Confessions of a Sniper at War

all right before we get going here if you're not already a subscriber click the button and ring the bell so you don't miss anything thanks everybody thanks for joining me on a Wednesday a hot summer day here where I am my hope it's not as hot where you are but what are we going to do it's late July um so this is a cool episode a little bit of a departure from normal themes we're kind of focusing on the ground combat element today but before I bring on Jack uh let's go over a little bit of uh Channel admin here the first thing I wanted to put out to everybody is I just heard from the naval Institute press the the publisher of the the punk trilogy and they told me they were wandering around Beach Hall over there the their headquarters on the Naval Academy grounds and they found a box of the bundle the hard cover three book set that they did as a special edition back when the books were republished uh it's been about two years now since the the trilogy was republished so these are special edition hardcovers each one is signed by me and there are limited quantities so if you go to that link and if you look in the channels description uh that URL is there and then at checkout use the discount code Punk YT p-u-n-k-y-t all caps you get 25 percent off the bundle so time flies it's not too long until it's the holidays um think of the aviation aficionados on your gift list and how they might like uh the the trilogy and when they're gone they're gone and I thought that time had already passed and apparently it had not so uh take advantage of the fact that the Netherlands due press has editions of the the bundle still in stock very limited number so check that out the other thing uh in terms of where I'm going to be and uh places that we'll go so a couple weeks ago we had muchapalooza here in Annapolis it was a fantastic get-together of patrons subscribers and Friends so we had patrons come from as far away as Mexico and Upstate New York and we had some subscribers who came uh particularly some law enforcement guys that came from Pittsburgh and again Upstate New York and traveled down to Annapolis and it really did my hard good and they had copies of the punks Trilogy that they wanted me to sign or other mementos I actually signed a tomcat natops from one guy named Phil and so a really fun Gathering so I want to do muchapalooza's across the country we've done one in San Diego we'll do others wherever we happen to be Reno Pensacola Virginia Beach but our signature one is the one that happens every summer in Annapolis so stay tuned for that if you can make it to the next one I would love to see it but this was a fantastic Gathering thanks to everyone who came out it was the debut of my new band danger boy uh and it was really a fun event so the next thing on the calendar in terms of the tour schedule is tail hook so we will be out at tail hook in Reno Nevada the dates of the convention in Reno it's at the Nugget in Reno and this is August 24th 25th and 26th are the dates got a booth there we'll be doing some meet and greets in the lobby of the Nugget and some other fun things so if you live in the greater Reno Sparks area I would love to meet you in person so please come see us on August 25th 26th and 27th we have a lot of giveaways at the booth and select folks will be walking away with a with a channel t-shirt which we've had specially designed for hook and then the last event is the Oceana Air Show so this is September let me make sure I get the dates right um 15th 16th and 17th in Virginia beach at the Naval Air Station Oceana it's their annual air show the Blue Angels will be performing so we're taking the tour of RV down there hoser is going to join me virus might be there um and we're going to be shooting buku content uh doing a lot of interviews with Amanda Lee the female blue angel with air Lance uh the Admiral who the two star who's in charge of uh the Naval Air Forces Atlantic kind of the EXO of the air boss and the CEO of any Associated the Seal of the Super Hornet rag there's a reception at the Officers Club on Friday evening that we'll be attending lots of other things so if you're attending the Oceana air show or if you were thinking about it please come see us we'll be right there on the flight line and again we'll have giveaways and other things happening uh like I said Kevin Miller hoser will be joining me he'll be signing copies of his Raven one series and the silver waterfall and some other things so we would love to see you guys there and then later this year we'll be going to Pensacola for the Blue Angels homecoming show and be doing some stuff with hoser at the naval Navy Naval Aviation Museum down there so uh really excited to get out of the attic and uh get out there and and meet folks in person like I said we just had a fantastic time at muchapalooza looking forward to hook coming up very fast and then Oceana so all right um I haven't done a live stream for a while in fact the last one was my Safety Stand Down uh review some weeks ago I'd like to do them more often so I wanted to use this opportunity uh with Jack Murphy to go ahead and do do this in a live stream format um I want to address questions but as I've said before doing live streams I'm kind of a one-armed paper hanger so please be patient uh we'll we'll try to get to the relevant questions and get them fused into the dialogue but let me go ahead and bring oh before I bring Jack in let me just thank uh one of my patrons and subscribers Benny Perez for sending me this very cool Corsair Korean War era Corsair you put it on a cool stand with uh with wings and a label it's beautiful stuff I got this uh he mailed this to me so Benny thanks very much for for that uh very cool model it it has a place of honor on the other side of the studio here so thanks very much I I love receiving stuff from Channel fans and and you know thanks very much for the effort I know this particularly is a gorgeous model made with with very detailed accuracy so thanks again Benny all right so let's bring my guest aboard Jack good to see you how are you doing today hey I'm good Ward good to see you man so Jack and I go way back as we described in a recent episode of his podcast slash youtube channel so I was on what was it Jack like a month ago or more yeah yeah yeah and and so this was a wide-ranging discussion that went all kinds of places um and I imagine this episode of me may do the same but this is the team house both YouTube channel and podcast I highly recommend you subscribe and check it out they have on special operators they have influencers they have all kinds of stuff and these discussions go deep on Myriad topics uh is it a weekly Jack how often do you guys put up with weekly or bi-weekly I mean every Friday we're live at 8pm but we do a lot quite a few episodes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as well nowadays okay so Jack and I go way back and we'll talk about how we know each other and it's not through active duty circles uh but circles that covered the active duty beat as military journalists so we'll talk about that the early days the wild west days of military digital media but before we get into that I want to talk about Jack's time as a U.S Army Ranger and sniper so Jack you were born and raised in New York yeah yeah I was born in Sleepy Hollow New York and lived there for a while then I went to high school in a town a little further north called North Salem graduated from high school there so I grew up in in Westchester County New York okay and so not unlike some other folks we know when you witnessed the horrors of 9 11 and you were already kind of thinking of maybe you'd want to join the military but this definitely motivated you to go visit the recruiter's office starting with the Marine Corps ironically enough and what happened with those guys yeah I mean the let's see so I was still in high school and I went to go talk to the Marine Corps recruiter because I mean hey the Marines are the place to be right um and uh I wanted to be Marine infantry like that's it right and the marine recruiter I kind of like did something kind of underhanded I felt even as a as a teenager I mean he he told me I had one day to sign up and if I didn't sign up right now he wouldn't be able to get me in an infantry slot which I mean we can both kick back and laugh at that thinking that the Marines are or or the Army would ever run out of infantry slots is just hilarious but um that was that little like uh sleight of hand game he was playing there and uh it didn't give me a very good feeling so I went down the hallway and talked to the Army and uh see what they have going on and uh you know the Rangers was was you know the next thing that was the elite infantry that that the Army has so your your spidey sense went off when this guy's giving you the Hard Sell as you put it and yeah which was weird why did he try to Hard Sell me I was already sold yeah well that's a lesson in sales right yeah yeah don't sell something that's already sold for all of you fledgling sales people out there um but uh so you you talked to the Army recruiter and he mentions Rangers so I I want to clear it up for my audience who naturally self-selected as interested in in aviation which is the theme of my channel um so when you say Rangers like I'm a ranger or they have a ranger tab that means a whole bunch of things and and so you got to kind of drill down okay raise your butt you know you sorry Ward are you still there did I lose you jack yeah yeah just for a second you're back uh you want me to continue yeah so just talk to us about um the the various forms of Rangers and your progression through R.I.P and ultimately becoming a a full-up ranger assigned to a ranger battalion sure so yeah the Army makes this like way way needlessly complicated um and there's a lot of misconceptions or misunderstandings amongst the public which I understand because again the the military makes it incredibly confusing So within the Army there is a unit uh an actual Deployable combat unit a special operations unit called the 75th Ranger regiment um and so the ranger regiment consists of first Battalion second Battalion and Third Battalion and the regimental headquarters first Battalion is in Savannah Georgia second Battalion is at uh JBLM Fort Lewis and Washington and then Third Battalion where I was stationed is at Fort Benning Georgia uh which is also where the regimental headquarters is um and so this is again this is a elite infantry Airborne infantry unit um they now um build themselves as America's Premier raid force uh they conduct raids Airfield seizures um a number of other different tasks um but at the end of the day they are a elite infantry unit uh now the Army also has a school um a school that falls under tradoc the training uh command um so it is not a Deployable unit is simply a training course or School located in the United States called Ranger school so Ranger school is a leadership uh and tactical training course that takes place over the course of two months in uh Georgia and in Florida and it is open to people all over the Army anyone in the Army can apply including you know something that has changed in recent years is women can also apply to Ranger School uh and so the course really subjects students to a lot of sleep deprivation and food deprivation and gets you cold tired exhausted and puts you in leadership positions where you have to lead infantry operations patrols out in the woods and um now the the connection between the ranger regiment and Ranger school is that if you serve in the ranger regiment and to have any sort of leadership position there you also have to be a graduate of Ranger school but other than that these are two totally separate things so the ranger tab that you get for graduating from Ranger school is one thing the ranger scroll that people assigned to the 75th Ranger regiment uh denoting that they are assigned to a ranger combat unit are two totally different things um and somebody can have a ranger Tab and be a you know chemical officer or an air defense NCO uh anybody can have a ranger not to say that I'm not trying to put it down I'm just saying that anyone in the Army can attend Ranger school and have a ranger Tab and people look at that and say well that's a ranger and so the Army has kind of shot itself in the foot because the Army itself doesn't necessarily know how to define a ranger right and uh it comes out I feel like I write this article once a year um because inevitably there is a political candidate who is calling themselves a ranger and then the debate breaks out are they really a ranger and well at some to some extent it does from the Publix per uh point of view it becomes a distinction without a difference like if you explain everything I just said to you know the average voter they're like huh okay so what you know yeah so I this I'm trying to think what the analogy would be in fighter Aviation and and so I think a rough analogy would be Top Gun right have you been to Top Gun and so now because Top Gun reaches every Squadron that rolls through Fallon every Aviator will be in briefs and debriefs and fly against Top Gun so arguably you could say yeah I've I've worked with Top Gun I've I'm I'm a top gun guy uh but that's not having gone through the Strike Fighter weapons training instructor full up syllabus or actually being an instructor at Top Gun right so if I go to Ranger school because having earned the tab is is beneficial on my record when I come up for promotion right which is almost mandatory right on the officer side if you want to be upwardly mobile past say major you have to have gone through Ranger school as an infantry officer is that would you say that that's true yeah I mean I think that's that's in the ballpark you know the the seals did it a lot better you know a seal is a seal you either have you either have your Trident or you don't and even their jsock guys are also seals so I mean it's much simpler by comparison to the Army and and then there's a whole other conversation about Special Forces which is also like completely misunderstood by a lot of people so so I have a cool picture of you and your mom yeah that was um so this was when I graduated from the ranger indoctrination program so that's the selection course to become a member of the 75th Ranger regiment and at that ceremony you were you know awarded that uh khaki Beret uh which is the distinctive headgear of the Ranger regiment um and now uh rip does not exist anymore it's now called rasp the ranger assessment and selection program uh the course I went through was three weeks long and now I believe it's eight weeks long so the guys receive a lot more training um than than I did when I graduated in 2002. so you had some challenges let's put it oh yeah it was going through rip or through through Ranger school itself well both okay well talk to us about some of that because I think the fact you made it through in the face of you know falling along the way is is you know speaks to your motivation and character so talk to us about for instance the 12 mile March that you you couldn't keep up yeah it's medical and different things like that and and how you were kind of uh they threatened to throw you out of the the course and you stuck with it yeah um so there's a uh 12 Mile Road March in in as a part of rip it's a forced Road March it's uh I mean the road March of course 12 Mile Road March is just a a common infantry training event um and I was you know at 19 at the time I was in pretty good shape and I I felt that I should not have any big problem uh accomplishing this thing um but I I found myself falling out of the road March um and then there was a retest and I also fell out of that and I felt terrible about it and very frustrated because it's like what's wrong with me why can't I do this uh why can't I do something I know I should be able to do um and uh I I went to see the uh Medics at the The Troop Medical Clinic down the street and they looked at me and they said well yeah half of your lungs is like halfway filled with fluid like you're sick as hell it's like okay no wonder why I couldn't keep up so they wanted to put me on a week's worth of antibiotics but I would have had to recycle the course I mean it was starting up on Monday and it was like that was like three or four days from that point so I was like hey I got to be back in the course and I can't be on any prescription drugs when I start so they gave me like this like three day crash course on antibiotics uh and uh pounded those down and yeah so it was like three or four days later restarted rip and um that time went right through the course um uh they actually did a release Road March and I ran the entire thing and uh I I came in first in uh my class so I mean I definitely wanted to be there and wanted to do it and um but I mean that's the thing about the Army these are character building experiences and the military does give you opportunities to try again to recycle to try to get your act together um and fix whatever you did the first time and um yeah I mean those are in retrospect as much as it sucked at the time I mean they're good experiences they're good character building experiences I think that's a good way to to put it um so you you roll to an operational unit uh talk to us about your initial experiences downrange sure so I got assigned to third ranger battalion right there uh at uh Fort Benning uh was assigned to ACO uh the guys had just come back from Iraq from the invasion of Iraq I was actually in rip when The Invasion happened and um through talking to some people there um I actually had the opportunity to go to sniper section um well I went to Ranger school first and and passed that and then when I got back from that um my unit was deployed to Afghanistan at that time so I didn't I missed out on that first deployment because I was in Ranger school and uh went over to sniper section uh then went to sniper school and so my first deployment was to Afghanistan in the winter of 2004. so yeah that's a that's a shot from uh Castle uh on the Pakistan borders up on top of a hill and that was sort of a border control Point um so I was uh part of a two-man sniper element attached to Charlie Company of third ranger battalion uh we were also there with the Battalion Recon team which you see in that picture right there um it was their first deployment um that you know there was a regimental reconnaissance Detachment which was getting sucked up in other jobs so each Battalion had to stand up their own refuse section and uh that's what you're seeing here I mean I'm the guy uh second or third from the right uh without the um you know just standing there with a pistol the guy wearing the brown picole and the brown beard here's something interesting that's uh his name's Paul Shari and he is like one of the leading experts on Military artificial intelligence now he's written two books on it um so a really smart guy really good guy and I mean this whole group you see here in the picture was a really good group of guys to work with well here I got to show you my pack cool shot from my time in uh as an embedded journalist in in Afghanistan that's a cool hat that's you know in case people don't know the hat that we're wearing in those in those photos is called the pack cool it's sort of a native Afghan hat right um so anyway foreign yeah so uh let's see that first deployment um did a lot of sniper OverWatch for Charlie Company missions um did some support for the recce missions um did some aerial platform support uh from helicopters again for the guys who are on the ground um it was not a super intense deployment uh this was the winner of 2004 so the Insurgency in Afghanistan had not kicked into high gear um we probably actioned like 25 targets or something during that three-month deployment um that's um I'm sitting on the side of a little bird there prior to a operation and you can see I'm wearing like a heavy Columbia winter jacket because it was pretty cold in Europe on on a helicopter flying around um and that was you so during the op would you sit outside like that and yeah just like that you just shoot shoot down at Targets on the ground yeah just like that I mean I didn't shoot at any Target Targets on that operation we did in training beforehand but thankfully there you know no shots fired on that Target but I mean sitting up there at night um looking through that night vision scope and um you know seeing the Charlie Company guys roll up on the Target and their Humvees and then there's another little bird with my sniper partner on it and they saw some movement in the compound below and I mean it's just one of those really surreal moments to reflect back on the little bird did like a dive bomber run right down into the courtyard of that compound and then like you know arced upwards at the last moment and just rotor washed out like the entire Courtyard and they did that as like a show of force to keep the uh you know enemy or their suspected enemies head down as the Charlie Company guys were rolling up in their Humvees and then the little bird just peels right off and goes back to doing OverWatch and you know the the Charlie Company Rangers made entry and secured the compound well here's another picture of you back you know in Garrison with a little bird just in the event people don't know what a little bird is super agile helicopter the the guys who fly them are incredibly talented um and and so you know if you uh see Black Hawk Down or any other of those sorts of uh you can see what the little birds are capable of that's makes them more agile and and uh Nimble say than a Blackhawk um certainly than an h-47 so a cool cool this that was in um that was in Fort Campbell during a training exercise and you can see the the boom above my head there that's for attaching a fast rope um so you can fast rope out of the helicopter onto a rooftop if you need to um this is the MH model that is designed for ferrying soldiers around operators Rangers whoever um there's also an ah model uh which um is equipped with uh you know rocket pods and uh you know mini guns and can actually do you know gun runs to support you know guys on the ground so here's another cool pack cool shot um this looks like obviously East uh uh part of the country very mountainous where was this taken this was South um on the Pakistan border during a reconnaissance mission um and yeah it's up up in the mountains obviously yeah so I know you operated out of fob Salerno I went through Salerno during my embed in 2010 um is that where you were based during this this uh yup that was it fob Salerno uh 2004. so what I remember about Bob Salerno obviously you landed commercially in Kabul some third-party Airlines um soft free air or something and then we they pushed us up to Bagram every every road goes through Bagram right and then the paos there ask you like what level of ride do you want to take you know and me and my managing manager editor Christian lower like hey we want to go all the way so they're okay and they push us out to Salerno and so the first thing we notice when we land is the runway is gravel right it's not a hard surface Runway yeah yeah you're right and then from there you go to places where there's no Runway there's a dirt LZ right this is where you get to the combat Outpost but uh Salerno as you said was right on the border in paktika Province uh with Pakistan and it was a this was a hot area right a lot going on there yeah yeah and this this was actually down on the border of its itself you know which is a kind of perilous Drive um I don't think we took High lux's down there I don't think you could even get Humvees through some of those mountain passes that we went through they look like they had been dynamited out um you know sometime in the past so what year was that that was so far oh four and then into 05. um so what are what were some of the highlights low lights what do you remember off the top of your head in terms of uh kinetic Ops and and stuff I mean a lot um you know the doing the sniper OverWatch for direct action missions was pretty interesting um moving around town at night and in in uh kaust was interesting um some of those aerial platform missions I was telling you about were were fascinating and fun um I was also involved in a friendly fire incident uh that you see in that in that picture you had just shown were up in the mountains um that was taken maybe a few hours before that that incident took place um and there's a whole complicated backstory that goes into that um but I mean there's a whole series of of things that went wrong that day and so yeah it was thank God I mean nobody was was killed in that in that event but I mean that's one of those moments that you know kind of comes to Define your life and it's in a certain way yeah no so when you say Friendly Fire of course Pat Tillman comes to mind well interestingly that operation was to do a reconnaissance mission for the person who supposedly planned the Pat Tillman ambush okay so it almost happened uh again right um yeah so um that that that coincidence is kind of eerie it is um so you get back from that that deployment uh then then what happened um let's see came back from that deployment um and came back and was training um had a bit of a falling out with my platoon Sergeant although we we shook hands we were we were adults about it um and ironically so he sent me uh to First platoon an alpha company uh whereas a gun team leader um on weapon Squad which was an awesome awesome job it was it was great um but that same platoon Sergeant uh he came to be my new platoon Sergeant he followed me shortly thereafter so he was my platoon Sergeant twice um his name was Jared van Alice um pretty uh you know impressive guy um I had a kind of a complicated relationship with him but you know again I think we both tried to be adults about it and work together and you know in retrospect he gave me a second chance in in a huge way in a unit where you don't get many Second Chances um so I'm grateful to him for that at um you know and if I'm speaking about them in the past tense it's because Well here here's to again to take it full circle I mean Jared went on to join Delta Force uh as an operator and he himself was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan um in 2010 um yeah not good um so you spent time both in as you've described Afghanistan and Iraq how would you compare and contrast those two Landscapes the the nature of those two conflicts that were going on in parallel yeah kind of kind of Night and Day from my perspective um bouncing from Afghanistan no five to uh that winner of o5 to Iraq in the summer of o5 um where Afghanistan I mean very brutal terrain long distance movements um targets difficult to acquire um Iraq was uh operating you know largely in an urban environment we're doing what was called at the time time sensitive targets so there was just this flood of um mostly signals intelligence that was coming into us um and we are launching on targets one two three times a day um you know hitting targets during periods of daylight periods of Darkness um going to follow on targets afterwards um it was just it was a frantic three months of just rolling outside the wire all day and night so you you have this this image of you in a vehicle that was one of your duties what are we seeing here so this is uh myself sitting inside a striker armored vehicle eight-wheeled armored vehicle armored personnel carrier um and that that was the primary way that we got around um driving them around and one of the positions I had in addition to being a gun team leader you know when we did helicopter missions called halves helicopter assault Force um you know I was just sort of a you know dismounted um gun team leader uh and then when we're doing these other operations weapon Squad was the ones that were um Manning and crewing and driving the strikers so our privates were driving they were Manning the uh 50 cal RWS the remote weapon system and then me and uh my the other team leader um you know we were working as What's called the TC uh which I believe comes from the term tank commander actually um or tactical commander and you're just the guy who's kind of like the team leader of the striker that's core telling the driver where to go and what to do and telling the machine gunner what to look at and what to shoot at uh and all that um and I mean it again it got quite hectic at times I had a uh Panasonic tough book up there and when I was the we I was the lead vehicle um you know for a lot of these operations so I'd have the the route up in the computer uh with a little hockey puck GPS keeping track of of our movements and I have to you know navigate our way to the Target um sometimes you know we'd have follow-on targets and I'm listening into the radio to the get the grids and then plug it into the Panasonic Toughbook and then plot the next route to the next Target um and some sometimes the targets were coming at us so rapidly that we're just winging it so after a couple of rotations and and uh you know some of what you did was hearts and Minds stuff you know dismounted patrols uh working with the local villagers sitting down with school kids uh well that was later in in Special Forces okay um so let's then to take us to that that phase of of your your career then sure sure but I want to get a sort of a broad sort of retrospective of of your sense of of these these wars which informs chapter two right um so um before you went to Special Forces though um anything else that happened that was noteworthy that that you know kinetic stuff or other sort of uh you know the the atmospheres of war the surprise shocked um the kind of thing that you just can't prepare for I mean there's so many things that happen during such cramden is such a short time span um it's very kind of uh surreal to kind of like reflect back on the sights the smells moving through these little Villages creeping around under night vision um quite a few firefights we got into on that deployment um times we were getting shot at times we shot insurgents uh frags going back and forth um there's one incident where uh we came up under an overpass and some insurgents threw hand grenades down on top of us um and got inside there was three vehicles in that particular Convoy I was in the weed the guys in the trail the trail vehicle uh one of the grenades actually went down into it injured a bunch of Rangers that we had to rush to the field Hospital in missoul um I mean I could go on and on but I mean it was just so frantic and so the the pace of operations was just so quick um so what's what the you just described uh you know a a harrowing uh event in just another day in your life on that that deployment um what was morale like did you have a sense that of winning um or did it seem futile um did the tasking make sense in terms of the progression over the course of weeks and months or was it just sort of a scattergram uh how did you feel uh over the course of that that particular diploma you know I I think that um morale was rather high at the time because it felt like the ranger regiment was finally being taken off the leash and we were being I mean speaking for myself and I suspect a lot of my teammates would probably agree that like we were reaching we felt like our full potential as far as what we were able to do operationally I mean we're being challenged and we're I mean by the end of that deployment don't get me wrong I think we were all exhausted I mean I know I was I was pretty Fried by the end of that um but it it felt good to know that we were being used to the utmost of our abilities if that makes sense um as far as like the the Tactical or strategic picture like when you are a soldier in a tactical environment like that it feels a lot like you're winning um because you're actioning these targets every day and we were pulling a lot of hvts high value targets off of these compounds I mean we hit a lot of dry holes don't get me wrong but we also captured and killed a lot of high value targets and when you're a soldier operating in that tactical environment it really does feel like you're winning um but now in retrospect I mean here we are uh you know well over a decade later you look back on it and you realize that you know yes we were you know being tactically successful but so what I mean we were strategically a failure uh we lost the War I am for in so many ways I mean you have to look back on that and critically ask yourself I mean what was it for and I think that our tactical success is you know worse they were effective at putting the enemy on their heels right like there's supposedly this Insurgency this Iraqi Civil War that was kicking America's ass well no actually we kicked their ass and um by the time you get to like 2009 2010 I mean the entity that we called Al Qaeda in Iraq was like pretty much done I mean they're kind of defunct as an organization um and into that void what should have flowed was the Iraqi government aided and assisted by the United States government um but somewhere around uh as far as that piece of the Iraq War things fell through I mean it did not turn out the way that any of us wanted it so what what year are we talking about at this point the operations that I'm describing was 2005 the summer of 2005. okay so this is the height of sectarian violence this is before the anbar Awakening and and the Petraeus yup strategy um and so forth so that that was a a challenging time to be in Iraq to put it mildly yeah yeah it absolutely was yeah so it's the way you describe it is the way I believe the unit I was embedded with in in there was task force rockets on part of the 101st Airborne in paktika province in 2010. right so it's not that you're ignorant of the Strategic but you're focused locally and for you it's a dismounted patrol and it's engagement with the elders in fact you have a picture here let me see if I can bring it up of you sitting down uh with with the elders um what were those sorts of things like uh I'll look for this thing but uh um you know because I attended some of those with the platoon leader and the company Commander uh impact Tikka province in places like Yosef Cal and Yaya Cal and those seems they seemed really productive right like Freedom was possible these people were getting a sense of their own governance and and things like cell phone towers and aqueducts and you know educating the the girls in their Community it just seemed like everything was possible and there was ground being made but it was cyclic right yeah um so a lot of that kind of stuff that I did was when I uh went over to Special Forces and um yeah definitely had key leader engagements and and engagements with the the I SWAT team that I worked with in tallafer um and also just more informal engagements yeah sometimes meeting with Elders um meeting with school children in in one or two cases um but it's all sort of like they're they're not what am I what the term I'm looking for vestigial it feels like sand slipping through your fingers right um that you can feel like there's real progress being made but at the same time I mean this this Con this country and this culture is what it is and it has its own direction that is just so well beyond your control um maybe beyond your understanding um and I think that was evidenced um by the fact that you know we pulled out of there and within a few years Isis came to town and any semblance I mean if there's any question at all that what we did matter I think Isis disabused us of that and and there's no way that you could possibly claim that you know our 10 years in Iraq was a success you right Roger that um and in some ways um even in 2010 like I'm talking about this cycle of winning and losing and so if you're sitting down with uh the two star at the chaos they're talking about cig acts and you know these sort of metrics of atmospherics yes and and that and declaring Victory against those metrics um but then when you're out in the field and you see they own the night and the locals will vacillate into whoever is going to provide security for the next 12 hours sure in terms of their allegiance and who do they love and so forth and so on um because when I was there in 2010 the Taliban were shutting down cell phone towers at night um you know just as a punitive measure um and and we had no way to remedy that uh at the time and you know two teens with AK-47s in in some field would light off this chain of events on the American side that was pretty disproportionate to put it mildly right so a Sig act just meant there was a shot somewhere and and uh near a combat Outpost and so all of a sudden Apaches f-18s off of the carrier that's in the north Arabian Sea um you know all kinds of drones you know satellites uh in reaction to this teenager with a rifle you know and and so you could tell that I don't know how he can sustain this we fought both Iraq and Afghanistan in a uniquely American way which is to say we threw a lot of stuff at the problem right so against an asymmetric threat we create compounds and the chaos that I sat in look like NASA's mission control I mean huge screens and comfy shares in every analyst was in front of a three screen you know sort of computer setup and it was super air conditioned and really nice you know and then you get to The Outpost and they're they don't have running water and they're eating you know um you know Cliff Bars and and uh you know what was that gel stuff that you know keep everybody rippets rip-its and you know that sort of stuff you know in Red Bull um I lived on those things for six days and I'll tell you what um and I'm sure you can relate um they start to taste like plastic after a while you know there's no like food taste to them um and uh so anyway the the point I'm making here is um you know as you see it all implode with a guy that has skin in the game and blood and sweat and tears in the game you lost folks in the pursuit of some measure of security democracy whatever the lofty tenants that sent you there um you know there's got to be a sense of frustration but we're getting ahead of ourselves because I want to talk about that once you put on your journalist hat um but let's talk about because you've hinted a couple times about your transition from Ranger to special operator what was that all about so let's see 2000 six uh or no it was the last class of 2005. I went to the Special Forces assessment and selection um got selected and then um went to the Q course the qualification course which is like a year year and a half of training um I went there in 2006 and then graduated in 2007 so it became a Green Beret at that point um you know for me I mean I was just ready for something new and different um you know deploying with ranger battalion was awesome um but also I think during my fairly you know short time in range of Battalion I I also probably participated in the seizing of Lawson airfield on Fort Benning like you know a dozen times some of that [ __ ] gets old after a while and you're you're ready to do something different um so let's in terms of the nomenclatures because again I want to make sure that that I have this straight in in my uh viewers have this straight um so Ranger if you're a ranger is that special forces if I say if I'm a ranger like you're an arranger Battalion is that special forces no that's it's Special Operations so okay Special Operations Command encompasses um all four branches now so there's Naval special Warfare Army Special Operations Command marine Special Operations Command and Air Force Special Operations Command and underneath all of those each branch has their own units so Air Force has the PJs they have their combat controllers all those guys Army has Ranger regiment uh Delta Force Special Forces the Green Berets uh and then psyops and civil Affairs and then Navy of course has the seals and the special boat guys um so that's like a very broad breakdown of what Special Operations encompasses so that's about okay again I'm asking the difference between Special Forces and Special Operations so did you just describe Special Forces or special ops special operations as a whole okay because you said Special Forces but I think you meant to say Special Operations yes Special Operations encompasses all of that okay um so what is Special Forces then so special forces is is again a specific Army Special Operations unit um the you know most people know them as Green Berets uh the operational element of special forces that I mean there are uh different groups that are assigned to different areas of the world um so the operational element though is a 12-man Oda or operational Detachment Alpha um that encompasses experts and Communications demolitions weapons um and Engineers um and then there's an intelligence Sergeant there's a warrant officer who is the you know second in command the captain who is in command of the Oda and a team sergeant in a uh E8 so the Oda is designed for unconventional warfare um they're designed to be able to go Behind Enemy Lines train local forces um but they have a number of different tasks I mean uh the the more peacetime oriented mission is called foreign internal defense where they will instead of going Behind Enemy Lines they'll go to friendly countries and train that country's military in you know tactics weapons whatever we want them to know um so for instance an Oda could go to like the kingdom of Jordan um and train with their military and and get them up to speed or or go down to Colombia and train Colombian Rangers and all these sorts of different things that happen I mean Special Forces deploys to probably like well over a hundred countries every year um doing these types of missions so uh their wartime Mission can be unconventional warfare special reconnaissance direct action um uh there's even like a Counter Narcotics counter wmd mandate in there um but uh it encompasses all these different things and I mean if I were to point out you know the I guess the main difference um between Special Forces and other elements other special ops units is that special force is really focus is on and they build themselves as America's Premier partner force that they are the guys that go and partner with our Allied Forces and train them equip them and and can accompany them into combat if need be um and to do that they have a much bigger emphasis on you know cultural fluency and on foreign language capabilities than a lot of the other units have so this is where you sat down with you know school kids and and you you kind of tried to immerse yourself in the culture uh in a very Insidious kind of way well you uh as they say you meet people where they are not where you want them to be so um if they if they like to sit on the floor and drink chai tea then that's what you do uh if uh you know it's it's kind of adapting to whatever the local people are whatever their Customs are and and trying to meet them at that point and then build rapport with them and build some sort of a relationship so again what I saw when I was embedded and attended some of those um Gatherings of the tribal Elders uh my sense was there was good work being done there you know the they had in fact I rode in an mrap with the uh the Battalion commander and the governor of sharana from sharana to uh uh Yaya Kell and sat down at ashuria with the the tribal Elders uh along with the angel company Commander um uh VMI guy named Josh powers and West Point guy uh named uh second Lieutenant first lieutenant rather Smith um and watched you know the look in the eye and the body language and the Terps were there and those guys are fantastic um one guy named Chewie particularly was an All-Star and that's why and this is a separate subject but we need to get the folks at risk that served us well like Afghan Air Force pilots and the interpreters to the United States because they are at risk as their holed up in uh places like Islamabad and that sort of thing separate separate subject which I actually have an episode coming up on that but uh in any case watching that when you emerge from that and you jump back in the mrap and you go back to the fob you're like you know I think a good thing just happened yes seemed like they trust us it seemed like what we're promising is taking it has some traction here you know well you know the locals on on one hand I think they very shrewdly understood how to play one party against the other um and you know essentially playing both sides looking to see who's going to give them a better deal and As Americans we can kind of sit back and judge that because you know we're sitting back here in America right you know eating double stuffed Oreos and stuffing a Big Mac in our face but I mean if you live in a country like Afghanistan or or even Iraq the people there have to choose their you know strategic Partners they they have to make these alliances to survive I mean it's a totally different game for them and when America just kind of UPS pulls up stakes and leaves the country all these different parties you know tribe family military unit whatever it is um they have to choose whatever side is going to give them the most survivability so I mean you have to be careful about how much criticism you you wob at them for doing that yeah I remember some advice I was given uh by of army vet um on my way over there he said nothing is what it seems um you know so the even the children with the Batman backpacks um will will look friendly um and this kind of sounds Vietnam waresque you know where it's like don't trust anybody but like you said they're they're working both ends against the middle um I think there's something to their survival sense that they are conniving and they know what face to put on at any given time in fact I took a video of Josh Powers talking to um the locals about an event that had happened the day before and and this is the other thing I don't think you spent too much time in either of those countries Iraq or Afghanistan certainly during the years you served without seeing some stuff in a hurry and so on day two of our time at Joseph Kell the combat Outpost at Joseph Kell um we saw an Afghan boy step on a landmine that was planted by um the the Taliban and and so what Josh is saying to the folks of of yayaquel or I'm sorry messed this was the village of mest uh where what's his name wandered off who am I thinking of yeah well where Bill Bergdahl had wandered off nine months prior to us being there in fact Josh power showed me where he wandered off and walked down the street his last statement was I'm looking for a party um and so um we're in messed and Josh is going who does this talking about the Taliban you know who would put a landmine so that a teenage boy gets his leg blown off and The Interpreter is interpreting it and the locals are like yeah who does that that's screwed up yeah I mean they're all like yes you're so right you know and you're like oh what he's saying is resonating they're ready to take stock and their own protection and you know take up arms against the Taliban but there's that was not even close to True right because as soon as the sunset and we wander back to the mraps and drive away now they're like you know okay what do we got to do to survive the night here without getting our throat slit or whatever right so when you see that cycle this is the long-term point it's like whenever we exited you know just the wheels going around whenever we exit the end state was clear even to me in in 2010 you know and there's no way short of I mean you know nation building is impossible but I like to and people like oh whatever the status of the war was for me I think you've described it in the kind of sort of granular way which is for the guys who served their senses they did good work yeah and that's why I think it's very frustrating when a lot of guys have you know we talk now about like moral injury and things like this um a lot of frustration um and I think there's a need also for um validation not like validation in the sense that like I as a veteran need to be individually validated as some sort of hero but just like a nationwide validation or recognition that this war took place uh a lot of times it feels like a fever dream and I even go to veterans events like big events sometimes and uh everyone loves to talk about the six the first six months of Afghanistan but it kind of ends there the celebration ends there and uh I'll be sitting at these events and you know what's one word that never ever gets mentioned Iraq it's just memory hold it's like it never even happened and it's just very surreal to think about yeah and that's being polite about it um you know it's like a Kipling poem at some level um so let's let's pivot to your transition out of the military it and and how you decided to pursue a career in in journalism sure I mean it was quite accidental I mean some of the the frustrations that we've been discussing um with how the war was going was something that I felt like as you mentioned in 2010 I thought it was pretty obvious that we weren't taking the war seriously and you know what the end state was going to be um so I got out of there um I I popped smoke in 2010 um didn't have much of a plan um of what I did I mean I I know I've told you this story before Ward but I'll I'll bore your audience uh quickly with this I um decided I wanted to write a novel like a military fiction novel and I started up like a little blog like a word WordPress blog to try to like support this book and get the word out and uh when I was doing that someone at military.com reached out to me and asked if I would write the same type of type of stuff that I was already writing about gear and weapons and things like that for military.com I said yeah sure so um that was kind of how I took my uh first step into the media I guess you could say and um just kind of went from there um I ended up getting involved in a startup company and uh that that specialized in Special Operations news and very quickly realized that meant I had to write news so um you know the the sort of eventually doing investigative type journalism and also doing um traveling overseas and doing kind of boots on the ground reporting from Kurdistan from Syria from the Philippines a few other places that's kind of how that all came about so the guy you're talking about at military Economist Christian Lowe who I've remained both close to as a friend but he's been a colleague at a couple of different places so when you were doing that I was the editor Christian was the managing editor he had a focus on gear and and weapons and he would go to SHOT show every year and and so Christian also embedded with me in Afghanistan in 2010 and he had embedded a few times previous particularly in in Iraq when he worked at Marine Corps times as as one of the writers reporters at Marine Corps time so Christian was the first uh reporter original reporter that we brought aboard um during my time as as the editor so you and I dealt with each other um in in a a variety of ways during those years like you said you were a blogger that's when the mill blogosphere was was kind of influential and huge right I mean CNN where they talk about the blogo sphere like what yeah right you know and so this is pre-social Media um and so a Blog was ground truth unfiltered truth and so what we liked about it at military.com because we were sort of over leveraged at that time and I won't bore you with the details of how military.com got itself in that position uh but let's just say they were trying to keep the lights on when the.com bubbled burst in early odds and so if if your news reportage is just syndicated AP Reuters When The War um is starting to be less obvious in terms of winning and losing right and so the time we talked about pre and bar Awakening post-invasion sectarian violence and you know like it looks like we're losing but bloggers were able to sort of thread the needle of okay there are some challenges but you know the U.S forces are still doing good work and I'm going to talk to you about my personal experiences and so forth and so on so as under the banner of military.com that was very important content and so Chris Michael the founder of military.com um was very forward-leaning and encouraged us to you know open the doors of military.com to Mill bloggers and you know we had various levels of success with uh you know some Mill bloggers thought they were the show you know like why do I need military.com I already have a huge WordPress site and I get this number of page views and everybody knew what their metrics were you know off the top of their head um but you started with that and that got you into our umbrella and then you took it to the next level uh in the meantime you were pursuing your education as well so tell us about uh how that went down yeah I mean during the time when I was trying to write this book I um I uh I I enrolled in college I did my first year in um Mercy uh in Dobbs Ferry and then transferred to Colombia in let's see that must have been two thousand twelve no 2011 because I graduated in 2014. yeah I think that makes sense um so yeah as a full-time student at Columbia during during this time period trying to do all juggle all these different things so here's an interesting comment because this is a name I haven't heard from for a long time so Alfa Romeo one five six you need to bring on Michael yawn and get his perspective do we know whatever happened to Mike Leon um I uh I had some like brief interactions I mean he started talking to me when he started talking to me about how he was chasing cannibals in China I kind of cut like okay I'm have fun with that um because he was he was the kid he was the kid in this early phase right he had some amazing photos he had some great reporting um his blog was was really really important in those days and and then perhaps uh let's just say there was some shark jumping along the way um perhaps um but that's a name Alfa Romeo won five that I haven't heard for a long time but it evokes this era we're talking about yeah the pioneers of the military military reporting space so you get your degree like you say at College well it was Columbia right and there was kind of a cohort of military veterans at Columbia in those days to do a bunch of things right there in New York um now did you use your GI Bill to get your degree yes yeah I did um I I and I used it believe me I used all of it the GI Bill post 911 GI Bill the yellow ribbon program the Pell Grant state tuition assistance uh and I still cash I think I cashed in like ten thousand dollars in um in uh in bonds and then I think I went like twenty three thousand dollars in debt what that happened yeah so yes I used the 911 GI Bill and then some yeah so that was a great benefit you know so if we if we did write by our warfighters post 911 so that's Jim Webb that's Paul rykoff and iava did good work in those days um who is his ledge Affairs guy I'm blanking on his name his great great guy worked closely with Webb's office um it's funny because um Senator McCain who's a controversial figure uh on this channel I I talk about him as an aviator and every time I do I I get flame sprayed by um folks who are high and right about his existence um but he opposed that GI bill because he said how are we going to pay for it and his military advisor guy uh was a classmate of mine or is a classmate of mine who I remember talking to him at uh the Navy Notre Dame game in in Baltimore he's like hey how are we gonna gonna pay for it I'm like I don't know but it seems like it's a cool benefit and people are going to use it in a good way and I know that Senator Webb is very keen on it and and so forth and so on but I just thought it was interesting there's always a negative to any initiative but I think ultimately this played out to be a fantastic not unlike the first GI Bill after World War II that paid for basically every fat cat for the next 50 years that's where they got their start they served in World War II they got their education they went on to create you know the greatest country on the face of the Earth yeah the the post 911 GI bill I mean it it there's a housing allowance um so they're they're basically paying you to go to school um there's uh there's like a book allowance I mean there's all kinds of different things in there um in the army or the military in general I should say they've gotten a lot better with like sort of like job training for guys there's a whole transition program for that um they've done they've definitely made a lot of progress in that regard so you mentioned some of your early assignments you know you're always running to the sound of gunfire so you're now a journalist in fact I got a super cool picture of you with your journalist's hat on although you don't have a head-on let me find this picture here we go that's that's pretty badass that's in uh notice the Siggy you're you got a ciggy going on there yeah I smoked at that time yeah uh that was Northwest Syria um during the during the Civil War it was that was early on too that was like 2014 um that I went over there so who are you working for in that in that capacity that was working for a little startup website that you know I had no top cover whatsoever um I didn't even I know that much about journalism um so it was really just like and I mean it really was winging it I was out there flapping um I used what connections I had and was able to make and got smuggled into Syria um with the the pkk actually smuggled us across the border um me and a couple other journalists and we were over there for you know a couple weeks so in some ways you're capacity as a military journalist is even more risky hairy than yeah yeah time is as special as a Green Beret or a ranger it was it was like Robin sage like the the training exercise that you do unconventional warfare training exercise I mean getting like you know linking up with the auxiliary and then they drive you up into the mountains and you go to this like gorilla camp where all the Hutts are like camouflaged in the side of the mountain and you go inside and there's all the like different flags of the different Kurdish movements Kurdish Independence movements and you one by one shake hands with all the people in the camp I mean that's that's straight out of Robin sage so did you leverage that training to keep your head in those environments I I mean it was certainly helpful in the sense that like it helped me like I wasn't surprised or I I was like oh I recognize this this is exactly what I was trained to do you know it was helpful in that regard um but I mean listen there's no air support there's no Medevac there's I mean if you get into trouble you are on your own like you are out there flapping and so it's exhilarating in the sense that you're like living by your wits and you're having to negotiate your own way and figure out everything on your own um I mean doing that type of Journalism doing it that way this was not embedded journalism this was just out there winging it um and I mean yeah that that's inherently very dangerous in a war zone so I think what we started to realize at that time was the the Paradigm was shifting rapidly in terms of who was a real journalism outfit and and so forth and so on I think at military.com we started to realize that if we through the right Talent at a situation we could break down walls sure on the public affairs side would normally they'd be like well you're not the Washington Post you're not the New York Times no and then when they saw the impact that we had and people stopped being uh sort of brand loyal they were sort of brand agnostic so you're out there you're having uh interfaces you're you're discovering things that other stringers or other major news organizations aren't and so now in this digital landscape uh consumers are starting to realize hey ground truth doesn't come from traditional sources you know um and I think the the best example of this is you scored an interview with President Assad um so talk to us about that how did that happen and what was that like well yeah I mean In fairness there was in the room with me uh a journalist from The New Yorker and a journalist from The New York Times um and we were just part of a very small group that was selected for this um but I mean yeah you're you're absolutely right and when you hear people talk about well like oh that isn't the New York Times well they they just sound like a dinosaur at this point I mean and for the reader I mean that stuff doesn't matter to them like who's on the byline um you know is it is it this is that I mean those are like inherently very elitist conversations that the average American just has no interest in whatsoever um but as far as um Assad that that was my second trip to Syria and that was um so the first trip was uh allegedly an illegal border crossing but the the second trip was um at the invitation of the Syrian government so in that case um I flew into Beirut and took a bus across the border to Syria and then onwards to Damascus and it was part uh I mean it was a bus it was literally a busload of journalists um and think tank people and some other colorful characters and this was part of the regime ostensibly trying to open up to the west to open up to Western journalism and have some sort of uh transparency I mean that that was how how it sold anyway um so we were brought in and um there was a uh it was a seminar event where you would go in every day um to this big uh Auditorium in Damascus and uh they would have lecturers and panels and stuff like that and some of them were okay some of them were surreal um some of them were just you know bizarre propaganda um so it really ran the gamut um but then on one of these days I was taken aside by one of the event organizers and they're like well yeah uh tonight you're gonna go up to the palace and you're going to uh have an interview with President Assad I'm like huh okay sounds good so I mean what was what was it like was he candid was it weird did he you know was it cryptic what what no no not weird not not probably what you expect um I took a car ride up to the I believe it's the Summer Palace that's up in the hills um came out and uh went walked into the foyer and uh there was a minder there um who you know after a few moments she said okay you can now proceed up the steps and uh meet president Assad and I figured we're going to go up there and get a briefing on like etiquette or some you know something like that right so I start walking I'm the first one I start walking up the steps and as I'm like halfway up I hear good evening hello and I woke up and there's president Assad and I shook his hand and walked the rest of the way up the steps and we went into a little office and sat down and did the interview and um you know no it's it's not it's not it was not odd or or creepy or or maybe what people imagine I mean he's a very personable guy um he has a lot of interests I think outside of government um we had I I mean it it's a appears to be a fairly candid conversation I thought there was nothing that was like off limits um in some ways it's a frustrating conversation um but you know you have to understand that President Assad is sort of that outward facing public messenger of the regime um and so he's very polished his English is quite good um and he has answers to to the questions that you're going to ask now you know is there are there are value judgments to be made you know is Assad a dictator is he a war criminal I mean these are all like important conversations to be had but well the the other thing at the time you interviewed him this is before this is early on in the conflict and the other things the the the chemical attacks that sort of stuff came some of them some of them had happened I mean this is 2017 by now oh okay okay yeah the barrel bombing I mean all that stuff was the Russians were already there okay okay so did that come up in conversation at all you're like sir did you what do you think about you know chemical attacks on your own citizens that kind of was that part of the conversation or was that there was some conversation about you know are you you know are you a war criminal uh how does that how does that sit with you um there were conversations um it was um it was actually in Bernard at the New York Times I'm really asking a lot of questions about you know people being tortured in government prisons and he was in he totally denied that said you know where's your evidence do you have evidence do you have evidence and you know I think uh several years later you know Ann published a story and she did have evidence she developed that story quite a bit so um I think it was probably a frustrating conversation and in some of those regards but I mean Assad you know very much like plowed right through those questions um without any sort of hesitation yeah I mean that's that's an amazing audience that you got there um at that time so um you continue to develop your resume as a military journalist um and you know we were to a bunch during the the years I was at military.com um and then you became part of another startup um there was a special forces Focus um kind of a thing um and and so let's talk about the the balance of your you know military journalism career up to the point that you start doing the the team House part of that that uh um brand uh so I mean you're also you got a million irons and a million fires and but I think any aspiring journalists military or otherwise need to understand that uh you know to to make this a viable occupation um you need to be both agile and uh and able to jump on opportunities uh you know you change your jersey a lot let's say I guess being a baseball player is kind of a rough analogy just watch Moneyball again the other night um which I always love the way that these players are always either getting sent down or traded or so forth and so on uh there's no job security and that's kind of like being a military journalist and uh I think yeah we've talked about the Pioneer um years of military journalism and you're one of the sort of standard bearers for that first wave of War Fighters that aspire to do sort of thing things that there was no path there was no pipeline yeah for what what you chose to do there was a sense that you could be good at it and it could be a way to make a living um and and so you just keep going there's also a sense that like if you have the balls you can make your own way in this line of work you know it there it is sort of a uh a Libertarian you know anarchic sort of uh model of Journalism that like anyone can participate and if you can perform if you can get some big Scoops if you can report accurately and succinctly um if you're willing to go overseas and report from combat zones if you're willing to do things that perhaps you know more established or Legacy journalists aren't willing to do um you can make your way and you can develop some sort of a niche in this in this line of work and I mean it's a great great job I love this job but good lord it's a terrible industry it's just a horrible industry so this is a conversation we had on your Channel at the team house um let's let's delve in sure now talking about how the media landscape has changed better for worse um what are some initial thoughts about that well yeah I don't know if I'm even qualified to speak about the media writ large right um but I'll just speak from like my personal experience um when I started writing and when I started doing this there was no one else not even setting journalism aside there was no other like special ops war on terror guys in the media at all I think maybe Tim Kennedy actually may have been the only person you really saw out there um and I remember that quite specifically and I understood that what I was doing was breaking the rules it was breaking sort of like the the unwritten rules of Special Operations that you don't talk um you certainly don't become a journalist and start like airing dirty laundry in public right I understood that I was breaking a lot of norms um and I and I did that knowingly and I did it intentionally I was I was prepared to break some glass um at that time yeah there was nothing else out there like it and to this day there's still a a void um there's a lot of like National level reporting but there's still to this day not a lot of reporting of like you know soldiers entered and cleared a building what happened inside that room there's still not a lot of reporting along those lines um but what what changed from you know I was I was very much an M you know I suppose a product of the 2010s digital media environment you know whether I like it or not I existed in that World um and grew out of it um since that time I mean social media came around and and I I would argue that it did change a lot of the things that I've been talking about here um previously the only online presence of special ops was like a couple like weird message boards where like some old guys would hang out and basically talk about how shitty all the young people are and and bad-mouth people who want to join special ops um they they were kind of like the internet Gatekeepers and then you know the next wave in the 2010s kind of washed them away and made them completely irrelevant from that perspective um and then in the as we get into uh you know so the social media error what happens is that you have all these um you know global war on terror veterans Special Operations and others jumping on social media and they're using that as a platform to begin telling their story good bad or indifferent whatever you think about it they're starting to post pictures from their deployments they're starting to talk about their experiences they're starting to get out there and they're also some of them are starting to write books they're starting to do podcasts and so the environment drastically shifts where you had these these kind of strange web forums you know into in the 1990s into the 2000s you get into the 2010s and you get like websites like the ones I work for in Mill bloggers or military journalists if you want to call it that and then eventually they get displaced by social media and from my point of view they the that type of reporting um largely got displaced by you know veterans joining social media well if you think about just the user experience Circa mid-auts right where it was a home page mattered right he would stress about tier one nav tier two nav how big how big should the logo be um pop-ups yeah um you know people would bookmark along the top of your browser um you know and and that was the end that was the way into information right you know so what you aggregated under the news feed or the news tier one channel vertical mattered a lot and now that's inconsequential it's just like my homepage for my YouTube channel if you look at the metrics nobody goes there and I stress about you know what are the thumbnails look like all aggregated am I using the real truth or deep Intel too often but that's not anybody's entry point into my content right and so when you talk about the way that people get informed and how do you stay informed in a in a balanced way these days um it's completely inside out so we were talking about okay home page and then you drill down and you get to an article and that would tell you what you wanted to know now you see the article first because it's either on your Facebook or your threads or Twitter or Instagram or Tick Tock or whatever and then you go maybe you click into it and you arrive at a landing page that's on a website and maybe there's some other thumbnails or links that allows you to migrate around that website but then you back out back to your social media feed yeah so it's completely different but like you and I where people don't care about the outlet they don't care about the byline they're not interested in that yeah right all they and they just care about facts right and that's the other thing that the just like if you look at the the comments thread that's going on right now that has little to nothing to do with our discussion by the way um but you know these guys are keeping each other honest you know um and there was a Russian bot that I had to like put into the Penalty Box while we're talking here but um you know it's let me just say it's self-policing same with comment sections at any outlet and same with your feed at your your social media site of choice so at some level the role of editors is less policing fast tax than it is just keeping the trains running or based on what the feedback loop is telling them reacting you know and and so that's a complete change from when when you know we were doing our thing initially I'd be kind of curious to hear your thoughts too ward of like I I'm I'm definitely of the impression that well things are certainly still changing and I'm wondering if we're going into now in the 2020s we're going into the next iteration of whatever this is going to be um is that is that like uh Gen 2 social media or is it something else because I mean Facebook was a thing when I started off that was like an important platform to be on and to use now it's completely useless like it's archaic there and and I go on there and it's so there's so much garbage on there I don't even know how to use the platform anymore um Twitter seems like it's going by the wayside quite quickly you mean X right right so um you know me and uh my colleague Sean Naylor are we're on sub stack and and we write special ops news on there some really big investigative stories um and I I really like that platform but I don't know I I'm not uh you know smart enough to be able to say that's the future of Journalism I don't know that I mean what do you see as like being maybe the next step so I I I think it's changing so rapidly even as we speak right you said Twitter and Twitter no longer exists now it's X um and I think people have thought that the momentum was shifting back towards the Facebook the meta body of properties and that they'd scored this coup with threads but the ux of threads is terrible you know and and the things like that make using Twitter fun and informative like gifts and widgets that could allow you to Auto populate your Twitter feed don't exist in Threads because although they built it on the Instagram their big ideas to load me and you into the metaverse oh hey there Ward oh yeah this is a good idea it doesn't replicate the the Twitter you user experience so as a result it's going to fail so they had an initial surge of millions of you know sign ups but the daily usage has gone plummeted you know and I know they're probably freaking about that and uh Zuckerberg's probably jumping up and down on his product team's heads but um in any case what I think of and this is this is how unorthodox the veteran media space has been you know we think of you know the the guys we know some of them have gone into traditional media like Jim laporta um and and guys like that um some have kind of been hybrids like Paul zuldra you know who created duffel blog worked with me we're the mighty went on to be the editor of task and purpose and now he's gone uh to the other side of the aisle and and uh works on a defense contractor side um and then there's others who have forged a path of perhaps the highest impact but under this sort of entertainment brand or uh you know merchants of like t-shirts and and coffee right so Black Rifle Coffee Company Matt best and those guys uh Nick at Ranger up um you know nine line all of these companies that basically started as uh your Grunt Style um that started as t-shirt companies and then they become they use the social media as a way to promote the product and then they just become their own like social media entities particularly Matt best and Matt's a super cool guy uh I I work with them a bunch when we're we're the mighty out in La um in fact I'm an extra in uh in in range what's the name of that movie range um 15 right and so uh it's when I was working in LA and they're like hey come on out you guys can be in the movie um so you know got to be very close to JT and Matt and and and all the gang there and black rival coffee company was just starting up at that time um and so Evan and those guys we we got to know them as well so these guys are entrepreneurs with a capital e you know um that where they've succeeded is not easy but what they the aha moment was we can use things like YouTube to entertain and Delight a constituency you know Aggregate and proliferate that that audience and then we can transact and and you know sell them stuff so whether it's coffee t-shirts a movie whatever but in the process they become influencers and I don't mean influencers like a Kim Kardashian kind of way but I mean influencers in what is your political Outlook even on the margins and I don't think but I mean they've also moved on to like their second wave like they're like act two right because I mean you don't see like Matt best in the media anymore you don't see those dudes like doing that kind of stuff and I don't know what they're doing but presumably they're like uh like uh Nick at Ranger up also another guy he's moved on like they're they matured you know as I hope we all do um and like moved on to like their second act I mean it in a good way that way yeah you're right you're right so they have they have podcasts they have like Paul started a basically Media Company um that is anchored by a Paul reichoff I mean um and uh you're right so again these guys are are entrepreneurs this is what informed their success as as you know leaders in the military both enlisted and on the officer side um that were you know showed courage Under Fire did the right stuff always gravitated like you towards you know tier one special ops or other things they didn't want to be in the rear with the gear that's the other thing they're all highly credible in terms of what did you do Daddy when you were in the war it's like well I killed bad guys you know what else you want to talk about right and so um that is what was the sort of root note and so when they go out and they make you know videos you know two minute videos of them shooting machine guns in the desert with like Rat Patrol and and chicks and bikinis or whatever you know it's like they're they have the cred to do that and then oh by the way they are business people in in the the highest most serious sense of the word you know and again I I think I think my girl had to like grow up past some of that stuff though because the war was look for me it was 13 years ago I'm not getting any younger here I just turned 40 this month so I mean that that kind of stuff I mean it's fun to reflect back on and talk about a little bit but it's not really relevant to to anything beyond my personal experience anymore um and I I mean I I just think like I mean I don't mean this like in a negative negative or a derogatory manner I just think like as I look around at all these personalities I see that they've all kind of like grown up and matured in different ways and the that type of Media stuff that we were all doing 10 years ago doesn't seem so relevant anymore now um it's like it's moving on to something else well plus there's a shelf life to our experience right yeah so yeah you know I mean the wars that you fought not to mention the the war between the wars that I fought fought um WWE Cold War and we won that one God damn it um you know the folks out there now were like hey Grandpa I get it but I'm you know on the front lines of this NATO thing right I'm in the Adriatic or the island ionian sea doing eight hour shorties trying to keep the Russians from coming West or I'm sailing through the Straits of Taiwan you know on the small boy this is the stories I'm hearing yep I'm like bro awesome it's great to hear that you're doing what you train to do you're leading a life of the greatest consequence so what do you need my C stories for you don't right and that's the good news and so I think to your point you know the the ranger up gang and the and the the brcc dudes that started as Article 15 guys you know that had a shelf life they're smart enough to see that we're running out of knots here you know um being the wacky shoot rifles in the desert guys has a time and a place but now we better triangulate this into something that has you know a staying power and I think in the case of of the brcc guys when you look who's involved it is all the the uh the Oracle 15 guys right except for Evan who founded it and and so there's a media arm our good friend Marty scovind is one of their main reporters there and he does fantastic work and so they have various divisions within this company that really makes vet influencers maybe some of the most important folks in America right now and I think to your point people miss that that that reality you know and and what have the the war the Post 9 11 War veterans gone on to do in some cases it's guys um uh like uh who am I thinking of that uh Massachusetts congressmen who worked for Petraeus is a Marine sorry um somebody in chat tell me what I'm talking about um you know so either they've gone into politics or they've been in think tanks um and uh you know or they've gone into the the business space or the media space uh in in a variety of ways so the impact is huge and I think in some ways um this this generation which is I guess you say Millennials who went to war um who felt in a sense uh betrayed by the motivation behind invading Iraq particularly this is where um you know Phil Carter and Matt slavin and Tammy Duckworth and all of these people who I met at the convention in Denver in 08 um and I was I just remember thinking in earlier eras all of these people would have been Republicans you know and and here or you know moderate Republicans here they're kind of moderate to Progressive Democrats I just remember that struck me very profoundly and uh so that's what has informed certainly the DC ecosystem you know and again I'm talking think tanks staffers the Talking Heads you see on TV um you know all of these kinds of folks uh but again I I look I just saw JT on a podcast uh or a YouTube uh uh thing my son loves uh he's a my son is a bow hunter and he loves uh those Seth maulton thank you that's exactly what I'm thinking of Seth maulton is who I meant to say so Seth maulton was a single Marine downrange with uh the during The anbar Awakening with a bat phone that went right to Petraeus you know and and so I know a lot of people like to present pain him as a progressive but the dude was a badass during the war in Iraq make no mistake and I've met him and and got to know him pretty well um he's a great American um and I'll go to the mat over that um but he's a good example of that era that pivoted into politics you know and I keep waiting for these folks to step up on a national level and kind of Kick the old stirs out I you know I I I'm just waiting for a millennial or even uh gen Z to to step up there I mean I don't know what Gen X is going to do but we got to get us Boomers out of the equation please not to mention um you know pre-boomers that that are in the mix uh so that's a whole other conversation so talk to us about the team house how did this come about and uh uh what are some of the highlights of what you guys have done besides the episode you did with me it's another one of those things that came about somewhat unexpectedly I mean I left the the startup company that I was working for I left abruptly um you know I stuck around for quite a while you know because I was kind of like co-founder and kind of had an emotional attachment to it but when the CEO is a lunatic there's only so much you can do right So eventually I had to step away that was like four or five years ago um the I think literally the day I did that um I had uh I was trying to start up another company that uh in a totally unrelated field but I had all this camera equipment and live streaming gear and everything in a studio I was setting up and I was like well what do you know I can I can launch right back into what I do and um so I think it was like that very next day I did the first episode of the team house which like when all these live streams or a podcast start um they're like kind of a joke in the beginning because you don't know what you're doing um so it took a little while for us to get uh up and running right um covid hits we're fortunate that because it's a live stream we can do these things remotely and continue to build the business um we had a producer come on it was me and my co-host Dave Park um you know it was just us then a producer comes on uh D who's been huge for helping us grow last summer we moved into a bigger Studio we built out new sets um kind of redid things and now this summer I'm kind of like doing some more work down there to reset things again for the fall um and we've just kind of built and built and built interview by interview we just did episode 223 last night um and I mean we've had some I mean we've had big guests and and less lesser known guests I mean which is kind of intentional I love to interview people who don't normally do interviews um but we've had all the way up to the former Secretary of Defense on the show too um we do a lot of special ops guys we do a lot of intelligence Community people some federal law enforcement um all kinds of different stuff counterintelligence um you know uh guys who is uh a Marine in in Afghanistan or an 82nd Airborne guy in Iraq but it's a heavy emphasis on Special Ops and the intelligence Community I would say that's kind of like been our wheelhouse but you do it's a Renaissance sort of brand and that you guys go all kinds of places that are CIA analysts undercover ATF agents yeah and the other the other thing that you guys are good at is letting the conversation simmer um and I think if you're you know if the listener slash viewer is willing to just sort of sit back for deep immersion on uh the topic then then that's that's the place to go so again the podcast slash youtube channel is the team house uh Jack and uh his co-host Dave uh do a fantastic job there um they have the comfy couches and they smoke cigars and drink Scotch up there in Brooklyn um right across the Williamsburg Bridge I I was supposed to go there in person um unfortunately it didn't work out the next time you're in town let us know man we'll uh we'll we'll have some stogies yes I'm there I'm I'm still there so you you I'm going to take you up on that please um textbook Murphy's law came out a few years ago it's a fantastic read I've reread it a couple times uh prepping for my parents on their Channel and this conversation is fantastic so if you haven't read Murphy's Law check it out action-packed also Jack as you saw here is a an intelligent erudite gent so when he opines on something it's worth noting so Jack love you brother uh thanks for spending some time with me today and I hope our paths cross again very soon yeah absolutely thank you ward all right all right that'll do it for this episode thanks to everybody we had a a smallish audience today but uh appreciate you guys hanging out with us hopefully you enjoyed the unorthodox look at another side of the combat element the ranger special ops green brace sniper part and as you can see Jack's an amazing guy so as always if you're not already a subscriber become one so you don't miss anything if you'd like to help support the channel as some of you did with the super chat you can use the super thanks the heart icon below or become a patron at patreon.com Ward Carol and as always in the meantime I look forward to talking to you again very soon we have some cool episodes coming up uh in a few days so so stay tuned all right you guys thanks

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 62,962

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Id: nOXqwN0VuTI

Length: 101min 44sec (6104 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023