Common Misconceptions About AFSPECWAR Career Fields- PJ, Combat Controller, Special Reconnaissance

[Music] you're listening to the ones ready podcast a team of air force special operators forged in combat with over 70 years of combined operational experience as well as a decade of selection instructor experience if you're tired of settling and you want to do something you truly believe in you're in the right place now here's your favorite cct personality jtac extraordinaire embracer of their ridiculous face unlike the shortest operator you'll ever meet peaches hey everyone welcome back to the ones ready podcast we're happy to have you and we appreciate you guys joining us today um before we get started i want to hit on one of our sponsors which would be eberly stock if you guys haven't tried out some of their rucks and you're trying and training for the pipeline then you may want to check them out if you have the resource to do so if you do that check out promo code one's ready at eberlystock.com it'll get you guys a good discount um i rock the f1 i think it's the f1 mainframe which is the external frame that goes around it i believe all of you guys also grab that right yeah i got that same rope awesome replacement rock super comfortable super cool yeah so if you guys are interested in doing that use the promo code ones ready and and you'll be good to go and you're supporting them who is also supporting us and we don't get any you know kickbacks or any payment from that so on this week's episode we want to talk to you guys about some of the misconceptions that are associated with air force special warfare um in terms of you know what is it like not just what is it like day to day you know because we've covered that several times and i don't want to bring trenton on something because one more time what average day is like gonna lose it so he's gonna go his vacation had him in a four he's gonna be at an 11. he's like a 12 already his blood pressure's 195. which is exactly why i'm going to start with him so trent like right off the bat what are some of the misconceptions associated with sr well it's a little too new to have really any real misconceptions i will say from what i've heard talking to some of you uh folks out there is and people tend to think that within special warfare you're like one thing so it's like oh you guys are snipers we're like well we go to sniper school and they're like okay well you guys are like the secret squirrel side you guys are this that or the other like we all kind of do a lot of everything and it's um you know it's it's the the people we're looking for are not you know the the people that you tend to think of you know what i mean like in southeast it was easy right it was like you guys are weather nerds like that's true we also do a lot of other stuff uh but like you know like you you bridge the gap a lot of times between like as a south team was like kind of combat support side all the way over into like action side um so uh i think any misconception is is a misconception because the the skill sets and the the things that you're asked to do are so varied um that that it's hard to nail it down if that makes sense to anybody else brian's going to look like i'm the dumbest person i just came off vacation so i don't know what i'm talking about both sides of the fence it's both sides of the coin too like you guys don't have an upward limit right now either like you you guys do have that you know not yet clearly defined like cap like on what cool things or what are gonna become your core skills because you guys are gonna have to evolve so that plays a part in it too right like when people are like combat controllers are like jtax and airfield guys right i'm sorry peach and they're like well what do you guys do and i'm like well this is what we're like kind of start with but like you said aaron it's like one of the my favorite parts about the career field is like i need to go do this and people are like why i'm like well because i want to and there's nothing saying i can so like really the the job is really open-ended so um the more you want to do the more you can do so when you came in i'm sure you had uh you know assumptions of what things would be like so did you think that you would have more trigger time than you have did you think that you would jump more often um you know ride motorcycles and do demolition and stuff like that more than you do or more that you have done i think my expectations were pretty limited uh but i will say uh my career path i got like the the trigger time and all that stuff really early on which is kind of unusual so like it was i went on my first rotation and kind of checked off every box that i wanted to hit you know being in and calling myself special operations um but what happened after that was yeah it's uh you know you kind of find yourself in some of those more support roles and that was a little bit different but you know i just i just roll with the punches and i do what i'm i need to do and uh you know some guys get a lot of trigger time some guys are like you know bullet magnets and tick magnets and uh some guys aren't so i've kind of had a nice mix of all those things and so anything like i've never felt constrained by an afsc or by a leadership or anybody within the community you know like even what is that the two three it's like well what do you want to go do i you know i go to leadership and be like this is what i want to do and they're like good go do and i've never tried to do anything and someone told me no at least nothing moral and ethical yeah the south tea guys whenever they're around you know they had those powers to be able to just transition to any team they're like oh cct that team's going on a awesome trip or whatever deployment like i want to just head up on that one or the pjs are going down to wales to go do some climbing like let's jump on that train so really they're gonna need us weather guys let's go yeah they're like really you know and like trent saying it's limitless on what you are able to do and see here is kind of i don't want to compare you too much to seer but uh they are kind of along those same lines where you know you can do more than really what's in this job description if you're a squared away dude and be able to like present yourself in a well-educated manner so i was going to bring sear up right away i thought i was like sierra is the only one that's even on par i think they might even have you know you guys beat jerusalem they're so masterful at it you don't even know what's happening sometimes you're like god i mean the seer guy got one over on me again than i do i always see those guys like in the parking lot of herbert and from a distance they'll look like one of my guys i'll start like jogging over okay and then i'm like oh never mind nevermind i want to talk to you guys whoa whoa what's sage sorry get out of here get out of here pewter boy this ain't your land but i think with the reconnaissance thing it's a it's a lot you know in the same vein um you know if you guys are gonna go climbing it's like well we might need to climb you know we're gonna we need ski trips we need uh to go out there and see what you guys are doing i need to understand a little bit about what everybody's doing in case i need to go check things out and understand you know what i need to pass to everybody but that's kind of the kind of people that we want though because we don't want people that if something comes up that needs to be done and that person go well that's just not my job that is not who we want that's like somebody that's like a pj or an 18 delta get shot not my job get out of here it's like a pj or an 18 delta gets shot and i'm just going to sit there and well it's ain't my job you know i mean it's on my ipad on them and be like there's dudes over there they need your help go you're gonna be great pj forward give me your song yeah but like you know i've had controllers doing nerdy type weather stuff helping me set up sensors and that's the good thing about soft that i think people it's hard to understand is if you're a pj and you're out there and something needs to get done i've never had a pg be like bro no i'm not going to do that dct um well i just want to clarify that it's uh if i remember right 17 and a half pounds and a half pounds don't forget about that half pound hey it is a accurate machine okay anyway uh so this one for you trent may be a little skewed just because of the current position that you're in but are you do you have as much office time as you expected or is it a lot more office time than you expected you know right now it's 100 office time it's uh but yeah i think getting into the the career field early on it's surprising how much work has to be done before the fun stuff happens uh you know like the first few years not so much but then you become a staff and a tech and start moving up the ranks and all this other stuff has to happen um but as long as you understand the processes and the reasoning behind it and this stuff has to happen you know uh you gotta get the paperwork done so you guys can get your guys out there and train and get them everything they need it's not that big of a deal you know i've never been like chained to a desk until you know recently for long periods of time yeah i understand and i feel the pain so okay so we're gonna move on a little bit and go to brian and erin about pj so what are some of the misconceptions about um pjs that exist i i'd like to start with one that i know has been asked several times and and i get it a lot as well is uh what is the difference between combat medics and pjs oh man i think brian and i are supposed to act like really really mad and start having big opinions on this one right i i i'll say the same thing like yeah we have it's just another skill set that we have right like i think it's a disservice to the the 18 delta types like 18 delta smoke us at stuff that we don't really understand that well like field medicine or you know helping with indigenous populations and oh by the way they're experts in you know unconventional warfare and irregular warfare and those are the because they're green berets like that's what they do and ranger medics are awesome at trauma i'd never take anything away from those dudes but we're just it's part of our skill set yeah and we train to a high standard of course because it's important but it isn't and like what encapsulates us as a job you know that's just part of the uh the bag of tricks that we bring to the entire capability you know that we have so that's how i see it i don't brian i don't know how you feel about it yeah i don't get super offended about any of these questions that people ask but it is important to clarify yeah uh you know combat medics are for the most part uh basic training so bmt and then 68 whiskeys in the army yeah and additionally they're most of the time assigned to uh one platform when you know pjs are used in any platform whether vehicle or just on foot type of thing where we're assigned to an aircraft for a different deployment but not the entire time we're not always on the 60 we're not always on you know whatever aircraft it's whatever we have is what we're going to go into to use and then you know worldwide technical rescue capabilities is the other thing that kind of sets us apart with having the free fall capabilities as well as like swift water arctic all the other different kinds of rescues that we can do so you know it's not only the medicine that we do all they see i don't want to take away anything away from the combat medics that are out there do awesome stuff and they're really great at their job but it's just a different skill set again this has to do with what special operations is as an entity and we don't try to restrict ourselves to one type of platform one type of way of doing things it's always just how can we think through this process and how can we use our um the tools that we have available to execute the mission the best yeah i've always compared the you know not not as a comparison like in the in this sense but whenever i'm trying to explain to people what the difference between an 18 delta is and a pj is 18 deltas are phenomenal at you know clinical type medicine they're not necessarily going to be great at any kind of rescue whereas you guys are phenomenal at triage rescue and recovering people but i'm saying that from a controller's point of view you know i was actually going through p8 when i was going through psu doing my clinicals the 18 deltas were there doing the same stuff and expected to know the same stuff as you know most of the pas do so they do a lot of clinical medicine for sure yeah they get it on yeah it's uh yeah for sure especially the clinical side of it like i said and you know indigenous populations and knowing crazy things and being able to do that in the field is is pretty impressive you know the stuff that they go through so yeah that's awesome if you look at the names combat medic and para rescue you mean you can figure out the difference between the two you're like way too far into it yeah don't don't start bringing logic or this is just gonna be like what questions make us the most upset all the time and that's how this one's gonna go i like this game so what's another misconception from you guys brian all right so you know when i was coming in there's a lot of books out there on the down pilot mission and you'll see a lot of metals that came out of vietnam that were just about when dudes you know burned into the jungle in vietnam guys would come down on the penetrator and that's kind of what's what's shown on uh some of the movies that have been coming out and everything but um like i said in the combat medic thing you know we do all sorts of different kinds of missions and it's not just one type of mission and it's been it's even hard to kind of break the mindset sometimes on some of the higher up people that have been in the air force for a while because i kind of see pjs as like break break glass in case of emergency um which we've had to overcome and i think we have you know over the last you know decade or so a slow process of being able to do that but yeah we're not going to be doing too many of the down pilot missions thankfully i mean we don't want to have dudes crashing but we have other types of missions that we occupy our time with i had an old uh green brave friend of mine he's he just picked me up on instant he was like hey do you guys uh are you guys attached to like oda teams and seal teams on the regular now some kid that's in he's in college on the east coast and he's like yeah some kid i ran into said that you know he had done that and i was like yeah man that's actually fairly common he's like holy crap you guys have come a long way you know he got out probably eight years ago that really wasn't a thing the guys that had done that really was a few and far between and now it's every rotation we're flushing guys to get guys as far forward as we possibly can so people think we're attached to the helicopter because of the combat rescue shows and you know where they see this very small portion of our job and they're like oh well that's what they do they're you know flight paramedics essentially so that show was great because it helped us out but it hurt us in some regards too and you know that was part of it was looking at that one really specific mission because it played well on that geo you know no drama it was a guy i love that everybody asked me about that yeah everybody asked me about that like oh did you see that show inside combat rescue i guess i did that's not that's not all pjs do so i i will say that there is another misconception um that i'd like to ask aaron about and that would be pjs and their hairstyles oh man i feel first of all honored i want to thank everybody who's electing me as the number one sme on all things pj hair so i was on hazard ground podcast today it'll drop it a little bit same question he's like hey i'm looking at your profile here it looks like you got great hair i was just like hey thanks man i don't know uh i don't know what it is if the if the job attracts the hair if the hair is just drawn to the job but that's not a misconception all pjs have great hair like look at brian's hair right now boom it's gorgeous this is after a really long day of work wearing a hat and you know it just this is how it pops up put a little pipe header what's up out of eggs pomade in my hair right now look it's gorgeous look at those flowing locks it's the greatest i don't know what it is it's a that's always that's one of my favorite inside jokes is the the pj and their hair thing the other jokes about always having a rope like that scene in boondock saints where he's like go get your rope then that guy was definitely all right but yeah that's a that's a good one well i'll ask you a more serious question than uh aaron so what would be your stereotypical you know special operator or pj or or the the the stereotype or the misconception with that oh okay yeah that everybody has to fit inside of this like box right right we have yeah yeah we have people from every single like dudes that are homeless and like live in their van all the way to guys with like doctor level phds that enlisted because and you know worked on ski teams in their life and everybody in between like hardcore lifters that listen to heavy metal and then dudes that are straight up vegan and like no kidding hippie granola type dudes like we have all types of guys and i don't think there's like a typical body type or anything all that like people i've gotten a ton of messages where they're asking like do i should i gain an extra 30 pounds or something like that i only weigh 150 160 whatever it is and i think i should put on some muscle or whatever it's like no just train to the job standards if you can rock if you can run if you can do the push-ups sit-ups pull-ups and all the things that are required of you carrying this heavy gear then anything else is just extra sure if you want to get those hollywood muscles you can get those hollywood muscles but you don't need to really look at yourself in the mirror and say do i look like a special operator right now do i look like a special operator today this is what i'm supposed to look like yeah because if you look at a lot of dudes that are out there and they've been in for a really long time they're not like super jack dudes like if you look at tactical dad bod is a thing homie you got a lot of strength in that tactical dad bottle i'm a believer yeah dude i can hear you i'm right here and you're just coming fresh okay you ain't been hitting them workouts dog we know what's been going on all right so you know we've got a decent amount of followers and listeners at this point um i i don't mind saying that so i would be willing to bet that a lot of the audience feels that we are pretty cocky um especially the pjs it's just what it is okay i mean so i'm gonna throw it to you erin okay on this one what is misconception about cockiness i know that controllers get stereotyped quite a bit well because it's true about controllers [Laughter] nice yeah well i mean if you you know call somebody a horse once you know punch that guy in a nose but if you if you get called a horse twice uh you might be a horse right so i mean that that perception is out there i think when you walk on that line like we do impossible things like think about assessment selection that's the hardest thing that people have done up until then so you need to be right on that line of super confident you know not necessarily cocky but super confident that you can do impossible stuff and that carries over a whole bunch of times and i do a bad job managing it because sometimes you're just kind of talking crap with your friends and be like i'm going to smoke you in everything and that doesn't sound like confident and fun that sounds like me being super cocky and not a cool dude yeah this career field breeds competition and there's a certain point where you know you have to even if you you don't know if you can completely do what that person is saying like they're challenging you you got to talk it up and talk yourself absolutely we're going to do this no matter what because i'm not going to back down off of whatever this dude's challenged me to do so there is a certain amount of you decide whether this ends up in the paper home boy but we're doing this but you you kind of you kind of want that though right you don't want somebody who's going into a sticky situation to be second-guessing themselves you want them to be confident you want them to go in there believing that they are going to have a mission success and they're going to make it out even in the the crappiest of situations so you know are we cocky yeah probably but i would say that most of i would say most of us are not necessarily you know a-holes but i've been proven wrong before too yeah and i think as you you know you graduate from the pipeline and or you graduate from etd or something like that and you're just like top of the world because the rest of the guys that you know didn't make it or whoever's on base they see you and they see you in the ascots or whatever and they see in that grad shirt and they're just like wow those guys made it through whatever and that's an american hero right there like and then you feel like wow i really did something important but really you just graduated from kindergarten that's how we always kind of equated in doc slash selection two it's kinder it's you getting into the door into real school so you can actually do a real job now the real training begins so um you know it feels great not to diminish those guys that are graduating or anything but just put it in perspective you haven't done anything yet and now you're really beginning to learn all the stuff that you really need to do so whenever you first kind of graduate you have that chip on your shoulder and then you still start to learn and you'd be around other pjs that have been in for a while you're like man i don't know anything at all so you really begin to learn that self and just learn a little bit of humility whenever you go out onto the teams and i think you know there's a place in time for you to be humble and a place for you to step up and say hey i got this and that's kind of i wrote down a couple other things here but it kind of gets into the way that the air force perceives pararescue and really any assw job is those guys if something happens they're not going to feel like they're scared to talk they're not going to feel like they're scared to act they're not going to feel afraid to you know do what they have to do they look to those people for answers and to look to them to be calm whenever there's a situation when you know everyone else is kind of freaking out so you got to have a little bit of confidence cockiness kind of mixed in there a little bit and sometimes it's you know all fake sometimes it's real but a lot of times you're just kind of like in on the inside you're going 100 miles a minute and then on the outside you're just trying to stay cool yeah you talk to people i hope this works yeah holy cow i just told them yeah let's let's try this thing out you know i don't know but i keep ringing back to to trey last week or you know the week before when we were talking to trey free and he was talking about those five attributes they look for i think you're allowed to be confident you're allowed to ride that line as long as it doesn't affect your interpersonal communications as long as you can communicate that to your team appropriately and they know you're there for for the good of the team and for the right reasons i think that's that's pretty okay i actually like seeing that in uh and people assessment selection i'm not i think sometimes people perceive some cockiness when really all it is is like when you're having a conversation about like the past tests or the the pt test that we have to take you say yeah you know you run three miles and you have to do it in this amount of time they're like that's really hard and you're not trying to be cocky you're like nah nah that's easy you know like you know what the things that you start to perceive as easy and normal in the community in normal conversations may come across as you know this guy is really full of himself and when all you've done is reset the standard for for you know your own personal expectations of yourself yeah that's actually really true i when i first went home after going through the pipeline and everything you know um my friends had asked me like oh what do you do when you're in the air force you know or whatever and i was like well i jumped out of plans it was a nightmare i kind of started to tell them and then i was like what do you guys been up to and they're like well i work at uh you know red lobster now or like you know whatever and i didn't say any of those things that sound cocky and i was just trying to tell them like what i've been doing but i really felt like i was being arrogant by telling them all the cool stuff that i've been doing over the past year and a half or whatever so yeah i guess it does kind of come across like that so this this next one is not afsc uh specific but it's something that i think we should probably cover and brian you brought it up um prior to starting a recording but i would say candidates and you know operators that have already graduated on the teams expecting to have the right answer immediately you know so i i think everybody thinks that they've got to have you know if they're asked a question or presented with a problem that they need to have a response and it'd be correct immediately when that is not the case whatsoever yeah and i think one of the important things about this is whenever something happens that's like that if there's chaos um you know that requires a lot of problem solving time goes by a little bit slower for us and we have time to think because you know when we were going through selection and endoc what we did was we took our mad minute and we stopped thought about it for a second and then continue to go we don't have instantaneous answers all the time to everything unless we constantly train like there's a bleed all right we have instant answers or you know something like that there's a threat we have instant answers for that but a lot of things that require problem solving we don't have instant answers for we sit there and we think about it because we have the capacity to just calm ourselves down and we increase the ability of ourselves to problem solve because we can stay calm in the situation and you know put all of our efforts toward that and then we move forward and continue thinking about that we don't have we never have the answers to a huge problem right away and you don't want to go about a huge problem in that way anyways you don't want to just instantaneously act unless again like i said it's something that requires an immediate action like a threat or a bleed or something like that you always take it just a second however it's easier too because that's what oh sorry but that's that's what experience uh experience gets you to is you can shorten that chain if you've seen all the steps in between where you are and you're like oh i recognize this scenario oh i've dealt with something like this before so you actually know because of your experience how to weave your way through that you actually become more adept at taking on bigger problems because you're actually eliminating decisions that you don't need to think about anymore you're like oh this is a no-brainer dealt with it bam and that's where experience pays off in that decision making as well well it is you know in reality it is okay to have an eighty percent solution and be eighty percent correct and then press on because being eighty percent correct and twenty percent wrong is better than no decision at all the hesitation not only is that a a detriment on your leadership and your followership qualities but i mean you run the risk of of really hurting somebody or or or yourself you know if you start hesitating so things are close right can you be like 90 on danger clothes is that is that okay that is probably one that you want to be a little bit more than 80 on danger close is whenever you're dropping munitions from aircraft within a a a very small distance from yourself and that is in an extreme situation so not something that we uh generally practice often so got him trent good job yeah yeah dang actually so think about it but not too long yes that's the whole thing don't take too long realize what's going on around you don't just sit there and stutter yeah so exactly uh trent i'm gonna give this one to you man are the instructors at ans and and prep and pre-dive and dive school are they actually trying to drown you yeah they're terrible people and they want to hurt you that's not standard instructor answer no they are so mad at you and all of your friends and everything about this day they're already so mad they showed up to the event mad they don't even know why sometimes they're just mad you already have half a dozen tick marks showing up yeah no it's understand that the instructors are working off curriculum and they are supposed to get you from point a to point b and they have a tool set to get you there and uh noise and uh feigned anger and sometimes the anger is real or it's more like frustration especially if you've been an instructor for a while you see the same thing over and over and over again um but not like those guys don't care you know they're not trying to hurt you they they care about you more than you know you'll probably ever realize especially if you graduate brian when you were instructed did you care i really didn't care about it um no perfect i uh it's it's like trent said we're following a lesson plan and by that lesson planned it may feel like we're trying to drown you and like we hate you in the moment because there are a lot of times that you know we get in people's faces and out of ucl not as much anymore because selection is different than indock was but we used to i'm sure hurt a lot of guys feelings and they would think you know sergeant silva really doesn't like me for whatever reason and in reality i just i didn't really put a lot of stake into whatever he did that he thinks that i hate um but i run the lesson plans and by this time people should be jumping in the water they should be done with their underwater so i'm going to say go and then if they don't go you know it's up to them whether or not they want to drown themselves or you know drown themselves drown themselves i mean if you guys want to go drown yourself fine i mean i'll prove it i recommend you just do the correct strokes and with you a lot of time as i give to you i'll give you a warning kind of so speaking of your that's good you're interesting as an instructor because you've got that just just like you just did yeah you're just supposed to do exactly what i told you to do just like the children yeah he would just just just make a real deep tone of voice yeah well one of the misconceptions i think is that the instructors are going to smoke you no matter what when 90 something of the time if you came out that day and did exactly what they told you to do that's my dream that was my dream as an instructor all right so i'm gonna ask this question to to both you and brian or aaron and brian but i'm going to give it to brian first because you guys come at this question from a different perspective and and the question is is um is is pear rescue and being deployed as a pararescueman is it exactly what you thought it would be and you know brian you came in as a new recruit and then aaron you actually had some you know air force experience and probably i would bet to say a better idea of what pjs do deployed and home station but brian i want to throw it over to you first and see if if what you had thought is pretty accurate i did not think that it didn't end up planning out like i thought it was going to be because you know the only thing i really had as far as exposure to the career field before joining was one of the books called that elizabeth by jack brim and he was a guy that was in iceland pj and he kind of recounted some of the stories that were going on around that time and you know there wasn't a ton of combat missions that were going on there wasn't a lot of missions outside of basically the water stuff like the rams jumps the submarine type of lockout things that they were doing back then and then civilian rescue so i kind of thought that it was going to be like that and obviously after 9 11 happened and we started actually going into a war things changed a lot um and the types of missions that we were doing and again i you guys can listen back to the other episode where i was talking about i really didn't know exactly what the career field did i just knew people were gonna get rescued by me and i'm gonna have some skill sets to do that so you know the amount of capabilities that we carried and i didn't know about like being able to shoot any gun that's out there and then you know have the ability to free fall into all the combat situations use um rotaring and fixed-wing aircraft in different areas around the entire world like i just didn't know that capability and i didn't know the the depth of what a pj was really allowed to do and i just thought it was kind of more rescue type of stuff when i joined so pleasantly surprised by you know the amount of stuff that we were able to do sometimes the ops tempo was a lot lower than i really wanted it to be on certain deployments i'm not going to lie on that but then there are other ones who are you know picked up a lot so yeah it's a double-edged sword uh too many offs not enough ops and i kind of a little bit different for me is i i had a little bit of an idea of what pjs did and had close friends that had gotten through the pipeline and and i still kept in touch with so i had a good idea of what to expect but pleasantly i was completely surprised by it and i've gotten due to do a a good diverse group of things from you know covering the nato air policing mission and and being up in iceland for a little while to see in iraq afghanistan africa and i still get to be on the teams it's great i weaseled myself into this position now to avoid that desk job so for me it's you know a lot more than i expected there's always some things like mancesar just as the uh as the shirt says might be uh come sit and relax just like brian is saying like you might not get a call for a long time and there's only so much working out and playing xbox you can do like and so much training you can do like i get it it takes a special kind of person to get through that so i think that's probably from my optic okay well that's good it's it's interesting how how different they are and you know reading a lot of the the posts on reddit on the pear rescue subreddit a lot of the stuff that we get in instagram i think there's a an idea that you know every week every day does change you know one week you're shooting one week you're jumping next you're diving and so on but it's also there's also a week or two in between that where it's appointments it's medical it's you know it's unfortunately the reality of the air force and the military now is that a lot of the computer-based training is a reality and you can't really get away from it so everybody's going to know how to use a fire extinguisher or not give their id to whatever her name is on the information assurance karen's trying to steal you on the information assurance and no i don't want your mixtape charles yeah go back to your desk so yes there there are admin days there are days where or weeks that hey we're not shooting we're not jumping we're not you know it it could be relatively boring and as much as we hate it like it's it's probably good for us to give us a chance to throttle back and and you know not not relax but sit back and not go you know race car in the red for too long that's that's just my opinion though you no you're totally right you need that that white space you know it needs to be built in there because you do need brakes i always want to ask people too because it's more of a misconception about soft in general for everybody out there how many nights do you think the dudes go out on target you guys are asking us like do you guys kick doors every night like bro the pros are going out like i don't know not as much as you think like they're not hitting five nai's a night guys so i always think like what do you think the normal ops tempo is like i think that's part of it well not not nowadays before probably that that was legitimate i mean there were several times that we hit four four it was crazy right you're gonna combat control right can we can we hop on the comic control training now jared and uh misconceptions sure i want to talk about how cocky you guys are oh i thought we were going to cover how short all of them are no no it's the tattoos that we all want to know about that's the real the real thing pj's got the hair cctv got the tattoos how many you got uh uh four yeah i got four that's the minimum that's it that's the minimum requirements for tattoos is that like a complete body part ex-girlfriend rule where you multiply by three so you actually have 12. yeah you know the misconception that uh we all have uh complete sleeves and body tattoos and we only marry strippers uh i mean hey is that it is that a thing is that out there at first i've heard of it but i'm i'm in i want to hear this theory well i can't speak for me baby but uh i have known some guys that have gone down that route probably didn't work out for him but whatever yeah it exists for a reason that this [Laughter] one of the biggest misconceptions that are out there and that is a it really is an education piece is that you hear the joint terminal attack controller or jtac used no matter what like hey a team needs a jtac or who's the jtac on the ground well i i'm pretty sure i've said it before but if not the the jtac skill set is a qualification it is not a job now there's a couple of career fields within the air force that can be allowed to be joint terminal attack control uh qualified you know so you've got your and i'm doing this you know off the top my head so maybe i get it wrong maybe i don't but you know you got your contr your combat controllers you got your attack peas you got your special tactics officers and then you have your tac pos um i believe those are the only four career fields within the air force that are allowed to be jtac qualified so um when teams or when people are talking about a jtac they have to know what they're asking for because you know if you if you get a controller yeah he may be jtac qualified but he's going to be also have the airfield capability you know if and he's going to be jump and dive and all that kind of stuff if you go with attack ps they're probably going to be jtac qualified as well but they are so ingrained with the army and so they know the army really really well and you want to start talking about tanks you know like when we had roomba in here dude that just blows my mind the way that they they move shoot move and communicate with that was big brain time dude i had no idea i was like i'm moving tank target and you're you're writing formulas up on the fly that was that was mind-blowing to me i still remember that but i mean dude the attack peas when it comes to close air support they are they are really really good especially when you start talking about the major major combat operations you know dealing with those tanks and those large forces on the ground whereas you know us hey i'm i'm good whenever i've got you know 30 to 60 dudes on the ground with me and we're moving fast so procedurally i'm correct but there are probably steps in there that i am not taking because i don't have time to because we're moving so fast so that that's that's the jtag piece that i i wanted to cover i definitely wanted to make sure that i got that out there um is the job exactly how i thought i it's hard it's hard for me to remember you know 45 years ago when i came in like you only went 45 you're like this is enough to satiate them that i made the joke but not too much or you're really giving it to yourself you didn't say 60 years ago either you know why because you're like 45's enough for these a-holes yeah that's enough time yeah but um man i so i i don't know i don't know if it's the same or if it's different but i i do know a funny thing is that you know the first time i deployed i was had in my mind um that okay we're deploying to the desert because at the time i'd never been to the desert you know i grew up in the southeast so the desert to me was sand dunes so i was like wait a minute we're we're going to land aircraft out in sand dunes and just set up tents and that's where we're living for for you know however long and i i never voiced that opinion but i just sit here going like i i don't know how this is going to work out washington probably for the best that you kept that one yeah so that was my my deployment misconception [Laughter] truth i think we all had a bit of that though i mean i can speak from being on alert and just you know seeing the hours take by sometimes be like man there's i'm glad that there's nothing but still you know there's still nothing you know so you're like huh i want i wonder what the pace is supposed to feel like you know yeah and and in reality i've been lucky and i and i know that um you know i i've been operational pretty much the whole time with the exception of the weapon school but even then i deployed out of there so it's i've been extremely fortunate with good assignments and good opportunities it is absolutely right place right time now you do have the guys like trent mentioned that are you know they're they're action magnets and no matter where they go whether they're deployed or not that they are they are seeing something and just you know and then here you are picking up scraps sometimes yeah rhodium thai cave rescue podcast yeah we're throwing back to a lot of uh references here uh so i got one for you also peach so what do you think about you know the standard line that we've given from a recruiter is well if you want to kill people go cct if you want to save people go pj what do you what did you say what would you say to them all right great question first of all a great question well pjs are combatants so they carry weapons and they're well trained in shooting just like controllers and sr and seals and odas stuff like that so you know we we train and shoot as much as everybody else same with the js so um i mean if you want to really simplify it okay sure but you know pjs also kill people i mean that's just the reality of it and i tell you what you put me on some kind of medical situation maybe i killed somebody so he's talking about the patient guys yeah yeah that's a pretty good one i missed the part where the recruiter goes and if you want to just creepily watch people go sr boy do i have the curry feel for you do you have a foot thing i heard all those dudes have a hey you in the window come down here i just want to talk to you you got a future you have a bright future come with me two hours i didn't notice you to like 10 minutes ago you're in so i i can't think of any other misconceptions that we would have in terms of combat control and i just think that the misconception that all of all of soft dudes across the enterprise is a bad not a bad misconception but it is misconstrued and that's partly because of hollywood and it's just like excuse me it's just like the you know the the veterans whether it's from vietnam or whether it's from what we've had going on in the last 20 years but where hollywood portrays guys coming back being broken riddled with ptsd i mean does that stuff exist of course it does absolutely sure of course but at the same time it doesn't mean that every single person that has ptsd is a threat or is a broken person that is stuck on opiates and drinking their life away there are those people and i and i don't i'm not saying they're not because you know we know some but you know hollywood makes it out that and almost almost to make you or it has almost made me feel like you guys are trying to make me think that i should be broken and and i'm not i i operate just talking me into it over here yeah you base you're basically doing the equivalent of looking up webmd symptoms now you got cancer what happened it was just a runny nose yeah exactly and it's it's unfortunate and it'd be nice if you know hollywood could you know kind of fix that image because i mean how how much are we able to fix it right now you know we've we're getting a decent following and we appreciate it to everybody that's out there but um until they start making movies and accurately depicting people it's it's going to continue yeah there's that's a crazy thing too it's i mean that's the the far minority of cases you have to remember that the the vast overwhelming overwhelming majority go on combat deployments come home and are totally fine mentally adjusted and getting the help that they need you know like we're we're talking about extreme cases so yeah and that's not interesting to watch so there's never going to be a movie about you know a person that retires and lives happily ever after [Laughter] so right yeah that is a common misconception though i've gotten a lot here at lachlan from like civilian types are like you guys are really nice it's not what i expected it's like what what did you expect us to be like just to be mean for no reason like yeah i got this beret time to be a dick about like every time a car backfires we all freak out and start punching people like i don't know you guys don't do that huh awkward i'm the minority i picked up a whole bouquet of oopsie daisies what else you guys got in terms of misconceptions that i can just blow v8 on is blow v8 gonna be your chief word uh yeah i'm gonna focus on haircuts and uniforms that's definitely my jam you're ready you're ready i'm trying to think about j you know in general because we do get a lot of generalized questions like the misconception that the career fields are are you know so different i did you know thinking my way through that one we are sort of tribal you guys know all seer guys are they're basically all seer guys you can pick them out of a room right be like i bet you're a seer guy you know like when we all do it you know pj is the same thing why do you guys think that is like why do you think because it you can tell you can tell across the board like we've all met rangers that we're like that dude is 100 a ranger that is that is what that guy is down to his dna you know but how can how can we tell how can we pick them out of a room it's easy controllers have trucker hats lippers tats and they're angry like aggressively angry at you jades are like hey bro hey man nah you can't come train with us but cool well controllers get angry for like the littlest reason though it's like the smallest things just set them off and you're like dude chill out and obviously that's coming from pj because i said chill out uh cct for the most part wouldn't be like super chill and then a lot of them get like super hyped up especially if you ever hear some of them on the microphone in the first couple of times that they come on and you listen to recordings we used to listen to them in some of the uh briefs that we did from guys that were deploying is just like those guys like just spitting out these freaking night these uh coffee fires and it was just like holy cow dude well the same way in person there is the there is no place like getting drug at a staff meeting during an intel update because of your radio voice how savage and it happens i've been there like you're just like oh what up with that one there big guy and he's just ashamed by the way he was fighting for his life on the radio well i i will say you know there there are there is such a thing as um being too calm on the radio right so if you're if you're real calm on the radio then the pilots that are flying they don't necessarily know that there is a sense of urgency even though you're telling them hey we're troops in contact we're taking effect of fire they're like okay well i mean you're not out of breath you're not huffing and puffing i can hear the gunfire but whatever until you start getting some kind of of inflection in your voice and then you can see them flip a switch and they are aggressive and they are hey when they said originally they were going to be in two and a half minutes and then 30 then you you know raise your voice and stuff like that and then all of a sudden hey i can be in 30 seconds you're like well where'd that other two in it two minutes ago but okay cool let's do it you know that's the exact same as dealing with students it's the exact same thing yeah watch them mako timeline and watch it you can go home for the day if throw a timeline on there it doesn't matter what that number is or what the task is they will make that timeline yeah that's that's so true i mean i just got i thought you'd be bigger a lot but you know it's because i was tiny bigger a lot well maybe there's something to it maybe there's not who knows i think that's the uh i think that's the main one there we definitely do fall in those lanes like and we gravitate towards one another i love getting off an air like an airplane and being a baggage claim for like a big event like especially like a rodeo or something and you don't know that dude but you know that dude and you're like i could tell unless you're sponsored by the same north face company that i am i think you and i probably have the same boss so it's always funny seeing those dudes at the airport when you link up so but i mean you know pjs are known for playing hacky sack and i as a controller have joined in with some hats i will [Laughter] we gotta close this thing up we went too far inside baseball nobody knows what we're talking about yeah all right so aside from all the hacky sack and all the things that we were talking about just there at the end because those things you'll find out whenever you come back and listen to this episode whenever you actually end up getting through the pipeline and you'll laugh about all the stuff that we're talking about but uh you know talking about some of the stuff from uh sr the misconceptions of whether or not they're able to do certain things but it's well within their range to do almost all the things that both of us do aside from the specialties which are you know being uh jtac set up airfield and you know being a medic um doing medical duties aside from the the rare occasion that they might have to in which case you want them to but um they can go and you know do be pretty much the chameleon and blend in with any of the people that need to get their support which is what they're made to do is blend in so and then along with the misconceptions of the pj i know we went a little bit more in depth hopefully that explains some of the the hair stuff the cockiness that we were talking about and then also the resolve and being able to stay calm in different situations you know we have to be the people that are going to have the answer eventually we don't want to hesitate too long i will come up with that answer but we also want to eventually be the person that has the answer because that is you know pj's job is to make sure that we're able to take care of any situation that may come up right now and then overall you know looking at across the different career fields yeah there's going to be down time it's not going to be call of duty and it's not going to be like as soon as we went into afghanistan or iraq or just hitting targets constantly you know that day may come again but right now those guys that are coming in you shouldn't expect that every single deployment you're going to be just missing every single hour or two missions a day or any of that kind of stuff it's going to be you know a steady stream and then like aaron said you know sometimes on c-star and that's also you know a running joke just for you guys that aren't in the community the seesaw thing you know sometimes you're just sitting around boom right there and you're just waiting for something to happen and that's also part of the job is you know we don't want people to get hurt but we're there in case anything does happen and then uh you know peaches we found out how many tattoos you probably have i don't know if you're hiding any from us next time we'll talk about where they are um but some of the other stuff you know like peter's talking about is the jtac thing and um how they're actually utilized versus um you know attack peas and and those other career fields that are also considered jtacs so all these things are super important and i want to open it to you guys if you guys have any other things that you want to send our way and a misconception or some kind of question we'll try and keep on bringing up different questions that we have because we want to make sure that you guys have as much information and it's as straightforward as possible for you guys going through again our sponsor or the people that help us out everly stock make sure you check them out use one's ready we're not getting any money from them at all but they have great products and we want to support people that are veterans and support the military community and support one's ready specifically and also i want to say thank you to balls for they just graduated pre-dive about a month ago and they gave me this shirt nice it's pretty sweet oh hey yeah i've got some new workout threads t-shirt look at that swag um so yeah and we got some more shirts gonna be coming out real soon you guys check out the onesready.com we have a couple more of the green men that are left right now all the uh ernest breath flags were gone real soon so we'll uh keep an eye out for the next time we drop some of those and as always we're here for you guys so if you have anything any questions at any time just hit us up on instagram at one's ready or at info at one's ready you can email us there and we'll answer your questions as soon as we get a couple days you know peach actually answers must know i'll just give them credit on that one um so thanks again for listening guys true i appreciate you and all your support go out there keep on earning each breath and go get some light up train hard you

Channel: Ones Ready

Views: 31,506

Keywords: Air Force, Air Force Special Warfare, Air Force Special Tactics, Air Force Special Operations Command, AFSOC, SOCOM, Pararescue, Combat Control, Special Reconnaissance, Combat Rescue Officer, Special Tactics Officer, Special Warfare Officer, PJ, Special Warfare Prep, SOF, SOF Prep, Special Operations Training Programs, misconceptions about afspecwar, United States Air Force, Air Force Air Commando, Air Force Pipeline Prep, Assessment and Selection, onesready, force recon

Id: kojFaK6-wQY

Length: 55min 35sec (3335 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020