like damn he oh he created him and his son created this art school and i got i got a um scholarship there and super stoked um basically only my mom and dad were gonna be required to pay for is like my uh my um for my room or whatever and then the food everything else was gonna be paid for which is for art school it's super expensive like all the supplies i mean it dwarfs what people spend nowadays on books which is a fair amount and um so randomly mike so i told you about my uncle who my my parents thought was a little off crazy uncle right crazy uncle chris super nice guy though um but his son and i were a couple years apart and but his son was going into the marine corps and he'd already like gone to he was 17 at the time i was older than him and he had already gone and his parents signed the thing for him to to go in early like as soon as he graduated high school or whatever and i was getting to the point and i don't quite know why i think it was because i spent so much time on the art stuff it sort of burned me out and i was just i started questioning whether or not i wanted to do it and i've always been i think pretty much a realist and i was like am i going to be able to make money like be able to you know have a career as an artist you know i mean i understood that the chances of me being able to like work at marvel or do all those things at the time was was hard you know but even then when it was still such a new thing i probably had a decent chance but you know i still was a realist about it and i'm like i i don't know i'm really burned out i spend so much time on my time kind of putting all this stuff together i wasn't sure i wanted to do it anymore and uh i went with my cousin he's like hey come to meps we're doing uh not maps uh what do they call it at the time when you you go to the freaking recruiting thing on the weekends and they uh the depth delayed end he was in the delayed entry program right isn't that what it's called yeah yeah delayed entry program he's like he's like hey man come to the come to the recruiting station with me this weekend we're gonna do we're gonna do like marine [ __ ] we're gonna do like blah blah blah whatever and i'm like okay yeah i'll come check it out and i was like this is cool you know i met the i met the uh the recruiters and they're like hoorah super motivated and all that stuff and i'm like okay that'd be cool so i went with them back the next month and i i had turned 18 and i signed up for the marine corps myself didn't tell my parents and so i was probably a couple months from graduating high school and uh the school had called during the day my mom had written me a 450 check that i needed to put an envelope and send to the school for my first like semester's worth of room and board or whatever the hell it was it was just like a down payment for my room or to to to set my room aside and i didn't say [ __ ] i just took the check and i ripped it up and threw it away and uh she got a call while i was in school and they're like hey is your son still coming because we haven't received his check and blah blah and she thought that i've cashed the check and spent it on something or whatever and i got home and she cornered me and she's like what happened at 450 what did you do blah blah blah i was like i tore it up and threw it away i signed up for the marine corps she started crying she burst into tears and was like dead center against it so yeah needless to say that didn't go over well dude so wait like how long did it take to to get her did she come around like before you actually went to basic no i don't think so i don't i don't think she really came around up to that point uh she you know and at the time this is this is and i hear we're talking about my age before i this is 1991 you know i graduated high school in 91 and uh it was the gulf war actually had just come was coming to an end and so that was fresh in her mind we still had you know we had the no-fly zone in iraq um that because you know that went off in january of that year and it didn't take long obviously we stomped their guts out pretty quick and and that kind of came to a screeching halt fairly quickly and uh so and before that obviously we hadn't done anything in many many years i mean obviously we panned them on and then yeah or that was vietnam i mean obviously grenada was something but it was so small and but the before that i mean there hadn't been anything that major since vietnam so now there's this fresh war that's in her mind and she was just totally distraught but when it came down to it i i can remember like you know you graduate boot camp and the day before they have family day um i don't know how it is for the army but you get like an afternoon with your with your whoever's visiting and stuff and so you know i'm walking around my blues on paris island and she was super proud and and that was like she was that that did it she was she was she was all in pretty much after that so man so she thought she was gonna have an artist and instead she had a marine yes quite quite a bit quite yeah that was probably a shock to our system it definitely was yeah the the one other question i had and maybe this is more appropriate later but like did did you ever have any regrets about not taking that other route i mean that's a pretty stark departure from drawing cartoons like you could have worked at disney or be a marine like i don't know if there's any uh a bigger disparity between yeah yeah there's yeah there's no no bigger uh i chasm from one side or the other you know what it's funny because i i it's one thing i definitely uh try to never have regrets and i don't regret that for sure but it is funny because it's it's it's funny to see what's gotten so huge now all the stuff with the the you know the marvel movies and all the stuff like that kind of stuff is so much of a cornerstone of pop culture nowadays and it's funny because it was like when i was growing up it was like i loved the x-men i loved all that stuff uh all the the superhero stuff and and um you know i remember seeing a couple of the old movies that came out when i was a little kid like spider-man those things were the worst and i can remember me and my friends always like man when you know one of these days technology is going to improve and these movies are going to be so amazing and i mean that's where it is now you know but yeah potentially it could have been something really cool but yeah i i don't yeah there's definitely not a regret there at all you know i mean i i've had an incredible career and seen things throughout the world that no one else you know very few people get to do and i definitely don't regret it yeah all right so let's jump into the training i wanted to ask about paris island actually because i interviewed eddie penny who was a marine and then went on to dev group and he was saying like that marine boot camp was no joke and the he was talking about i think we've called them like i grew up in florida for high school and we would call them like no seems but like these little bugs that uh god damn um the hell did they call this man and see this is back to my freaking head bumps uh not no see him oh god damn that's not not in that point no not gnats in it is a it's a huge thing out there man and it is like a whole another level he said it was brutal man just start like trying to stand at attention or whatever you had to do without moving and i hadn't ever thought of that because i've never been to paris island but i do know from the coast there what that's sand fleas you know it's funny because it's like i've never really never really been uh uh i've always been pretty confident in in kind of what i could do and i you know i i know so much of the stuff that we've done in in in the guys in the special operations community it's so much of it is that mental side you know having that having that trust in yourself and that self-confidence and that that self-motivation and i can remember getting off the plane because the whole crap where i like i'd go to albany and spend the night in a shitty hotel and they put me on a plane and i fly to uh you know south carolina and paris island like i think we someplace around beaufort i don't even remember because it's in the middle of the night i never for one second had any concern right because i like once i had made that determination that hey i'm going to marine corps boot camp i was like running every day i was doing push-ups doing all this stuff i was like i'm gonna be prepared and when i got off the plane holy [ __ ] the humidity was like hitting a brick wall i it's not like that in upstate new york it's just not you know i mean even mid-summer it gets hot but it's not that humid this is like 110 humidity i could feel my hands start sweating the sec i mean and i'm off the plane like walking through the down the like ramp to going to the airport and i was like what the hell i like the the air was heavy it felt like it was harder to breathe i felt like i was on the god damn moon and that was the first time i was like whoa this is this is really weird i never experienced because i never really growing up i hadn't traveled a whole lot and so that was for me that was a huge i've never been to the south so that was just a huge hurdle that i didn't see coming at all god all right so so you you go to boot camp and i know that you later transitioned to the navy so like what is what is your time as a marine like and it sounds like you went straight in to be in the infantry right so talk us through what that looked like yeah i uh i tell you from from beginning to end i definitely had a very unconventional career uh so i didn't i i uh went from boot camp and i i signed up um and this is where the recruiters come in so i signed up for for i wanted to be an o311 which is infantry you know it would be what's 11 bravo in the in the army or whatever so i wanted to be hey i want to be infantry and that's what i said i'm like i want to fight i want to learn how to do all that cool [ __ ] that's what i want to do and uh so but the recruiters are like well you can sign up for a security forces contract and i'm like what is that and they're like well it's like you shoot different weapons and blah blah and it wasn't in their defense it wasn't a complete and total lie but it's not what exactly what i expected um and you're laughing it's like i think i think 90 of the kids like coming out of the out of the recruiter's office are like what the [ __ ] did that guy just do to me you know um but so i had i had i was an o311 so i went to security forces school but it was kind of crazy because at the time um the marine corps had created something called mct which is marine combat training and um that was for basically you know the whole every marine is a rifleman thing they basically wanted to start putting all the support troops through more rifleman-centric training so basically what the the marine corps came up with this idea like hey once everyone graduates boot camp we're gonna come back from their 10 days leave and everybody is going to go through mct including the infantry people to learn goddamn infantry tactics so i spent 30 days at um camp geiger geiger geiger tigers is what everybody called you uh so i spent 30 days at camp geiger learning basic infantry tactics with a bunch of like you know people that are going to go on to be like you know humvee mechanics and and god knows what else and so you do that for 30 days and then for the infantry that guys they're like and that's after that everybody goes to your a school so for the infantry guys they're like grab your goddamn uh rucksack and your your freaking sea bag and walk down the street to infantry school it was literally like a block away no break i just spent 30 days and so i graduated in october 10 days leave and it was like november to december time frame that i did mct again like freaking rock marches uh rifle stuff like squat assaults all basic infringy [ __ ] and then i pick up my my freaking sea bag and we walked a block away to infantry school and started it all over again obviously way more in depth now infantry school was i don't remember now it's maybe 60 days something i don't remember off the top of my head but the funny thing is like probably 15 years ago the marines like why are we sending infantry guys through mct so they can't that so now nobody does that anymore somebody wised up and said hey let's save ourselves you know hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or per marine probably and not send them to freaking infantry school and or mct so now it's still it still exists but now infantry guys don't go to that anymore so yeah got it and so how long did you spend as a marine then patrick was it four years in four years 91 to 95 like this is i had it like i said i had a kind of interesting career so o311 security forces and that was kind of my first taste of of craziness because uh i i went to um through the security forces and uh and i'm getting deployed spent some time in somalia and that was where i really first was like oh [ __ ] there's people shoot at you and you know so that was actually pre i was in in there when the what is it unscom or whatever the heck it was when all that stuff was going on pre pre you know down right before all that stuff happened i was out there and so that was like my first like holy [ __ ] africa is is exactly what everyone thinks it is talk about like you were just saying you hadn't even been to the south and now you're in somalia yeah oh man uh ridiculous i mean it was just it was like it was it was super interesting and it but it was you don't want at the time it was exactly what i wanted to do because it was it was uh an experience that you can't get anywhere else you know and uh but seeing seeing you know there's italian troops there there was uh french legionnaires there there was they were actually the first guys i can remember when we were on the ground they were the first ones that actually kind of got into a little shooting match with with some of the locals and um you know we were we were going in and out of the airport and we were doing initially like there to help secure the embassy because that's kind of what fast company does and now it's a huge organization but at the time it was really small there was like 10 platoons and we were all in one spot on norfolk naval base and but yeah it was um it was very interesting you know it was but it was cool seeing seeing like the big military machine at work because up at that up to that point it'd been just like you know training and uh but yeah i had gone through security forces school and all in in uh virginia and stuff before that and and um so it was uh yeah it was it was definitely an interesting experience and then like i said i was in o311 so i had orders to second battalion second marines down in camp lejeune north carolina so i'm like oh [ __ ] i'm going to an infantry battalion this is going to be crazy and but again it's like there wasn't a whole lot going on in the world and i showed up to receiving in camp lejeune and uh you sit there for like a week while they dick around with your paperwork and um one day i i remember i mean god damn there was just a lot of sitting around for nothing i we just sit in this big room and rows of chairs and it was they're like a bunch of admin [ __ ] you're like you know going through your paperwork and two guys walk in two marines walk in and they're like does anybody here have any boat experience and i'm looking around and i'm like man that sounds cool and i had no real boat experience to speak of but i could swim really well and i like put my hand up and there like a couple other guys did too and they're like they're like what experience you have i made up some [ __ ] i totally lied i was like uh i was like oh yeah i'm from upstate new york and i grew up on lake the adirondack lakes and my parents had a boat and i would drive the boat around the lake all the time i like i canoed around the lake maybe once when i was growing up and that was about the extent of my experience and they're like okay you you you and they took like six of us and they brought us um they took all of our paperwork they took our records and they took us over to some place on uh on camp lejeune uh it used to be over there's like in the center of camp of june there's like this big steam plant and they had a compound right next to it that was the future small craft company it was the the riverine unit for the marine corps that just got stood up so they had like all this money coming in and they were standing up a riverine unit for the marine corps and so they sat us down and went through like an interview i interviewed with the company gunny and then they're like did a pt test and uh i can't remember what else we did they like asked us some questions about boats again that i just i don't remember what it was but i completely lied and uh they kept me so what kind of craft like what are the boats that you're using at that time they had two or three platoons one was called the rack platoon rac and it was standard for stood for uh riverine assault craft and it was like a almost looked like the old pbrs from vietnam like had a cover top a gun you had a kind of gunnel or whatever the hell you call it that's some navy term uh that's for being a navy guy i don't know [ __ ] about the navy really um they had they had a gun like mount or gun tub in the front that we we would always put like a 50 cal there and then they had another mount in the back was usually a 50 cal or like a mark 19 and on the sides they had uh a couple of other mounts and we would put um there a saw or uh god i don't even know if we had gone to the 240s yet i mean it's time we still had freaking m60 so i think we had some of those and but yeah and i end up in the rack platoon and uh yeah i did that for until i got out in like 95 but then the other platoon was like a small boats platoon or uh i can't remember exactly what the platoons but they were all zodiacs and another thing called a rigid raider which was like a uh a fiberglass boat with a a console in the center and like two evinrude 250s in the back and it was all open there wasn't nothing to it you know and it was uh that was the small boats platoon too so and that was like the big stuff that we did was like all counter drug stuff down in south america and that was their primary thing so patrick you go on to like a long career in the navy what was the decision to leave the marine corps it was funny because it was like 95 time frame it was like the summer it was coming i think about i had about a month or so left and i had to go over and see the career counselor or career planner whatever the hell they're called and uh i'd actually considered trying out for force recon at the time so they're they're they're they about once a month they had held like in doc and it was you know a rock a swim um i can't remember you know a pt test they then you do like a five mile rock a weighted rock and then they beat you at the pool for a while and then after that there's an interview and if you're you're cleared or whatever you'd be making through that then you get the invite to go come and you go to brc and all that stuff or amphibious reconnaissance school that was the process back then you had to like you had to go and try out and uh it was kind of interesting because i had a couple i don't know why they were in the company but i had a couple past recon guys or dudes that had been at recon i think maybe they further you know the knowledge of skills or the skills that they had in boat stuff they were pulling these guys in and we had uh another guy in my platoon that was the he was the um squad leader whatever is in corporal at the time and he had been a uh a sniper and they just you know talking to us about this stuff and they're just super cool so i was like yeah that's what i want to do i want to i want to do more i you know i enjoyed what i was doing at the time but i was like i i want to do more but i've always been one of those people like i said i was i'm very like uh kind of no [ __ ] and i i don't like the [ __ ] [ __ ] games and i don't like stuff like that and uh i can i literally can i know the moment that i was like i'm getting the [ __ ] out i was sitting at camp lejeune getting my hair cut and i'm facing this big window and there's dudes i'd see him they park their car and they're walking toward the exchange it's a saturday afternoon and some marines coming out of the coming out of the exchange and other guys walking in his car and the dude just starts like screaming at him about his shirts not tucked in or he's not wearing a belt or in the midst of a haircut i saw this play out like three different times with different groups of people somebody coming out of the exchange or walking up when somebody else is walking up and these dudes start yelling at each other or one's yelling at the other one over just petty [ __ ] and i was like you know what [ __ ] this i i that's not the life that's not who i am and i i can't stand that crap and uh yeah i was like i'm i'm i'm done i'm not sticking around for this if this is the attitude i'm like i don't want to be around it so i'm like i'm gonna get out and go to college so yeah i about 95 sometime i i was just like i went back and told the career planner like i'm done i'm getting out and so is that the route you took patrick you went to college and then found your way back in yes yes and no so and i started going to college and i quickly became bored um college was fine but it was just like i always enjoyed the military i did you know it was like the camaraderie just the the i i like the the intensity of things and i like the camaraderie and i like sitting around with the guys and bullshitting and just doing stuff i just i i'm not a fan of the [ __ ] the pointless crap so yeah um one day i'm like in college and i'm walking through the hallway or whatever i'm like in the student union area and there was like a little pamphlet thing for 19th group or 20th group but army national guard special forces unit so i'm like that looks really cool so i called up the national guard recruiter in the area and he's like he's like hey thank you for calling me he's like but where you're at there's no there's no special forces unit around here the closest one was in um again i'm in southwest virginia like the freaking bottom corner there and he's like the closest one is like two hours from you or something it was closer to richmond which was yeah actually like four hours away i think um i'm like goddamn okay not doing that so then i was like i wonder what marine reserve units around here so i i found same thing they had a bunch of pamphlets there the closest marine unit was like a motor transport unit in in in around like knoxville somewhere or johnson city tennessee and i'm like nope not doing that i'm not driving trucks and working on [ __ ] and changing oil i'm not doing that so i went back and i called the national guard recruiter again and i'm like are there any other like combat units around here what else is like what's close to me and he's like well about 40 minutes from you there's a reconnaissance unit he's he called hhc like a headquarters something and he's like there's a recon unit there there's a mortar unit and there's a tow platoon i'm like ooh okay let's do that so he i don't remember even the process i just remember i showed up at drill one weekend and they gave me uniforms and like i didn't i i didn't obviously didn't go through army boot camp because i'd been a marine and so i started doing that i started drilling with those guys and it was pretty interesting you know we they they had guys that had been they were sending guys to ranger school they were doing sniper stuff but i ended up with the toe platoon i'm like damn it you know i was in the guard i actually ended up going to the the the recon platoon and i was with those guys for a while and i ended up um same sort of thing got bored and they're like hey there's this thing going on in bosnia and i'm like send me literally i was the only guy from my entire battalion that volunteered to go to bosnia i'm like i'll go to bosnia and they're like all the guys around me were like why am i [ __ ] surprised like i'm not surprised so i tried to do [ __ ] all the time like anytime something came up like to deploy or do something i was always the first one like i'll go send me you know i'll do it so i ended up going to northern virginia and uh spent a year in bosnia almost a year about 10 months there which was crazy the guy that uh one of the guys in my platoon was from northern virginia and worked for the agency and so that kind of like i ended up he was like we became really good friends and he made the suggestion like hey man when we get back to the states i want to introduce you to some people and so that's how i made that transition into that i moved from southwest virginia up to dc started working there you know and i don't know how much you want to talk about that stuff i mean i i i can talk about a little bit you know so share what you can i definitely know the the limitations so whatever you can share great and totally get it it was it was super interesting and i definitely learned a lot and it was um it definitely helped me later on in my military career you know uh i mean you had a completely different different uh path with those guys i think your stuff was my stuff was the stuff that i did was a little bit more not off the cuff i would say but um it was it wasn't like a full-time gig i mean you could make it a full-time gig i definitely i worked there enough to make up plenty of money and and you know there was people that did it full-time but there was also a lot of people that had been like worked for you know the courier stuff for the for the agency and then like they retired from there and were like part of this team or whatever and did that for a while but i mean you and i have talked about the stuff that we i was doing and um it gave me definitely a skill set that i had never had up to that point it was super interesting that's the thing is i was working for the agency at the time when 9 11 happened that was a huge thing and uh we were just like dude we got to do something and a lot of the guys that i was working with and stuff we talked about they went on to do like grs and they went to they went and did some other things with agency and and so people were they were having to start replacing contractors at the gig with like blue badgers and stuff because people were just like boo like [ __ ] was chaos you know at the agency at the time and um everybody was going to afghanistan and i was just like me and my buddy were just dude we got gotta do something we can't sit here and do this you know i want we gotta get into it and so we literally pulled out a freaking napkin and we're like okay what are our options we can go wow marine corps we can go in the knee i really wish i still had this napkin because we literally were like what do we want to do and i was like dude it'd be because i worked with the special boat teams a little bit uh when i was a swick i mean when i was a when i was with this with small craft company in the marine corps and it was like day and night it was like look at all these guys with the best [ __ ] like the best boats and like we had nothing you know never have the gear man they just don't happen oh man forever it was the worst it was funny so these guys would pull up to the pier you know we were gonna do i remember we did an exercise it's called agile provider uh french foreign legion came it was a huge exercise in camp lejeune and and uh some dudes from special boat team 20 came down and i think there was a seal team down there as well and we were just like damn these dudes got everything man they had like you know they're pulling out their sat phones and setting up all their antennas and like they were like i got a motorola that if i lose the marine core is going to cut my nuts off you know i mean that was like high tech for us but so i was like dude let's uh and i think at the time too we had a couple weeks before that there had been a thing on the mall in dc there had been like uh i can't remember what it was there had been um a big military expo thing on the mall and we nobody had walked around and we talked to some guys from special boat team 20 there and they're just like oh yeah yeah if you guys ever want to come out and like come on down to norfolk and check it out blah blah blah i'll show you around this dude castro i'll never forget the guy's name and i was like dude let's go down there take this guy up on this and like look at the unit and see what they actually do let's see what it's about and he's like yeah yeah let's go and we went down there and he like showed us around the master chief at the time brought us into his office and he like showed us this video of this new capability that they were developing where they like throw boats out of a c-130 and the dude's like halo out behind the boats and i'm like that's awesome i'm like that was badass and like the boats under like legit the a freaking rib is under canopy and there's dudes just going around the rib as this thing floats down and they're just circling i was like that is the [ __ ] coolest thing i've ever seen in my life i'm like i want to do that and so and uh i was like you know again it's like i don't want to go back in the military go to some line unit and get like yeah cannon fodder i didn't want to do that you know so that's when i was like dude let's go in the navy and at the last minute my buddy's like dude i'm not going to do that i don't want to do it so he pulled out and i'm like [ __ ] i'm doing it and i just yeah so i don't know much about me i i don't know much about that career field like what is the what is the training process like selection i mean that's a special ops community right like what is that how hard is it tell me about that training i just don't know anything about it you know what and it's so i was in class 4-4 so now they're like i don't know what they're at now they're probably at 144 now so i was still very new when kind of not new new i mean obviously there was there was uh quite a few iterations of that but at the time it had you before i got there had just closed looped meaning you could spend the rest of your career in that career field you could because it used to be talking to other guys like when i showed up they're like yup we just now they just got their own swift pin they only got they only they had just gotten their like own combat whatever the hell you call identifier i don't know what the hell you call it but um the the community was closed-looped so it used to be that they'd take fleet sailors um of certain rates you had to be like a gunners mate you had to be like everybody with all these different rates then they put them through swick school which was like i don't even know how long their initial classes were and then you would you'd go to a team and you'd spend however long at a team three year two years three years whatever and then they sent you back to the fleet and so now all this all this skill set is gone and you've got to bring in new guys and reteach them and obviously everybody knew early on that that was a [ __ ] way to do things and so when i got there like when i came on active duty it was the same thing i had to pick a rate i we weren't closed loop like now like when i was there it was like after maybe god i don't [ __ ] know how long it was maybe uh a year maybe a year and a half they it had already been closed looped but then they maybe a year or two years they i was even longer than that maybe three years they made it its own rate so everybody went through like i came in as an hm so i had to go in go to i went i showed up to the navy freaking up in great lakes and uh they send me to the welcome to the navy class it was like the dumbest thing ever you're like i didn't even have a uniform yet i'm like in civilian clothes and they're it's like they had two sections in this barracks osvets other service veterans and then navettes people that were coming back on it so everybody's come back on active active duty a bunch of us were other service veterans hadn't not prior you know navy and then navettes navy veterans that had gotten out and were coming back in and uh they had us all in this barracks together and they're like i mean they're like you can be here for 30 days you can be here for 45 days you're just waiting for your orders to go to your next thing and uh it was hilarious because i remember one day they're like and then i'm in a in a room like a a shitty barracks room two beds in there the the crappy like little side tables and all that stuff and uh they they got a hold of everybody through the pa system they're like mr maltra true show up down to the quarterback blah blah blah so i show up down there i'm like hey guys what's up and they hand me this paper through the through the little thing and it's like a list of uniform items they're like hey you're set up at the exchange go get your uniform items and i'm looking at this i'm like i don't know what the hell any of this [ __ ] is i show up over at the exchange and i grab a cart and there was a i went over like i said to the uniform section there's a like little filipino woman who comes over and she's like she's like okay you just go around find your size and then we'll fit it for you and it all comes out of your check great so i'm like jumper top whatever jumper bottoms i'm like what the [ __ ] is a jumper i don't know this is all like the the navy blue so i had to pick out a bunch of goddamn uniform items i didn't even know what they were luckily i didn't get everything because i'm just like i don't want to pay for this am i going to need this like the pea coat which is like 180 like jacket i'm like i'm going to swix school i'm not i don't need any of this [ __ ] so some of the things i didn't even buy luckily because i never needed um and the the funny thing was so when you put on the the bell bottom freaking blue things so this is the silliest thing in the world on the front there's like this [ __ ] like 55 buttons that you know you got it's a flap or whatever in the back it's like a drawstring i'm like well there's a flap on the back and drawstring in the front i'm like i might it must wear like this i put it on backwards and come walking out of the goddamn uh the try on room and the woman there starts laughing i'm like i'm like what she's like that's on backwards honey like how am i supposed to know that so i had a yeah so that was my and then then after that yeah there's like you you show up at another place for a two-hour powerpoint on what the navy is and i'm now in the navy and it was it was weird the kind of funny thing was there was some cool guys that were actually at that at the uh at the command there at what they call tpu transient personnel unit there's actually a dude that was coming back in he already had his trident there was a seal that was coming back in to go like he he already had orders to team three he had gotten out was coming back in there was another dude never forget his name because so unique aerosmith this dude had been a buds dud he had like came in the navy went through buds didn't make it and somehow he got out of the navy like right afterwards i don't know how if he got injured or he finagled something or what but waited two years and came back in and was gonna go to buds again then there was another dude that had been a combat controller had been an air force cct who was coming back in who was going to navy eod so it was cool it was a cool like the four of us all kind of got to know each other because everybody else was like i'm going to come back in and be a [ __ ] boiler or whatever i don't know like a bunch of dudes doing regular navy [ __ ] that we didn't really talk to and so we would all like work out we'd go down to the i mean we're all right on lake michigan or whatever it is and we'd go we'd swim in the freaking freezing water and we'd go get hammered in chicago on the weekend so uh it was a good time for for a month again i was still boozing it up every day basically with these dudes and uh it wasn't the worst time ever and then suddenly i had orders to core school and i had i had to walk down the street to there so so so what is that is core school the swic training like no that's navy core that's like my hospital that's your like that was my my oh oh i got you okay corbin right yeah corman so it was like navy core school and it was funny because i've got all these freaking ribbons and [ __ ] from the marine corps and i'm wearing my navy crap with all my ribbons and stuff on it and i show up there with my orders and the dude at the desk is like he's like no man he's like staff checks in someplace else i'm like i'm not staff i'm a student and he's like oh okay okay okay man and uh it's kind of funny because i like uh he he gave me a room assignment and i like went up to the to the barracks they were actually fairly nice i go up there and something was broken in my room i don't remember what it was and i go back down and i'm like hey man the other secretary in my room is all busted up and he's like okay you know what he's i just won't put anybody else in your room with you and he so he scratches that space off on the card i instantly went back up to the room took apart the other bed took apart all the other [ __ ] in my room and carried it down to the hall and threw it into somebody else's empty room and like moved my bed into the better center of the room and like that weekend i went got a nice car like totally outfitted the room for myself i went and got a decanter kit and like had set and had like booze on top of my refrigerator in the corner and it was pretty funny the first room inspection the uh the staff it was like he was like a hm2 like an e5 or whatever he's like maltrip you can't you can't have a [ __ ] decanter set in your room uh he's like you need to put that in your locker during the inspections and i'm like oh okay yeah i'll do that yeah oh yeah fun stuff well tell me what um what the training was like for swic man how hard is that what what does it look like it sucks man it's every day is monday you know i mean it's it's it's it's i went through core school finished that and then i i have kind of a weird situation because most of the time and i'm sure you know you go through your training and then you get orders for seer school you go through seer and then you go to your final unit you're you're like ready to go like send me out the door coach i'm i'm good to go i don't know why i got orders to see your school right before swick school so i left it totally in it it it [ __ ] me up in in i had i had a buddy who's a really was a great [ __ ] dude um man he was he was just a great dude and somehow we ended up with the same [ __ ] orders we ended up going to seer school before swift before indock so we you know got our asses handed to us in sears goal and i'm not a huge guy i mean i'm like i'm like 190 pounds right now and i think at the time i was probably 175 180 i lost like 12 or 13 pounds he lost like almost 20 pounds we got we showed up to swic school they were already about two weeks into indock which again was i think because of our cedar orders it totally screwed up we weren't there at the very start of the class we show up and we walk into they were in some they were in the midst of some class in corn you know in on the amphib side and there's a senior chief who's like teaching the class and i walk in with my orders i i can't remember but i remember i walked we were in our blues and everyone else is in their camis and he's like he looks at me and he looks at my freaking ribbons and stuff he's like were you a marine or you just a [ __ ] up seaman because i'm i'm an e3 i'm a freaking uh whatever [ __ ] hn at the time hospital man whatever i was an e3 and uh i'm like i was a marine senior chief and he's like all right go sit down and so after the class they pulled me and my buddy aside and they're like listen [ __ ] retards you guys just showed up two weeks into indock you've got to go take your your pst like your your your your screening test again because apparently that was like when everybody showed up day one of in doc you take your screening test and that was like a quick way for them to weed out people that showed up not cheap and we're just like i mean i felt like a bag of hammered dicks my buddy same thing i mean we were just we were completely smoked from we had just come out of the field like on thursday did our debrief on friday and friday afternoon we're like being told hey tomorrow morning you're gonna yeah you're gonna go do your pst we both failed it we just had no energy you know and um so i failed my initial pst and because it's it's pull-ups you have to do a minimum of like 12 or 13 pull-ups a three-mile run a 500-meter swim and also pull-ups swim push-ups sit-ups yeah that's everything so it's a lot and it's right after each each other you know it's like all right get out of the pool put your freaking running shoes on go three miles go and like i don't remember what i failed i failed a couple things and my buddy failed like he failed to swim he failed the pull-ups um we just had no upper body strength and they ripped into us they're like youtube idiots they're like uh they're like next friday you're taking the pst again you fail you're out of here so one of the things when in swic school they give you a freaking like alice pack and you've got fins in there you've got a bunch of [ __ ] in there that you carry around constantly um you know you got your freaking helmet you run around with an ore all the time so we're running around with that [ __ ] and in the morning i would run over to like a little mini mart and throw about four or five cans of um like protein drinks in my in my pack and i was just drinking those all day long um trying to like put weight back on trying to get my strength so i'm like doing push-ups all the time and uh in the in the midst of all this we're doing you know a little bit of classes here and there but it's like hey you're up at five o'clock in the morning it's it's the pool then it's freaking o course then it's a run then it's you know we're going through that stuff for a week that next friday we did our we did our screening again i passed and my buddy failed again and they kicked him out oh yeah he ended up here yeah all because of that and this dude was a machine and i have no doubt he would have made it and i mean physically he was ready and he ended up going to iraq with a stay platoon from camp lejeune and uh got caught in an uh ambush and lost an eye and uh it's just like it's like you can like literally see in that moment where this guy's life completely changed you know um but great dude we're still really good friends and um but yeah so that was that was just yeah that was just showing up freaking for indock so it and so is swick a lot of i mean is it certainly it's physically demanding it's shooting you're on the boats all the time i would imagine like is that accurate or no yes yeah and so it's i don't know what i couldn't tell you what the current iteration is from the time that i went through until today i know it's changed a bunch of times i don't quite know what the process is now but when i was there it was basically broken up into phases you went through in doc it was very very similar to buds um first phase second phase third phase whole first phase is just a beat down like i said every day is monday you're just getting thrashed it's it's one iteration of a workout to the next and that's kind of like to weed people out um my class started with well over 100 guys we're pretty pretty large classic 110 maybe 115 guys and we end up graduating like 16 or 17 something like that 18 plus 18 maybe so the attrition rate was huge and it was funny because when i showed up there was a guy that had been a rollover from another class he had claimed an injury which we all knew was [ __ ] it was just one of those guys who's like a [ __ ] loudmouth he's a big dude too and i remember the one of the weekends when we were out during indock and he he walked up to me wherever we were on a bar whatever at coronado and he's like he's like dude i'm gonna tell you right now you're not gonna [ __ ] make it he's like you're not a real navy man because i've been a marine and he's like you're not gonna make it okay [ __ ] whatever like drive on in and uh sure enough like two weeks later in the pool he quit he's like oh feigned a groin injury or something crap like that and then he quit and you're just like go away man like you damn it's it's stuff like that though it's for me personally when i would see bigger dudes that were i thought like physically more imposing or ran their mouth a lot more when those dudes would quit it was like it just gave me energy you know it just drove me on like you don't you don't have it man you know so so when i when i was looking looking up swick for this i just want to read this thing from the site right like this is the website that the navy's putting out so special warfare combatant craft crewmen are specially trained to operate in and around rivers coastal regions of the world uh extreme firepower deadly skill they operate to support one special warfare special ops missions and two as well as conducting direct action and special reconnaissance missions of their own so certainly sounds awesome like what is the day-to-day like when you're in garrison and then if you could like if we jump to combat like what does that look like in that role for people who've never been in it and there's been such a you know there and again like i i like thinking about especially it's a very small force so when you talk about i know i don't off the top of my head it's been year i mean just like all of us i've read a ton of books about different special operations units and stuff and i i remember reading one time they were saying that i think the force for army special forces is like over ten thousand guys it's a huge force seals quite a bit smaller i think more to two to three thousand maybe the time when i was in any at any we were i remember we were always manned at about 80 percent we were never fully man and i don't think anybody really ever is but yeah they were saying so you've got special boat team 20 which is on the east coast special boat team 12 which is on the west coast and special boat team 22 which is a riverine unit is down in stennis mississippi and at any one time there's 450 guys on active duty total wow um so very small force and you know through the years i mean they've been involved in everything in different you know different manners so and it's changed a lot like um we had guys in iraq we had guys in had gone to afghanistan doing like uh jtac stuff i mean exactly like it says is 100 across the spectrum of warfare across the spectrum of of operations for you know the special operations like you said from direct actions special constants all that they do it all um and there's a lot of guys that are out the door to other units and things like that so again really on par with what a lot of other units are doing but very much i think there there was there was a uh you know one of little motivator videos that they put out years ago and it was like you know the best kept secret in the navy and 100 it is you jump to like the first time you're in a combat environment with this organization like where where were you where do you find yourself i think when you talk to somebody who's an infantryman or a seal or someone else it's a little easier to be like oh that makes sense what what what is your experience like what was your first time in combat with these guys well so and uh it wasn't necessarily this isn't like so my very first deployment this is this is crazy and it's i it sucks talking about it because it's it's the thing that everybody knows about my so when when you're working in an nsw environment like the way that they deploy is as a squadron so it's a seal platoon and you'll team up with us a special boat team a debt those were detachments so you'll team up with with a seal platoon and a debt and then you do you'll deploy together but it starts out with uh ult which is six months unit level training and you guys are everybody's going through their whole stuff and you know you're going through your shooting schools you're going through all the stuff that the guys need to deploy and then the second six months is squadron level training so you kind of team up and you do boarding and stuff you know uh you'll do tons of live fire stuff you basically you integrate those two uh entities and you learn to work together and then the next six months or longer is your deployment so that's that's the cycle so you got about a year and a half of you know a year of of training you deploy for six months i don't think i ever had a single six month it was always longer than that and then you you come back so my very first squadron was they put us together and it was danny dietz mike murphy all those guys so and it was like all the other guys from the platoon uh a lot of you know dudes people don't know they had a second lieutenant um besides mike uh and i a little short italian dude i don't remember his name um but it wasn't their their squadron was actually interesting it was um our their thing was a mix of guys from sdv team one and dudes from team 10 and they put them together so when we deployed it was we all showed up in bahrain together because that's where naval special warfare grew three names before three i think is in bahrain and that's where everybody kind of works out of initially you show up to bahrain you check in and you start doing whatever you're gonna do and so pretty early on they split up the the seal platoon and a bunch of the guys went all those dudes went up to iraq and i don't think there was much going on at the time nothing that they i think got pulled in for so the rest of the dudes from my detachment and the other half of their seal platoon went off and started doing jsat stuff all around all around um the middle east we actually we went up into iraq i think we went as far as north is as basra and we were doing a bunch of stuff where we were clearing um clearing uh ships hulks of ships along the euphrates because when everything kicked off the shipping had to stay stay going through there through the euphrates into the you know uh north northern part of the gulf and ships were getting taken shots and stuff from the shore of all these like hulks that were on the side so we went up there and we're doing basically checking these things out clearing the ships and doing things like that and uh i wouldn't even call it there were nothing major went on i'm back but i mean yeah we're like [ __ ] dude somebody's shooting at us you know and yeah it wasn't it wasn't to the point where it was like super pucker factor but i remember we we were staying in kuwaiti naval base k and b is what they call it at the time and we're like we got word like hey the the other platoon half of the platoon is going into afghanistan like oh [ __ ] you know it's like dude we're you got everybody's and we're all brothers man we're like playing volleyball hanging out training every day you know we're working with the kuwaitis we were teaching them boarding exercises boarding stuff and you know taking them to shoot houses and you're just doing all that stuff and i think we were in we left k b we all went back down to uh bahrain we were in bahrain for maybe a week and we went to doha qatar and we were doing all that stuff in qatar we were doing all the same sort of stuff we did the same kind of stuff doing training for these guys and we get word that there had been an incident in afghanistan and so all those dudes like the whole seal platoon the rest of those guys were like [ __ ] we're done get us out of here so they put them on a plane and they sent them uh i mean i don't know where they went after that but they all went in the country to go look for those dudes and um you know everybody walking around at that time too and we got cut short because they're like well you need to go back to bahrain because [ __ ] has gotten crazy these dudes are missing we don't know what's happening so a couple days after they left we left um i remember our trip got cut short and the cheating is it was weird part of my detachment was a mark five debt so it was like the bigger the bigger boats so we couldn't just hop on a [ __ ] plane we had two 81 foot craft that we had a hall ass from from uh qatar all the way back to bahrain and we sat around for a couple days and there wasn't a whole lot going on we're just like what's going on with these dudes you know what's happening and and uh obviously pretty sure we're like the nsw didn't really at the time the command wasn't really putting out what happened and uh dudes started like hearing about what kind of what happened to um to uh latrell to uh marcus and uh and uh you know everybody's like it was crazy because our deployment wasn't much longer after that we got back to the states and everybody was calling the one hey man did you hear about the one like blah blah he made it but you know and a lot of people didn't know who it was and so it was like for a first deployment you know for a first nsw deployment for something like that to happen yeah it was just like it was sobering to say the least you know and to yeah so patrick i mean for those who aren't as familiar right you're talking about marcus latrell lone survivor operation red wing um yeah that incident was part of that yeah yeah and the crazy thing is and a lot of people i mean some people know this some people don't if you follow but like marcus has a twin brother morgan and uh not that long after that so in the compound for special bow team 20 you share a building with naval special warfare group four which is sort of the overarching command for for all the all the um boat teams so naval special warfare group four is in charge of all the boat teams like and so there was like you know naval special warfare group one is on the west coast and they're in charge of all the seal teams out there naval special warfare group two is on the east coast as well but they're in charge of all the east coast seal teams so that's kind of the hierarchy and it was weird because his twin brother morgan was working at at uh the the group four at the time you see this dude walking around you're like uh whoa man wow yeah it was just like and then of course they're super similar dudes i mean obviously they're twin brothers and you're just like what's up man and i always like hey how's your brother doing he's got he's good man he's good you know it was just it was a very weird surreal experience and especially for like through the years is all that's like it really came out and it's gotten it's blown up more and um yeah very very weird very weird yeah what what an odd experience for your first like real deployment as you described it right for that to happen yeah and it was you know it was like we didn't because the the platoon got separated fairly quickly and we only did i mean we went through our whole um uh squadron level training sqt or yeah um the ult and then sqt together all squadron level training and stuff so you didn't like we don't like spend the weekends together and hang out i mean we're all working around norfolk and stuff and so you get to kind of know the guys and but like so i didn't know him super super well you know but it was just like we came together we did you know we hey man what's going on blah blah blah whatever and it's just such a weird thing to to right off the box all that stuff that kind of happened to those guys and uh yeah so and then later on it was kind of crazy years later i was working for goruck and uh mike murphy was a graduate of the university of pennsylvania and uh they reached out to us to do like a memorial goruck thing for the for the uh rotc program there and i went over and did that and it was just uh i mean just a great honor to to meet all these guys and and you know to to you know they had there's a big memorial for for mike at yesterday and yeah super super cool though dude all right so if we then jump to a place where where you kind of described like that wasn't the pucker factor the the boarding and that but certainly that the experience itself was unlike what most people experienced their first time out if you go to a place where you had this big pucker factor where would you go like that were you out in your career a few years later so um that was in the 2000 what five time frame when all that happened and then uh i actually was at the boat team until 2009 and i left and was going over to a uh another unit but i had gotten pulled up to because i had been a medic i'd been a traumatic special operations medic i got pulled up to do some augment stuff and uh that was four months in iraq and yeah that was that was the pucker factor you know and the classic go and do you know raids uh at night and uh you know my primary job there was exactly that as the you know i wasn't going in first i was at the the freaking guy that was there to patch wounds and stuff and uh i mean i actually still have uh the isr video from like one of our first times out that i was working with the guys and uh dudes blowing themselves up and you know as soon as these guys made entry like super heavy resistance and guys took rounds right off the bat and and uh yeah so that was the pucker factor and you know and it's it's super intense and that's the only thing you're thinking about at the time just to get to these guys and and [ __ ] drag them out of there and do exactly what you need to do you know but it's uh it's uh yeah it's an intensity in a in a i mean that's like the only thing that exists that in your life i don't know it's hard to describe yeah so i was going to ask i had a couple questions on that patrick so were you first of all were you teamed up with marines were you with some other navy units like yes so i was with gold squadron at the time those guys and yeah and so four months of of you know almost every night either you know race or helicopter or frickin we go in by freaking vehicle and then puff you know hike in to rock into a freaking uh compound or you know doing surveillance in some place and yeah so um and that was pretty pretty constant pretty high level of just night after night you know uh amazing experience and i would never uh a hundred percent one of the best times my life you know i mean guys that that operate at a level that you know you just don't see with an intensity that you don't see normally in the military and uh it's exactly what i wanted to do you know so great opportunity did they did they embrace you as like part of the crew patrick i mean you're kind of an outsider coming in right yes 100 so and that's the thing is like when you go there like i showed up to the medical that's the whole process is kind of like showed up to the medical department i meet the guy i knew a couple of guys and so it's like you kind of have to be like somebody has to bring up your name like hey i know this guy and i knew a dude that worked over there at the time and i had talked to him and they were like yeah we can get you over here so i went over and the just the medical department alone you do a bunch of interviews and stuff you talk to all those guys and then initially i just spent a week over there just going through you know they're putting me through uh trauma scenarios putting me through different scenarios and then i'm like you know working out over there doing all that stuff kind of getting into the guys and then you find out what squadron you're gonna go to and it's the same sort of thing you know you sit down with all the chiefs and they're like hey [ __ ] like you you've got your [ __ ] wired tight right blah blah blah blah you know um so yeah i mean you there's definitely a vetting process and there was actually another guy who showed up there who had been a a navy sark which was the recon guys the the the amphibious reconnaissance corpsman he showed up at the same time good dude and i think he had been i don't he was from he was from camp lejeune and he'd been with second recon out there or something and he had some super good dude literally like not a problem with him at all but he had some family issues going on at the time and he wasn't the only one i was actually going through a [ __ ] divorce at the time and uh but i was like never brought it up never like hey man i'll stay until [ __ ] midnight if you guys need me to like i'm making i'm making blowout kits for everybody you know doing the [ __ ] that i needed to do and i just never you just you focus on the the job and that was it but he had some like family issues and was like hey can i go to do this and they finally were just like hey dude no you sorry it's not gonna work out so damn yeah so it's like a constant vetting process even to get into that to be their medic yeah incredible yeah yeah and the crazy thing was uh i mean it was it was cool it was an honor and like uh so i i've done that and i ended up going to this advisory unit after that another amazing experience and spending almost another like 10 months in afghanistan but i was getting ready to leave afghanistan coming back to the states and i get a random email to my like afghan email but i never got i never i don't think i ever got one goddamn email from anybody to this i i don't know were you ever in afghanistan or whatever right yeah yeah you get the email address for like being in country or whatever nobody ever emailed me [ __ ] and i checked it like once a month and i checked it one day and i'm like whoa who's this and it was like it was a dude that had been when i was at the boat team he had been like a an uh first class or whatever but he was a he was a med dude over there and he's like he's like hey patrick hey i saw you in afghanistan you know hey i know about your deployments i know where you've been blah blah blah he's like he's like when can i call you i'm like oh okay give me a call and he's like uh he's like hey we've got this new unit that's spinning up um he's like you'll be doing like a qrf kind of thing you'll be like one terrain feature away from the assault team and then if you have to go in there blah blah blah you know we're looking for for trauma guys that have experience and have deployments and and uh like and i still to this day don't know exactly what the unit was he said it was down in i'd be in north carolina and whatever and i'm not gonna get but yeah and i'm just like this was gonna like and i was leaving afghanistan i already had orders to see her school and it was gonna be my first non-deployable unit in like 15 years and i'm just like i hadn't seen my daughter and i don't know how long and i was just like it was the first time that i ever sort of stepped away from that you know that uh kind of stepped and i feel like i stepped away from the job a little bit like stepped away from wanting to be the first person in the door and put my family first i guess you know i was just like and it would that you asked me earlier about like consent on you know something it was a conflicting moment that definitely was and i was like man i wanted to more than anything but i also wanted to see my daughter you know so i was like i didn't do it and that's the one thing i was like i wonder what that would have been like you know but yeah i know exactly what you're talking about man i know i think so many people who listen to this will know exactly what you're talking about yeah but it was like yeah and the reality is i hadn't you know my i'm in afghanistan like trying to call i had a ex-wife that wasn't the greatest person to deal with and i remember i'm like i somehow got away i'm in i'm in uh spin bold act this this cop on the border of pakistan and i'm like calling 12 hours back to my daughter's you know her her first grade crap class or whatever and i'm like trying to get a hold of her on her birthday so i could wish her happy birthday and yeah they're like the the school's like who are you who is this i'm like i'm in afghanistan i'm trying to get ahold of my daughter ava she's in a classroom blah blah like and they were like oh my god yeah we'll go get her you know so it was like thinking about that while i'm deployed in all the crazy that stuff that went on that deployment i was just like i yeah i want to be home you know yeah i want to be home and yeah dude sir patrick if i could take take you to the time like you're referring to maybe the time with gold squadron right like you're going in you're doing these hits probably multiple hits a night and you're the medic like you're you are there to keep people alive i i've not interviewed a medic before but i'm just curious like when you're working on someone i imagine it's got to be like a baseball pitcher like you just got to block everything out doesn't matter what the hell is going on around you just to work on somebody is there one of those moments that comes to you where you're like oh this was insane like the type of injury the activity around yeah i mean absolutely a lot of them are like that i mean it's it's uh i mean i've worked on good guys and i've worked on bad guys i mean that's part of well that's your job you have to do that and i mean not just with not just that deployment but then the next one i mean there's just so many instances where you're you're just like holy [ __ ] um like there's a bad guy that i worked on uh this dude had taken a round through the back um i just i just showed up at this outpost in afghanistan maiwan province it was i was there to help augment seventh group there were some seventh group dudes that were there and we were uh um my one uh what the hell was the name of that cop i don't remember what the name of the cop was it was in my maiwan province um like my literally my first day and the guy nobody was really at the uh nobody was really at the cop at the time the guys were out and there was like a skeleton crew there um there's a couple dudes in the talk and they the the sf team had some security guys there that were like uh 82nd airborne or something like that and these dudes were the ones pulling security and me and this uh marine lieutenant show up and uh i get word that there's a there's a dude in the the the aid station that's been shot i'm like what the what the are you serious so i run over there i walk in and they're trying to wrestle this afghan guy down on the ground and or not down on the ground but down to this this this uh stretcher and i'm like what the [ __ ] what's going on and there's like it was like chaos in there of course like when you i mean if you can think about something like that and uh they're like this dude was brought in he was a [ __ ] bad guy running from somebody and they shot him and he had kind of mid-back went went in his back and came out right under his that little point at the under your sternum is called the xiphoid process that little tiny bone that feels like sharp right there the round came out right there you have a descending aorta that or an artery that descends from your heart down in and then it splits into your you know splits into your pelvis and all those arteries he had taken around like right through there and i think man if this guy had been on the if this guy had been on an operating table he probably wouldn't survive but he was super combative and these these medics from the 82nd are trying to like hold this guy down and i'm or just they're trying to like physically hold them down with their hands while somebody puts an iv in them i'm like [ __ ] tie this guy down he was so combative not in just i can totally understand i mean you develop and they they talk about it all the time in the trauma courses you develop like that sensation of death and people freak out and i've seen it a multitude of times and that's this what guy was doing he was losing his [ __ ] and i'm like you need to treat him for the pain so we gave him some freaking fentanyl we had fentanyl lollipops at the time and we we gave him some fentanyl he instantly calmed down put an iv in them and within about 45 seconds he expired and i mean the blood just pouring through and it was like one of those litters that's uh the mesh you know there's not i mean it's not like the the solid green like almost like not vinyl but like the solid green nylon litters it was the black fresh ones blood is just pouring out of this guy's back and i mean yeah but i mean again like another time uh they i'm treating a guy that multiple ak rounds to his his femur and just gushing blood and the thing is like right off the bat it's hey stop the bleeding right that's the first thing you do is so you put a tourniquet on the guy wrench it down and he took like three ak rounds to the to the upper thigh you know 762 these things are beefy rounds i stuck my i'm start pushing gauze into it and it felt like it felt like you know when you break a glass in the no the the glass is like the super fine shards that sort of felt like in his upper thigh his femur was just in shards um and yeah he ended up the guy ended up losing his leg losing his left leg i mean something like that it's just yeah you break your leg yeah you can put that stuff back together or whatever but something like that where you just splinter your femur there's nothing that you can do but it's it's again like that's and i'm just boom boom stuffing that in there you know then at that point then it's like i'm thinking about you know treating the dude for pain treating them for for you know infection getting getting um blood into them doing all i mean there's it the thing is that i and i always love trauma work because you're whatever you're doing you get feedback instantaneously it's like i've got tons of friends you know what i'm saying if you're [ __ ] up yeah yeah man that person's gonna go down if you're doing the right [ __ ] the person's either gonna stabilize or they're gonna start getting better and you know you're stopping that you get instantaneous results and you get instantaneous feedback i've got tons of friends who you know all the schooling that we've gone to and they're they're off their pas i've got my my buddy that lost his eye he's a pa now or he had been for a long time i think he said [ __ ] it he went on to do something else but it's like i've done patient care in the past like working it at the team and stuff and you're like you're the sick call guy and you got to stand there and listen to people give you [ __ ] about how they did whatever they did and you got to treat their [ __ ] like uh you know i hate that crap because it's like especially in the civilian world nowadays it's working in an emergency room or working treating people people come in they lie to you they're trying to get drugs it's a bunch of drama and it's [ __ ] i can't stand that but if i could have a career where i just worked trauma that would be the jam although it's insanely stressful it's like somebody's life is in your hands at that exactly literally it is it is it is it's insanely fulfilling and it's insanely depressing too because there's been there's been dudes that i didn't save you know and it's it's like uh that's that's the stuff and i can see where guys come home and they're like you have you have nightmares or you have a bad day i mean i my last appointment i came home and i had the same nightmare over and over and over about this room filling up with blood from this kid i put in a chest tube and you know [ __ ] make the incision put in the chest tube he had he had multiple fractures his pelvis was crushed and a lot of times you put in a chest tube and the expectation is that there might be a little blood that comes out start emptying any any potential you know blood that's filling up that cavity it i've never seen so much blood come out of a chest tube before and he never regained consciousness and he expired pretty soon after that but it's like that's that's the kind of [ __ ] that sucks you know and that and that's why like when my buddy when the guy's like hey you want to deploy again you know it's it's like that's the decision when it's not that hard to make you know so so i i don't want to keep you all day patrick click i'd like to talk about what's going on now with you with savage actual and like how did that come about man like where did that was the most random thing in the world and sorry i um i should say patrick for those who don't know what is that and then how did that come about because it's a departure from what you know to some degree from what you came yeah for sure i mean like i've um i kind of got i dipped my toe in the business world a little bit prior to uh coming off of active duty i actually i'm a patent holder for a unique belt design i own a company called gpm kit and um i patented a kind of a replacement for the rigger belt rigger's belt which i hated um so i did that for for a long and i still do it it's it's very low key i don't really do a ton of stuff to promote it because i have enough sales and stuff and i i a lot of guys a lot of military people buy it a lot of uh sell to a lot of like law enforcement a lot of like marshals and stuff because it's basically a super low profile belt that doesn't require a buckle so you can like wear gear you know i don't know if you've ever had seen guys with like the riggers belt that everybody freaking wears and it's like people will like move it off to the right side so it's not jamming in your stomach and stuff so i did that for a long time like i said i still have that i've got a friend that actually runs it for me to do a ton of stuff with it kind of like fire nice yeah um so um so i was doing that and then um my wife actually worked in the movie movie industry for years she's been in a bunch of movies was in like multiple seasons of uh of um that motorcycle movie tv show uh sons of anarchy so she's from she's from like southern california and so she's like that you know southern california very we're very different um but very much the same so what she gets casting stuff all the time so this was like pre pandemic before the world [ __ ] collapse in on itself she's like hey i got this uh there's this casting call for a company called gameology and they um are looking for some special operations guys to talk about video games or something like that or i don't even know if it said exactly what it was so i was bored i'm like yeah i'll call them like i call them up and they're like they're like hey can you do like a two-minute like send us a two-minute video of you talking about something blah blah blah blah and um i think i talked about when i got crushed between that chinook and the freaking my boat and i talked about that a little bit and uh they're like oh we love you you're hilarious blah blah blah and they're like do you have somebody else that you can bring and at the time this is in la i thought my buddy jason lilly who you'll talk to soon is uh he was working in la i thought but he had moved back down to san diego but anyway so he's like yeah man i'll come up let's do this so we sat down with this company and we talked about video games so like we shot like six episodes and it was huge and still to this day they're like top three or four videos that they've ever made we've had like 50 million views on like six videos so but they were kind of i don't want to talk too bad i don't want to talk about them they were kind of a pain in the ass they didn't want they didn't exactly pay me and uh so they were a little shysty and i'm like so um yeah this stuff blew up and i said jason i'm like dude we need to do this ourselves start our own channel do this ourselves man it it doesn't look like that hard and it'll be fun and he's like nah nah nah he even said he's like he he kind of told me a couple times he's like oh yeah yeah yeah man that's that sounds like fun okay we'll do that and then i didn't hear anything from him when i call him back i'm like dude what are you doing he's like oh yeah okay so finally i convinced him and we did a couple episodes for called it savage actual and we kind of stayed in the same sort of framework of what we did with gameology and within like a week we had like 30 000 followers or something like that yeah blew up um and then i mean it's been we started that like you know kind of into the pandemic a little bit and it's been fun we shoot like once a month and it's a it's our own youtube channel that we talk about video games initially is what we're doing kind of talking about shooter games first person shooter like call of duty and all that stuff but we've expanded it a little bit now we've got a series called war stories and beer where we sit down with like veterans and drink some beers and just talk about stuff we one of the first episodes we had we had this guy trey who is a ranger dog handler and uh just sat around drinking beers and talking to him and just it was a great time you know and so um yeah it's been awesome uh savage actual freaking got over 80 000 followers in in the mid in the midst of all this we got sponsored by black rifle coffee company um we actually just got sponsored by a local brewery who's gonna who's gonna support our war stories and beer and the best part is they just called us the other day they're like we want to do a savage actual labeled beer so there it is i know like we our channel has our own beer so we have we we we put out the partnership and stuff and the the beer will probably be out i mean they're already getting ready to start brewing but it's going to be a blood orange wheat and i think we're going to try and have our first meet and greet at the brewery in uh temecula california it's iron fire brewery check it out all right yeah yeah iron fire brewery they're making our own savage actual labeled uh beer and uh yeah we've got a lot of other stuff coming up i mean it's it's blown up and it's been pretty awesome we're getting ready to work with a uh i don't know if we mentioned this we're getting ready to work with the game developer um i i don't want to get i can't say that with the contract since i've been all finalized but yeah we're going to be assisting them with the creation of a game and jason and i are going to be in the game with jocko willanick and uh it's kind of crazy yeah so and the crazy thing is jason is a super big gamer he plays all the time and he but and i enjoy it but it's never something that i've been just like i'm a gamer i would never consider myself that but i've definitely learned a lot about it in the past few months um but yeah it's it's been it's been more than i expected it's been more than jason i both expected at this point you know yeah i mean it kind of brings the comics and the art kind of full circle i would think and uh i interviewed john striker meyer who was a vietnam vet and he was saying he and jacob were working together on a on a video game as well so i don't know if jacob's got his hands in other video games or not that guy he's he cracks me up i've never met him before um but i know tons of dudes that have and he's like obviously jock was just super intense and i'm looking forward to it because we have to do motion capture and all that other stuff for this that's cool man getting the opportunity to like say say hey to him and and uh you know and obviously in that community everybody it's nsw is way smaller than than a lot of the other groups and so i guarantee we know a lot of the same people and it's it'll be interesting to chat with them and truly see how intense he is that's awesome all right i got two more questions i'll let you get out of here it's two questions i like to ask everybody patrick the first one is when you were you're going into combat were there any um were there any items that you carried with you that had like sentimental value or good luck something that somebody gave you that you always wanted to have on you or near you when you were deploying uh yeah randomly uh i used to carry this i was in virginia beach one day and i was it was actually when i was working to develop my belt i was driving from um from uh the base over to uh to uh the the the gear company that was kind of sewing my stuff at the time that was developing my prototypes and i was in like virginia beach boulevard and i stopped at this big four-way intersection and uh i look in the middle of the intersection and there's a flag like it was like one of those ones that had been on like somebody's like with the window like plastic window thing you know what i'm saying like the little plastic pole that you put in your window or whatever and it and it was sitting in the middle of the road i mean virginia beach boulevard and i don't even know the the other like maybe lynn haven boulevard or something i think is the four-way i mean it's a huge intersection and i've got i drive a jeep wrangler and the top was off the doors were off and i'm in uniform and i'm like there's a [ __ ] flag sitting at the middle of the road and i just pulled the emergency brake and got out of my jeep and walked over and picked it up and sure enough it was like nice too it was like this really nice well-made sewn flag i got back in my jeep and it's something i always kept with me and it was nice because it's like you know maybe that big and i always kept it folded up and had it in my my chest pouch and uh yeah i i think i've had it on almost every single deployment so yeah that's cool that's very cool all right and then last question i think i know the answer but i like to ask everyone i mean you you have spent time it sounds like in the marines the navy in the army in the national guard oddly enough i know i just need to i need to hit up the air force and see if they can like got to man and i get the the the the four-way action going on that's right man so just looking back on that time especially having to treat people the way you did and uh as a medic but the the raids everything that you went through um would you do all that again yeah absolutely absolutely and it i i don't know if i said this at the beginning you know it's it's uh it was going into the marine corps i wanted to do something more you know and it was like looking at hey this potential career that i had ahead of me with being an artist or being whatever whatever it would have become in that i knew even then that it would have wouldn't match with the experience i would have as a as a marine and whatever else was going to go on in my life you know i and i i am definitely one of those people who has anybody that's contacted me and i've had a lot of people like jason and i have people reach out to us all the time um i've had you know i've worked with goruck for a long time like leading those endurance events and doing all this stuff and you have tons of people and i've got guys that i've interacted with that have gone on to become army rangers and have gone on to do amazing things and you know i that was that was it's amazing it's like it's it's the military gives you something that you can't experience anyplace else a better understanding of the world around you it's my wife and i say it all the time it's like these people who you hear on the news or these these kids in college they they talk about the world like they know it inside now and all they've done is you know listen to their professors or reading a book get yourself a [ __ ] passport and go out and and see the rest of the world go to africa and see how people live go to europe like go to central and south america you don't have to go to war i i'm definitely not a proponent of that because i think this country could maybe rain some of that in a little bit but getting out of your own backyard and experiencing the world as it truly is in in talking to people the military will do that for you and you get paid to do it and there's there's not you know there's nothing else that'll i mean you know there's nothing else that will give you that experience in any way shape or form and you will meet people from every corner socioeconomic corner of the united states i mean especially being in the reserves i had guys in my platoon that worked for the cia one of them was a lawyer another one owned his own woodworking business um but one was a a federal police officer you just you you meet people and you interact with people in a way that you will never anywhere else so yeah 100 i that's without a doubt i'll take the good and the bad and i would do it all again perfect way to end it man this has been a lot of fun patrick uh i look forward to talking to jason as well hearing his side of savage actual thanks for the time we'll have links to everything here for folks to find you guys absolutely hey thank you very much i hope you enjoyed this combat story people often write to me with incredible stories and suggestions for interviews if you want to share a combat story of your own or from someone you serve with record yourself for up to five minutes and email it to ryan combatstory.com i'll select some of these stories and feature them at the end of our episodes thanks for listening stay safe

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 82,262

Rating: 4.940866 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, Devil Dogs, NCO, Non-Commissioned Officer, Ranger School, Ranger, Iraq, Afghanistan, CIA, paramilitary, 1st SFOD, navy, SEAL, TFBlue, DEVGRU, developmentgroup, sealteamsix, SWCC, savage actual, Patrick Moltrup

Id: YmOkCKtpvGk

Length: 108min 57sec (6537 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021