Combat Story (Ep 38): Chris VanSant | Delta Force | Ranger | All Secure Foundation | TYR Tactical

you know we started the flight into downtown baghdad and i remember as we flared over the target building seeing the charges go on the first floor from the ground assault floors and i thought we are the greatest nation in the world like what would you do if you were on the receiving end of this you have helos full of commandos descending on you from above you have vehicles full of commandos hitting you from the ground floor like how could anyone deal with this and it stuck with me there were a lot of those moments but like that one in particular because it was broad daylight which didn't happen a lot um and the timing was absolutely perfect and i just thought there's nobody that does this but us and it really stayed with me 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 chris van sam a retired army infantryman ranger green beret and operator and first special forces operational detachment delta or delta force chris survived 11 combat deployments in hundreds of combat operations across multiple theaters as you can imagine after so many years at the tip of the spear chris ended up confronting and overcoming traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress he remains a committed veteran and advocate helping others through these tough times he's now the chief operating officer of tyr tactical which manufactures body armor and tactical equipment for the military and law enforcement he's also a board member for tom and jen satterly's all secure foundation this is a two-part interview chris had a story career in combat and had to overcome so much afterwards we felt it was important to spend adequate time on both the combat and what came next particularly today as so many vets and hard chargers confront these same issues chris is very humble given all his achievements and success and i know you'll enjoy his combat story as much as i did this episode is sponsored by better betterhelp betterhelp provides global online professional counseling and therapy that allows you to connect securely with the counselor over chat video or phone as i've mentioned on combat story as have many of my guests we tend to deal with the lingering psychological effects of combat and stress i've used professional counselors for years to help navigate these difficult times and i'm glad that i did i recently used betterhelp for this in fact and found it an easy convenient and cost-effective way to get the mental health support i needed betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist and what's great is that you can start communicating within 48 hours for me this took less than 24 hours i'm also trying better help for professional coaching in addition to stress related counseling which is something i've been looking for but never quite found a convenient remote option that would fit my schedule i know for many the idea of counseling is not something we want to talk about but i hope that hearing the stories of these veterans and their decision to seek professional support will encourage others to do the same what's great is that combat story listeners get a special offer of 10 off your first month at betterhelp.com combat story that's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com combat story chris thanks for joining the show and taking the time to share your story hey appreciate you having me anytime so i wanted to kick off with something that i noticed on your instagram page which describes you as a climber hiker world traveler and if if your military career is anything any indication i'm imagining it's not a low scale low impact climbing and hiking so i wonder if you could kick us off with one or two of your favorite hikes climbs maybe one of the more dangerous ones oh interesting yeah so most memorable um i got lucky uh i i met a person that um fell in love and became passionate with something that i'm passionate about which is being in the outdoors um my wife robin so uh i introduced her to that um not long after we met and and she loved it and when i was getting ready to retire from the military she said you know what's something you've always wanted to do because we had had a conversation about like what are you gonna do in transition um before you move on to career number two and i said uh you know i always wanted to hike the appalachian trail or the pct or something like that um we ended up settling on the john muir trail um john muir to this day you know it's it's 226 miles or something like that you start in yosemite national park and you finish on the summit of mount whitney um you cross through three national parks yeah yosemite sequoia and kings canyon a lot of it in john muir wilderness it's just every day is absolutely incredible um and it's it's for us it was 21 days straight uh two resupplies along the way i joke around i say all the time like i'm like long distance like through hiking or a climbing trip for that matter or just like planning a military operation like you've got logistics you've got resupply you've got where you're gonna sleep you know what do you do in inclement weather what are your contingency plans um so all that stuff is very cathartic and and i've always enjoyed it but we did john muir right after i retired as as kind of like uh i don't know a a a line where uh this is what i used to do and i'm moving on to the next thing and it was absolutely incredible man it was one of the best experiences of my life um i i healed on that trip like it gave you time to focus on thinking about the past and then focusing on the future it gave me time to deal with some issues um it gave some clarity of thought with no distraction that allowed me to process a lot of the stuff that had happened over the course of my career both good and bad um so john mirror is definitely one that stands out uh it's the longest hike that we've done to date um but at this point i'm now six years post-retirement we've we've hiked all over the world um we just got back from uh the y wash trek in peru um it's been about nine days in the peruvian wilderness there in the andes um and that was incredible but uh number two would be um so i i got her into the back country and the next step was alpine mountaineering um i've always had a goal of doing the seven summits uh ideally it would be with with someone else um not just myself um so my wife and i have started doing bigger stuff uh and the first real big one we've done a lot of 14ers and stuff in the us but nothing really alpine is like 14 000 feet yes yeah and so a lot of those in the u.s a lot of people do that that's a big thing um at the end of the day it's kind of a small mountain uh it's big in the u.s but it's small globally um so the first sort of bigger mountain that we did was um uh in mexico it was orizaba which is the tallest volcano in north america and pico de orazaba was it it's just a grueling climb uh it's not super technical but you you know you do cross the glacier and you are roped up um and it's it's you know a pretty steep angle crampons ice axes the whole nine yards and finishing that mountain with someone that you that you love and you care about um was kind of a huge milestone for both of us uh and that sense of satisfaction for me it's akin to like a successful military operation when you set out to do something and then you achieve that goal and no one gets hurt no one gets injured and you do it according to plan uh and then you come home um it's just really really mentally rewarding and so that kind of started the bug so since then um we did cotopaxi uh and about four other summits in ecuador last year um and then uh we were supposed to do um mount elbrus and russia this summer but because of covid restrictions and travel stuff that didn't happen elvis would have been the first of the seven summits um so instead we're gonna we're gonna do aconcagua in january um so we're kind of bumping up to to pretty high but um you know the between the cotopaxi trip cotopax is like 19.5 and then where we just were in peru we basically stayed above 13 000 feet for nine straight days um the highest pass was about sixteen five so we're ready to go do it um so we're gonna do acaco in january and then kind of continue to tick them off so i'll probably do kilimanjaro because that's a relatively easy one um and then hopefully get back to elvers and russia and then kind of progress from there so i don't know if we'll do them all together i don't know if i'll get my wife convinced to do uh vincent in antarctica or or everest but um my goal is to accomplish those before i'm i'm physically unable to do so so while i'm while i still got enough gas in the tank i'm gonna give it a shot damn are you doing these with guides or yeah actually uh yeah i should plug them i i did we randomly booked a trip with mountain gurus which is a international climbing guide company um and a guy named teresa lester that's uh on the side he's a professional photographer um but he's a mountain guide his father is a legend in yosemite climbing and climbed a bunch of routes first and stuff that nobody's ever done and tarray is a fantastic climber he's a really good dude and my wife and i are both about connection so if you climb with a guy and you like him and you all get along and you learn to understand each other why wouldn't you stick with that so he actually summoned everest for the first time just this past year um but he and his company guide all seven summits so you know if luck holds we'll we'll probably end up doing all of them with him just just out of curiosity is that something if you're if you're looking to do the seven are you planning to do those in a certain time frame like you want to knock them out in two years so your body's acclimated and prepared or is this like as you have a chance you might knock it out in 10 years yeah no no there's no time goal at all um it's about being ready and being acclimated and prepared um i i still have that like that old stubborn militariness in me and that i don't do enough preparation for an event and i go do it and it sucks way worse than it should um so we're trying to be a little bit smarter about that um i tend to punish myself a little bit but but yeah we're with no time frame we're going to do them as as they sort of make sense um we were looking at doing a while ago but it was supposed to happen post elbrus and russia and then alberts fell through so we we pulled the peru trip out um because we wanted to do something high altitude but do a long distance hike instead of a climb um and so it kind of sets us up perfect so we'll go right back down to south america it's like a three week trip i mean they do a really good job in acclimatia and preparing you and going progressively higher each day so it's it's slower than i would do it by choice but it's probably the smart way to do it awesome so this is really interesting so robin must be a very very forgiving forgiving person to to all of a sudden fall in love with not just the outdoors but like climbing these summits i just interviewed an australian sas guy mark wales who was on australian survivor met his wife and then was on the eco challenge in fiji like world's toughest race with her yeah and honest to god i could never like my wife would never do that with me so that's pretty cool you guys are doing that i tell you what yeah i mean she's a fit person and takes good care of herself uh and she's a couple of years younger than me um but uh i tell her all the time she i don't think she laughs and doesn't understand because i met her sort of at the very end like the last couple years of my career so she didn't know me when i did any of those things she didn't know any of my co-workers or anything like that um and started later on in life and i tell her all the time i'm like i know sf dudes that can't do the stuff that you've done like when we hiked john muir and we were standing on the summit of whitney i said you just hiked 226 miles in 21 days that's 10 miles a day plus and you know at each resupply she was at about 30 35 pounds like like that's that is substantial i i i know guys that were professional operators that would struggle with that um without a lot of preparation and you crushed it and that's pretty cool um now i'm you know i'm all old and broken so she's she's my motivator she's the one that says you know what are we gonna go do next so it's it's good balance that's cool all right well i want to i want to use this to talk about um growing up a little bit but i can't pass up the fact that you just described these people as co-workers which is funny in this context because i think of co-workers as like an office environment and i'm imagining like shrek as a co-worker in that context which is it just makes me smile anyway so you mentioned as you were talking you had always kind of been into the outdoors like is this from early childhood did you just spend time outside did your parents take you out like what was what was your connection to the outdoors uh yeah i mean not a ton i mean i grew up in delaware um i literally born and raised in dover delaware there's delaware is like one of the flattest states in the country so it's not very mountainous um we did used to drive up to the poconos a lot and go skiing when i was younger and then as i got older and had a driver's license and stuff i used to spend most winters you know running up there on weekends so i kind of grew up skiing and loved skiing i always loved the mountains maybe that's part of growing up in a flat state you know you're just sort of drawn to it but then my military career exposed me to a lot more um you know later on in my special operations career you know i was on a climbing team and we did some trips and things and uh you know did some ice climbing did whatever you know just training but they were good trips and i learned a lot of stuff and realized i'm fairly decent at it and and i really enjoy it um and then it wasn't until later on that i realized like just how healing the outdoors can be like my wife and i have a saying like they what the back country is our church is what we say all the time and it's there's a spirituality that goes with being out there isolated alone um and at the same time there's a spirituality that goes with pushing yourself uh kind of to the limit to accomplish some of those things and then at the same time knowing when to to back off so uh yeah man it's like it's it's 50 of who i am these days and and keeps me sane and then growing up in delaware what what was the connection for you to the military when did that enter your mind um it was it was a myriad of things but you know i always tell people i think the biggest now looking back the biggest contributor was my my grandfather my mom's dad um both my both my grandfather's mom and dad's side were world war ii veterans and my mom's dad i was closer to um and i was the youngest of all the grandchildren so i got my grandfather at a really good point in his life like you know you get older and you mellow so some of the older grandkids you know he never talked a lot about anything but by the time i got him i it was when he was mentally ready to start telling stories from his past and for me as a kid growing up listening to him i was absolutely fascinated and i reflecting on it now i like even when he told a sad story which it was like 50 50. some of them were happy some of them were sad but whenever he told a story he told it with such reverence like he was an old man and he remembered it as vibrant as if it was yesterday and he told it to me like that as a child but probably much to my mother's dismay but you know he shared a lot of things and i think that just captured my attention i was like man if if this man could spend four years fighting for his country overseas and when he reflects on it all these years later it's all so positive how could this be a bad thing and i think that is what really built the draw and then and then you know the obvious stuff was we grew up in the movie age and there was a lot of really good movies when we were kids which were the movies for you i always find this fascinating yeah people always ask that i mean jokingly i always say like the chuck norris lee marvin delta force movie is one of my faves the the navy seals movie with charlie sheen and michael bain uh you know they were just cool flicks um and you know whatever they glamorized that whole thing but but you combine that with stories from world war ii that we all have an impression of being some of the most difficult times that anyone has ever lived through and to hear your grandfather tell it so strongly like so like it's just such a part of who he is and he's you know 75 years old like that that was just i think that combination is what really sold it for me um so yeah i most of that i attribute to my grandfather yeah that's really cool do you was he he was in europe for for the fighting uh he was actually in the south pacific for most of his time um he was in the army air corps so it was pre-air force uh and he was uh i don't know i guess an rto for lack of a better term but he dealt with airfield so when they would move to a new island and establish an airhead um he would deal with the airfield and a lot of that stuff so he bounced around you know he had great stories out of australia papua new guinea and a lot of the islands in the south pacific and just interesting stuff for a guy that was in the army air corps um drastically different than the path i chose but but it was enough to spark my interest man and then so for your folks did either of them and it sounds like your mom probably didn't well you described it but did did your old man end up serving my father did he um so let's see you're talking mid to late 60s um so vietnam was still going on my dad was one of those people that and and he said this he was like i was either going to get drafted or i was going to volunteer um and he and my mom had just had a baby they just had my brother uh and my dad decided to enlist in the national guard he thought well i'm in college i have a baby i'm gonna go ahead and do my part enlisted in the national guard and then never actually ended up in vietnam so uh you know he took that step which he felt like was the right thing to do which always stuck with me um but never ended up having to go over which you know thankfully for him yeah oh man okay so so you're watching the movies you hear from your grandfather you kind of see see your dad your dad's path um at what point was it in high school you're like all right i'm gonna go in and do this thing or did it come later no no it was pretty early uh my i was a mess as a kid um what does that mean what do you mean you know i i didn't have a bad upbringing my parents got divorced when i was very young um but they both remarried and they both remarried great people so i'd like to i make a joke of it but i ended up with two good families instead of one um so you know it wasn't tough you know you go through ups and downs when you go through a divorce so you you know you're middle class and then things are tough when it's two brothers and a mom and then they both remarry and then life gets better so i don't you know there's nothing there's no big drama there or anything but um you know it's delaware there's not a lot to do and and back then getting in trouble was something to do so you know we we drank at an early age and you didn't really get in trouble back then you know if you got stopped by the police they called your parents because it's delaware and everybody knows everybody um so we could kind of get away with a lot um so i was a drinker at a way too young age by the time i was a sophomore in high school i was getting a lot of trouble i was drinking i was acting up in class um i was one of those kids where if i was interested in the subject i was like i was a history guy i would get you know straight a's in history classes um math i hated and it was boring or english or whatever and i would do terrible because i would act up because i was bored so about midway through my sophomore year i was not in a good place i was drinking a lot um so about my junior year uh my junior year was the first time i got told if you don't get certain grades you can't play sports uh and that for me was a little bit of an eye-opener because i really enjoyed athletics and you know i was a baseball player and i live for that like i live for summer ball i really wanted to play in high school um so that was the first time that it impacted me um and that was when i started thinking about you know am i going to am i going to go to college after this am i not what am i going to do and i had a kid in class with me that who's ironically whose brother was a combat controller was a air air force combat controller um and cct guys and pjs have a really cool pipeline and if someone just hands you like the document of this is the cct or pj pipeline and you're a kid that grew up watching you know the navy seal movie and the chuck norris death force movie it sounds like the coolest thing ever like literally i'm gonna join the service and you're gonna let me jump out of planes and send me to dive school and i'm gonna do all these things like this sounds amazing and that i think that piqued my interest um and then you know as school went on uh i i think i had a little bit of an awareness of if i went to college i'm gonna party and drink and i'm not gonna do well um so as much as i wanted to go my dad was a college baseball coach too at the time oh wow so i really like baseball was in my blood and i really wanted to go play college baseball but i knew i would mess it up um so i really started seriously looking at the military end of my sophomore year junior year and then uh i thought you know there's a lot of avenues here and there's some things that appeal to me um so maybe i'll give that a shot and it's really interesting you know not having heard the rest of your story but to have done what what you have what you go on to do it would seem like you have some pretty strong self-discipline but the way you're describing it is no not really unless it's something i really enjoy right i mean does that come later for you uh no i think i mean i think i was always an individual um i think even growing up you know there's whatever especially in a small town there's cliques and people do this i was always that guy that was his own person and did his own thing and found his own way and fit in sort of everywhere so i yeah i think i i think i always felt like i could do whatever i wanted um and that's not that wasn't confidence that was just i'm just me and i'm gonna give it a shot and if i fail i fail i'll either try again or i'll move on to something else and i don't know i don't know when i found that um i really don't uh but it manifested itself in my military career many many times i mean i jokingly i say like i've failed everything in the course of my life like i've i've failed enough things to figure out how to be successful and i i don't know where that you know maybe it's maybe it's my family maybe it's in the genes but um you know i just never i never listened to people i never listened to opinion if someone told me i couldn't do something if anything it was more of a motivator to go do that so yeah i don't know i probably didn't answer your question there oh yeah no that makes total sense i mean i feel like you're a very humble guy and saying you failed everything is is maybe uh pretty subjective here others would look at what you've done differently but i i hear what you're saying just as oh no wait wait till we keep talking i'll tell you all the times that i failed and got fired now they exist [Music] um just out of curiosity when you grow up in delaware what is the pro baseball team that you follow uh it's kind of split so if you're it's it's almost like the mason dixon line in dover so there's three counties in the state of delaware dover is right in the middle in dover kind of north they're all philly fans um dover south they're all orioles fans and ironically it's it's almost equal distance if you live in the center of the state to go to philadelphia or to go to baltimore i actually i actually grew up both um i was a philly fan when i was young young um and that stayed with me and then as i became a teenager and things like that um i had an uncle that lived in uh in in the maryland area that had season tickets to the orioles and my dad and i used to go over to orals games all the time so i fell in love with the o's you know i was a giant cal ripken fan and all that stuff back in the idiot yeah brady anderson cal ripken robbie alamar days like yeah so giant baseball fan man but i honestly i still to this day i split time if one of them is doing bad i ignore it and pretend like i'm not a fan but but if by the year that philly's won the world series the last time i i tell you i was the happiest person on the face of the earth that's awesome i just like the past couple days i'll be sitting here eating lunch and i'll put on the little league world series and my wife is like what the hell are you doing it's like kids playing us nah it's good i'll watch this any day i went to baseball camp in williamsport pennsylvania really yeah and and so you would you would i forget how i think it was two weeks or whatever but you know you would go do drills on the alternate ball fields all day and then in the afternoons you would go do like scrimmages and stuff in the world series stadium and it was the coolest thing ever like i that was one of the coolest times i've ever had uh they did a phenomenal job i don't know i don't know if they still do it but it was it was a really big deal when i was a kid to go there and it was one of the coolest things i ever did baseball wise as a child oh man was that like it must have been like your own field of dreams it really was that's what it felt like you felt like a professional athlete as a 12 year old or whatever i was then um yeah it was awesome god all right that's cool okay so so you're in high school you decide you're committing uh did you just walk down to the recruiting office or what like how did you find your way into the military yeah i i went they had a combined recruiting station i went to the recruiter's office um i had done my homework like i said i had a buddy that literally handed me like the cct pipeline and so i you know i you can only do so much research back then we didn't have the internet right you could look stuff up so like pamphlets and books and like word of mouth is all you had so yeah i went i went to the joint recruiting station and and i went to see the army guys originally um and i said i want to be an army ranger and uh the guy that i got didn't really know a lot about the program no nothing against him but he that wasn't his background um and he kept trying to pitch me other stuff like being a logistician being this being that and i really wasn't interested it kind of put me off um so then i went you know to the air force and i said i want to be a combat controller and the guy same thing knew nothing about it he was like well yeah yeah you can you have to sign up for another job or whatever and because if that doesn't work out you have to have a career in the air force and i was like so if i can get injured i end up doing whatever and he was like yeah and i was like eh i don't know about that you know they all kind of throw their i think at the time it was like montgomery gi bill and the or that was the army but and they had like some college money and some other stuff and i thought this won't be bad i'll do it for four years i'll get out and it'll help pay for school but yeah the air force guy didn't have anything so then i went to the navy and i told the guy i want to be a navy seal and he same thing he knew nothing about it you know he was like yeah you can you can do that you can volunteer to go to buds when you're in naval base training but you have to pick another career field and so that kind of put me off and then i went to the marines and this is after listening to all those guys you made the rounds i did it and i was like i want to be a recon marine and the guy was like well you need to start out as an instrument you know and they're gonna you know this this this this and i was like that that yeah that sounds pretty cool um and you know he's the marine was probably the most squared away of all of the recruiters i mean the guy looked the part he looked like a marine he was a big barrel chested dude you know whatever high and tight or flat top or whatever marines do and sorry that's probably i probably just pissed one off but you know what i mean like he looked the part he looked like a barrel chested freedom fighter and i was like that's pretty cool and so he he gave me his whole spiel and he got done and i was like yeah that sounds pretty good i was like i was like but i gotta be honest like all the other services are offering other things like college money or this or that um you know like signing bonus whatever it was it wasn't a whole lot back in 1995 compared to the stuff they do now but but he goes uh or 94 actually was the year and he goes i said so what's the marine corps going to give me and he said we're going to give you the privilege of being a united states marine son see your reaction that's exactly what i did at 17 years old i laughed and he threw me out of his office love it literally he said you can go and i was like what and i was like i'm sorry and he was like no he's like you can go and i got up and i left and so as i was leaving um one of the army recruiters not a guy that i'd talked to ran out and i've told this story before but um guy's name was cory deal i have no problem saying it because he was phenomenal dude and and corey ran out and he grabbed me and he was like hey man he's like you got a second i said ah you know and i was really kind of let down because i really wanted to do this and i just didn't hear the things that i thought i was gonna and corey said you know i listened to your conversation in the office he said we're broken up by school so technically i'm not allowed to talk to you um because we have quotas and like whatever whatever he said about i'm not supposed to talk to you because you're not in my school district um he said i heard you i understand he's like i wasn't a ranger but i was a paratrooper 82nd airborne he's like proud of it jumped into panama he's like i gotcha man he's like will you give me five minutes let me go talk to my boss and make sure i can talk to you and i said yeah yeah that's cool man so he goes back in talks to the whatever is station chief or whatever and comes back out he's like hey come on back in um he pulled up the army ranger video uh and showed me um and i asked him i was like well how do i do that um and he said yeah they have airborne ranger contracts uh and it turned out they didn't have a ranger contract available um but they they did have a guaranteed airborne contract and he said when you go to airborne school you can volunteer to go to the rangers um he's like but at least you're airborne qualified and you're an infantryman which is what you want to do and he said you know we can get you going and kind of the rest is history so he guy was totally totally honest with me he's totally straightforward super motivated like god bless him um i probably would have not ended up in the military if it weren't for that guy yeah man i love moments like that so again like that guy probably had no zero benefit from that right from a quota system out of the kindness of his heart because of the things he heard me say he just thought this dude would be a good addition in the united states army so chris like i don't know it's impossible to know the answer to this but like what if you left there that guy doesn't come running out like where do you think your life goes at that point man i don't even know man like i i didn't uh you know i wasn't a dumb kid i was an intelligence kid but but i didn't have the grades like i probably would have gone to community college and i don't know played some kind of ball and i who knows man wow i i i i mean i might still be in delaware working working at nine to five doing something i hate i i have no idea but yeah that one guy i mean it happened to me several times throughout my career where just the the goodness of one individual and somebody being selfless changed my life um and it i carry it around this day like i like i i try to be that with people i try to be the person that that just might say the thing that you need to hear that day because i've had that happen to me so many times that's cool man god all right okay so so you you finally join up um you go in through airborne i know you've talked about this extensively so i don't want to make you belabor it but um as you joined up how long do you end up spending um on on the ranger side i know you move over to the green berets um maybe just the first question here would be was this your goal all along to find delta or was it just hey i got to get my foot in the door and see what things are available yeah i don't think i knew a ton about you know the special mission unit world when i enlisted i knew about army rangers i knew about green berets at least on the army side um i knew that i wanted to be an army ranger like that was all i ever like that was my goal that was my initial thing was that is that's awesome these guys are highly trained like if we have to go fight for our country these are the first dudes that they're gonna call on um like that meant something to me uh i think as i went along you garner more information um when you're a kid in regiment um and it was rare then but occasionally unit guys would be down uh or you would do something in conjunction with them and back then it wasn't as close a relationship so it would be like you're gonna jump in and do an airfield seizure and then once you've secured the air head these dudes are going to fly in on the helicopters and land on this target and you're never going to see them you're just going to hear a bunch of booms and bangs and then the helicopters are going to leave 30 seconds later and those badasses are gonna be off with what's really important here so just make sure you do what you're supposed to do and they build this lore um so as a young ranger like you see that guy and you just think they're a superhero amazingly when you're young it's like you only ever see the guy that hollywood expects you to see like the like the 6-2 like adonis build guy that just looks like an operator the reality is is they're all regular dudes like me and you and while there are those guys like that is not like the precursor to do things like that is not being a physical beast it's part of it but it's it's not really what it's about so yeah i think i think there's a lot of things that build along the way but i always wanted to be i always wanted to be in the in that top tier i always wanted to do the thing you know growing up as a baseball player you know your goal was to make the all-star squad right your goal was to play outside of your bubble and the only way you could do that was to be the best at what you did and to move on to all-stars and then be able to go compete outside of that realm and i think that just carried on i i just wanted to be a part of the top tier of whatever it was that i was doing and i and i wasn't gonna stop until i got there based on the timing you described were there guys in your unit who had been in moog during uh the black hawk down type work yeah my first unit for sure my first unit was was um third ranger battalion uh i wasn't there very long i i ended up getting a dui as a young ranger and at the time if you got alcohol-related incident you had to leave so i was only there for like 18 months um but when i got there that was 1995 1996. um and i was in charlie company 375. so beco 375 is historic for mogadishuma and all the stuff that went down in somalia and so all those guys were still there um to boot at that time in the mid 90s you had guys in third range battalion that had you know two mustard stains um they had a they had a you know a combat jump star on their jump wings from grenada and panama uh so there was a lot of in your mind then there was a all this combat experience there was all these guys that had been there done that um so if anything i think it made you pay a lot more attention and listen to their guidance um because those guys had actually done some stuff in another otherwise peacetime stretch of time yeah oh man that's interesting so so you mentioned the dui i i'm probably going to try to keep a tally here as you said that you failed everything oh i missed one you missed it oh okay you got another all right so when i went to the ranger indoctrination program uh they did a they did a we didn't have cell phones then right so you had to write down the number of where you were gonna be on the weekend and it was only three weeks long so you only have two weekends in the middle and they they brief you on the regimentals deployment policy and if you're on ready force one or whatever and you get called out you have to be in and anywhere in the world in 18 hours or less so they tell you at any point on the weekend you could be called back in well i because i was who i was they said don't go outside of an hour radius or whatever i drove to clemson south carolina because i had a bunch of friends in clemson university and i thought it would be fun to go party with them and lo and behold on a weekend that i did that they did a recall and there was a bunch of us there was like i don't know 10 or 11 of us um and i thought i thought that's it i'm gonna go back out to the regular army they actually didn't they they made us do rip again so they recycled us um so i actually did it twice uh thankfully but um yeah so that was the first i stepped on it and i got basically fired and i got told you got to do this again and i went back and did it so then yeah so then fast forward so now 18 months in a range regiment um yeah i had a buddy that got a dear john letter from his girl back in texas and you know he'd been away a long time and and uh wanted to go out and have a few beers and you know at the time it really wasn't a big deal if you're old enough to fight for your country you're old enough to have a beard just don't get caught was kind of the philosophy um but at the same time if you had an alcohol related incident the policy was that you were leaving the regiment uh and so we went out a couple beers i literally had two beers um he had a bunch and i was driving him home and it had just rained and a car stopped on a yellow light and i hit the brakes and slid into the back of him and because there was an accident involved and my buddy was obviously drunk they were going to do a sobriety test the cop advised me look you're underage just refuse it he's like it's an admission of guilt but you can have a lawyer plead dumb blah blah blah you know the games that they play uh it didn't matter they took me back to the station they did a blood test i had alcohol in my system even though i wasn't over the legal limit i was underage so anything in your system is considered the dui so i was charged with the dui uh and and yeah i spent about another six months there um we actually did a deployment to germany and a whole bunch i did a bunch of good stuff after that happened but um but i was leaving yeah so my my the joke of it was my my section sergeant got a dui the same night we weren't together but um so there was no way i wasn't leaving the regiment they were going to make a statement out of the two of us so so yeah i ended up leaving after about 18 months it crushed me um was probably the first and worst thing that had ever happened to me because it's all i wanted to do and i was so happy about being there and i loved it i love what we did every day i look back now and i laugh and like it was like a frat house at night like i mean it was like fighting each other and drinking and then you'd wake up at 4 00 a.m and be outside in formation and go run six miles as fast as humanly possible you know but you were 18 19 years old like that was that was just what you did at the time so that was a hard lesson um it was a good lesson but that 18 months that i got exposure in regiment right then and there was kind of key to a lot of things that happened later on in my career and i didn't know it then but i realized it years later so i don't want to lose that thread i mean and i joined you know i i commissioned an o2 so i wasn't there in the 90s but i do you know i'm familiar with how difficult it was this zero defect mentality and you would think a dui would sink your career certainly as it's happening how did you come back from that it took a few years um so i i left there and i was actually an 11 charlie um i was a mortar guy um so i was assigned a weapons platoon in 375. um because i was at 11 charlie which turned out to work in my favor when you leave the regiment like that when you get fired and leave they call it worldwide assignment meaning needs of the army they can send you anywhere and honestly most dudes that get rfs like that you end up in a shitty place like fort riley kansas or something like that um i actually stayed on fort benning um because i was 11 charlie they sent me to kelly hill which there was one brigade of third infantry division that was on kellehill on fort benning um and they sent me to kelly hill because i was 11 charlie and they had a uh like a heavy mortar platoon in that in the one of the battalions in the brigade um and so yeah i went to kelly hill um right there on fort benning so i didn't have to actually leave and go anywhere i stayed in the same spot but i mean you want to talk about a culture change you know going from regiment after 18 months and then you know being an airborne ranger and then moving to mechanized infantry um that was a uh that was an interesting transition damn and then how do you find your way out i assume next you go you go to selection for sf or node come back so so i'm you know i had a four-year enlistment um so whatever basic training airborne all the stuff that happened and then regiment and the timing regiment then i leave so i get the third id and i had i don't know a couple years left on my initial enlistment we did a deployment to kuwait it was operation desert thunder so it was post-first gulf war when we were still patrolling the skies above iraq um and we would do these deployments to kuwait as like a show of force so they were constantly maneuvering forces in kuwait kind of just to keep the iraqis paying attention that they we got an eye on you um that was awesome that was a really good deployment like as a mortar guys 11 charlie like we went over there and we had all of the ordinance that they had built up from the first gulf war that was just sitting in kuwait so we did live fires like every two days um i look back now and i'm like okay i shot you know a hundred thousand four deuce mortar rounds that's probably contributing to my traumatic brain injury later on in life but but it was but it was awesome as a soldier so that was cool i had some good leaders in that unit um we had good good soldiers and bad soldiers it was just very very different uh and i learned a lot they i progressed really fast in that platoon because i was hungry and i was motivated because i was pissed off that i left the regiment but i was gonna get out and um so two years went by and i was coming up on the end of my enlistment and i literally was gonna get out of the army i was like you know what i'm going to get out i'm going to use this gi bill and college fund whatever and i'm going to i'm going to go to school maybe i can get back and play baseball i don't know but that's literally where my head was and i had a conversation with my toon star and he kind of ran it up the chain and like i said i was a i was a good trooper like the dui stung me and i'm not saying i was perfect i still did dumb young kid stuff but but i was a good soldier and a quick learner and motivated and good at pt and and so he came back to me and he's like hey the uh battalion commander wants to talk to you and i i was like what like italian commander doesn't talk to at the time i think i was like corporal vanzant or whatever maybe they'd put e5 on me i don't know but i was young and i was like why would you want to talk to me and then he wants to talk to you about staying in the service so i had to go down italian commander's office i i'd never met the guy guy's name was colonel lee um but clearly he had had a lot of conversations with my chain of command and he said a lot of nice things said a lot of good things about the service and he basically asked me like what do i need to do to get you to stay in the army and i was like sir i don't know that you can do anything you know why do you want me to stay i said look i got it i got a dui in my first enlistment like i got a general letter of reprimand like like i had this i'm literally winnie the pooh i got this or i got this dark cloud that follows me everywhere and i said i just don't know that i can overcome that and that's not what i had in mind like i don't always want to be living out from under the rock and he said well what if i can make that go away and i said what do you mean and he goes well i can't make it disappear he's like but i can move it to your restricted fish he's like you got it as a young kid he's like kids make mistakes you're not you know it's not going to haunt you the rest of your career it's not going to slow down promotion like you'll be fine and i was like well that's interesting like if you could really do that sir i would consider staying and i said but i'm not staying here to the battalion commander and he to his credit he he took it in stride and he was like no i get it he's like you started out in the ranger regiment and you came to a mechanized infantry battalion he's like that's a big change of pace i said i said no offense i've had a great time here as a it's been awesome i've enjoyed it i go but it's not what i signed up to do and he said well where would you be happier and i said well i at least want to get back to jumping out of planes because i really enjoyed that and he's like well you know what about the 82nd and fort bragg and i said yeah that would that would definitely do it he's like all right well if i can move that letter reprimand would you be willing to re-enlist if if we can send you up to the 82nd and i said yes sir i will yeah so that's another another guy who kind of went out of his way just no reason to do it i mean just one guy in his battalion and he took the time to do that and it it made a huge impact on my life and a huge difference in my life and it made me feel like i made a mistake and i can recover from it like it was a really good lesson of just stick it out man like stay resilient like keep fighting keep doing the right thing it's okay you screwed up get over it and don't do it again and people will look out for you if you work hard and i it really was it was a huge moment man okay so so then what happens next you get to the 82nd and are we talking like are we 2000 now um this is now 1999. okay um so i went to second three two five um in the 82nd um so i was back jumping out of planes i immediately i was at e5 so i immediately took over a mortar section in a line company um which was another kind of cool moment um the mortar section and a line company you know it's usually an e5 promotable or an e6 and it's in charge you got two gun teams so you got three or four guys on each gun team you're a small element within this infantry company and you answer to the company commander so as the section started you're like you're like a platoon leader and a platoon sergeant at the same time so i you know you gotta go to the first hard meetings as an nco and you gotta go to the the ceos meetings as a platoon leader because you're your own element uh and it was cool they you know i love to train i love to train the guys and we spent [ __ ] five days a week in the woods like i love that stuff um i enjoyed my time there had some great people around me um i used to befriend the the new lieutenants that would come in because i shared the command company cp the command post with them so i had a desk in the same place with all the new platoon leaders um so i was like the one nco you know they had their platoon sergeant that treated them like they were idiots and then you had you know sergeant van zant that was a e5p that was cool to all of them because i'm like other new guys like somebody's got to take them under their wings and uh and i met a lieutenant i met a lieutenant a guy by the name of paul karen uh that came in and he was a west pointer um i wasn't a west pointer fan uh up until then um there was just a difference between guys that came out of rotc guys that were prior service and west pointers and um and paul changed that he was he was a boy scout through and through he's a little odd um but he was brilliant i mean he was a super cerebral guy and he was one of those people that just seemed to know a lot about a lot uh and i didn't know why but i liked it and so we got to be friends and um i think a year and a half or so went by uh and they wanted to move me to hhc to take over a section in the 81 platoon which was at headquarters headquarters company so you had 60s in the line companies you had 81s at a headquarters company that supported the entire battalion and honestly i had learned so much in my time as 11 charlie with the kuwait deployment and moving up and all those things i was already doing fire direction control like i had all that stuff kind of mastered really what was left for me was like leadership roles like being a section starting being a platoon sergeant there was no more learning involved i was an infantry mortar man and i was bored yeah and uh and so paul you know the platoon leader he ended up getting a second platoon he because he was a rock star he moved and took the scalpel tune um so he had a line company platoon then he took the scout platoon and i knew paul was going to be one of those o's that went to regiment like when he left the 82nd like that was his path he was going to end up an sf officer in some form or fashion and you know paul said to me um hey i'm going over to take scalp between want to come with me and i was like i'm 11 charlie like they're all um those are 11 bravo victor slots like they're 11 bravo ranger slots i can't go do that and he was like hey ken he's like i'm the platoon leader i can recommend whatever i want and he's like you know you're as good at individual 7-8 tactics as any line squad leader that i've ever worked with he's like if i ask for it they're going to give it to me he's like they all know who you are like you're a performer um and i was like well how do i do his lemon charlie he was like just reclass and i'm like what is that and he's like it's where you just change your mos and i was like how do you do that he's like go see the re-enlistment again how does this guy know all this as a brand new lieutenant and i you know i'm i'm self-absorbed and i don't even pay attention to all that stuff you know i figured it out after the fact but but yeah so i did um and the commander first started signing off on it they reclassed me to 11 bravo i was promoted e6 the day after they did that because of where points fell so as as a e5 p11 charlie points were at the top of the totem pole and nobody was getting promoted but as a e5 p11 bravo points were way down here so as soon as i reclassed i was immediately promoted to e6 i moved to the scout platoon the next day and took a team um under paul's command and the scout platoon and uh and yeah so we did some fun things there and then um he actually had a conversation with me one point about you know what my next course of action was and i said i wanted to go to sfas i wanted to go to greenville berets election and he said is that what you ultimately want to do is be a green beret and i said no and he said what do you want to do and i said i want to be a special mission unit operator i said i want to be a delta force operator and he was like why don't you go do that and i was like well i'm i'm 23 years old like they don't take dudes like me i have no combat experience you know i had all these preconceived notions um and he said well that's [ __ ] and i was like what do you mean and he like showed me like the requirements and he's like you have to have minimum of four years of service you have to be 22 years of age whatever they were at the time and i was like wow and he's like yeah he's like so if you you know you go take the test pt test and do all the things they ask you to do and they invite you to attend selection he's like if it doesn't work out so what then you go to sfas if it does work out then you end up where you really want to be and you don't waste that time doing something else didn't know why he was saying that um as it turns out he his father was the unit sergeant major at the time no way yeah and i i didn't know that um like swear on my life no clue how would i all he ever said was his dad was a 12 bravo was a combat engineer and he was a combat engineer because you could have any mos and go to the army special mission unit but he never told me anything else and so one day we were coming back from setting up some training and he said hey do you mind if we stop in and see my dad and i said no that's no problem at all and he turns onto lamont off mckellar's road and i'm like where are you going and that was when the compound was more easily accessible but it was still a compound and he pulled up to the gate and i was like dude what this is the unit compound and he goes yeah he goes we're going to see my dad i told you and i go you told me your dad was a combat engineer he goes he is he's a 12 bravo i go well what does he do he goes oh he's the unit sergeant major jesus man well i don't know to this day if like that was a joke that paul played on me or what um but yeah so he took me in and meet his dad it was kind of a funny conversation he didn't say anything positive or negative uh he just you know told me good luck um i just wanted to get out of there uh and yeah so i went to selection that fall uh i didn't make it okay so what is that three check uh you know i made it all the way to like the last thing um that you have to do and i got chopped on a day that that a lot of people get chopped and they don't tell you a whole lot fair to meet the time standard but they asked me to come back um and i did and i was successful the second time so uh yeah i mean that was that was all again because of one person taking the time to i don't know do something for me for no reason no reason at all and it changed my life so i i want to talk about the second time through but before i mean i feel like you've got a little forest gump in you here where like these for two years i'm slow no i'm not safe but these these encounters you have and i wonder again i know you're very humble but it do you feel like you might be more open to people's advice like how i think there are a lot of times in life where you could come up with this you might run into somebody who could help you like maybe there's a little bit of you helping yourself there as well along the way maybe even under the radar yeah i'm not sure i mean i i was just telling somebody the story the other day when i when i was in high school growing up i had teachers that loved me and teachers that hated me but i had one that stood out her name was kathy morris and she was a marketing teacher in high school she taught marketing one and two and i enjoyed that right it was like how do you appeal to the masses to get them to do something that you want and i did really good in that class um it covered a ton of subjects but mainly it was because she was a really good teacher and i really liked her like she was interesting she was entertaining she was down to earth she was just a good teacher and she said to me um the year that i graduated she said you know what you're going to be successful at whatever you do and no adult had ever said that to me and i had made a lot of mistakes i was a kid that got in trouble quite a bit like no one had ever pulled i mean your parents of course say positive things but no other adult had ever said something like that to me and miss morris did and she said you're going to be successful whatever you do and i said why do you say that and she said because you're a really good bullshitter and i go what and she goes no she goes it takes an incredible amount of intelligence to be a really good bullshitter and bullshitters are successful because they know how to continue to push and excel and get to where they need to be and she said so whatever direction you choose to go just know you're you're going to be successful at it and frankly that stuck with me like it didn't matter if people said the bullshitter thing i say is a joke and she did too like she was being funny because i was a little [ __ ] but but it stuck with me that you know what if you put your mind to something it doesn't matter what other people say it doesn't matter how big you are or how physically fit you are how intelligent you are if you put your mind to it you can achieve it and honestly man from my senior high school that stuck with me so no matter how many times i got beat down i felt like if i just you know put my boots back on and keep going it'll work itself out and it did okay so you mentioned that you don't make it through selection the first time how hard is it mentally to think like i'm going to come back and do this again because i've just heard it's so difficult it wasn't for me um i honestly i i felt like i was crushing it the first time i was good at land nav like for whatever reason i'm just i mean maybe it's why i like mountaineering and doing all the backcountry stuff now like looking at a map and reading terrain and understanding it and navigating was just something that came to me and i enjoyed it i enjoy maps i collect maps to this day i build my own when we do trips and i save them but but i was good at it so i i felt like i was fast i felt like i was in shape i felt like i was ready the first time honestly when they sent me home i felt like in my head which isn't true i probably didn't meet the time standard which is an accurate statement but i felt like they were just testing me i felt like they're going to send me home because i'm 23 years old and they want to see if i'll do it again wow and you know who knows if that's true or not um the unit is really really good at screening and selecting folks and and phenomenal at finding the right people for the job but so i came back a year later and i was confident um the only downside of that was in august so this is august of 0-1 i used to take my team actually two teams out of the scout platoon and believe it or not we used to go play basketball in ritz epps gym there right on fort bragg and i did it because we were constantly crushing dudes with road marches and pt we did pt twice a day it was like one day a week we would go over and we would play like five on five basketball and it was fun and i twisted an ankle like high ankle sprain really bad in august of 2001 and i was due to go back to selection in in the end of september early october of 01. at the same time i got levied in august to be a drill sergeant at fort benning where i started out so i was on orders to attend a drill instructor school and i had just sprained my ankle and i called the unit recruiter and i said hey look i just got orders that said i gotta go to to drill sergeant school on this date and it was pre-selection and the guy said don't worry about it and i went what i think i'm a soldier i'm an nco in the army and i have official orders that say do this and he said send me a copy of that or however i think i faxed it or whatever at the time but however that happened he said don't worry about it you're coming to selection don't sweat it um so i in that last like month that i had leading up i learned how to tape my ankle um went back to my baseball days and your athletic trainer and you know looked up library books on how to properly tape an ankle and i take the [ __ ] out of my ankle so i could continue to train and uh and then 9 11 happened um sort of right in the weeks leading up to that and you know that was i was in the field and we got we were in the middle of an exercise and we got called back to like the company cp and i thought it was [ __ ] i was like why are they calling us i thought it was a test because we were out on a reconnaissance and surveillance mission and i thought they were messing with us and i had just gotten in a gunfight with op4 or whatever and but we came back in and they said yeah um and the company commander briefed us and said you know a plane just hit one of the world trade centers and that was before the pentagon got hit and then in the time that we went from the field they load us on on buses as soon as they get them out they brought us back to the company headquarters in that stretch of time was when the plane hit the pentagon and then the other tower and so we were watching this all in the day room on tv and it was just it was such a crazy like stretch of time like i'm on levy i'm supposed to go back to selection i'm on this bum wheel and then and then all this happens and i thought well i'm not i'm definitely not going to selection now like we're going to war like i'm going to get on a plane this is 82nd airborne like we're the premier airborne infantry you know unit in the army and and um but yeah it it drug on for two more weeks and lo and behold i went to selection about two weeks later um found myself in west virginia and uh i i mean i was as motivated as a human being can be when i got there uh is is it odd for me to think you may not have been the greatest drill sergeant you know i don't know i don't know it's a good question nobody's ever said that i think i would have been good what do you mean you seem so mellow yeah i mean now years later i i mean when i was when i was a corporal when i was an e5 i was what you would expect okay i was a hard charging young nco that did whatever people told me and pushed my guy to the limit uh yeah no i think it would have been a good drill sergeant i would say that in ingest i would have hated it but but i think i would have been all right at it damn okay so so you do selection the second time clearly you make it through when you finish that did you feel like finally made it after all this time i'm wherever i want to be definitely i mean it was it was a really really neat feeling i mean when you finish uh the end of selection you know the last event is a 40-mile road march or whatever um and when you get done uh you know you get some handshakes and you're not used to that and people tell you congratulations and then as sort of time goes by as you're sitting there all pathetic um you realize that not a lot of guys finish this thing uh and then you know a few faces show up um and and you're happy to see them and it's that like mutual accomplishment thing that is probably one of the more incredible moments of my life like you know you're moving on to something bigger you know this is the next step you know you're only a millimeter of the way there um but yeah i definitely felt a sense of accomplishment i felt a sense of redemption like like i i stuck it out in spite of all the things that had happened and now i'm finally moving on hopefully to to some place that i really want to be wow and so theoretically you're the first class post 911 yeah yeah we were um it was an interesting group it was an interesting class there were a handful of guys that were on their second time there with me so i knew a few of the faces and it was a different mood guys were there was not a lot of communication that went on not you can talk a lot anyway but it was a very somber class it was a very motivated class um yeah i think we were uh you know you feel really good but at the same time we were all really serious about what happens next wow yeah so please take me through what happens next like you if you fast forward to the time you get into combat um what is that like the first time for you yeah so i went through school um i graduated in the operating training course um typically in the pipeline you graduate the operating training course and then you move on to a couple other specialty schools you know like one of them being like military free fall if you haven't already gone i didn't even get to do that i graduated the operator trading course i reported to my squadron my squadron was actually deployed at the time they were in afghanistan so this is now late spring early summer of o2 so some things have happened in afghanistan that we were very aware of um we knew that the unit had participated in operation gecko um right post 9 11 that they were kind of the first statement that the u.s made so yeah so i show up to squadron and and there was an op sergeant that um uh received us and went through like kit issue and told us you know this is the team that you're gonna be assigned to you we have about a week to get you guys ready and get some in processing and stuff done and then we're putting you on a plane on a rotator uh you'll you know you'll fly into oman um and and sit there for a couple of days and then you'll go from oman to uh to bagram and then link up with your team and that's exactly what i did um so there really wasn't a whole lot of time to process or even think about anything and then i found myself landing in kabul and um being taken to the tents that everybody was living at the time this is you know this is o2 so it was way before all that stuff was built out um so the organization had a series of tents um that they were all living in and i went in and met my team for the first time um kind of in the middle of the night is when we arrived because they would only fly into bagram in hours of darkness at the time um yeah um i think my my first uh my first mission i think i did one training like iteration with the team somewhere there on bagram and they were just feeling me out and then literally within a week i was on target in gardez afghanistan with a new team is it sorry for the ignorant question here but you know coming out of of otc and this training pipeline do you come out at a position where theoretically it's plug and play and and it doesn't matter that you didn't train up with the team for eight months like you're interchangeable basically no [Laughter] no i mean you you come out of school i mean i was i was a young motivated dude and i just had a lot of success after overcoming a lot of obstacles so uh you know i was probably a little cocky in mentality at the time and the very first like i said i got i think i got one training run with the team and the very first realization i had was you know i thought i was this lightning fast dude in in in the course um because you do get really good it's repetition and and you spend so many hours on the range in so many rounds and you do so many iterations like you're you're you're a performer and then you get there and you realize that you're moving at like half speed compared to to these guys so it was an eye opener um there was a lot of lessons learned just in the first few days with guys like guys that you look at like i never i i'm not a big guy i think i i had the same thing i had the hollywood impression of what an operator looked like and that definitely wasn't me so i was always humbled to be there i was humbled when i showed up because of that and then you look around and you go yeah you know there's yeah there's some dudes like that but there's a lot of guys that look like me and then you do something with them um and you start training with them or you do a hit with them and you realize wow these guys are [ __ ] phenomenal like they are just really really good at what they do and i have a long way to go and that's exactly how i felt on that first one you know if we could spend just a minute longer on this that this has got to feel like if we if we put it in context timing wise like this is the beginning of this war and i mean it's early early on even at the time um it's got to feel like you were called up from the miners and thrown into like a playoff game yeah a whole bunch of guys you've never played with and they're like you better [ __ ] hit man like you got to get on base what was the how much pressure did you feel at the time uh you know i had some really good teammates um i had i had a couple guys that are lifelong friends that the guys on my team um were very very good about being inclusive they knew um they knew that i was joining them in combat they knew that the next day we could be on target in a life or death situation and i'm the guy on their left or the guy on the right like they knew they didn't have a choice but to be inclusive you couldn't be there wasn't time for hazing at the team level yeah so you got stuff from other people in the troop and the you know the troop starting major or whatever like there was an element of hazing that went on but the team was very inclusive and those guys were quick on the draw like hey you need this you need that hey you're gonna need this you're gonna need that they were open to questions like they were really receptive uh like i said lifelong friends guys that i still talk to to this day that first team that i joined um i spent a lot of years in combat with like we didn't change and and those dudes you know are probably part of the reason i'm still here today so uh yeah it was it was a great experience um i felt like i evolved quickly i got along with teammates which is helpful uh it doesn't always work that way for guys like you don't always click i got i got lucky you know one of the guys on the team was from maryland we hit it off right away like i'm from delaware you're from there we're like we're like chesapeake crab eaters you know what i mean um so you know there's some kind of instant connection with a few of them um but uh but yeah all in all it was a good experience afghanistan was a different time then too you know i think that squadron did like i don't know like nine or ten ops like legitimate ops during that first rotation that they were over there because things were slow we were still developing the battlefield we were developing targets and everybody went to ground you know post gecko when they knew we were coming everybody went to ground and disappeared for a while so it took a while to build those target packages so it was a pretty slow rotation which i'm thankful for um but but yeah all in all it was a great experience can you take us through that first operation you know as much as you can say but just like what was the feeling like um what what type of offer you guys doing what happened yeah we let you know in the community we laugh at a low vis operation low vis meant i'm in civilian clothes and wearing my body armor but we did it we did a hit in uh in gardez afghanistan chasing some targets and um if there's two things that stood out from that one was i made a fool of myself um i didn't you know never being in afghanistan the facility that we did the dry run in in bagram was normal and was a regular building with regular doorways when we did the hidden gardez we blew the breech and we entered the compound the very first doorway i went into was an afghan door which is about here on me and i'm only six feet tall so under night vision um i i don't even think we explosive breach i think we manually entered the courtyard or you know manual breach moe breach and went in and and we ended up left in the first sort of room off the courtyard and just scald myself man like nods on the bridge of my nose broke them off my helmet end of the room had to go to you know my tack light instead of my nods and i got yelled at by like my team sergeant at the time like what are you doing why are you using your attack light like stay on nods you didn't know i ripped my nods off my face and was bleeding which i'm not the only person that's ever happened to in an afghan doorway for the first time but that was one two was after we were all secure um i ended up moving up to the rooftop of my team and we were providing some perimeter security from the rooftop and there was a lot of stuff going on there were alternate targets and my troops are major was on the radio and he was the coolest cat i had ever heard on the radio and i thought it was interesting because i here i am in combat there's all this stuff going on but even in all of the training that i had ever done leading up to that point i had never heard a guy so cool calm and collected on the radio and it stuck with me because it was significant it was like man that's exactly how you want that guy to be like if you've got a dude yelling at you you're just going to turn it off you're not going to listen and i i did at various points later on in my career when people were like that but but bill was the man and totally chill and it kind of puts you at ease like you you literally felt like you were surrounded by the best in the world i wasn't i wasn't scared in afghanistan um weirdly i think i just felt so comfortable and and i believed so much in the talent of the people around me that i literally was not afraid at all that stuff didn't happen until much later okay and if if we kind of jump to that later tell me about your first time in iraq i guess yeah so afghanistan we came back um my squadron commander at the time is kind of the guy that solely sold the fact that we need to do a long-range desert mobility into iraq um so when the the army special mission unit when the unit was involved in the first gulf war they were scud hunting in the western desert so they left out of rr saudi arabia they drove across the western desert and they were seeking out scudding missiles so now you fast forward to the second gulf war um and he pitched it as a long-range desert mobility and that intelligence believed that if saddam had weapons of mass destruction whether they were nuclear biological or chemical that he was going to not store them in the major cities that they were going to be hidden out west in some of the ammo supply points and things like that so he pitched that concept um and fought for it and we ended up being the unit that did the the desert mobility into western iraq um so we're about three days before the air war um and we again left out of our saudi arabia on in unarmored vehicles in in six wheeled pen scours um as a squadron uh and our goal was to basically disrupt to hit all of the ammo supply points in various targets throughout the western desert and work our way towards tikrit which is where they thought saddam would flee to once the war started so about three days before the air war began we left rr we headed for the border um we got snow i think that first night in the desert which uh you know i was i read a lot of books prior to getting the unit and one of them i read was was andy andy mcnabb's book uh two two sas guy bravo two zero um and you know they were crossing the western desert in the first gulf war and they had you know had an engagement and ended up breaking contact and guys ended up eni and all over the place but he talked about getting snow in the desert and i remember reading it thinking that's not going to happen and then here it was snowing on us but anyway so a night goes by we get to the border um we ended up uh one of our mechanics we had on satellite imagery we had identified a bulldozer that was sitting here they had these big berms on the border of iraq and saudi arabia that you couldn't drive a vehicle over they were you know 40 or 50 feet tall earth and berms that had been built however many years ago and then periodically you know ever every so many miles they had these guard outposts with towers and so the plan was um we were going to have special operations aviation dudes on the army side so 160th helicopter your your kin we're going gonna take out the two outposts that were on either side of our crossing location on imagery we had seen that there was a bulldozer in the vicinity that we wanted to cross so we headed for that site um actually made a clever assumption that whether there were keys or not that our mechanics could hotwire the bulldozer and they did they used that bulldozer to plow a hole in the berm uh and then round about the time that the you know helos were commencing the assault on the outpost we crossed over that berman into iraq that's awesome is it i mean we're only talking 10 years from gulf war one were there guys at the unit who participated in that like was there institutional knowledge yeah so weirdly um in the in the lead up to that invasion because it was a desert mobility and that was wasn't something that was very common um the unit did something that very few units ever do they went and found all of the vets from the first gulf war that's awesome there were a handful of guys still in the building that had done the last one that it was b squadron at the time but that had done the original mission they pulled all those guys in and they basically went through lessons learned and they said all right if we're going to do what we did then today with all the assets that we have how would we do it and we kind of built a plan from there so all of our rehearsals and all that stuff i mean we came up with some unique equipment we had some technology on our side this time that that they didn't have then you know we had we had ground-based flier balls mounted on on a handful of the vehicles which as you know were only on aerial based platforms to that point and some ships right so um we were the first unit ever to employ a ground-based flare ball and it was night and day difference on the battlefield it gave us so much standoff to call close air support that you know they never knew we were there most of the time god and then if you could just i mean you've you've been involved in so many operations but could you take me through maybe one of the more memorable sets of ops that you were on that that come to mind during the invasion or or post that i think you can choose take it take it however you'd like but yeah the ones that come to mind that you you kind of remember for whatever reason the invasion was was significant because it was a long-range desert mobility like very very few times in history and i'm a history buff has that ever happened you know it it hearkened back to you know the the world war ii and north africa uh days and that was unique there were a lot of there was a lot of unique engagements a lot of unique targets along the way um that stand out to me but honestly that like the next phase of iraq was probably the most fun um post invasion you know we we went home another squadron relieved us and kind of continued the work they finished up some desert mobility stuff and then sort of transitioned into sustained daily ops where they were working out of a singular location and we were hunting deca cards then um so they were you know bath party members iraqi military members saddam loyalists um they were basically folks in saddam's chain of command that uh posed some significance but all those guys like they wanted no part of the usa like um yeah there were some gunfights and stuff during the invasion there was some stuff that went down there that were fairly substantial but once we started hunting deck of cards you know those guys basically rolled over uh you you know you might end up in a gunfight once every 10 or 11 you know combat ops um and it was a lot of fun we were doing a lot of land on the x stuff we were doing a lot of stuff that we didn't do years later because it was frankly too dangerous so um you know we did things like and one that stands out to me is like we did a daylight half gaffe so you have a helo assault force and a ground assault force and i know you know but maybe everybody does this no gaff ground assault force yeah yeah and so um my team was a climbing team um so we ended up on little birds uh a lot um versus blackhawks and we were doing a lot of uh you could literally hover over the target and rope in if you couldn't land it was very commando stuff um and when you're when you're a young guy like me like getting to do all that stuff was just incredible like you didn't like i said i wasn't even scared back then i i was so excited about what i was doing that that stuff hadn't caught up to me yet but there was a particular one it was a daylight half gaffe and it was pre-saddam capture uh and we were i was on the hilo assault force on a little bird and we took off out of where our location in baghdad and we had the forward stage at a at a forward operating base and a fob that the regular army had and so the because the gaff the ground assault force was going to take you know twice the amount of time to cover the distance because it was literally in downtown baghdad and it was a multi-story building and so we take off and we land at this fob and we get off and now so the us army is established in iraq at this point we have forward operating bases that are controlled by conventional units kind of all over baghdad and and you know one in fallujah one in ramadi uh and uh so we landed this fob and we get off the birds and we're walking towards this building because basically we have about 35 minutes to kill and this nco uh the regular army runs up to us to my team that's getting off the helo and he says you guys need to go over there to the clearing barrel and clear your weapons [Music] yes and i don't know what was said to the guy whatever it was it's probably not nice but somebody said something to the effect of do you see all the [ __ ] that i'm wearing i'm in the middle of a combat operation i'm not walking over there to go clear my weapon um but uh you know 30 minutes or so went by we loaded back up on the birds um and again this is relatively early on and you know we started the flight into downtown baghdad and i remember as we flared over the target building seeing the charges go on the first floor from the ground assault floors and i thought we are the greatest nation in the world like what would you do if you were on the receiving end of this you have helos full of commandos descending on you from above you have vehicles full of commandos hitting you from the ground floor like how could anyone deal with this and it stuck with me there were a lot of those moments but like that one in particular because it was broad daylight which didn't happen a lot um and the timing was absolutely perfect and i just thought there's nobody that does this but us and it really stayed with me for those opps you know just talking to some of the some of your co-workers you know as they describe uh some of their previous ops how how dialed in they were and as you describe it right like you're landing on the roof at the exact moment as a breach is going off down below um were there some of those where you got you came in to an op thinking all right we're going to be in and out and it became a protracted battle yeah yeah so um same rotation um we were actually no this is later uh halloween night um so october 31st of 2002 no three 2003. so we caught saddam in december of o3 so this is two months pre-saddam capture uh we hit a target in fallujah it was a split target british sas had one block we had a block we had rangers in supporting roles and we had um a a cav unit that had bradley's in blocking positions and the brits advancing up the block they got to about the fourth house in their block and willing to breach the gate the brits at the time didn't do a lot of explosive breaching they did moe they did manual entry stuff so they used a lot of halogen tools and stuff like that and as they breached the gate to get into the courtyard they took rpg and and belt fed um they ended up losing um two guys that night um and you know the gun fight that ensued uh you know we helped them extract their casualties and and get them in birds and off back to baghdad for some care um and then we sort of took over from that point um and that was the first time we ever encountered foreign fighters so that was pre-saddam capture uh i'm fast forwarding but at the end of that engagement we ended up with a bunch of dead guys that um were literally in tracksuits all in the same tracksuit and sneakers and the house was full of nothing but guns and ammunition and like food and water um and they were part of the initial rat lines coming in from the west and that was the first time that it sort of dawned on us that um people are coming from other countries just to come kill us uh this is definitely going to turn into something bigger than just hunting down saddam and and removing a dictator from power um and and you know it got bigger and bigger as it went but that night really stands out to me um for a myriad of reasons i i watched some things go down i watched some guys make some decisions that night in the midst of gunfire that was the first time that i ever witnessed like what what that's like like when it's just your job to do that stuff every day and guys make those decisions like that has an impact on you as a young soldier and i was still even being in that organization just watching those leaders make those choices um i think affected me for the rest of my rotations you know during my career how um you know i know it's a summer experience but uh with the sas there how much um trash talking goes on between those two organizations not much with 2-2 not not much we we had a good working relationship i mean that night was rough um a couple of their mates we didn't um you know fortunately uh i you know a guy that's a long time friend of mine now that's out of the service uh threw a grenade at me that night a brit um on a rooftop i made the mistake of of saying you know you never say the thing that you don't want something someone to do and i said don't throw a grenade and he said right frag out because he thought i said throw a grenade um but no the relationship between two two in the unit was always very good we were pretty segregated at the time but we um we cross pollinated training wise so we were you know we had a bigger budget than them we were at that point in those two organizations evolution we were more advanced than they were they didn't even have night vision when they first went into iraq and they were britain's premier tier one unit um we were way advanced on them or way advanced compared to them breaching wise um so even though they were our legacy and they were where we came from and they were what our organization was built on um at some point you know in the late 80s early 90s we had surpassed them because of money and training and technology um so we worked a lot with them on breaching stuff uh frankly those guys are a lot better at at infinixville and some things like that they just spent a lot more time on it um so it was a very good working relationship between the two hi everyone i hope you'll forgive me but we're gonna break here for part one chris has graciously given us a second session where we can dig into the second half of his story which is very important because we've come off of this time all of these deployments where he's living his dream and the next step is a lot harder so we're going to really spend a lot of time with him on what that was like because it is a powerful story that we want to tell i hope you'll forgive me for this but i am really looking forward to round two and i think we'll all really enjoy that next session thanks so much for your support stay safe thanks for listening to this combat story as we wrap up i just wanted to say thank you to those in the combat story community who have taken a few minutes out of your busy lives to not just listen to these stories but also leave positive and supportive comments on apple and youtube here are some of the comments that caught my eye this week her first comment today comes from just saying today on youtube says this guy is incredible so informative so f and funny and the interviewer is tremendous too i want to know what the stuff is that he's drinking in that little six ounce glass so this is a reference to uh john shrek mcphee he's drinking out of something that he took off the battlefield which is awesome and he is drinking whiskey out of that our second comment comes from apple podcast it's someone who goes by the name of jetud lestwell and he says very informative this podcast is both informative and interesting for a non-military person like myself the chance to listen to two veterans discuss military life and battlefield experience is an honor as an american and outsider to this essential world it cannot be easy to relive experiences that were potentially traumatic but their vulnerability and willingness to share is a treasure to americans who support our vets and know that freedom is not free these men and women paid for it thanks so much for leaving these comments i couldn't agree with you more looking forward to more to come you all stay safe

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 14,413

Rating: 4.93994 out of 5

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

Id: tdSA8O_T6mE

Length: 91min 53sec (5513 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021