Combat Story (Ep 36): Mark Wales | Australian SAS | Troop Commander | Author | Kill Kapture

one of my guys had been shot in the opening minutes of that battle kind of high and left on his chest we were kind of pinned we were stuck there while we were trying to treat matthew calling fire you know deal with the taliban here i knew they were going to try and flank us around the south so the snipers were firing to cut the guys that would come around to cut us off so it was just it was busy and i was sitting there just going holy [ __ ] i'm you know over my head here and i've got my whole team in our brain heads 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 mark wales a former australian sas officer who spent 16 years in the australian military including six years in the elite sas he led special operators as a troop commander and completed 10 deployments to afghanistan iraq east timor lebanon and the solomon islands mark would go on to earn an mba from the prestigious wharton school of business and then worked at mckenzie and company he has since written the book survivor life in the sas was on australian survivor and competed in the bear grylls world's toughest race eco challenge fiji 2019 which i highly recommend watching on amazon with your family and since all this isn't enough mark also founded kill capture a tough luxury e-commerce brand and is now a sought-after keynote and motivational speaker i hope you enjoy mark's honest self-deprecating and relatable combat story as much as i did hey mark thanks for taking the time to share your story today hey thanks for having me so you're the first aussie i've had on the program probably happens often for you i'm sure i know you've done a lot of interviews but i regardless of nationality i put you into this category of people i don't have a name for it yet but it's the people that make me feel lazy as hell so i know i know we touched on the intro here but just going through some of these sas wharton mckinsey speaker two tv shows that i know of kill capture like entrepreneur so i was really pleased as i read survivor which i really enjoyed that you actually you have some levity in there that brings you down to earth for a lot of the rest of us um so i wanted to start out with with something i read in the book um i have a 14 year old son i'm i'm wondering if you can tell us about the first interaction you have at a brothel and uh what that meant for uh what that was like for your life i i gotta tell you i was in a cold sweat when i when i thought at one point i'm like my goodness i'm gonna have to put this in the book because and and part of the thinking was um and for anyone who a lot of people probably haven't read it but when i was 14 i lived in western australia which is kind of the wild west even in australia it's considered pretty isolated but um me and my mate had this great idea you know we just got a part-time job hey let's go uh let's go do a run on a brothel and see what we can see and uh so i turned into a whole episode um i was very lucky to get away with it and i didn't tell a soul my whole i was so embarrassed about it um i didn't tell a soul and then i when i was writing the book i'm like if i don't share some of this kind of stupid [ __ ] that i'm embarrassed about i'm just not going to be a relatable protagonist i think so um i i hate reading books where you hear about this person that's done everything great and i didn't want that i wanted you to see me unfortunately as i am which is very human and you know and very flawed and i've done some good things but i've done some stupid things as well oh man it's a great story in the book um and there are many but just like the way we don't need to get into details but could you just describe the waiting room because i found this hilarious especially thinking that you're 14 and how you talked your way into it i went to this this old kind of colonial building it would look really innocuous oh this is interesting and when i went in there was this kind of lounge room area where we where there are a bunch of girls sitting there kind of came in looking bored you know off their shift and you know one was doing post grad high school work not high school post grad homework and i sat there with my mate and i'm just thinking what are we doing here and uh so i thought we're here now we're committed so we'll go through with it oh it's great so this is since we're talking about growing up in western australia could you just talk a little bit more about what was your life like as a kid i mean like many guys i end up interviewing especially from these tier one elements super driven um from the time you hit the military on were you like that as a kid yeah i as a kid i grew up on in coastal western australia which is there's just nothing there it's like i think that state is the size of kind of about a third of our continent it's pretty huge it's like the um probably a third the size of the us so it's a huge state and there was only a couple of million people there so you we had the run of the place and i was born up north in a mining town which was just you know 800 people and there was nothing there and so we grew up like like that not much supervision um this is in the days when there was there was just nothing really we we had to worry about there was a lot of crime right out there so very much a free-range childhood and i didn't get an idea about the military until i was in high school and i saw some some pictures of the brit sas uh doing the iranian embassy siege in london and i just thought holy [ __ ] look at that and uh so how do i how do i become one of those guys all clad in black like that's as cool as [ __ ] and that's kind of what got me started i realized australia we had our own unit as well which is which was exciting to hear so i interviewed one of the guys on that raid in fact um very well very interesting story just kind of know where he went into the building and and what went down afterwards fascinating wow fascinating stuff and it wasn't like it was all captured you know i mean it was in london so the pictures of the guys live on tv it's awesome um all right so so you kind of see that image and then maybe that puts the military in your mind did was there any family history in the military did did that play into the decision at all no my my grandfather had fought in world war two in mauritai i think it was like uh in the pacific islands sorry my boy was trying to get and we he had talked about fighting the japanese i remember it quite well and thanks that coffee delivery yeah it's a different time there for you so exactly understandable that's about three year old um but yeah he he talked about fighting the japanese on maritime how brutal that was and i remember him showing me that samurai sword i talked about in the book but he showed me a samurai sword he had taken from a japanese officer and um i just remember seeing thinking wow that's really heavy like it's just intense to think that that that once upon a time our forefathers were fighting like that and i didn't really grow up you knew it was bad but you don't really grasp it i think when you're a kid um but no one else had been in the military in fact a lot of people tried to talk me out of it but i was like you don't know what i know we've got a really cool unit and um you know it'll be a great thing to join were there people in your family trying to talk you out of it because i think if if i recall you're one of three brothers right you're in the middle yeah yeah yeah so did they go in or were they pushing against you or no it was my parents they're like have you thought about you know people who joined the military kind of [ __ ] kickers and that you know it's kind of a hard job i'm like yeah they've thought about joining the air force or the navy i was like no i'm not doing that um and so you know i just stuck at it and and had that goal of joining we have a defense academy which is kind of similar to west point and that's where i started my officer training i actually wanted to ask about that could you talk through what that looks like for you again the first time i've interviewed somebody from the australian military um what is the pipeline for an officer going in yeah we have a like a joint service academy which is you do three years your undergrad uh degree whatever you you choose to do there and then we go across to a strictly military academy if you're army you go to a strictly military academy called duntroon and that's where you get your really you know you detailed officer training when you graduate you're a lieutenant and you're a platoon commander so that's that's four years worth of trying to get in the officer track and i was 17 when i joined and 20 just turned 21 when i left does does that three-year undergrad experience is that the only way in to the one-year program or can is there some other feeder program yeah there's direct entry you can go you don't actually have to have an undergrad you can go directly to that academy you do a slightly longer course like 18 months instead um we call them bakers and uh why is that fresh baked they call us of course facts which is um if an advocate it's and so we have this um we have this rivalry between the the two parties but everyone graduates and it's always a good crew when at least on our side of the service when you're going through the the training college on the officer track you're competing the whole time for what branch you want to get um and then you know it's just competitive across the board then once you're in that you know if it's infantry or aviation or whatever then you're competing for an assignment or an aircraft or or something else what was it like for you guys when do you kind of decide all right i'm going infantry or i'm doing something else yeah towards the end of that year training you've you've chosen your core and i was going for infantry and the important thing is you want to choose the right unit so we have the light infantry and the mechanized units and all that and we had just started deployments to east timor which is a peacekeeping mission the first first real operational missions we'd had in a really long time i think you know we had a pretty strong contingent in vietnam but east timor was the first kind of war-like operation they'd been in a while and so i was competing for the unit that was going to go there next yeah was it is it really hard to get into the infantry track in as you're going through the pipeline it's not hard to get in the infantry track but it's hard to get into the top units like the highly regarded kind of light infantry units that's a bit harder yeah and then you know i'm curious because we're talking east team or we're we're talking the the 90s right at the time lately yeah like 90s and for us it kind of felt the same way like had the gulf war but really before that it was vietnam and there had just not been a lot happening so it's interesting that you had this one place where you not one place but an area of operations to go to for us i guess it may have been kosovo and bosnia at the time yeah how uh what was the feeling like being a young officer going in about hey am i going to get my shot to go and do do something like was that weighing on your mind at all i just knew that it was that particular area had the massacre that had happened there in the wake of the independence vote was really bad there were a lot of people killed and it was really primitive stuff you know machetes and just a lot of violence and so i thought i felt like it was a really good mission for us to go there and stabilize the place but there was still a lot of i knew there was still a lot of militia around and i was just i was gonna be glad to get my team out into the jungle and actually do some operations on the on the border of indonesia and i was so young i had no i just saw some footage over there that i was 21 i had i had no idea what i was doing but luckily he had some really good ncos and you know i worked hard with them and we did a seven month tour and it ended up being really good we didn't see combat but um it was just a good introduction to operations you say something in the book that really resonated i'm sure it would with any officer or nco but i think you said it something to the effect of these guys had a really vested interest in your ncos in me being proficient or or getting up to speed quickly right yeah in the us army i mean it's certainly that way where you have a young officer and these ncos that have been around for years doing this and they have to kind of break in this younger officer what's the dynamic like in the australian military for that oh it's it's good because you know classic like you know in the films the gunnery sergeant grizzled and knows what he's doing and but i think if you're a young officer you've got to remember you you bring a lot to the party as well you're a critical thinker you're you know how to plan you're organized you're disciplined you bring a lot of skills that small teams need so i think anyone who's who's young or starting out just remember you're you're trained and ready for that role and you bring something completely unique to it and i think the best teams are the ones that use all those different you know advantages it's not just the sergeant leading it's it's everyone doing the work together and in the book at least you're very self-deprecating early on you know kind of talking about it's almost like you're lucky to have made it to where you are as you enter the military but clearly you know you advance so far there and then what you do afterwards um i wonder did you did something happen when you were at military school or when you started your training where you just felt like you were in your element and able to apply yourself to this this lifestyle that you had always been looking forward to was there some change that took place for you yeah i knew that the i was excited about it right and i think that's a big indicator for me in life there's something i enjoy or i think about a lot or i'm always excited to do it it's probably something you're going to be good at eventually even if you're not good at the start your learning curve is going to be better than most others and i feel like that was the military for me i started i wasn't super great when i started with tactics and that but because i was interested and excited about it and asked a lot of questions and learned i was able to kind of climb that curve a bit quicker i think that's the key just kind of you know trying to keep that self-improvement going yeah i mean i mean you you kind of it seems like you had a lot of self-confidence or at least how you portrayed yours not portrayed yourself how you interacted with people early on and i think it's really tough for junior officers to have that so it's kind of interesting to see the progression there um i wonder could i ask you to talk us through what that initial training is like for the conventional side of the service right so you're an infantry officer what does that look like from the time you graduate you're done with your college or you're an officer now how does that program look yeah so um you go straight into the battalions and australia has most of our battalions are situated in the north of australia which is closer to the tropics so darwin and townsville so they're all super warm areas actually i went up there i was excited to get away from canberra which is bloody freezing but um i went up to townsville got attached to a new platoon met my kind of company commander quickly realized that it was a hell of a lot more relaxed in the battalions and it was in the in the training institutions which was good and i think for me it was just that you know this is a train program we're going to have i expect you to go through this training with you with you guys um this is my company come on speaking go through do this training with you guys you're going to make a lot of mistakes early and totally fine i'm just going to be watching you and helping you learn and so it's just a classic case of going through all those drills and rehearsals and attacks and urban ops and all those things you do that you're not experienced with that slowly when you improve with as a team and this was pre-deployment training to go to east timor yeah yep that's right we had about eight months and um we went towards the end of 2001 so september 11 happened and then we were we left about a month later damn what was what was september 11th like for you seeing that happen in australia well i had i'd seen the world trade center only a year before i'd been over to the us for a holiday and i remember seeing the buildings and i knew how huge they were and um when i'd heard about the attack you you just had that feeling that things were going to be very different um there was going to be a war i think everyone knew that i just think people didn't know how it was going to pan out and i don't think people expected it to it's been you know those wars have gone for a long long time but um i think everyone knew there was going to be some revenge and yeah it was just one of those really defining moments wasn't it for us i will say we were and so i commissioned in 2002 so i was kind of watching this play out and we we all had kind of the gulf war in mind and like oh my god this thing's going to be over in like four months i gotta get into the fight and i mean how how naive looking back yeah yeah yeah first time i went to afghanistan for a combat it was 2007 and i was like quick hurry up you know it's going to be wound down before the end of before the end of the year and that you know wasn't even getting started really so i'd like i'd like to spend just a little time on east timor but i do want to back up just a bit because there was another item in the in the book that i found really interesting which was when you're training on how to throw a grenade i wonder if you could talk us through this one before we get to your superman yeah this is yeah this is hilarious i uh we were doing grenade throws as part of a it was like a final part of training actually and i've been throwing a few that day and we were training each other to be safety staff and i was in the pit with my mate and it was the last like three grenades of the day no one wanted to throw them and i'm like hell yeah i'll throw them and we're in the pit i threw one and that was fine and i was starting to get a bit i wasn't quite doing the drill properly i was getting a bit confident with it and i threw one and i've just like i don't know what happened i think the lever caught on my hand but it basically fell right in front of me on the edge of the bay and i just remember like i've never seen a grenade in front of me with no dressing on no no safety pin no lever and i'm just like holy [ __ ] and i knew we had about four seconds to get out of there and and me and my mate ran off and uh this grenade exploded no one got hurt luckily but like i was saying in the book i found out years later they still use it as an example of you know doesn't matter how big you are big strong guys i've seen this one dude totally screw a throw up and nearly kill everyone so so i'm still using it as an example at the training establishment which is funny did you not get crushed by whoever was running that course afterwards no that would just i was just happy no one was dead and and that funnily enough the sergeant watching was actually more excited about than we were he's like god you guys got out of there he did the right thing and uh but i was i was mocked mercilessly by my mates so yeah oh man okay so as you're training up with your with with your team getting ready to go to east timor in your mind somewhere is there like hey down the road i want to go to sas or do something a little different or you just hey i'm happy to get into some type of action here yeah there was already battalion in place in this team or when we went there to take over so um when we got there we handed over with the units that are already there the facilities were super basic like australia had a really atrophied military back then we had no our logistics was terrible and we had the bases were just they were just woeful and i compare that to you know 10 years later in afghanistan they were much better but back then we had super basic facilities and we're just doing these security ops up and down the uh the the border with with west timor so for me i want to understand what that what happened in the country and also to try and learn a bit a bit of the uh language so which is tetem uh it's portuguese kind of baseline language uh used to be a portunity portuguese colony so there's a lot of super old forts there from the 16th century and and uh portuguese is a strong part of their language so i learned a fair bit of that just to try and uh you know interact with locals and and use that to just be a part of the population a bit more and the idea were you guys going in you said to do peacekeeping ops but you were training like urban environment um is that what it ended up being when you got there it was more it was it's a super poor country so it's really basic kind of hilltop villages and places like that and the places we worked in mostly were kind of close country uh because east team all you're close to the tropics is a lot of rainforest so there's a lot of kind of green rolls in close country stuff which we're australia actually we we specialize in a lot of that because of of the nature of all the places we fought in world war ii and in vietnam was pretty much jungle dominated so luckily we've got a good background in that type of work in australia and were you guys out in the jungles during that deployment yeah we used to go out for a week or two at a time and you know set up on these borders and watch the foot traffic and try and stay hidden and and yeah we're just making sure there's no militia coming across from indonesia which was west team or into east team order to harass the locals and without trying to sound flippant here were there was there a hope that you you get into some type of an engagement because i i do feel like at least on the u.s side when you're first going in somewhere you're like let's just get this on this is why we're here but you know it's not a peacekeeping mission so i'm just curious what that may have been like yeah it's weird you don't i mean you don't hope for it but you also want to prove yourself as well right like it's because you're there to do the work and so are you kind of there going well if someone tries us on at least we're well you know we're ready to go for it so there's always that in the back of your mind like he knew it could be dangerous but i felt like we're always kind of ready for it too and there'd been some skirmishes but they weren't like pitch battles but there had been a couple of times where guys had been had caught militia teams and been in battles um the sas had actually been in a couple of pretty solid ones so it wasn't um totally innocuous in the area okay perfect so i and i know you said look there you guys weren't involved in any any gunfights necessarily but still when there's the potential for it it's your first first time leading troops in in a situation like this i'm sure it it still feels like a heavyweight could you just talk about maybe the first patrol you went on if you can remember kind of just what did it feel like for you were you a platoon leader or equivalent something like that at the time yeah i was a platoon leader i remember we got i think we got inserted somewhere by some kind of dodgy russian helicopters couple of mr7s or something yeah super dodgy and uh yeah we landed and found it found out to a couple of villagers and i think i realized pretty quickly these people just live really basic lives they live in villages they farm they they want a bit of security for their kids and you know economic support and so i remember going through the villagers and realizing this is just a very different life compared to how we live in australia um so that was that to me that difference was really stark that was such a poor country and i realized that you know they just want the same things we do and were you guys doing kind of like long moving patrols in that setting yeah we would we'd cover a fair bit of ground sometimes we'd be out for we'd out for as long as we could we'd might do nine days at a time without resupply so we carried not much food yeah it was super super yeah a long time and the idea is that once you're in the environment you want to stay there just because you it's much easier to to get a gauge on what's going on um and so a couple of times we obviously eating literally a handful of food a day because we just didn't have the supplies that we could carry with us yeah and and sometimes and for food and you know for water we just catch a bit of water off our tarps during the day and use that and were you was this a small unit that you were moving around with or was it at the company level uh platoon so you know 25 30 guys yeah a small unit so it was you like you were you were the one in charge for that how did that feel and so i guess for context the wars that i am familiar with you know most of the folks had already been there or when moving in it was a significant size force but to be out on your own your first rotation and you're cruising around for nine days in the jungle how did that feel like what was the weight like for you yeah it was it was good because i felt like we kind of we earned that trust to a point so we might get you know the start get a shorter job and it's it's not as mobile and you've got a platoon nearby and it was just a case of if i keep proving that i can do these jobs reliably i get a bit more kind of freedom and a bit more trust and that's how it felt and then towards the end we're doing these long patrols just on our own and that was it was super cool i really love that and i think it was motivating for everyone because they were like we're out here on our own we got to do this properly and so that that trust that was invested in us was really that was cool because then it was it was like we no one's going to come and get us if we're in trouble it's just us yeah was there any air air support or no nothing there was just like you could you might be able to get some some blackhawks occasionally uh it was yeah there was nothing out there really but it's not a huge it's not a huge ao as well like it's only maybe 300 kilometers wide so you could get if you really needed help quick you could get it from one of the bases and and you get it back and whatnot wow yeah it's super cool so how long was that deployment for you then what what was that time frame that that was seven months and um so it was the end of 2001 start of 2002. and then you come back from that do you then make the transition over to sas or do you have to spend more time on the conventional side before making that uh i still stay conventional for a bit longer because we actually had another deployment to the solomon islands we ended up going to um guadalcanal which uh you know which is where the you know where the marines and all you guys landed way back at the start of world war ii really and um we're actually right near alligator creek which was the site of a huge battle um i think there was like a thousand japanese killed in one night uh dude the cha yeah banzai charges this is way back at the start of the war um when the marines had just landed and we're headed inland to go take henderson airfield so we were there and we knew this is a kind of cool uh one of the early battles of world war ii um battle of sabo island and a few other areas around guadalcanal and ours was another stabilization mission there were a few gangs there that were that were heavily armed so we basically went in there with the police force and helped uh disarm some of the gangs i think we did a weapon buyback kind of scheme and so there are all these really cool world war ii rifles coming in from the islands and i was like some were getting cut up as scrapping i was just there was a tiramisu some of them they were beautiful weapons like 303s and m14s but yeah and so that was a another deployment we did and then after that that's when i applied for selection okay so i'm curious if you took your grandfather's route where you took one of those items back with you like the weapons he took the sword right did you did you somehow i took a couple of 50 cal rounds from henderson airfield i got i got a um eod guy to kind of uh render him inert and then i i took him home i don't know how the hell i got them through customs but yeah i've got a few 50 cal rounds at home that's awesome oh man okay yeah um so during that deployment were you still a platoon leader do you advance like do you move to the exo role how does that work yeah i was a platoon leader but i was in the support put in the support company which is like we have in the support and we have recon we have assault pioneers which is kind of like a light engineer platoon and that was mine we had small crafts we had explosives training and um yeah it was cool super cool nice did you end up using any of that during uh oh we we had the boats we had some uh some uh some of the zodiacs with us and we used them for island transits we'd take police out to the arms and i mean we were we had super basic training i don't know how we didn't get in more trouble but we were shipping around one time we launched off a boat about kind of seven or eight uh kilometers off the coast and went in at night yeah we were doing all these things we just weren't really trying to do but we kind of made it work that is awesome all right so yeah so you come back from that it sounds like you've had your heart set on going to selection how hard was it to to just start the process yeah it was i think it's i think recognizing that oh my god this is actually i'm actually in a position to do this now that was the and then applying and getting the paperwork back and there's a training program and then i was like holy [ __ ] i'm actually going to be doing this for real yeah wow yes for real and just the the fear there because you've everyone's heard the stories of what the selection course is like but i also think there's a bit of bias in there like you hear the most about it from people that come back and have failed at it so it kind of makes sense that they might they may have inflated the difficulty of it or what not you know because it is hard but they if they fail then maybe they do want to they have an interest in inflating the difficulty of it a bit more but i mean it was a bit of a boogie monster everyone has heard about the selection course and knows it's it's rough so yeah was it not as hard as you expected based on that because you kind of went in with the boogie monster mentality yeah i went in totally expecting worst case scenario like totally and so every day that i survived i was like wow i you know survived another day in you know this apparent hell uh and it was it was super hard there's those really low moments but it can't be hellish for three weeks straight like there's got to be patches that are hard and patches that aren't as hard so again it was just a case of writing out the bad bits and from reading about it it sounds very similar to kind of british sas selection delta for us probably all based on that same system um you mentioned an officer section or segment of it for like 96 hours i've not heard that before on our side it might it might happen you know i don't think i've interviewed somebody who's had to go through that but could you just talk a little bit like what was that iteration like being pulled out as an officer to do this other segment yeah everyone had heard about the officer module in selection so we're all going through it together and then at one point i think we're about a week in uh they said all right um you know everyone we're doing this navigation exercise for 72 hours if everyone if the following people come with me and it was all the offices right and um and so i went with with the instructors and i knew it was the start of the officer module and so they gave us a series of leadership activities and then some really unusual scenarios they're like all right you're going to come up with a plan for this you've got two hours here's like a million pieces of paper and maps um sort out your plan now and you're going to be briefing you know us in two hours and so two hours later we'd walk into a room and that there's the top you know sas commanders one that just invaded the western desert of iraq and you know he existed only in legend and here you are about to brief him on some kind of half-assed half-assed plan you've come up with at 3 am and so and and now they were looking at us under pressure they're like can this person assimilate information can they prioritize what they're trying to do can they come up with a coherent plan in a short period of time and can they present it well that's kind of what they're looking at and then they get us to go out in teams and do this and ours they're like all right we're going to go here we're going to put an ambush in we're going to recover a hostage here you know you're going to lead it and that they just watch us work together with with no food and sleep and just see what we were like man um does that segment i mean it sounds like it's a short segment compared to the rest of the program but does that weed a few officers out through that yeah i think so because they they start to see that some either aren't prepared or don't have the mindset necessary because a lot of the planning jobs they were given us were just really weird things that you we never got taught they're like all right there's going to be a you know a tsunami just hit samoa um organize a plan to fly and evacuate all the australians and so you hear these things you just never had to do before and and you just have to be creative about i think at some point they would see that some people would adapt to that and others wouldn't and i think that's where they started waiting people out i i wonder if you could share maybe one or two of the more difficult moments during selection that you described because i i want to touch on something after that that you you share where you have to kind of describe your weaknesses to someone i think it would resonate with a lot of people so i was just hoping you might set us up with like what were some of the difficulties or points where you felt like i might not make it yeah there was one part where i had i was badly injured um about halfway through i accumulated some injuries i had a really strained knee and my other foot had really severe blisters and that's kind of you know that's going to happen at some point because just because of the work you're doing but i couldn't cover the distance we were on a solo navigation exercise and this is something fairly unique i think to essay selection is that expectation that you can work alone for a long time with no feedback and complete uncertainty that's actually quite hard to do and so i was out there on my own in the middle of the this coastal desert just uh just dying trying to you know trying to take steps so i could barely walk and i was just like holy [ __ ] i'm not going to finish this because i just wasn't covering the distance and um luckily i found an aid station got some bandaging done on my foot and um off i went i had to make up a lot of lost ground but over the next couple of days my injuries started to heal which i think a lot of people don't understand is that if you stay in it long enough all the things that are going wrong with your body can actually start to repair themselves and i think it's a shock at the start of anything like this like adapting to it is really difficult but once you're in it for a while you do turn around and improve and so i was able to kind of come out of that like just i think i i nearly failed there's no doubt i nearly failed in that phase why do you think that the timing of it makes you think that yeah you've got to cover in five days you've got to cover a certain amount of distance like 130 kilometers or 120 kilometers and i i got there at sundown on the last day so i was like out of time i was i was nearly i nearly missed the cut off yeah so yeah there's this moment in the book where you're talking to the cadre there right and for some reason they're asking you like what are your weaknesses and you say i'm sometimes slow to pick things up you know but i work on comprehension and once i've grasped the concepts i move quickly and sometimes i'm not punctual which i thought was funny um do you feel that's still true for you that kind of these weaknesses like as you were younger maybe you observed in the military is this still consistent i definitely associate with this yeah i think that you they don't no one expects someone to arrive and say guess what i'm a complete completely perfect candidate you do have weaknesses it doesn't matter who you are you have weaknesses and i think it's your job to know what they are and to be okay with them for me it might be quickness or comprehension there might be some straightforward concept they're trying to explain to me that i won't get but for me sometimes i i would take a lot i would i would get momentum in an idea and once i had it i was fine sometimes i was just slower off the mark than other guys it just meant that i had to work a little bit harder in that field what offsets that is all the other distinct advantages there might be some spikes in your characteristics you might have really high levels of self-control you might have really high levels of humor and adversity that stuff's worth a lot to a team and those are the things they're looking for that are going to offset those weaknesses so i think i think for anyone who's trying to go down that path is like know what your weaknesses are and don't give them [ __ ] like people say oh my weaknesses i don't suffer fools and you know i'm a perfectionist like [ __ ] that's a strength dressed up as a weakness so be honest tell them what you think is a weakness but understand that you have a whole bunch of other you know skills and advantages that they're going to want yeah where does the do that you're not often punctual come from i i think i was just clutching at straws there um all right so just before we move off from from selection you know it's it's a story event that we hear about whether it's you know the uk side of the house yours the delta side is there is there something about selection that you think is misperceived or misunderstood that you might only understand if you go through it yeah it's uh i think when people look at those things i think this is going to be physically really hard it's going to be mostly physical i need to be strong and fit to get through this i'd say it's it's kind of inverted for me it was about 30 physical 70 was mental acumen mental endurance mental capabilities um and then your own personal characteristics and values that you bring to to selection that you're kind of born within and conditioned with over the years the physical is really just they expect you to be at a threshold level of fitness and just make sure you're above that make sure you can pass the test but you don't need to be some physical specimen you need to be someone that doesn't give up under under pressure someone that cooperates with their team no matter how bad things are going someone that accepts responsibility when things aren't going well someone that would just persevere no matter how bad it gets that is the part that counts uh the physical part really doesn't matter that much it's perfect yeah i hear that all the time actually a lot of guys i talk to will say not just the mental piece but they should they they almost all recall showing up with these guys who look like superman and they're like by the end it's it's these wiry smaller guys that are making it through yeah yeah it's so true uh there was all shapes and sizes right and i was actually i was a bigger guy like i'm uh you know about 230 pounds so for an essays guy everyone said that to me like these guys are endurance-based you've got to have endurance but like let let them decide that you're not right don't you pull yourself off or or not go let them decide don't don't be talked out of it by someone else so so as you roll out a selection my guess is you go through considerable training on the back end right after you have to get out of that um as you arrive at your first unit are you thrown into a leadership position right away as a junior you're not a junior officer anymore but as like a fresh officer out of training are you then leading sas soldiers yeah you get allocated to a troop and so not everyone necessarily goes to a troop right away you might go into a operations role or something like that and that could be because there's just not enough positions or you know you might not have been deemed suitable just yet to go to a trip i was able to get to a troop straight away and i got the first jobs we had were small teams of about kind of six of us going to the middle east which had kind of just been just been open for australian forces and we were escorting we're doing um basically bodyguard work we're planning and taking politicians and generals through the middle east to to get them to the battlefields and to meet the the troops that were there at the time and so i know in the book you kind of describe it as half you almost feel like a parent to some degree like taking care of making sure nothing happens to your kid yeah planning everything out can you just talk through like i mean this is your first time deployed with this unit you'd worked your whole life to get to what was the feeling like going in oh yeah it was it was incredible so i remember the going away with the soldiers was great we all knew each other well because a small unit a lot of people that trained me during the selection during the reinforcement cycle were the ones i then deployed with so we know each other really well and there's a lot of trust and people know that you've got the standard needed to do the work but when we got deploying to the middle east was so interesting because i only heard about it right and when you see it when you you know land in kuwait and you see the sunset and hear the call of prayer and the smell of the like it's a really cool place you feel like you're on tatooine right like it's it's super cool and um and then i saw some of the the american military machine like just how big it is and how how much of a footprint you guys can hold in one place um and so and i remember taking military aircraft all the way around to afghanistan and and landed in tower and count for the first time on a dirt air strip and um getting out i'm just thinking wow this is the most exotic remote uh biblical place i've ever seen it was it was pretty crazy and when when you were doing that i don't know is it is it vip protection i don't know what you call that mission set but as you were doing that did you end up getting into any any issues like either from the planning side having to deal with senior leaders or just from a a tactical standpoint no it was pretty good and i think the good part about it is if we knew we were doing one of these jobs we'd have an advance element go forward like two weeks early and i'd be in there so we'd have two weeks to go and travel the route we'd see all the bases and it was super cool just to be in the area and not have a giant military structure hanging over we were kind of agile we could go around and we saw most of the major cities in iraq and afghanistan in advance of taking these guys there what kind of stood out to me was is we don't i think the part of rather means we don't have as much control over these battlefields as i thought we would i was like i thought you know being the allies that we are and the westerners that we are we would we would have things under control but it just wasn't and you would know that from being there was just there were parts of it they were just completely out of control yeah you must have been getting almost like threat briefings on every area you were going to yeah consistently right so you almost got this full aor threat picture over time yeah yeah and i remember the one of the earlier jobs we did was to kind of bag dad in the middle of 2006 and it was just a it was just a hot mess you know it was just i i remember hearing like one morning just you sit there and listen and you can just hear explosions and fighting and bloody rockets and it was just carnage you know so i i was wondering for a team of like six sas guys that yeah that's right how do they feel about doing executive protection yeah oh yeah we all wanted to be inside the wire we were so keen to be you know task force black all this all the strike stuff going on we were just throwing our toys out of the cot going you know we're getting left behind but again australia's we're not serious about war fighting we're not serious about it because we don't have the assets to do that stuff we don't have the lift capabilities and the isr and all that all that crap you need to do it we weren't serious about deploying it overseas so we were part-time kind of war fighters and that was incredibly frustrating for us and so we will watch in and at that point we hadn't we had recommitted to afghanistan we had a squadron over there um we didn't have anyone in iraq we'd had a squadron in the early part of the invasion but there was there was no one else really there there was some some conventional forces and that was it but um we really wanted to be doing the the high precision kind of strike missions and hostage recovery and all that but we couldn't but we the next best thing was to be there at least have a look at the place so if it happened we were in good shape to do that um so yeah we were lucky enough to move around and see the whole place and yeah so when you come back from that i think you've got do you end up doing two more rotations to afghanistan afterwards is that right yeah so we did i for the first year i was out of training i did a lot of those we call them protective security detachments so a lot of those kind of running the generals and politicians around both theaters and then the the rotations in orozcon province were ramping up that was that became it became clear that was where the action was for the unit and some of the stories coming back were incredible like some of the some of the battles the guys were in were pretty full on and this is in the early days we didn't really have a lot of lift back then there wasn't a lot of isr was a lot of vehicle work we got the long range patrol vehicles we used their ieds but probably less back then and so by 2007 um i'd been doing this work for a while and i was now in in the running to take a a troop over for a combat rotation and when i was in his team or actually we were there on another kind of recovery mission uh in 2007 my squadron client comes and goes hey you've um you're in the in the front seat for a rotation at the end of 2007 and you're going to take a composite team over and you're going to get a like a winter rotation almost and that was the first time i went over and you say this is a recovery mission is that how you describe it in uh yeah we were after a fugitive in east timor this is in isn't it anymore yeah called uh alfredo renato he was like a split like a separatist this super charismatic kind of rebel and uh he he'd escaped one of our one of the hits we did and was out in the jungle kind of causing a bit of havoc so we went over to try and uh get him so wait this is when you were in sas yeah yeah so i ended up doing going back to his team more two more times yeah and you called her so sorry when you were saying recovery mission i was thinking like uh like a downed pilot or something so this is like a capture yeah yeah kill kill capture mission yeah okay dang all right so so that's you come back from the the psd work in afghanistan then you do a rotation or two to east timor yep and then you go back to afghanistan later yep 2007. all right so the east timor trip again do you i don't know how much you can talk about tracking down this individual but what was that like for you that was another funny one and my friend was leading the team there and i was the targeting officer but i did the targeting that i would throw my gear on and go out on every every job just as a kind of bolt-on but um i mean we're having real trouble trying to try and find this guy because you know the assets we throw at uh close in targeting and intel you would know this more than anyone doing in the jungle was quite hard and we didn't have we didn't we just didn't have all the assets to do it like australia we're just not equipped for some of this stuff and we're slowly getting there but it just it's been a long painful road and i think that again the full structure is changing again for more of the kind of state on state stuff but back then trying to do targeting missions for one guy in the jungle was quite hard and targeting just for people who aren't familiar we're talking about building a targeting package like where this guy is going to be how you're going to access this exactly basically how you're going to get in there like we're trying to fly into jungles at night with clouds and tree tops and mountains like it was super dangerous mark i mean i think it's cool that you ended up bolting on to that but when they're going in and you hit a dry hole are they like way to go mark you should have been doing it you should have been back at base doing your homework oh man all right so did you get into any uh any fights during that trip um in the in the the first hit they did they went up against and i missed this by like two days because i was coming back from turkey on another job um they they went his kind of uh building with him and a bunch of his um followers and i think two or three of his followers were killed and he got away um so that was the first kind of chance we had to get him and we we screwed that one up so and we spent the next kind of four or five months trying to find him yeah yeah um all right if we then move to i don't know when this is the first time you're you're on a mission and you're in a gunfight if we could yeah that afghanistan you know yeah can you talk us through are you a troop commander at the time um yeah where are you at in afghanistan as much as you can say and then yes what was that like for you yeah so we we flew into orozgan province taren cow this is kind of just north of helmand australia has a base there we were co-located with dutch and some americans but mostly mostly dutch kind of a forgotten patch of afghanistan because it's in the south but not south on the border of pakistan but a lot of taliban would move from the north through us to get to the south a lot of weapons as well and so there was a valley north of us called the tripura valley it's kind of like 10 miles north of us that we had so many troubles trying to recapture they'd done two clearances of it in 2006. the dutch had had fired 155 rounds indiscriminately into the valley there was so many enemy in there um yeah pretty full like world war one stuff and our guys had been involved in one really heavy clearance called op perth where they'd run a couple of ac 130s dry over the targets yeah so i really heavy enemy contacts in there um and a couple of guys wounded one of my mates got hit got lost some of his draw from an rpg around and this is all coming back to us we're like this is this is a serious fight like these guys aren't some mountain boys they're they're real fighters and so we went back i went back with my team and the commander of the south rc south said i want troy cleared and i'm going to make it my priority and i'm going to throw my reserve force at it which was a gurkha battalion and so we said hey we'll do the advance force work we'll go out we'll we'll map the valley out we'll tell you where the enemy are we'll go on recon the whole place and so i went out with my troop and we spent two weeks day and night we're either in observation posts by day and by night we're on foot in teams of six going through the valley to try and find where the enemy were and that's really classic um close country reconnaissance for us like that's one of the things i think we do better than anyone and that's completely undetected going into enemy territory and finding out where they are and so we did that repeatedly for for two weeks uh there was one contact during that time where three we ran into three guys that came out at night that um they all had weapons and and my guys there was one patrol i wasn't in it but they shot those three guys and they had a pkm rpg so yeah so they had some they had some heavy stuff right and um we knew that they knew there was going to be a clearance and so they were putting ieds in them preparing the ground and so we got ready for when the clearance was going to happen it was going to be early morning we were going to go and mark the landing zones we're going to secure the area make sure there were any heavy weapons there and the gurkhas were going to come in we were going to land put them in their format points and then we're going to go off and start the clearance and then i had a plan picking my team up and go sit a bit further south away from all the commotion to an ambush location because we knew there was a high activity zone plenty enemy there and by day we were going to uh going to hit these forces and so we we left and did the mission we walked in at night uh took us all night to kind of get in i was all quiet and we we repositioned uh gurkha forces landed kind of two chinooks at a time they were dropping a company at a time we were receiving the forces and sent him on the way we ran behind time and so as we're getting ready in daylight to move towards aaron bridgeson i was like yeah it's a bit hairy because it's daylight now but i thought let's just keep going because we're going to get away from all the all the friendlies that are here um as i was moving along this we're moving along this river we've got i've got snipers a sniper team up on my left about a thousand meters away as fire support we've got two apaches overhead there were brit apaches and we came up against a cornfield and it was super weird because by now there was nothing in the valley but there was also no pattern of life and we're like this is you know everyone's going to ground here this is this is super dangerous we could just feel it um and my first team came up against that cornfield and the team commander spotted someone or something in the cornfield and then a bunch of shots rang out and that was the opening kind of uh gunfight gunfire of what became a 12-hour battle and so i was up with my team i was right up close with him um and i jumped forward and was in a ditch and just trying to survive the early part of that battle because there was a lot of fire coming back and they were quite close and i had i had a grenade launch out of 203 and so i started firing back i was firing this 203 back and people had always said even in training like officers that you don't fight back but you might not get a choice right you might be so close to enemy you're going to be fine same as everyone else and so we were just i was responding with gunfire everyone else was shooting back in the cornfield and i had a jtac with me uh he was a sas qualified guy he was calling in the apaches on the far side of that cornfield and they were doing some um they were using the the 20 mil cannon along there a couple of hellfires so hitting guys are on the far side of the cornfield and i'd never been that close to ground fire and it was bloody loud and it was uh it was pretty close too i was [ __ ] myself because even even the hellfire like just the sound of that thing um because you're not fully expecting you're kind of like shooting back and here's god awful explosion um and so i could see without hitting it was probably the 20 mil was probably hitting about 80 or 100 meters away so pretty close and i was like [ __ ] they're actually really close to us um but um one of my guys had been shot in the opening minutes of that battle uh matthew lock he was really seasoned sergeant really good fighter he was only 33 but he'd been shot kind of high and left on his chest uh and was unconscious he was badly wounded unconscious badly wounded um so we were kind of pinned we were stuck there while we were trying to treat matthew call in fire you know deal with the taliban here i knew they were going to try and flank us around the south so the snipers were firing to cut the guys that would come around to cut us off so it was just it was busy and i was sitting there just going holy [ __ ] i'm you know over my head here and i've gotten my whole team in over our heads and um but we kind of we stuck at it we had to pull matthew back we got the ame guys to to fly in and pick matthew up and they were pretty ballsy piles they they did a really good job and i think i know the the ame um blackhawks have much better avionics from what i've heard um but they were just incredible they just dropped out of the sky and um we picked him up but that was that was the opening kind of couple of hours of this battle and just after that i was like holy [ __ ] these guys don't care that we're better equipped that we have aircraft that we have indirect fire those don't care they're happy to fight yeah so it was like yeah it was a hell of an experience i never never fear that [ __ ] all right so just so that i don't get hate mail later it's a 30 mil cannon i'm sorry sorry so that i don't i need to continue getting christmas cards for my my brethren we can't have a puny 20 mil supporting us yeah sorry yeah i don't know um when you say the gurkha who are you talking about um so the royal gurkha regiment which is the british uh gurkha regiment so led by british officers but nepalese soldiers and uh you know we saw them run off the they they ran off the chinooks all these kind of little guys kind of four foot five for tall guys with it they had the cookery knives like those massive knives they all had them with them so um yeah they were ready to go so so you've got like a sniper team up ahead it's small unit you got a guy who's injured immediately um it's daytime is that right early morning yep yeah you're coordinating air support both medevac and gunships so that's a lot going on for your first engagement right yeah um yeah did you really feel like you led them into a bad spot or i mean it sounds like this is what you were trying to do now yeah it's it's funny because i remember when we put those parts out on the on the on the kind of chess board we're like we'll have the snipes here and we'll have the aircraft here and i'm like if we get in trouble we're covered right we've got we've got options but then when i got in trouble i was like oh my god this is worse than i thought it was going to be and but i think the fact that we got out of it um intact and no one else was hurt was because that we had planned it well even though i think it was probably it was probably a tactical error on my part just because you don't you're not fully aware of how how dangerous that green belt can be um when you haven't when you haven't come up against it but after that i was i was very cautious and i stuck to night time you know we we yeah it was pretty close and you said that was a 12-hour fight in the end yeah the opening part of it took about two hours to kind of fight get move matthew out get back to a compound and then the battle continued all through that day and we were kind of in helping some clear compounds and and then we picked up just before dusk and started our move out and um and we spent most of the night trying to get out when when you finally got back to wherever it was after that kind of back to safety what was going through your head i was starting to i started i knew we'd survived but i was also the fact that i knew matthew was dead that was hard because when we went back one of my mates back there was a uh experienced kind of warrant officer too and he was a really good mate of mats and when i got back i was like mate i'm sorry um and it was it was so hard it was really i was so upset and he just he was really good about he goes mate you know it's it's it's war that's what happens so i don't don't feel like that was was your fault it's just um you know that stuff can happen no matter how well you you plan things he was really good about it damn okay that's a tough tough opening to a appointment very tough okay there was something that you mentioned in the book that i just wanted to ask about i can't remember if i got the exact you said you weren't yet fluent in the language of the unconscious body right as you're moving around the battlefield can you just talk a little bit about what that means as you say it yeah there are certain cues that you'll see or hear or pick up on that will make you feel uneasy even though you don't know why and it's because i think the unconscious mind knows that there are certain things that just don't conform to the patterns that you use to see so it could be something as simple as the way a person looks at you before they walk around the corner or the way someone folds their hands or the way he you see someone speak to their friend things as small as that can tell you a story and on their own they may not mean anything but together with a lot of other signs they can really paint a picture about what's happening in front of you and i don't think i was fully sensitive to that at the start or if i was sensitive i perhaps ignored it but over time i came to rely on that as one of my greatest strengths is the ability to look at people and to know exactly what they were thinking based on the tiny things they were doing how they stood how they fold their arms if they look at you when they talk all these little things tell your story um and so yeah i learned to pay attention yeah how long do you feel like it took you to develop that skill um not that long i don't think i think enough time i think i had a good baseline because i worked with people that i knew and trust and believed in so that's a really good baseline to have and then when you deal with people that aren't necessarily trustworthy or have questionable intentions then you kind of know you have a better idea of what's good so that gives you gives you an idea of when there's a question mark over other people so i feel like it that skill came quickly especially in warfarin yeah and then if i i can't imagine that you have something even crazier than that but if you if you look forward to that the rest of that deployment or the following one if you think back to one of the more dangerous or difficult experiences you had where was that and what was that like uh so there was another time we went all the way out to the helmet river and we had again we're kind of troop formation this time our long-range patrol vehicles um which are pretty well armed actually we've got heavy heavy weapons rocket launchers 84 mil the whole thing um really good air support we've got joint joint um the jtags are with us so they're pretty quick to call in air support um we had the dutch with self-repel 155 mil artillery not far away and so we where we went into it was called darawood coalition forces had not been there for a really long time and when we got there there was a handful of basically al-qaeda guys basically foreign fighters um a couple of chechens a few pakistanis that had been organizing the battle and these guys were really good they had all their [ __ ] together they had all their ammunition brought forward they had defense in depth they had uh mortars they had rockets they had they had a heavy douche they had a bit of everything and they were ready for us and so we spent two weeks going up and down the banks of the helmand just um duking it out with these guys and this time we really lent heavily on american air power because just once you're bringing that stuff up to the to the party you can really do some damage and and so we were using uh the i think was the um the b1s right there the lances yeah yeah we're bringing the lancers in to do some bombing runs here i i still i can one of the most impressive things i've seen is the air strikes from the from those guys and i remember seeing a couple of 2 000 pounders drop and i was like if if this is precision bombing i would hate to see like unrestrained like like unrestrained bombing would just be a spectacle but yeah that really tilted the balance we're able to to make a big dent on these guys without really having to dismount go right into the green belt we're going to be up close fighting and possibly losing guys so our job was to sit there and hold them for a couple of weeks while the brits were doing a clearance in musa carla not far away dang dude yeah it was full on did you know that you were going into an area with that type of enemy posture or did you learn that as you were engaging as you were moving we knew we knew there were there was a lot of enemy there and they were pretty well organized but then when we got there i was like oh god these guys really want to apply and uh they're more excited than anyone and we would hear them day after day talking about what they were going to do and any mistakes they'd made that day and um you know it's pretty some of it's quite funny you know just hearing them carry on the radios um telling each other off and but uh but you know i was lucky we were lucky to get away with that one like there were ieds all over that place and we didn't we didn't hit one so we're pretty pretty lucky damn right um i don't want to take up all your time here mark so i want to talk about your initiatives you're doing today as well um and there is a lot to cover and it's actually very entertaining from from my perspective sorry i remember the name of that colonel it's bob haskell yep so he was yeah so we were um just for those listening mark and i were talking before we started recording and i was i was just relaying the unit when i left 101st we had just come back from afghanistan i left and the unit was redeploying to afghanistan and i think it was 2010 2009 2010. and uh they worked with you guys and every time i talk to them they cannot say it's just always like it was the best deployment you missed it was great it was all these sas guys they always wanted to go out and do hits and colonel haskell he was my battalion commander when i rotated out so that's small world yeah and we i mean we had such a good relationship with with those guys and like i was saying we brought them over to the bar a few times which was you know which was a big big deal for them they weren't necessarily allowed to do it but we uh we certainly got on the on the cans with them a few times that's awesome that is awesome all right um i i do know as as you described leaving the military it's a pretty difficult transition as it is for many people but i mean you've seen a lot um the multiple deployments um can you just talk through what that was like for you coming out of the military frustrated what it was like trying to land on the other side yeah i had gone i've done all those deployments so i did that 2007 one that i did a heap more until 2010 and so by the time i kind of left the you know i was pretty exhausted and i went back to that um done true in that training establishment to be an instructor which was actually a really good kind of loop to go on because i went back and was able to share my experience and when you're young and training that's all you want to hear you just want someone to kind of tell you about what it's like and um you know what to do so it was good it was a good way to go but i knew as well oh my god i am i'm so exhausted and that really damaged me and i'd had this idea about going to the us even when i was a kid i wanted to go over and play football i never never got to i played too much john madden when i was a kid but um i never got to go back but now i was an adult i'm like oh maybe i can go back because like i was saying i visited new york and i just loved the us i love that you guys lead a lot of industries your mindset around what's possible is is exciting and so for me i thought well maybe i can i can switch careers if i go if i go to a really good school and i get the right training education maybe i can switch careers and have a whole new career and so once i once that thought had taken root i really i really got excited about i'm like actually i think maybe i can do this and i started doing my homework about where might be a good place to go in the us and i knew the mba programs over there had you could do two-year full-time programs and there were some really good ones in the northeast and on the west coast there's so many good schools in the u.s so i had the idea about applying to it and it was pretty pretty scary because i knew if i didn't get it i could potentially compromise my career as well so i was trying to apply to us business schools in secret while i'm also trying to do my day job and hold my career together and there's just people in australia don't understand what those schools are like unless you're in high in the corporate sector you've probably never heard of a lot of them in australia so when i was trying to explain to people i'm trying to get to a u.s business school hopefully in ivy league one people just had no idea what i was trying to do and uh there was no real support there so i was working hard to try and try and make all that happen and do the gmat and all that stuff so you know it just took forever to try and make it work and eventually i was able to do the scores set the gmat a bunch of times and uh yeah eventually got the right applications sammy my wife eventually got the application done and was able to to head over and it was an easy choice once i once i'd been accepted to to warden i was more than happy to go that's no joke i mean that's gotta be top five business school in in this country um yeah it was it was i knew it was a good school but i don't think i realized just how good it was until i got mad it's like holy [ __ ] this is really good yeah god it must have like the caliber of of other students there must have just been off the charts probably reminding you that yes i would imagine it was great and so varied too like so many different walks of life um and everyone was so nice like you're in the military people like the hard asses right it's a hard place to it's a hard environment um and i wouldn't call it the friendliest workplace in the world you know and then i got to business schools like these people were so nice um it was it was exciting why did you have to do it in secret i don't think i'm tracking that is it because you were you you were still in so you wanted to make sure you landed at a business school before you exited the military yeah i was still in but if i had if i had let anyone know that i was looking at an alternative career um it would have would have set me back against some of the other some of my peers for example because we're still competing for spots in the army for you know squadron command or whatever how hard was it for you mentally to make the break like all right i'm gonna head out and and leave this career behind me once i got accepted it was easy but um leading up to it there was that thought of holy [ __ ] i worked so hard to get this career going am i really going to do this and i'm really going to throw this away to do something completely different and to start again really i'll be going to the bottom of the of the stack i don't know much about business at all and just that trying to get my brain restarted around just critical comprehension and maths and all the [ __ ] that i've never done for 10 15 years it was it was like trying to restart the old diesel motor it's you know a bit rusty um so yeah it just took a lot of work but it was it was totally worth it and then a lot happens after this right so you write a book you found a company you're on tv a couple times you work at mckenzie like what is the what's the driving force for you there because as a kid you're looking to get into the military sas you do all that how do you kind of reinvent that new path for yourself yeah when i was at school i didn't know what i was going to do after school but i knew i had kind of two years to to learn and think about and all that so i knew i wanted to do my own company because i just love that small team stuff and being creative and different and i'd come up with that idea for kill capture because i thought you know how we're going to explain what it was like to be overseas and at war in these teams and i thought actually a brand is actually a pretty cool way to do it because there's so many different ways to tell that story you can do it with video or products and and so to me that was exciting but i also knew it wasn't going to pay the bills for quite a while so that's why i was applying to the consulting firms applying the top consulting firms because i was like uh i can do two or three years there and that's a bit more time to think about what else i want to do and so i had worked hard to apply for mckinsey and was again pretty lucky to it was it was good i was i worked hard so i did the work but it's um it is hard to get in and i was i was glad i got there because it gave me another another two years to kind of keep working on kill capture and think about what i want to do next and um just randomly when i was in new york i'd seen i think i was in a new york winter and i'd seen the ad for uh australian survivor and i was like holy [ __ ] i could totally do that you know go hang out on a beach for a while and and you know that'd be so much fun and so applied to that and again the survivor franchise i had no idea how much of a big deal was because it kind of come out when i joined the army um so i hadn't seen a lot of it but i knew it was it was the original kind of game reality show but um it was it was so good to be involved with it is such a cool such a cool game i mean you gotta fact check me here but this is where you meet your wife right yeah yeah on the show on the show showmance and uh how how mentally difficult was it compared to selection it was super weird because when we got there i was like we've got this team there's like 11 or 12 this and they're all totally different to me totally different they're all either young kids or your old accountant or and used to these military teams and i was like oh my god what have i done so it was a i knew i couldn't really trust anyone but i met sammy and really liked her and i trusted her as well so um we we stuck together and it was just good to kind of fend for each other look out for each other while all this kind of carry-on is going on in the game um but even just just to be involved in tv production was was cool because you realize it's just entertainment right i took it seriously but it's just entertainment these people do such a great job at bringing this to life oh man how long like how long are you immersed in that oh it took it maybe took a good three or four weeks to get ready for it and maybe three or four weeks to audition and apply for it and then once we're out there i was out there i went i got kicked out about a third of the way through but even that took a month like each episode you see is about three days worth of filming so it's um you know it's a lot of work yeah it's a lot a lot goes on for each episode at this point in your life it's like you've never failed basically what was it like getting kicked off of that show oh yeah i knew i was in trouble because they'd uh they kicked sammy out more like a tight pair and by now we're three weeks in i'd been polite to everyone and i was like you know what [ __ ] these guys i'm gonna i'm gonna go and get them all and um and so i went after the the guys that kicked her out and i kind of lost the battle because i didn't have a big enough coalition with me um so it was yeah but it was it was really good it was really good fun and i think most people that go on say that it can be tricky psychologically because you're getting lied to a lot and it's it's uh you know a bit traumatic but super fun sounds a lot like cia training it's a lot of uh being lied to yeah in games i wouldn't i wouldn't be surprised and and the treachery of that like the treachery of that world is just yeah it's unbelievable yeah some of it's necessary right yep yeah so i will say i did not know until i was doing my research that you were on eco challenge and i watched that with my family that thing was awesome and brutal at this like people are getting hypothermia and completely getting knocked out of this thing i did not realize you and your wife were on that right yeah we we samantha is an uh like an adventure athlete uh an endurance runner it's kind of a main main job really and she had seen this they'll re-raise the eco challenge which used to be one of the original it was back in the day yeah it used to be huge and i watched some of the old things i'm like no way we've got to do this so we put forward a team um we got we got picked to do it we trained up it was probably like part-time training for about six months or at least got our equipment together and we flew out to fiji and we saw the course it was like 700 kilometers some really rough terrain and there's one part that where we had you had to walk out about 10 kilometers across boulders to this 300 meter high waterfall once you climb that you're on the tallest part of fiji it's about 2000 meters up and it was freezing up there and so once we got up the top we had to go through a river system for about five kilometers and that's where everyone was getting hypothermia because we're really really beaten up by that point and um people were getting in that water and by the time they got out they were hypothermic and that happened to a lot of teams and uh it was it was brutal it was just brutal i remember that the organizer of the race are like checkpoint 22 that's your waterloo if you get there you've you've broken the back of it and uh we made it just i mean those the river section that you're talking about like you're in water like cold and water yeah or yeah hours it seemed like yeah i i turned around and the cameraman that was following us was hypothermic and i was like oh we're in trouble here that looked like one of the hardest things i'd ever seen people do and some of them like the professional team not pro teams but the folks who have done that over and over it's amazing what you can do in that yeah yeah some of those top teams are incredible they're not they're not even super fast they just they keep going and they don't stop like they really sleep they just go 23 hours a day for 10 days and that's that's why they win they just keep going and how did how did that feel for you like i mean for you having done selection which has to be the hardest thing physically mentally what was that like in comparison yeah it was it was easier than that because we weren't really carrying weight i had like 13 kilos in my pack so it was just a matter of it's actually technical it's there's a lot of technical skills you need to do the train you need to operate your mountain bike and know how to climb and look after your feet so there were new skills in adventure racing that i had to kind of relearn but i was the only guy on my team that hadn't done adventure racing and and i was kind of worried about like i'm going to do something wrong and let the team down but it ended up being a pretty good race we kind of stuck together and the feet was the big one in the jungle if your feet went bad you were you wouldn't be out of race so luckily we kept it kept together i so my wife and i we can't like get in a kayak together and the marriage survives so like how the hell did you do that man well he said that why this is going to be hard but the good thing is we're a team of four so yeah we we were like kept it pretty professional and there's enough people that was kind of the circuit breakers and i can complain to someone else about my wife without shouting or anything oh that's awesome all right i've taken up a lot of your time um i do want to just make sure um that i plug again the book survivor is is really great i think you cover not just the easy not easy but you cover the hard times um very self-deprecating but also some some great life lessons in there kill capture you've referenced it a couple times for those who aren't familiar could you just give them a rundown of what what it is it's pretty cool online so i just wanted to yeah so kill capture is basically we're a tough luxury e-commerce brand we i wanted to take the kind of the best of uh special ops outerwear and kind of take those design features and put into streetwear so we're it's a streetwear brand everything's handmade in in new york city or other states in the u.s and uh yeah we sell direct to consumer so it's a lot of fun we're still making stuff still building products so uh yeah check it out it's got a badass looking jacket that i think i'm buying for somebody that i know is coming up it's really cool looking anyway and watches on there it's really neat um and then there are just two questions i like to ask everybody mark and i'll get you out of here in a sec uh the first one is when you were going on uh your combat missions was there anything you carried with you that had sentimental value good luck charm you always wanted to have with you uh so i had probably my i had the same dog tags that i had since i started training i had two dog tags so i had one on my boot and one around my neck and i think i i knew that was something that i would if i survived the war i would hand down to my kids or grandkids or whatever so to me they were it was cool to have the same dog tags through my whole career and yeah they were probably the things that i i made sure i had on me all the time i actually had one other thing i had this is a really weird story just quickly i had the name of a of a firefighter from new york that died in 20 hours i had on a bracelet i bought in new york and i cut it off his name is dan marino and uh i put it on my weapon and i wrote to his wife i found his website wrote to his wife and said hey i got your husband's name on my rifle hope you don't mind she's like of course and um years later when i went back to new york like you know seven or eight years later i spent a couple of days looking for apartments i was going to try and rent and i still looked at 20 apartments and i eventually settled on one in hell's kitchen and um that year they had the september 11 commemoration i went downstairs and checked and uh sure enough it was the same fire house with that dan marino was from i had ended up yeah i'd ended up basically next door to him after all that time and it kind of made sense to me i'm like yeah it makes sense that i would go full circle and end up close to this guy um after all those years that's really cool what a small world yeah it's mad um and then just the last one if knowing what you know now looking back at all the deployments and you know losing people and the sacrifice would you go back and do it all again yeah i would go back because it's just you know as hard as some of it is it's just it's it was such a good thing to be a part of and and the teams and the people and the you really do see the best in humans you see the worst as well but you really do see the best in people so such a great experience and i gotta say i'm a big fan of the background with the apache picture back there that you've got i don't know if you get that just for me but uh they're yours they're apaches and one black hawk there as well so i love it love it all right well i really appreciate the time mark i've got links to to all the places people can find you um is there anything else that you're working on in your superhuman time that you'd like to share before we wrap here oh not at the moment i'm just taking a taking a breath after doing that book so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna chill for a bit but um thanks so much for having me it's been great and and so good to see that we've you know our worlds have overlapped before and i'm sure we'll keep doing that so true thanks a lot mark really appreciate it thanks rob 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: 83,026

Keywords: Delta Force, The Unit, Special Forces, Special Operations Forces, Delta, Squadron, Operator, Force Recon, Marine Scout Sniper, Marine Sniper, Marine Corps, The Marine Corps, Hoora, Devil Dogs, NCO, Non-Commissioned Officer, Ranger School, Ranger, Army Ranger, Iraq, Afghanistan, CIA, paramilitary, 1st SFOD, apache, helicopter, pilot, gun pilot, operations officer, DO, directorate of operations, Australian SAS, SAS, Kill Kapture, Survivor, Worlds Toughest Race, EcoChallenge, Bear Grylls

Id: vO2OQL5D46I

Length: 87min 48sec (5268 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021