Combat Story (Ep 5): Wes Bryant Air Force Special Warfare | SOF TACP-JTAC | Author

yeah literally every time something as we say come came off the rails when i i gave i or someone on my team gave that cleared hot and it came off the rails there are those there's these moments of uh you know it takes some time for that ordinance to hit the ground whether it be 10 to 60 seconds and during that time if you're not actively maneuvering on the ground or actively coordinating something else you have you have at least a few moments to second guess 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 on this episode we hear the combat story of u.s air force master sergeant retired wes bryant who served eight combat deployments in the post 911 era as a special ops attack p and jtac he co-authored the book hunting the caliphate america's war on isis in the dawn of the strike cell a first-person account of the war on isis written alongside the former commanding general of iraq major general retired dana pittard he shares his stories calling in strikes in multiple theaters with conventional and soft units including pioneering the next generation of strike cells enjoy um wes thanks for joining us and uh sharing your story appreciate the time thanks for having me i'm looking forward to it so i have a lot of questions here but i think that we probably can't go a step further unless we clearly outline the difference between some of these different roles that you are in in the air force between jtacs cac p's cct's i think pjs are self-explanatory but you've done a great job in the book hunting the caliphate in the at the end describing the difference between some of these career paths but i just thought for some who aren't as dialed in if you could just talk through some of the differences between those um seemingly similar career paths to those who aren't in the air force yeah definitely the air force is a little bit strange in that there's there are two separate career fields that control airstrikes essentially control our air power and one of them is the attack b which i was a part of it's the tactical air control party the marines incidentally call their jtacs the attack p as well the tacp were made to support both conventional force conventional uh maneuver forces and special operations so as attack p you start out in conventional uh you know much like in the army you'd start out usually as an infantryman most most special forces soldiers start out you know in infantry and then go into the green berets so kind of tip similar in the tacp so we have about at least you know when i was active um maybe around a thousand tapes in any given moment and maybe around 100 of them working in the special operations capacity give or take then you have the combat control teams or combat controllers of the air force and that crew field was initially started as a as a forward air traffic control capability essentially so guys that could go out and be a pathfinder on steroids go out and survey and set up austere landing zones and then call in all those aircraft to to bring them in like in the worst environment possible and get all the rest of the special operations assets and well then combat controllers always had a secondary qualification uh as being a terminal attack control qualifying or becoming jtacs well as soon as september 11th kicked off and especially special operations needed more jtacs or at the time they called them etacs enlisted terminal attack controllers you know the combat control teams upped that requirement and pretty much every cct at that point was getting jtac qualified so now you know you fast forward up to today 2020 you still have my career field of tacp all supporting the conventional army units as jtacs you've got a contingent of tacp um supporting special operations and we work right alongside the combat control teams uh as they conduct their jtac mission and their other their other missions their assault zone and survey for special operations got it all right that's perfect thanks and it's clearly outlined in the book i know for sure but it's it's not as clear i think to people who are not on the inside of the air force dealing with that every day and i know just from having been a pilot that working with you guys i mean you're truly like the elite whether with a conventional force or with some of the sf or soft units um but i would say amongst the elite it seems like you guys are some of the the least heard of you know you you often hear of the green berets of rangers seals but you don't often hear of jtacs unless you're really in one of those units so i'm curious how you came to that from the beginning like as you were looking to get into the military how did you find your way to that community and was that what you wanted to do going in that's yeah that's interesting most people don't really unless they put a lot of uh a lot of effort into seeking out exactly what's involved yeah you know what combat career fields are out there um what initially pulled me into the air force is that actually all the pear rescue recruiting um you know because that's it it looks great it markets really well it's a great career field and that's what i thought i wanted to do and i explained in the book kind of my path i initially went that route um decided i didn't really like that route and as i'm you know evolving in my air force career i i figure out what these what at the time what the tacpees do and i just liked that better it fit me better yeah i wanted to be the guy controlling airstrikes in combat but uh no i didn't i didn't seek out i think a lot of people there's a lot of guys that come in yeah i want to be a green beret i want to be a seal but not a lot still to this day come in knowing like yeah i want to go to the air force and be attacked or come back yeah it's not the same right now but once you work with those guys like yourself you understand like how how elite and how out front everyone is um i guess for you then what was the decision like when you did get into the air force even if it was for the pj or pararescue mission what uh how old were you what was the environment like family-wise what what got you into it to begin with well i'd say you know being a little more of a troubled youth having a little bit of a broken family you know really helped and so like a lot of young men the military becomes that that fallback like hey i've got really nothing going on this looks pretty awesome i can go like have a new life which i i am thankful for frankly so i was just in a state after high school of um you know not knowing what i wanted to do not having a whole lot of i didn't of guidance really be it financially or otherwise [Music] and just not being motivated for being out in the real world frankly doing some classes and general classes in the community college my area in the portland area in oregon and failing him because i just didn't care about doing school ended up having to pay that money back of course oh so you know then i i was throwing around the military for a couple years off and on and um and just decided to go for it and really i look back and it's funny because you you know you tend to be more dramatic when you're younger i definitely was and i just sold everything that i had i was living with my stepdad at the time he was a great um great supporter and you know great mentor for me really supportive of my decision for the to go in the military but i sold everything including my car i said this and at the time i would have gone in the military like if they said just room and board is all you get i would have been fine with it um the paycheck was just gravy yeah yeah so i can go in you guys can like take care of me i can get an awesome job and you know some kind of a combat capacity and get this great training and you know see the world type of thing um so yeah i was just ready to leave it all behind and start a new life and that's really exactly what i did what year was that that was 90 1998 so spring of 98 i went in basic and graduated in march so definitely pre-911 like no it wasn't like the impetus was 911 for that so was there was there any military history in the family or was it truly you just kind of latched on to it on your own uh there was military history and yeah 911 was not the motivator in fact um you know the gulf war happened and at that point my mindset uh maybe a little bit limited knowledge at the time but i just thought oh yeah we're definitely nobody's gonna be picking fights with america yeah um of course i didn't go in thinking like oh i'll i'll go in there's no war going on so i'm good to go i just didn't think it would ever happen um what's that like many people at the time yeah yeah and you know arguably as i as i got in a couple years in i was i was regretful of that because i had all this training and i was you sit there thinking well now what can i do with it but that's that's a whole another um side topic um what was the missile yeah you're saying there is some military history in the family oh yeah the military history sorry uh so i did have quite a bit of military so my my uncle was at the time serving um he was a captain in the navy and he was i don't think he was then the commander of the teddy roosevelt but within a couple years he became at the command but he retired mid-2000s um with that as his last uh last duty so ironically i remember talking to him about it was down to the air force in the navy at one point for me and i didn't know what to ask so it really asked like well which which one will give me better quality of life and he's like well definitely the air force it's a good question yeah and well then i picked the career field where we're always with the army so i really didn't benefit from that but oh that's great oh yeah and i had a my grandpa on that side was a bomber a navigator and pilot in world war ii no way yeah and he died when i was younger of um parkinson's i remember him kind of fading away from that and you know that's one of my big regrets is when you're that young you don't i had appreciation of what he did but if i could go back now and talk to him that would be right um so i had that and then on the other side of my family i had one uncle or two uncles in vietnam one in one a marine infantry in one uh one army and then my step-dad was he was just he was in just after the air force just after the korean war um so he missed combat but he did work on some of the he was in air research and development and worked on some of the first f-15s um way back in the 60s yeah oh that's cool so pretty strong military background then in the family so it wasn't out of nowhere that you join up um you actually did have variety there yeah it wasn't out of nowhere it wasn't there you know in our family it wasn't like hey everybody should go in the military but it definitely um we were supportive milk a family that was supportive of the military and i had a lot of military experience for sure yeah okay very cool so once you once you get in especially in the pre-911 era from reading the book and this seemed like something pretty consistent throughout your career but you really seem to jump to different career paths which you alluded to earlier you you know it was uh pararescue coming in you moved over to techp you kind of move back and forth between different different areas there i was wondering if you could just talk through some of the decisions between from when you got in and realized this isn't right for me and then making a jump and then jumping back even because i think what what i took away from your i mean the book is great in what it talks about but specifically for your career it seems like you really knew what you wanted at different times and went after it and i think a lot of people in the military don't have that tenacity to really fight for the jobs they want but you seem to to not be dissuaded even knowing how hard it would be to transition career fields and did it pretty effectively so i was just wondering if you could talk through those initial parts of your career and how you made those decisions to jump to different career paths yeah absolutely that's a good point because you know though i'm thankful for everything i got to be a part of and do in the military in my experience you had you have to fight for everything that you get you know yeah nothing is handed to you at all um and so yeah i came in initially to be a pj prayer rescue and i thought man this is awesome you get all the best training in the world um you get to go to be the guy that's saving people be it in in combat or otherwise so i spent gosh my first year minus maybe going through the what they call the pipeline so i was in the paris indoctrination course which at the time was roughly about 16 weeks total and that that's comparable to um i mean they modeled it after buds it's got quite a few differences but it is essentially a long selection that beats your body up unbelievable unbelievable and uh in a prep for the armies at the time the army's combat dive school um so by the time i got done with that indoctrination course i had uh had gone through exertional migraines because i had never i mean i'd grown up doing martial arts and stuff but that level of uh beating to your body day in and day out that you do in this a combat selection process in the military you know i hadn't experienced that all right so had exertional migraines i had acute achilles tendonitis that i was taking this anti-inflammatory for every day or else when i'd get up you know i can barely walk so i'd get up and this was during the indoctrination course pop those that's out a little bit and then finally usually we'd start out with a run in the morning and that would loosen everything up and then you're just you know get beat up all day you're you're cleaning all day which is destroying your ankles even more yep the next morning they're you know just incredible pain again but made it through that and then the first uh the first course after that back then in that pipeline uh which has changed a little bit now was going to the army's cdqc it's called the the green berets the special forces combat diver qualification course and all the air force special operators were going to that course to get to dive qualified this this course is run by the army it's overseen by the navy whoever sees all dive-offs all waterborne operations and there's there's seal instructors in that course as well so it is actually [Music] exactly the same content as the combat dive training that the seals go to without the underwater demolitions okay because there's no that the green beret divers don't have that mission need so that's the first course you go to and back then and now as well it was incredibly difficult to graduate usually guys coming out of the air force indoctrination were really good physically they were fine uh to handle everything all the physical requirements of it which it's known as the the most physically demanding course in the army um but there are other things the what they call the attention to detail that they get you on um you know little things like going down and calling ditch calling it ditching dawn okay you got to go down once you finally get through pool week which is all the smashing you underwater and everything that you're used to from from your selection training then you get on you start out with your um your 280s your tanks in the pool before you go to the rebreather the non you know non-bubble creating special operations uh diving equipment so you go in your 2080s and you got to do all kinds of uh you know panic-proofing training and prove that you can do things underwater under stress um if you're in bad environments in the sea getting getting thrown around and survive right so one of those real one of the real simplest ones before you go on to the rest is called ditching dawn where you go down ditch all your equipment on the bottom come back up go back down put it back on but if you don't ditch everything exactly in this perfect sequence you know put everything back on in the perfect sequence and looking perfectly um you'll get what's you would get a safety violation and then then you throw you throw that in with getting beat around in the pool with a blacked out mask getting your air source taken from you one man confidence and two main confidence and um so that got a lot of guys in that uh need to say i i failed out um in my first time in combat dive school for getting a major safety violation and this is what happened actually i was doing donning my tank back on um that's time we had short little chest straps and they have new ones now but short like one inch test straps and you had to have a two finger quick release in that chest and my chest strap had come undone inadvertently when i was putting it back on um and i didn't put that two-finger uh quick release back in it was just you know put in the in the buckle normally and that was a major safety violation that was done [Music] so then at the time you know you just get uh you get kind of hammered by your air force chain command when you go back and you failed right so i got that i was going through it yeah i was a little pissed off and stuff but it was fine uh but then you that's when sometimes you start kind of rethinking things and um there are these tacp guys tech p recruiters there and this is at what's called medina annex in lachlan air force base where all the all the uh air force special operations component to their trainings and selections so these guys were talking to me about um being attack p and going behind them enemy lines and calling on air strikes and i just thought that sounded a lot cooler and i was a little bit pissed off you know i'd failed this course and feel like i should have failed it i knew i could do it i was getting you know berated by these pj instructors i was like i just want to go be something i want to sit here and keep getting brave about you guys you know yeah that's what you do when you're younger you like have these emotional decisions that's that's what i that's the path i went i said okay i'm done here for now um and went to become attack p went through about gosh six months of training uh and that focuses on on you're basically an air force infantryman that that can coordinate air power and it was great because you know tech p it falls under the air force's special warfare now but fundamentally still and it is you know for all intents and purposes it's a special uh special warfare uh type of application but the guys that are not in special operations they're supporting you know your army infantry um units and not not nearly as glorified not nearly as you know sexy as they say of a thing as being a pj or like a combat controller right off the bat but it it was just fantastic experience um and i i did not regret it at all yeah and today i would say it seems like it's probably more attractive in the military being being a jtac attack p than a pj these days yeah um you know pjs over the years they've done just a lot of great missions they've done a lot of great things but uh as the war on terror man airstrikes have become the they're our primary method of warfighting and for almost every airstrike that happens a jtac is controlling it somewhere be it whether he's forward on the ground or now in like an operations center or a strike cell so they have a lot more of the chunk of the mission but you know as i went to tech b and my first duty station was up in uh fort drum um new york yeah oh yeah really brutal and my wife and i live right on lake ontario like 100 meters off the got some pretty great winners yeah i bet well um i think if in the book it says right that you went back to the dive course i did and it was it was three years later right yep in uh january of 2002 so me and actually another buddy named dave um we had both gone we had done the same path we had failed the same dive school we've gone through and docked together failed basketball went to tacp together um and then got stationed at fort drum together yeah both of us so we became best friends through that and it was just a thing where god we we know we could have graduated that um and so we worked not only on being good tac bees but on trying to get back to army dive school which was not a precedent as attack p um you know as a guy that attaches to an infantry unit the chain of command and the conventional attack p did not was not really keen on like sending us to special forces dive school and said why are you gonna you're not gonna use that right so we had to do some convincing just like just like most guys do um when they're trying to get to a cool school that yeah their current unit doesn't need um so you know and we did the convincing and we went down to uh but we did permissive tdys where they're the military doesn't pay your per diem and whatnot so we paid that um we had to go to third group special forces uh pre-scuba because you have to go to a combat dive pre-scuba within six months before going to die school so went through like a it was about overall three-week course at third group at fort bragg and that was a kick in the butt too that was in um 2001 like summer 2001. um you know not nearly as much of a beat down as the indot course that we graduated a couple years before but it was tough they did some some really tough things in the pool as well but it got us back into shape for dive school we had been training for it ever since but it got us back into you know readiness and then we we were able to get into the last course that we could january of 2002 before our our pre-scuba certification that we've done in the summer um lapsed again right so we just worked worked all these deals and you know begging pleaded to say hey we're not charging the military anything you're not even paying for rty paid our way down and and uh we we ended up getting slots down to dive school that weren't taken you know for that that particular cycle and i graduated and i i failed uh again i almost almost failed out that same week what's called pool week at dive school um during one man confidence where they put a blacked out mask on you and they throw you around and they're taking your air source and hitting you and it wasn't for freaking out i'd been training for so long in underwater um operations and breath holding i've been training since we failed out back in 98. uh i was good to go there so it wasn't it wasn't for panicking at the end usually they take your your tanks off and they'll hide your regulator into some kind of a knot somewhere where you have you you have trouble finding and recovering and the whole point is every time they take your air source from you you've got to go through these algorithms and the same way every time these sequences you've got to recover your air source and get your equipment all back squared away this is to simulate that you know you're doing the worst infill ever somebody has some really bad planning and you've gotten like you're out in a thunderstorm or something right been thrown all around in the surf um so you're panic proofing underwater so the instructor took it off me and keep in mind this is all with a blacked out mask i'm i've got my tanks there on the on the bottom i'm looking for the air source i cannot find my regulator anywhere it turned out it's like tied into something and shoved up under the what's called the manifold um i couldn't find it long enough to pass out when i you know was on a breath hold long enough and and passed out underwater and they underwater yeah you know the instructors are they're fantastic um nobody dies in the water there so you're automatically i just remember blacking out and having two instructors kind of uh pulling me up as i'm going completely out and that was my first time blacking out in the water of all those years before um you know then up on the pool deck you get the oxygen and good to go and i went the next day and passed and graduated of course you must have been sweating it that night though huh the word because you get you only get one chance yeah the past second time um you know it works long to get back there and i knew yeah last chance but it's just a lot yeah and and those things are they're formative they shape you even if you never use you know i never used combat diving i'm calling an airstrikes in afghanistan or iraq but these are um kind of warfighter shaping situations god yeah i think it just says a lot that you i mean you didn't even have to go back to the course but you're like you know i'm gonna pass that thing one way or another you big bar and steal your way to get back to it that's pretty cool yeah um that's great so i wanted to see if you could set me up for your first time going into combat as an attack p um you know as much as you could say about like what theater you were in which unit you were supporting how long you'd been with them and then kind of lead us up to the first time you're in an engagement and you're actually calling in an aircraft to understand just what goes through attack p's mind when they're doing that but what's the context for you like where were you what year was it where were you at yeah um so my first deployment was in gosh about winter fall winter of 2004. um so after i had graduated dive school and this was keep in mind right after september 11th right i already had in in motion that set in motion going back to the pj pipeline uh me and actually my buddy dave that i referenced earlier and it was just something to where i felt hey i failed out and i knew i could have done it i'm gonna go finish it um i don't think at the time i really thought fully through it what i really wanted to do i was in the pj pipeline again for another gosh almost two years went through all all kinds of other training airborne military-free fall a bunch of other advanced stuff they got a combat medic and paramedic certification and then now you get into the end of 2003 into early 2004. all my buddies from my unit at fort drum had been back and forth to afghanistan and iraq at least once or twice for drama or unit of drum they sent some of the first guys into into afghanistan they were in the big operation anaconda anaconda yeah um so and then they were among the first on the invasion in iraq as well so i missed uh really both of those and i was i was pissed off because of it that's feeling like man i'm just wasting all my time training you know not wasting my time because it was it's great training but yeah i just started feeling like this is not what i want to do i didn't like the medical aspect um and when i'm talking to my my guys my buddies that are you know telling stories of calling airstrikes on on the enemies of america i just felt like that's what i wanted to be doing so as i say in the book you know maybe a little dramatic but i wanted to be the predator out there and it was true um and so i left the pga career field again professionally i was in the final uh pair rescue course where you put it all all your schools together and then uh learned the rescue piece and up and quit and left pissed a lot of people off um but went back to my old career field of attack b and never looked back and that was early 2004 i went got got to unit in texas um called fort hood well it was at fort hood uh and then within about six months i was upgraded to a jtac i'd gone through jtac training i was upgraded we were called to what we call seven levels so as certified as a battalion liaison officer so i'd gone through our advanced attack b course and then boom went right off to iraq as a jtag and that was with the first cavalry division out of cool yeah and you know i wasn't i wasn't doing pj stuff but much of my buddies stayed and continued and became pjs became great pjs um it wasn't you know they weren't the glory boys by any means but i was loving what i did it was a great choice for me yeah so i found myself in iraq just after uh the big battle for fallujah in um in 2004. um well actually as some of our guys were in that i was pushed down to southern baghdad and conducting operations around what they call the suny triangle it was a good good trip i managed um a lot of operations from uh from a brigade brigade operations center and then i did my first couple of strikes in a combat zone in iraq um so talk me through that though it's like the first time you're on the ground with a unit walking around like was it day or night what's the setup there and do you remember like what the first aircraft you called in was like what airframe what type of munitions what what was it like for you yeah it was you know for this one this was actually a pre-planned mission where we went and uh good probably the best the best case scenario for a brand new jtac that because we were not being shot at we had planned this to go out and both wrecky this this big concrete building or these couple of concrete buildings that have been used as actually torture locations so torture chambers by local insurgents so they were it was a formal like radio center and they've been grabbing people iraqis in the area and literally torturing him trying to get information out of him so it was somber on that regard um but from a jtac standpoint good because i got to go do something without you know taking fire and learned that i could yeah i could call on these airstrikes without without the other aspect factored in but uh you know we went and um recovered bodies from from these uh compounds that had been tortured and then killed by the area we took those that we then called in uh air strikes that were pre-planned we called them in on the ground there um laser guided which we don't often do in combat yeah we ground lased them in with our big laser that we set up right and this was a bit with uh f-15s um well we did laser acquisition and then we had gps bombs uh okay yeah did the acquisition um so 500 500 pound bonds and then 2 000 pound bombs on these on these structures again it was like two feet of concrete so i did a lot of uh procedural cleanup you know we went out and i'm still nervous even though we're not taking fire and we kind of did a lot of planning for it um but got through it and uh did a lot of the procedures that you don't often do in a combat zone doing this laser acquisition and kind of high profile difficult targeting with multiple compounds and multiple gps bombs now once we destroyed those buildings which is more for psychological effect against the local insurgency we took those bodies to a mosque in the area and in in body bags and gave them to the locals so that was it was a strange first yeah well in the combat zone compared to a lot of yeah yeah i'm sure compared to what you saw later but that that makes sense so having kind of like you're not in an active engagement in that sense you got time delays um were you with like a company-sized element at the time about no it was about a platoon size element and we had a contingent of army and marines with us okay and working hand-in-hand with some some marine tech fee and just all uh all doing handoffs with the there's about four jtacs out there working the target area is that normal it's not normal it's not at all but since we had time to plan uh yeah when you have time to plan and with these joint operations you can do things you wouldn't normally how so how nervous were you for the for your first strike calling it in i know you mentioned your it was a bit nerve-racking but like i mean you're bringing in some heavy weapons like that first time nobody else really probably knows it's your first time but how are you feeling at that point yeah nobody else did except there's another more senior jtac um with me and then there there was i had what we call our romad so a younger guy that's not yet a jtac he's kind of helping you with the radios and everything else he's learning to be a j-type so they knew but we didn't advertise to anyone else that it was you know that's my first comment um so yeah just super nervous because what people don't realize is you give the military gives um young enlisted guys with you know in the savannah world no real training or skills um but if they go and train them up and they give them some of the biggest responsibility on the battlefield as a jtac you know it's joint responsibility with that pilot um but oftentimes we are the rear the eyes and ears on the ground that pilot the pilot literally is is blind without that jtac um and so the responsibility falls on both of us when when ordinance comes off the aircraft and and your ground commander whatever officer is in charge on the ground but largely it will come to the jtac and the pilot first if something goes wrong so yeah you get you just get just get really nervous but i don't think it compared um you know there were no civilians around we cleared their areas true yeah that's a good feeling i bet yeah so it didn't compare to some other times when i was i was really on edge later in later years when not only you're taking fire or another force you're calling in strikes force taking fire and then there's civilians all over the battlefield in different capacities so actually um i think it might be interesting to dive into that because you i don't think i saw it in the book how many deployments did you have wes because it as i start reading about some of them you're like yeah i deployed with i think like the 82nd first ad first cav you just rattle off so many but how many deployments was it for you i had eight over my career which is a pretty good pretty good number um uh you know i have i have friends i a couple of my my close buddies you know are at the 12 13 deployment the time they got done we've known a few guys in my community that have been upwards of 18 to 20. now we would do especially in soft generally around six months um deployment so you're not deploying for a year like a conventional army i think the marines were a lot of times i think they were on six months usually maybe so it wasn't quite as long on all of them but still eight in country that's pretty impressive um yeah i guess with that oh sorry go ahead wes keep going so you end up you know especially as a jtac being farmed out to different units all the time you end up getting a lot of exposure and experience um to a lot of different mission sets and and entities so that's one of the things i wanted to ask you about because a lot of these units that are deploying conventional or soft have been together at least for a year and probably more before they deploy just to get to know each other work together operate together and then you're kind of the odd man out i mean you're dropped in from a completely other branch of service with this really unique role so how i mean how hard was it for you early on to assimilate into like an army unit a new one each time how how much lead time did you have going into some of these deployments oh man great question and it's still really the case where your air force gtacs are um we're for plug and play which is a good thing but also you don't have time a lot of times to to prep and train with and uh develop a relationship with the unit that you might be attached to so you just had to get used to stepping in to this this team whether it be you know an infantry uh squad or a platoon or company or battalion um within a special forces team or task force um or you know a seal team what have you you have to get used to stepping in there as the air force guy who's always going to get made fun of even though they know for sure yeah they even though everybody's got respect for what you bring to the table in texas the air force jokes are going to fly and then you're an outsider to their to the little team cohesions they have going on and you got to step in and show them that you know you're a professional there to do a job and anything else any meshing of personalities and you know the locker room stuff and the brotherhood that you form really it comes after that so guys that kind of stepped in sometimes they're you know you're less mature guys that uh their first priority was being the cool guy for the team um and then when that didn't work out then things just fell apart right what i learned and i think what the the guys that really did well and it learned was don't don't try so hard you step in first and show them i'm a professional i can i can do the job that you're you need me to do here and then everything else just kind of follows i ended up attaching to teams and units that some of which the guys you know i mesh really well personality wise others i would not have hung out with him um and the real world i did not like quite a few of the guys personally but it didn't matter when you're there your your brothers you know and sisters as the case may be um and you're going to protect each other you're going to take care of each other you're going to do your job no matter what even if you can't stand each other yeah yeah were you would you often have would you be like assigned to the unit at least a couple months before deployment or were you kind of dropped in as they were moving into theater dropped right in sometimes you'll you'd have some lead shining um you know to prep with you knew you were replacing another jtac okay yeah he would prep you with you know uh who the team is maybe get you in touch with that team sergeant or the uh or the alpha in the case of special forces um maybe with the platoon leader or company commander in the case of infantry but uh a lot of times not a lot of times you wouldn't have that chance and then even then you're always on different deployment cycles so i could go in and be attached to this one team for um a couple weeks and then they're ripping out getting replaced yeah god yeah i can't even imagine how hard that must be especially with units i mean that was the vietnam war right like plug and play onesies and twozies and it just didn't work for the army as a whole or the military as a whole but like your role is so specific it has to be that way but i was just reading through the book thinking like god you imagine like getting dropped in especially with some of these soft units like you really probably have to check your ego at the door and just be a team player right away and just earn their trust but it must be difficult i was thinking uh really difficult and you know we had our share of guys that they get get attached to teams and they had done a few things and think like get a little too big for your britches you know have that mindset of well i'm as good or even better than you guys at some things and that just i never went over well yeah i bet then you have that you know clashing that comparison so with all that in mind could you could you kind of take us to one of the harder engagements that you were in um and you were alluding to it earlier maybe um you know you're in an engagement that's not planned in advance or or might be reactive you've got civilians there one that comes to mind for you if you're okay sharing it just how you were thinking through what was the situation like and then kind of how did you operate in that environment [Music] yeah there's there's quite a few you want to narrow down to like a time frame or a specific theater no not neces i would say probably not the um the strike cell that you described but more one where you're um on the ground with the ground force commander um i i think i'd leave it up to you one of the hairier ones where you're kind of like oh god this could really go wrong maybe a danger close shot something like that yeah um i think really the best one of the best ones because it was the most formative is that that situation in the book where i'm discussing and interesting this is my first control in afghanistan okay which was also my first control and actually getting shot at under fire so it was the very next year after my iraq rotation um i went to afghanistan in the fall winter time frame um and we were pushing out gosh i think i was like a week or two weeks in theater at the time i just met the unit i was with a an infantry company what an army unit was it was like a number on that one yeah okay yeah the uh the 173 it was a component oh yeah airborne brigade okay yeah so we're gonna do a week-long clearing operation up in uh northern areas of kandahar where the the taliban i mean still to the stay um traditionally can can take root and just hang out and hide because there's there's just a whole lot of uh sparsely populated areas a whole lot of mountain ranges that are difficult to control like nobody's ever been able to actually control ground and mountain ranges for long periods for some reason we haven't hadn't figured that out yet still so yeah that's what we were tasked with brand new to the unit i was with the company headquarters um element and then a platoon of his for security and it was me and uh my roman name alex um why that one ended up being difficult we ended up being ambushed like a three-point ambush at least going up generally north or north-south road ambushed uh from mountains here mountains here and then mountains behind us um then our our ground units just took off along with uh who was then the acting company commander and he was just a lieutenant he's normally a captain the captain was on leave they're on a year-long invitation he took off uh gosh i think the yeah the platoon sergeant took off uh the mortar team leader or the team sergeant so all the guys that i need to talk to to control airstrike where's all your guys at right i need to get that information i need to get approval to culinary um so what what wes what do you mean they took off oh they so when when we got hit gosh i was think i was like four vehicles behind the lead we also had at the time a couple squads of uh well not squad a couple teams like four man elements on right and left of us bracketing our convoy because earlier on we had heard we got some communication uh from one of our or teams on the ground that could could listen to uh ground radio yeah we got some communication that taliban was somewhere around and they were prepping to mount an ambush on us and like you did at the time like really anyone will do now in the us military instead of saying oh my gosh there's somebody planning an ambush we said yes this is awesome let's do it because that's what we're out there for we're out there to find them and engage with them um so when we heard that when we got that chatter the commander decided to put the the two teams out bracket the convoy so that they'd hopefully come up on these taliban which were probably in the mountains and then engage them first and i could call in air strikes and go all perfect uh anyway it didn't it didn't go like that surprise happening was yeah there's a three-point ambush these guys the two teams got in it pretty thick the one on our left side um would be our generally west side came back to the trucks and then one team kept pushing up into what would have been the northeast ridgeline and got in got in it pretty heavy with taliban team up on the peak there so they're already in heavy ground combat going up a ridge line coming up yeah and here come the rest of the guys in link with the convoy here comes our convoy up as we're being being told what's going on right now you got fire going everywhere from three points down to us in the convoy you got this group of guys this team going up the mountain um to our front right basically uh and then as soon as we all stop for some reason the lead truck which was uh commanded by that that lieutenant who's acting company commander he decided to just kind of stop right in the middle of what's usually called the kill zone so right where they they planned on initiating ambushing us um where they could cause the most damage really you know in its hindsight his armchair quarterbacking but he should have um either stopped three prior to that or pushed all the way through the valley and then relied on me to just call in air strikes um but his guys were were stuck in combat going up this this ridge so his first priority was stopping we're going up to reinforce them and uh he was out and gone before i could even uh catch up with them so need to say ended up being i don't know roughly an hour of getting shot at rpgs wasn't over ahead uh surviving because a couple of them were duds that duded right next to you that was good um not knowing where any guys on the ground were because i lost columns with at least half of the uh the elements that were on the ground my that come the acting company commander i had him about 50 percent of the time on the radio when i did finally get him he didn't know where all his all those guys were um and so but i had aircraft overhead i had a-10s and we had locked down at least two locations we locked down the two true ridgelines up here northwest and northeast they were taking fire from so they could have thrown down bombs on top of these ridgelines really early on but the you say wes when you say you had them locked down are you saying like you had them pinpointed so you could have hit them if you needed to we it's really hard for aircraft um you know flying it between 12 and 18 000 feet depending if they're about like 15 000 feet um to to see afghans especially in in the mountains in their their full dress you know maybe probably derogatory called manjamas um you know they're in that they're in there what looks like a pajama looking outfit in flip-flops and usually it's like a brown outfit that matches in black brown or black that matches the terrain and they're running you know they can just hide behind anything they're all bogged down with all their 70 pounds of armor and stuff right so it's really hard for aircraft to pinpoint them but we could identify um rpgs and then gunfire coming from the location so we knew generally where they were enough to be able to drop bombs on them the problem was we knew on this side the north east side i knew at least i had a team going up the the south face of the mountain we also had a truck at one point that pushed forward of the two peaks so it was a few hundred meters in front of the rest of us didn't know where those guys were um so my my fear was and then same with the pilot it was a great great uh set of pilots that i was working with two a10s but all our fear was if my ground commander this attendant doesn't know where all his people are and he can't confirm exact locations i've got this truck that's forward over here these two mountains there could be people on the north side soldiers on the north side going up the north side of the mountains right to get these riders so now i'm worried about and then where are they are they at the top potentially we're about throwing bombs down there and hitting our own people um so it was you know at least an hour long of frustration at that point trying to knowing i have targets right in front of me but not striking anything because i had no idea where all our friendlies were um i also didn't have approval from the ground commander to to do an airstrike because he knew that he didn't know where else people were you know in the in the meantime perhaps we took a really small team we took three casualties we had one afghan kill um if i remember right in the neck uh two of our guys shot one was shot uh through the abdomen under the body armor but he ended up living wow that met a vacuum out quick enough to get to surgery and then one shot and killed um right there on the mountain as well yeah um and you know and that was formative for me because i felt like i was just horrible i was like oh my god i lost my ground commander didn't have calms half the time with anybody but looking back you know everybody made bad decisions it was chaotic the communications ground communications were not nearly as good as we have now as far as our the headsets we have and then even the radios we have um and then just battle tracking capabilities weren't weren't as good we have better tactics now we've developed it after a couple of decades of uh of war fighting um so a lot of mistakes all the way around but as a jtac you think i had two a-10s overhead i knew generally where these guys were and i couldn't do anything anymore because of it you know so it was pretty devastating for me um but it uh it shaped the rest of my career from then on out there there literally was not a deployment or a mission that i did where i didn't think back to those moments um and what needed to happen to not create that scenario and as i became an instructor later spent the last third of my year a third of my career when i was home not deployed um instructing and evaluating making new jtags i always inserted those lessons you know i when i was in afghanistan in 08 when we do like deliberate ops with soft teams i thought i recalled the jtac would be where the attack p would be like right next to the ground commander during the op i don't know if that was born out of incidents like that where you just there's such a force multiplier that they had to be like at the right hip of the ground commander so he could use them immediately and effectively so it seems odd that you'd be separated by that many vehicles because that's exactly what would happen in an engagement you wouldn't be able to sync up with the person who had to authorize the shot yep that that is kind of our our standard or mainstay and when you're not if you're not right at the hip with the ground commander it's something you've worked out like okay you're going to go with this element and you've got some kind of a contingent worked out as to how you're going to get approval for strikes yeah ground commander might even delegate approval to one of his other guys sure um so that stuff wasn't worked out i was young this lieutenant was young sure yeah really any training he said all right let's go we got air covering us we're good to go barely any prepping plenty of training barely prepping for that operation all right how about in that case tell me maybe just one more kind of hairy situation where you ended up calling in something um in in that type of setting where kind of chaos fog of war type incident um i'm trying to think of a the best yeah i i know you worked a lot of sf teams so in some of these cases i know you probably can't even speak to some of it but if there was a case where you were calling in strikes and it was a bit chaotic i think that would be interesting to hear i'd say um you know the the the most chaos on the battlefield was uh that i had faced was early on in the fight against isis in 2014 and the reason why is because other times on deployments to iraq or especially afghanistan being there the us having been there for long periods you know when you'd roll through somewhere the locals would often know when insurgents were in the area um because they're they're often you know embedded and the locals are sometimes a part of that group or sympathetic where they were scared and being controlled by that group but they knew and they had a way of being able to get away before things went down which is great because that meant you know less chances for civilian casualties but in iraq in 2014 when isis came to the picture and we were controlling remotely controlled you know strike cell uh strikes in support of iraqi forces on the ground that were going in and liberating these areas from isis where a lot of times civilians could not leave because isis was essentially holding them captive and they're in their little country those are the most the most hairy scenarios um you know by far um in those quests that was the strike cell that you described in the book is that right where you're not even co-located on the ground and you're taking you're taking feedback essentially from a local force that's in play yes yeah so how like talk to me about that as a jtac how like how do you the books pl just really nicely describes that dynamic but for people who haven't read it i mean you are completely removed from the battlefield taking the word of somebody on the ground and maybe maybe like a picture that they took with their phone distance direction and you're calling something in how did that feel to you um you know you use all the same all the same procedures i guess i liken it to a surgeon doing surgery with his hands or her hands and then going to robotic surgery really all the same things but you're doing it through some other medium maybe that's kind of a good analogy except it almost sounds from reading it that you're you're the surgeon but you're in another room and you cannot see necessarily everything that's going on somebody else is kind of describing it you may have a picture but not the same type of picture yeah and you get to communicate through a bunch of other entities yeah so all the same things had to take place you had to you had to know where your friendly force was um where your enemies were and then you know one of the top priorities of u.s warfighting and being a jtac is limiting collateral damage and then causing zero casualties that is the goal in in every operation and so when you're not on the battlefield you're getting your information from in the case of iraq ford iraqi or kurdish forces sometimes uh or a lot of times other ground intelligence that might be out there your aircraft that are forward and that are just looking down and like a soda straw with their pods and then other intelligence entities spread throughout so you might be getting information on the battlefield from you know upwards of a dozen different entities at any given point um you'll be trying to track all kinds of movement chaotic battlefield movement um by in this case iraqi or kurdish forces and then delineate them from enemy forces that look exactly the same as them so a lot of times these you know isis would they were beating back iraqis incurred so much especially early on in the summer of 2014. they had taken a bunch of their equipment much of their equipment was our equipment right so they even had abrams wow a lot of gun trucks um and so now we're we're looking for enemy that looks just like our partner forces and they're using our equipment and trying to delineate so yeah it gets it got really hairy um then you you factor in civilians all over the battlefield because a lot of this took place and takes place in heavy urban areas in iraq different than a lot of places in afghanistan um but end up being really rural and mountainous but iraq a lot of that fighting is just from suburban to to heavy urban so your what they call the your pucker factor goes up quite a bit for um causing those civilian casualties because many people probably don't realize on the outside they think u.s is just dropping bombs everywhere um arbitrarily all over you know we're bombing iraq right bombing afghanistan but um that's part of why we wrote the book is to show like how much goes into each and every strike and how the humans [Music] that are in charge of throwing that ordinance down or the whole team the jtac the targeting team that helps the ground commander that approves it the pilots that are doing it that are releasing it no one wants to know that they killed civilians or any non-combatants it's it's a more it's a mark morally you know people are going to deal with that mentally and emotionally and then professionally it's a mark like as a j type if you're a guy that you know you had a bad strike and you killed civilians it's everyone in the community knows um yeah so you oh sorry keep going wes and if you you know if you're found um negligent for a strike like that you're done being a controller very rarely did did it actually happen in fact a lot of the the reports over the years the last couple decades we've had some bad accidents some some some incidents that are that are horrible the the strike on the hospital and kunduz is one of them um in 2015. all right um but we've also had a lot of reports that were not actual reports they were reported by enemy forces up through uh local news and their false so that's happened a lot over the years and really made made reports of civilian casualties uh a lot of times higher than what they they were yeah you know you mentioned something in the book um i can't remember if i have the quote exactly but it's something to the effect of you know you're you're always worried once the once the munition is released all the good jtacks are because you know i guess maybe let me ask you i mean what does that mean to you when you're saying that what's uh i assume a lot of jtacks have that feeling yeah i'd say yeah all but the the ones that get so cocky that think like i'm good to go you know whatever i do is gold and you have those people in every community yeah um but yeah literally every time something as we say come came off the rails when i i gave i or someone on my team gave that cleared hot and it came off the rails there are those there's these moments of uh you know it takes some time for that ordinance to hit the ground whether it be 10 to 60 seconds and during that time if you're not actively maneuvering on the ground or actively coording something else you have you have uh at least a few moments to second guess i think like all right is everything in place that needs to be in place in the case of the strike cell where we got we had so many moving targets so many moving moving factors we had a lot of moving targets a lot of moving friendlies uh civilians all over the battlefield in some situations and then a lot of different reports we had to sift through that may or may not have been true um we just had a lot to to ensure was in place before anything came off one of them being sometimes you know we'd even tell our iraqi forces we were dropping uh within danger close meaning so close that the bomb or the word the missile whatever what have you could cause friendly casualties so close to them i could cause from the casualties we'll say like you know dropping a 500 pound bomb within a couple hundred meters of friendly forces um we're doing that often because you know the battlefield is not this perfect linear yeah the asymmetric um and a lot of things had to had to be in in place and we'll say near perfect before you authorize that shot and one of them in those cases had to be all right does my forward unit that's right there know that a bomb's about to come off and hit that target they need to know that and they need to get in or behind buildings or behind their vehicles and not move but many times that doesn't happen so um what can a lot can happen in 45 seconds on the ground you know even if you've done everything right a lot can still happen once that thing leaves the rail and for us like in an apache you know we'd have like a 10 to 12 second delay from when it left the rail for hellfire but some of the ones you were describing in the book are a minute long i mean holy cow the things that must go through your mind as that thing's coming in have got to be pretty staggering yeah and you you know you probably know full well there are times when you second guess yourself as it's as it's in play and then you feel bad like wait if i'm second guessing myself and that that shouldn't be the case you know i should but you just do it's just no no it's human nature [ __ ] well all right um i had two other things i wanted to touch on from the book and then just like a couple rapid fire questions for you wes i don't want to take up too much more of your time but there are two things you describe that i think are just worth asking a little bit more about one is your deployment to korea in 2007 you described that you've been through several deployments and then you kind of realize at the time that you're dealing with some aggression that it sounds like becomes ptsd um i was just curious if you could talk about what it is that tipped you off to it um how you recognized it and did it come from like a single moment maybe it was the o5 deployment that engagement you described but the way you lay it out in the book is pretty interesting yeah i appreciate that it was you know i did uh in 2006 so i had an iraq deployment in afghanistan deployment in the afghanistan iraq when i saw some um you know not good things for sure afghanistan won i had the issue a situation where i just felt guilty you know that i had i had been the one that caused us casualties because of my inability to be a good jtac right and and the rest of that deployment was very as we call kinetic i dropped a lot of bombs after that on other missions and we just had a lot go on [Music] and so going into the next year 2006 orders got dropped for me to do a year remote tour in korea which is just something in our in our career field in in tech p like a lot of uh well a lot of people a lot of air force and army um but you have the requirement to do a year-long rotation in korea some people seek it out i wanted to deploy a little more so i wasn't seeking it out but uh couldn't get out of him i went kicking and screaming yeah um and it was just a bad time for me and my my wife who i'm still with to this day but there you know during that time i had been getting building a lot of anger at home um was definitely not having a good time at my unit you know my work relations with everybody in my chain of command and then we were having financial issues because i'm just a young it was like an e5 um you know we had our first house and we were having trouble paying the bills she was going to school at ut austin so just a lot of factors was the worst time and then now now i got drop once i got to go remote for a year yeah um but i couldn't get out of it so i went and i decided because i had been i grew up doing martial arts it was a big part of my life and i just thought well okay at least i'm gonna go find it's korea so i'm gonna go find a korean martial artist you know a teacher and train with them and then on their career side try to get just use that experience to get better as a jtac right so i went in thinking somewhat positively but it was still horrible i think of all the times that i deployed and left is probably the worst because we're having such a hard time at home we're having financial troubles and then now i gotta leave for a year um for something that isn't even and you you justify deployments to iraq and afghanistan yeah oh it's to fight the war it's hard why am i going to korea you know just wasting my life away this is what you think but it ended up being one of the best things that happened in my career um uh and the reason for that was i met when i first got to it's called camp casey up there in northern northern south korea um right near the border with north korea uh there's an old old korean man that had taught on base there since like the 60s kung fu and i saw this flyer i didn't know at the time but i just remember seeing this fire says kung fu you know so i go meet this old korean man and um you know he asked me when i meet him like how old do you think i am i was like i don't know 50 son he's 77. and then uh you know speaking broken english it was like the mr miyagi um yeah experience right well i had been doing martial arts long enough to know that after a few sessions with them i knew like wow this guy is a actual kung fu master like this is the real deal and he did uh you know an art called praying mantis kung conclude that i just fell in love with so while i was in korea i worked really hard as a jtac i became upgraded as an instructor i did a lot with the korean military but on the side in my off time i was training with him non-stop you know up to upward during the week and then on the weekends i go over his house and train and he became just a huge part of my life and someone that helped me through a really hard time and a large part of that was not just for the martial arts but he was native north korean in fact he's still alive he's he's uh 90 years old wow let's turn 90. um i just talked to him the other day that's cool yeah he's um north korean uh earth grew up in north korea and during the korean war there were these entities called uh they're referred to as the partisan fighters so our equivalent of the cia you might know a little bit about this and then you know the the the first units of the green berets essentially um worked with these partisan units these guerrilla fighters in the north that were against the communists as well so it wasn't just the south koreans that were against communists there were a bunch in the north that developed these guerrilla militias and fought the communists as well and he was one of them and his so they would uh go up to the mountains um live up in the mountains and then come down and raid camps just for rice and you know other food and then go back up they ended up going island hopping off the islands off the west side of what is now north korea they would hop those islands and then go do raids and come back to the islands and uh gosh they lost out of a great brigade side size element um he said somewhere around 2000 roughly that were rooted for his from his area to fight they recruited trained arms and then they were given missions by these handlers basically um us handlers they lost 1472. wow yeah and and so here i am dealing with you know how did i know that i was dealing with ptsd i got really angry all the time every time i would drink um i started seeing fire and explosions and bodies and uh and i get really you know i'd want to fight anyone um and then i was i ended up going to a therapist a military therapist who diagnosed me and actually uh wanted to take me off you know there like they often do they want to you need to stop doing everything you can't deploy anymore and so i promptly stopped going to the therapist because yeah worst thing for anyone that wants to be a warfighter to hear is you can't be a warfighter anymore you're too messed up so i stopped going completely but um you know one thing i got from uh master poc as i got him as as i call him one i realized man growing up in north korea with um under japanese occupation because they are he grew up completely occupied by china uh then having the the russians invade for a few years they did some committed some atrocities and then the korean war and then being you know after the korean war with armistice you're asked or you can either stay up north or go down there's that grace period and you could go down south well anyone that chose to go down south they were separated from their family he's got family most of his family that stayed up there is dead now but for all those years going down after the korean war he's got family that he never got to see again um and so just and then then you go into rebuilding south korea that was demolished after the korean war so you know learning these stories from him gosh he was even he was shot twice he was even targeted by a us airstrike on accident which his his unit was and he laughs about it he said say yeah they see any you know anyone career anyone not american they just you know but he laughs about and he says he doesn't he's like that's just war yeah so thankful to america for what they did and that's part of why he taught all those years at the basin and uh it was humbling for me because i yeah i was dealing with stuff i still know things over my career but when you put in perspective of someone like that and had to really sit and get stories from him which was mostly when he was drinking um you know the stuff we go through the stuff we've been through it's tough we have some some hard things but uh there's people i've been through a lot worse yeah wow that's super interesting so it was kind of the perspective he gave you not just or maybe it was part of the training and the martial arts as like almost like an outlet for you but it was really the perspective he gave you yeah it was it was largely bad interesting you know and i i opened up to him at times and he would tell me uh he would give me you know guidance and mentoring and uh be compassionate but i i couldn't whine to him a lot because though i'd been through some stuff nothing at one it didn't feel like anything compared to what he'd been through so i couldn't cry to him right and yeah i put it in perspective and even to this day i put into perspective the things we go through as war fighters to help not just to defend america but help others out there you know um iraqis syrians african afghans the things that they go i think about i think he he got me thinking about that a lot what do the people on the ground go through yeah this is the actually the anniversary of the yezidi genocide which prompted our airstrike campaign uh to kick off in august of 2014 and the things that the yazidis went through right it may it can make you step back and say okay there's some hard some hard things to deal with um with the experience of being a warfighter yeah this is why we deal with them because you know that that was it kind of leads into this other the last question here that i wanted to ask you from the book was this this experience you have in this i think it's a mall in bahrain and i'll get the year wrong but it's like 2014 2015 maybe where you're kind of sitting there observing people who had for a long time in your mind as you described it been the enemy and you're just watching them at a mall like being normal people and it kind of changed your perspective on them i was just wondering if you could touch on that for a bit because i thought it was a really interesting um way that you described it in the book yeah i appreciate that that's that's that section i almost didn't put in the book because i thought you know this is just a little bit cheesy you know i went back and forth and then dana my co-author um you know he insisted he's like this is actually really great yeah it's really good and i've heard that heard that a lot but it was a little bit opening up because um uh you know here i am 2014 i've been back and forth to iraq and uh and afghanistan and all my experience with with the muslim world was you know of course there was the there was our partner forces and um and the civilians but you're there to engage this this islamic jihadist enemy so you develop you know even even the the most um level of us that you develop some kind of a bias eventually um and a lot of people develop even more of a bias you know you have that mindset of you know all of islam is evil kind of thing yeah a lot of war fighters developed that and and to some um respects you can't necessarily blame them it's the same thing that's happened in every war um you just vilify everything about that culture in people to where even a lot of guys didn't even like working with our iraqi and afghan partners you worked with them but you didn't really trust them yeah because especially in afghanistan you're getting a lot of green on blue where afghans are turning and killing you because they're actually you know taliban sympathizers or so you had all that just distrust and just you know islam is is evil and less um so bahrain early on in 2014 when the the initial re force for the crisis response force went into baghdad in june um i was the lead jtac tasked to the command task force above them i went to baghdad about sometime in july but earlier on i went into bahrain because there was something called the special operations joint task force and they were the command element that was leading the guys in baghdad so i was sent there as the lead jtac to help the air infrastructure piece to to manage all the all the jtackery as it may be and get it manage all the jtacks that were going into theater and and to be a fires guy the fires liaison for um the commander who's a seal captain uh and that was my first time i was actually you know as a kind of undisclosed uh naval annex on the uh in bahrain in mana in the capital and i was staying in a hotel you know civilian clothes kind of thing really doing what would be normally liaison work no nobody there would have known you know we were running uh essentially running a combat operation or what would develop into a comparation operation against isis iraq but it was the initial stages of it um and so though i was there you know at the task force for you know 12 13 plus hours a day um i had to go back to my hotel of course and i was eating uh you know out in in the normal area with normal people so it's really it was a surreal um deployment for me because it's my first non-combat oriented though it became combat later covering something combat where i was uh was not at least half the time so you know i'd go and be covering all this super secret stuff about isis while i was with the task force go back to my hotel and i'm a normal person kind of you know hanging out in bahrain and a couple of times when i had uh i was just about ready to i was kind of finished with uh with what i had done at the task force and was getting ready to be pushed into baghdad but i was really waiting on a plane so i had a little more downtime i was able to like hey i'm going to go to this big mall and all right and in monoma they like love this huge shopping mall they have like a four or six story shopping mall it's amazing it's pretty glorious um so you know i'm looking i put a lot in the book about dichotomies i love hey i'm out here um you know covering this this high profile mission on one hand but i'm gonna go to like a five-star restaurant because i have time hey if i have a chance to do it i'm gonna go do it right yeah so so i went to this found this little chocolate cafe for uh for dessert after i just had some lunch at this mall one afternoon went to this chocolate cafe in bahrain you'll see a mix of i'd say i guess you more liberal muslims that are that are not fully shelled or anything i might just have something even on their neck and then you'll have people on their their full get up with completely black um black sheldon and faces you'll even have some that have what almost look like cages on their face um so you run the full gamut and it was my first time in a country that wasn't in you know islamic based country that wasn't in war i wasn't in the warsaw people just being normal which is really strange i i couldn't you know carry weapons or anything um and i felt weird the whole time that i couldn't be armed and i was you know by myself at least a lot of the time outside of my duty at the task force because it's just back to hotel get some food whatever i might hit a restaurant um and so i'm sitting in this chocolate cafe and i'm watching like you know bahraini muslim families down here with their kids playing and everything um and i'm kind of having one of those philosophical emotional moments i'm thinking all back i'm thinking about my girls back home and thinking about the mission against isis and just about where i'm at in life these this group of girls teenagers come in and they're all fully shelled except for their eyes their eyes are like you could tell they have like a lot of makeup on and they're their shawls were very fancy they had some jewels on them and everything so it looked like they came from some event um and they're all giggling and giddy like teenagers in the us but just with with that get up on essentially and then you know those selfie sticks yeah in the us but a lot of people in the middle east and asia have um so one of them they're all giggling and laughing about something i don't know because i'm not don't know what they're saying but i'm like a table away from and try not to stare because you know be like weirdo staring at somebody yeah i'm just noticing like this is kind of surreal for me seems dumb to say but it's real yeah for sure um and then one of them takes out a selfie stick and they all do they're like they're selfies as much fun as can be and i and i had like really had an epiphany right there that's what i relay in the book of like oh my god i've been i've been really angry i knew you know this was 2014 i was still dealing yeah probably even more anger than i was back in 06 um from just deployment after deployment still i've been really angry i had been building up really a kind of a hatred towards the people i viewed as our enemy um and really all kind of will say what we think is middle east culture but but all arabs are all muslims um you know not just because of our enemy but because of uh civilians we couldn't trust on the ground a lot of times in country and then like i said the forces the insurgents that would infiltrate our partner forces and then attack our guys and kill them and i just realized like i've been this hatred i've been developing has been eating me up and making me is definitely not helping me in the rest of my life and that and i realized it was just stupid and wrong i realized man there's i'm thinking about my daughters and one man who are younger exactly yeah i'm seeing them as that could be my daughters in this culture easily yeah and they're looking they're acting just like teenagers back home yeah a little annoying they don't you know they don't even at the time you know at the task force we're hearing and seeing all the reports of what's going on on the ground in in baghdad in in iraq what isis is doing these girls have no idea right and i think yeah isis could just as easily come here and do the same thing and and this is what it's these these are our friends the afghans are from we have one enemy and it's a it's a small percent of the population of these cultures if you will exactly and that's when i finally kind of realized and i uh i really understood it's just one of those moments where i just understood like how much hate and anger i'd been harboring that i didn't need to yeah and then i realized story there's a little a little bear uh with the hijab on it at the chocolatier so i bought that and brought it home to my girls um i've got a picture of that in the in the story and you know to this day and that's what we we strive to do is you know they're still too young to understand most of it but as they get older it's going to be like hey here's here's what the bad people are that we go after and here's why we go after them and look at all all these other people that we may not have the same beliefs or do the same things culturally um but we're all essentially the same as human beings just a small percentage of us that uh that go to the extreme and become the people that that we need to stop yeah now i really appreciate you sharing that i think it's a super interesting take on something um that few people get the chance to to have and little and share so i know i've kept you for a long time i'm just going to ask you some not rapid fire but just quick questions and then i'll let you go wes but um one of them is when you when you went into combat was there some type of um item that you always had to have with you or a superstition that you carried throughout your deployments no other than my radio because that's your that's your lifeline as a jtag that's an airport um once there was one item that i carried it wasn't uh it was for sentimental reasons um so after uh when the the seal still team 6 element got shot down in afghanistan extortion 17. one of my best friends um actually he was from the pj pipeline him and his wife were our neighbors through uh through our whole training was that the two years i was there they were they were a couple of our best friends um uh gosh we had known them that was 2004 up to 2012 right so and even going to different career field going to different duty stations we would link up in fact i linked up and had fun with him in korea was the last time so his name he was one of the air force guys or three air force guys killed in that um yeah and uh two pjs he was one of them john brown so when he we got killed i deployed shortly after that to afghanistan as well um his wife uh who's we remain you know she's one of our best friends this day she gave me one of his a set of his dog tags so i carried those dog tags in in one of my pouches on my chest for through every deployment that's really cool yeah okay it was actually in my they're in my shadow box now from uh post retirement as they should be that's really cool that's a great story um how about with all the different units you've worked with what what was your favorite one on the ground to operate with since you've done conventional and soft um even though i did have a couple bad teams i really enjoyed oda's army special forces yeah uh seals naval special warfare was definitely interesting they have a lot of strengths i just didn't suit me i think i think mostly because of the mission and mindset because the special forces have this uh especially when you talk about foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare the training and the mindset that they go through to cover kind of all these aspects other than just like going and door kicking and yeah um it's it's really neat and when you get with a team that really embraces that stuff their entire mission i mean you meet some smart individuals for sure and then um probably last quick question here is uh what's what's the within the jtac community what is the most fun aircraft to call in or when you're going into a target and you get like your stack what is the one aircraft where you're like yes i got that one for this for this uh operation glad you say actually because fixed wing um you pretty much always wanted a 10 if you can you can choose and other than that you always want apaches if you've got a patches overhead the only time you don't want them is when you don't want to burn the objective you don't want them to know yeah a certain area um but outside that yeah if you got a patches you're like i'm good i like it man i like it that's great and then just my last question wes is um so 20 years in uh eight deployments fighting isis on the ground all that you saw and uh emotionally and what you went through physically would you would you do it all again if you were the 18 19 year old signing up absolutely i would i would do it all over again i just would have told myself to uh to calm down and not be so angry through it all and and i've had so many fights with my chains i had some of the worst battles but it looks like it served you well by the time you were fighting isis because it looked like you knew how to push back by then and people respected it and how you ended up writing a book with the the retired general so it seemed to have worked out in the end for you awesome well thanks for the time west i really appreciate it um great stories it was a lot of fun i hope you enjoyed this combat story if you want to tell your own story go to combatstory.com if you know someone we should interview send me their info at ryan combat story dot com hearing these stories can be tough or bring back your own memories if you're battling ptsd please call the veteran crisis line at 1-800-273-8255 stay safe

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 21,150

Rating: 4.8834953 out of 5

Keywords: Wes Bryant, JTAC, TAC-P, TACP, Hunting the Caliphate, Air Force, Special Operations, Special Operations Forces, Author, Dana Pittard, Iraq, Syria, Veteran, Post 9/11

Id: dkCy8dl-OdQ

Length: 96min 47sec (5807 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020