Jocko Podcast 276: DRAGO. Rebelling Against Communist Poland, to Patriotic Navy SEAL

this is jocko podcast number 276 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening archival publications of the institute of national remembrance poland court name court of the pomeranian military district b judge lieutenant colonel joseph sobitsky court file number redacted prosecutor's office file number redacted security service file number redacted case examination date 1981 12 14 case conclusion date 1982 12 28 case description file in the criminal case against redacted name suspected of printing and distributing leaflets containing false information that is crime based on article 48 section 3 of the decree of december 12 1981 on martial law detained temporarily on february 11 1982 based on the decision of the military prosecutor's office february 12 1982 the accused acting together and in consultation with redacted name produced brochures for distribution which could cause civil disturbances and which contained false information on activity of authorities of the people's republic of poland in the period of martial law and calling upon civilians to oppose the authorities and to organize an illegal underground organization that is crime based on article 48 section 3 of the decree of december 12 1981 on martial law based on the ruling of the court of the pomeranian military district redacted name is sentenced to three years of imprisonment and three years of loss of civil rights a charge to be paid on behalf of the state treasury in the amount of 4200 pln reimbursement of one-third of the costs of court proceedings so that is a document from a book the book is called camp posey and it's written by an individual called naval who is a member of the polish grom special forces and the document is from the case against a man whose name is redacted in the document his name is thomas zeron thomas was born and raised in communist poland and he made a stand against the authoritarian communist regime and was sent to prison for his actions sent to prison for speaking out against the evils of communism and he ended up in prison communist prison and i i guess i need not talk about the condition of communist prisons because we've discussed them on this podcast before but it goes saying goes without saying that those prisons are not for the faint of heart but luckily thomas zeron possessed an incredibly strong will and he survived prison and he made it out of prison and eventually he made it out of poland and eventually he made it to the united states where he eventually joined the navy and became a seal this is also where thomas zeron took on a new name a nickname drago and this is where i was lucky enough to serve alongside him on and off the battlefield and this is where we became brothers and it is an honor to have him here tonight to share his story with us drago welcome thank you it's awesome to be here on your podcast uh i follow it for a long time and eventually i thank you for inviting me and um it's honored to be here yeah somebody on some something reached out and said well why don't you have drago on i was like anytime drago wants to come on no no factor of course so this is like one of the craziest stories as far as backstories go not just for joining the seal teams but joining the military in general i mean it's pretty straightforward what happens to most american kids right oh i want to be a soldier they join the army the navy the the air force the marine corps that's what they do man your story is about as crazy as it gets for backstories i guess it is but for me maybe not crazy but it's different and uh just even from uh well let me just back out a little bit uh when i came to america i came with a bag of clothes and 10 phoenix the germans like less than 10 cents in my pocket so everything i have everything i own i owe it to america to you to american people so i promised myself that i would be the best citizen that america can have i'll do everything to be the as good citizen as i can be so uh yes this beginnings were very hard but but like no there's not nothing unusual you can't don't speak english you you i didn't come here with expectations like hey give me a job and make tons of money and i have i just wanted to work i just wanted to leave free man and that was given to me so that promise i i tried to i still keep it deep in my heart that yes i am i'm successful i've succeeded but there is so much more to do for america for our country and that's what i that was my goal be the best american citizen america can have so let's let's take it back a little bit before you get over here with less than 10 cents in your pocket so you're born in poland is that right you're born in poland yes i was born you're born in poland what did your parents do my father was communist he was uh he was a professor he was a teacher then became became a party member they joined the polish that's really not communism more socialism they're very the same we can talk about the differences later but so my father was a party member my mother was was a teacher she was an elementary school teacher so when i was born my father was already starting his career with political communist polish communist party now is that is that something that you you know if you're if you're living in poland and you see the communist party on the rise your dad looks around and says hey you know what i kind of gotta i kind of gotta go with the flow and get with this party if i'm going to advance my career in life i think that's what it was uh but you know he came from very poor family too so the opportunity they gave it to him say look if you just close your eyes on some moral aspect of socialism and just follow that our doctrine and you're gonna be successful and he fell for it he went he became very successful eventually he ended up in warsaw in the pretty much the top communist government as a one of the directors of uh ministry of art and culture so he was successful yeah but it sounds like your mom wasn't quite as on board with looking away from some of those immoral aspects of communism uh neither my mom neither my father's mom i remember that that was big rift in our entire family i remember as a little kid maybe six seven years old visiting my grandmother and i mean my father's mother my grandmother and she always was telling me communists are evil they are devils socialists as evil socialism as evil system and i always had the image of socialist or communist as the guy with the big tail with the big horns breathing fire i remember i even asked my grandmother that they breathed fire and uh my grandma yeah they are wars and they they murder people quietly on this on the sides and uh that they are just really bad as evil that so that in my mind was always communism and socialism as for the evil system it is um and i remember my father tried to protest mom look i'm not evil i'm not really uh i'm i'm your son look at him you are if you sold your soul to socialism or communism if you that you're part of these murders that are quietly happening in poland so you are evil and i don't even want to consider you to be my son that she was very adamant about it so for me i was like always remember before going to bed we were my my grandmother teach me how to pray so i was praying that whenever we always close the prayer of god please help us take all the communism communist and socialists out of poland so i just just kind of grew up with it and there's never different and the the rift with my mom and and my father i still remember that was i think it was i don't remember what age it was but we wanted to go to church my mother wanted to go to church uh on sunday and i still remember my father standing in front of the door say we cannot go because i'm going to lose my job we cannot go i'm going to lose my job we are not going to charge the charge that the communism and charge and socialism and charge are not compatible and we're just not going there so my grandmother was visiting at the same time so my mother left they couldn't he couldn't stop her my grandmother passed me through the window to my mom it was on the first floor and we still went to the church but uh that was pretty much constant raped eventually that that marriage fell apart my father went with the communists and socialists uh i i stayed with mom my brother my younger sister stay with mom so that's was it was very difficult too for us because at that time in poland it changed now but at that time in poland if your parents divorced you as a child were stigmatized so you were the divorcee you know the exactly that parents would say hey you don't go play with this guy because his parents just got divorced he's just divorcee like there was a kind of derogatory name in polish that we work out so they actually can't toughen me out because i end up actually beating up some of these guys and they they left me along they were not my friends but that they never bothered me again so that worked so what what uh you're going to school every day is this like normal is that what's happening in poland in the in the this is in the late 70s huh or the 70s that was 1968. i remember i'm 60 years old so i was born 15 years after second world war so this is i was born with a less this time distance that we have between we our beginning between september 11 and uh and and today and this is still so fresh in our minds right september 11th zach happened yesterday so i was born just 15 years after the second world war so i was still playing the ruins in the broken houses there were some people were still finding bombs unexploded bombs and explosives uh kind of interesting so so are you going to school is that is that normal are they state-run schools is there communism are you being taught communism in schools oh yes absolutely i have actually a couple notes i found from my uh from my notebook from school those elementary school like later classes like seventh grade about communism and socialism yes you were indoctrinated from the very beginning in socialism and communism and the things are very uh funny there because the government the socialist government they feel like they need to have a total control and the russia they have to but otherwise people just people don't subscribe to slavery so so socialism is not really that good systems and they don't want it so they they uh i remember they forced us in fifth grade i was in fifth grade elementary school and we had to learn russian i was not really i was never the best student and then they throw the russian on me as like for the [ __ ] we like to learn this [ __ ] i don't want to learn it and i'll kind of open up in my in the class i say look i'm polish i don't want to go into a land russian language i i don't want to learn it i don't feel like i'd rather learn english or rather learn german oh my god i had no idea what's going to happen but next thing i was pull out the principal's office uh my mother she was a teacher in different schools so they they they called the police the secret set police came in they picked my mom they drove her to uh to principal when i was already waiting there scared [ __ ] was and they they say so what happened so that teacher explained that i am anti-socialist apparently i don't like socialism and i am also objecting to russian language indoctrinate the russian indoctrination so my mom is all in tears she's scared all shaking then they dragged my brother into it my sister had no idea what's going on so we sit up there or there and they were very clear i still remember that if it happens again these kids will go to orphanage that government will make them good citizens if you cannot do that so this is your last warning and so i had to rise up a little bit i never changed my attitude i was always outspoken but i remember that fear that my mom lived for that in the rest of our lives until and the rest of the the time when we were still growing up and the state could take the kids away from her so that that's uh the other interesting part of it is that like uh today i have 11 years old 12 years old daughter 11 years old son i'm looking over them like hulk i don't let them go anywhere where i can see them i i can play but i have to be always able to go and assist if something happens what did it happen in poland poland i remember i was seven eight i was eight years old i was driving across the town taking bus crossing the streets going to somewhere else and uh it was like there's no big deal all the kids they were just 10 miles away from school where we have to commute and we just commute it was like no big deal my mom just bought me a ticket so every time i got into the bus if i could because they were so crowded you just have to pull yourself in and sometimes the doors are closed so you're just holding yourself in it your legs are sticking out but you're just going to school so that was kind of yeah there was like we i don't know it is because we felt we did feel safe my mom apparently feels safe about it and maybe this is because there was no internet at the time so some of the crime that happened was not very transparent it was not very readily the information about it was not readily available so people didn't know something bad happened so i remember going to kindergarten so i was that was i think i was five and a half years old so we had to go from uh from our home i took my younger brother so he was around me three and a half and by hand we are carrying the house shoes in another hand we had like the house shoes what's what's house shoes slippers because in kindergarten you cannot wear those shoes that you wear outside you have to have a slipper so it has to be clean everything so we had the slippers in our hands we're going to around the school around the street across the street actually a friend of mine got killed on that street by the motorcycle so but it was like no not a big deal so you when you go across the street you look left you look right and make sure nothing is there and we just walk across the city so we just walk to a kindergarten by ourselves being six and a half plus six five years old so today i think i would go into jail for letting things like that happen to my kids but at the time was just that was very common in poland that's nothing wrong so you're you're you get this experience in fifth grade where you basically say you don't want to learn russian they they crack down on your mom your brother your sister yes did you at any point were you so were you so you saw what happened between your mom and your dad you'd been told your whole life that communism was evil did so did you just kind of suppress that a little bit to to keep from getting taken away from your mom i did but maybe not intentionally really at that time i was not political i was just like i would just annoy that i have to have the language that my grandmother tells me those people are not really good and they don't do good things in poland they uh they are prayers poland so i don't have to learn that language so there was nearly not so much political but the state was very political the state was very uh they were very cautious with citizens they wanted to control they did control almost every aspect of social life that's what socialism is uh so that didn't really that the the political part came later when i started learning about the mortars the political murders the oppression of socialism uh and then what was became a little bit more aware of what's going on then reading about the people disappearing from the street and like never heard from them again uh dad become a little bit more then i became more aware and so then in late 70s in poland it had so much so enough of these lies because what happened is we had the empty shelves there was nothing to eat and you can buy food you can buy clothes you cannot buy furniture but all you hear how great is in poland in socialist system if you look at america people are sleeping on the street and they you know we had no access to an information they show those tents or they show those shacks where poor people sometimes stay or they show the worst thing about america so that that was just people knew that this lie so they got so fed up that eventually no matter what that socialist press said people didn't believe if they say that this is this is brown people think they know that they're lying even if it was brown this how how they had enough it had to explode and that that thing was accumulating first the people lost the faith in in the government they lost their faith in the the the truth that's written the truth the lies that are being told they stopped paying attention to it so at the end no matter what they say people didn't believe they had enough of it and it exploded in the solidarity trade union movement where that people just raised up and say enough is enough we had enough of socialism and communism when you're when you're um growing up you talked about fifth grade you're in eighth grade you're in ninth grade you're in tenth grade and i know we're gonna end up talking about this at some point you learn how to fight like not just what you you learn how to street fight and you learn how to fight on some level did you what did you train you trained taekwondo did you train boxing what did you train i started with boxing just regular boxing and i remember you know being just my mom growing up uh my younger brother and sister so sometimes i had to fight for my brother too that's quite often and so the box boxing was important for me to kind of like uh codify what are you already new to just learn maybe this technical skills now and it worked great i mean i really liked it but then uh again so my brother got beat up at school i think because we're divorcees so there's people just so i was remember i was sick and uh i said well i need to go to school then i just pack my stuff i went to school i found the big guy that guy was like huge so i just knock him out and and and knock him out so bad that this guy show up with his mom later in the evening in my apartment and it's like his mother like see this your son did that to my son he can lose his eye i mean i look at the guy from like behind the corner and i was like holy [ __ ] the guy has no eye he's like big swollen hair and so my mom just kind of coming in and she's like look at me i'm like half of his size and this guy is huge and he's crying so uh it's like so that guy bit your son i was like yeah yeah you see what he did to him so if your son that big let him happen to that i think he deserves that why don't you just guys leave so um yeah they left was there a boxing gym was there a boxing yeah there was one there actually there was a program or something there was official program yes there actually there was the police club i didn't know about that time but the clubs like this were on usually by the police so so yeah i belonged they called it guardia so so yeah i belong to this club but when i nailed this guy i broke my hand i didn't know it so that put me and so some of my friends went on their first boxing matches and stuff i just stay i had to stay home and okay then we just moved to different towns so but that was my style was with the boxing and i liked that i got involved in the eventually taekwondo and that's kind of funny story too because my attitude was a bit different and the taekwondo they practiced in poland at that time was there's two different type of taekwondo itf wtf i so we did the itf there's like no covering or anything just go and took it out uh so we went to the first polish championship and i didn't know any better they put this thing on me i was like how do i fight with that but okay so i just keep knocking these guys out they just keep progressing so i get every time i finish my fight i say yes you have minus points for the being brutal your fight is brutal you can do that so so i mean it was like it was funny and the final fight uh final fight for the first place i knocked the guy out and there's so the guy's laying there the guy that judge comes to me say like you you're being disqualified from the program you i mean not quite disqualified but he's the winner so then you know they announced okay this is uh the winner is saying so right here the guys are late they're passed out so i was like okay well but anyway if i guess it was i was not very though my fight was not very sports like because i got a lot of whistles and booing after i went this is a second to take my second place and then kind of ended up and then you know the prison came in and uh actually they helped me a lot in prison i was i'm glad that uh i was able to help other political prisoners as a friend of mine who actually i met again when i visited poland recently so since i didn't have anything to do up there just sit and we just just hey you are solidarity i'm so dirty let's go train so we were training he said look what you did to me help me later survive the beatings that i got from the guards and the there's a and all that stuff so so so you were go let before we get to being in prison so now it's the late 70s now at some point you must you made a decision that you're not you're not going to comply with communism you're going to you're going to fight against it yes the initial i didn't even know how to but the the the first thing actually when i when it would start changing my when when it started making me aware what's really going on in poland was uh i started listening to radio free europe and the voice of america and bbc this station you could go to prison for listening to it so i remember my mom was like in panic oh my god i can hear you get more pillows on your over your head get more those big uh uh uh blanket so neighbors don't hear that she wasn't fair she could she could go to prison for that so uh so i was listening to bbc how old are you at that time i think i was 12 13 14. so so as i was getting all that and i was getting more interested in what's going on this is what i learned that you know the socialists are actually quite killing people who are inconvenient to them or those people disappear like we don't know where this guy is he was very outspoken about socialism he just disappeared so so i was learning about it i was learning also about them the murders the extra judicial murders uh committed by judges in poland who subscribe to socialist ideology um so that's what started changing uh in me they say this is not wrong this is wrong what's what's going on in poland how did those murders take place usually you just i tell you how it could happen because nobody knows but i tell you what happened to me eventually so i was working from the gym we're working out just do some fights and uh can get the police pulls in say hey just grab you by the hands pull in the car just go that's it and that's it and then just they drive me and say like that's like where are we going i said well where do we go once we made that it won't anymore matter to you anything that's like oh [ __ ] so i'm already thinking like hey uh so if we get out of this car i'm going to kick this guy out i'm going to do this i'm they're going to assure me they're going to kill me most likely but at least i'm not going to go down quietly and uh brother just drove around the town just dropped me off in the other part of the town i had to walk back home for a few miles so that's just like intimidation letting you know what they can do yes if they want to yes yes how old are you and that kind of thing starts happening uh that started happening when uh that happened after i was released from prison but before that this is what i assume this is how these people disappear they don't like you you are outspoken you cannot we either comply or we just destroy you or your family that's that's how socialism works and um so i experienced that how they disappear people after i get out of prison but before that i was not aware i just knew that people were just there and that they were not there any longer or this they committed suicide or they followed the stairs so that some it was just something that was waking up in me that this socialist system is very oppressive and you can't leave as a free man when uh in oppression like this i remember actually at that time was also downing on me that there's different countries they have differences and they're free i'll learn about america i remember in warsaw first every time i was in warsaw i always like to go to u.s embassy because they have those beautiful cars those big cities there's those images you know it's like i can pick through the fence i can see like whoa look at this car you know and then i was like the images that have all those like glass things on the fence where we can read about america i was like why poland cannot be like that you know why this is so awesome i remember every chance i had so this is like when when i look at american flight something like taking my heart it's like this is so free this is this is that this is the freedom and i always from then on i always carry so whenever something happened in poland i was like we need to change we need to be like america so that's where the start my views start maturing again so how old were you when you started to actually do something about it that you you know what you eventually get arrested for at what point and was it was it other kids was there some kind of leadership network of people that were leading solidarity do you join the solidarity movement how did what did that look like it when it crystallized i remember the first strikes happened people were hungry i said i don't know we want food and freedom so they um they organize strikes this is where like walesa came in the picture he was the the prominent eventually became the leader of solidarity the trade union movement in poland so my mom got involved and i got involved and i got involved with my friends up there on the different level my mom was involved in school and this is how it went and so then we start there was really not much to do at the time because the solidarity was doing everything they were there was the first trade union there was a trade union it was the first movement in eastern bloc country that was independent from socialist regime from socialist communist party so that was uh you you i was just like i couldn't read enough what that was being published what really happened in 19 when when the communism and socialists came to poland after the second world war on the stallions and bayonets uh as we started learning you know about the atrocities about the murders and about the the the the freedom that we didn't know that we are not free sometimes that but when we learn about how other countries how is that it is being done in america so that's when i started actually maturing it started growing and when i 19 so that was right before the it was before the martial it was late 1970s when especially with the john pope came to poland and he like rise people up he said look you can live on your knees you need to rise up you know basically his message he didn't say it directly but his message was like this or was taken this way and people raised up and kicked the socialist ass out so that the they had seen i mean the communists had seen this kind of thing happen in other eastern bloc country countries i mean the hungary had happened so they kind of they follow this so so they they were nervous about that so they end up declaring martial law they do martial law to try and yes they suppress the the solidarity yes they lost control they knew it and there is no way to putting this genie back i think something will happen with trump here you can you can't put it back but unless you're at least violence so they realize that they cannot go back to what it used to be people won't trust them people don't trust them they know they are liar and they know that they weren't that everybody knew they were liars and thieves too so um they decided eventually we had enough we are losing control and if it continues they will hang us these people hate us really for what we have what the socialism done to these people they will they will prosecute us so they imposed martial law and i remember i was on the phone with a friend of mine he was in austria and midnight click as we were talking quiet and say what that what a park that no uh no connection so then people start coming hey they just shut down all the tvs all the radios there's no communication though the telephone lines didn't work they shut down the communication the entire poland and i think 15 after midnight they start rolling in so i was at the solidarity headquarters at the time at midnight when they came in so they they just broke the door they round up everybody who was there they hold us on the um on the police station and then they they only hold those people who who hold prominent leadership positions so that night they arrested i have different estimates they are from 25 000 people on the low side to 65 000 people arrested that night they were not criminal arrests they were there but basically the way they explain to us those people are not arrested they're sitting in jail but they are interned we internal for their safety because we want them to be safe and also they were potentially dangerous to the state so they were not really dangerous they were there it's not like they did something they were potentially dangerous to the state so we didn't jail them we just in turn them they have a good living conditions we provide them food it's just it is so ridiculous now when i'm listening to what i say and it is so sounds so weird but that was the fact then that was that the way we perceive that reality that it was quite normal oh well you know martial are they in jail 60 000 people one night when you do something this is why i get to eventually get we and a couple of my friends start building them say we cannot just see them i didn't watch it we what we're going to do is sign the shutdown of the communications we're going to create our own so we're going to create our own network and we start printing and then just working it was pretty naive the way we did that but you know we didn't know that i'm any better so we just print what happened we bring the names of the uh of people arrested so the families know that these people just didn't disappear yet they're just sitting in prison now eventually so we stopped distributing that in in my city where i was at the time growing up and that's how it started so we functioned for a while until we got caught after and of course it was not very difficult for them because they were prepared for that and um and that's how i ended up in in prison eventually they start publishing the lists of some of the some of the people they they in turn basically put them in presents so so you get you get arrested they come to your house do they find you at school do they find did they grab you on the street they got me a pretty much of the street i was working at the point where we were printing it to pick up more of the our newspapers that we printed out and as soon as i walked in uh knocked on the door the code we had the knife and the doors opened exactly three guys ran up from the upstairs uh it wasn't like a stairway uh like five guys jump out of that room and just put there i had like 10 guns in my head it was like a police stand of almost the gun from every side pointing loose and uh so they got handcuffed in the hallway and get in prison so in in jail and here goes the netherlands story they this is something i had no idea i didn't know that i can have a lawyer you could but they just ignore that so it didn't really matter it was besides it was martial law so that was a bit different so i got to jail that's okay so did you do it i said no did you do it no you did it no so you know got a little bit beat up and uh that stuck by my thing and no i didn't i don't know so what about these papers what did you find in your house because they went to my house later this they searched my house my mom later told me that they just demolished my house my apartment my home i mean i live with my mom that's sort of the demolished hair apartment like i said i was just still kid and uh so i said well i'll just find them on the street it's like how you find them on the street it doesn't really matter because i get three as present sentence right off the bat so i remember the funny thing is like they uh they got me from uh were going to the from the present to to the court so i took my boots away so he took their boots i said well i take my boots so this guy the cop comes out so yeah this guy kicks so he cannot run away he cannot kick with the bad feet i say wow duke with the bare feet so they beat me up for that so and i went to the court i said look i was beat up i would say like we don't care that basically i was there with these judgements to say that we we don't care it didn't happen so what's the what's the prison conditions uh president conditions did for me at the time i didn't know any better at that person i thought always has to be bad but again you're always hungry right you have no rights you can't see though there's another funny thing because when i went up there they say you can't you cannot lay down you cannot you have to just sit on those stools all day long and just at the table as i close a rough table and from the ultimate just wait there when that cow comes in you go to uh you'll go to uh you could lay down in the bed so i'm just trying to be you know like i'm still scared i'm new to this environment i'm sitting but it's like [ __ ] i ain't going to sit here all the goddamn day long but i'm going to wait and see what will happen so i'll just lay down just come and just kick the [ __ ] out of me if i'm outside so i'm coming back to this so i see why now i'm beat up i can hardly see on my eyes so i save pocket that i don't think they're going to beat me up again now they know i have a legitimate reason to lay down i can't see it so another kim did it again so it's like repeat three times fine you'd like to say i guess they say like [ __ ] it they ain't going to sit and could be laid down so just left me there so so i had no problems but then there's one of those criminal guys because you would keep common criminals he'd say [ __ ] ain't that tough i'm tougher than him so i think i can earn my way to [ __ ] too i don't want to sit all day at the table just on the stool no baggage or anything so he lay down in bed and he's bad up there across and it was my friend it was not my bed because it was there was like four beds but it was like 15 of us there so we slept on the frost but i said like [ __ ] it could try to kick me out of that so uh so he lay down on the bed and the same story just you can hear us screaming the beating out he comes back all black and blue and he doesn't go to bed he goes to the table and he seems like he there was a he was like okay well i had enough and i will sit so it turns out he wasn't quite as tough as you well about toughness i just he yeah he was not prepared for the beatings so he was like well i don't really rather put that with sitting on the on the stool in front at the table then then deal with these guys so eventually they and actually i was so naive i had no idea they told me hey those those those are prisoners like you know if we can make the hole in this world to this other self can we have a sugar and some other food because these guys have a lot of stuff so i said [ __ ] i do it you know i'm just climb under the bed and start this thing so that made the hole maybe like this big but didn't go far because of course you know there's like there's no no tools or nothing wait what were you trying to try to break the hole in the wall to using what using using the rug the the the uh from the stool that you see okay the like you take them apart and he took this tool apart and he had the a concrete legs yeah it was not it was not really that hard actually there was not maybe the concrete in the beginning but eventually i got to the concrete but it was so it went went nowhere so i got pulled out somebody pulled me by the legs and you know get the good kicks and stuff and put out the sound so um so here it is then um bag of this this is not the principle with the word warden so you have a lot of problems with you you know you gotta go you do it again we're gonna go and put you in isolation and they kind of like a tiger cage so it was a cell and within the cell was a cage just like in the zoo and just put you there so i said okay well whatever i'm not going to be punching the walls in the holes in the wall okay because i was so stupid but i didn't know any better so then i every every day for like 15 minutes we were allowed to go outside and walk there was like a room maybe a half size of this with the high walls with these guards working on the top above you and the funny thing is that it was made of these concrete posts with the slit inside if we've seen them in iraq and this uh reinforced concrete slab will slide in between the posts one on the top of another science well i think that what i remember i was just for demonstration i was breaking those in half so i thought that i heard the voice of the guy who was in the case with me so i'm saying to communicate with him let me take a look i didn't mean to break that [ __ ] i'll just go just like get a quick jump and just kick that [ __ ] so i thought just making move this some of this mud from in between those cracks between these slabs that [ __ ] thing fell off and just this whole two slabs above just fall down on it and stuff you can see that the alarms going on everywhere i was like what the [ __ ] so so i ended up in the thai tiger cage the town just sitting there and now there was no there's not the one time that was the final time but there's the second the other time they put me in the prison with uh with the broken windows it was winter time and they gave me no blankets so i was just laying on those woods for uh i think it was a week so it's not it was you know it was was okay i was freezing but there was nothing that would kill me and um you know like i'm looking watching some of the tvs here about the prison in the united states i was like [ __ ] now if at that time i wouldn't tr i would trade my life in poland for prison here because i would be fed i have a medical attention i had a tv i would have a gym maybe possible even and and how can you live better i mean what else can you do you want from life because you have you have everything provided to you you know you don't have to fight for anything so that's that's how so how long we how long did you end up staying in prison uh there was three years prison sentence and they released as i think close to a year and a half or after a year and a half when john paul ii was coming to poland again so they try to make a gesture so okay we start releasing political prisoners for on amnesty and uh yeah that's i noticed they started releasing us and some the prison starts shrinking because you know after the case was done my case i was sentenced to get my sentence they ship us to russian border we were in prison called yeshuf um basically we can through the window we can see that the river you can see the russian territory next next to it so it's kind of like unnerving because at that time there was a reality of uh invasion i mean we were afraid that the russians will come in to take to put some uh uh order there because they think it was the communism and socialism was falling apart so they um we knew that if the russians come in we're gonna get killed so we were thinking like we're going to get killed anyway if they come in this is what we need to do we have like a plans actually you know how to bridge the bridge not the bridge like windows other seals now but how to get through the wall how to get this we're just making the getting the equipment done so they maybe kill some but maybe they not don't want to kill everybody but we cannot just sit here in prison and just wait for to be slaughtered so there was that that that thinking uh at the time in prison so we uh so yeah so we were in this uh that's actually a couple other things came to my mind too i didn't even think about it so they beat us up i remember i had some issues with oh okay so we went on the hunger strike say okay when you where on hunger strike that we we want status of political prisoner there was some head of in socialism i don't know if you guys knew but in socialism there are no political prisoners the there are but they are sitting for something else they are sitting like stealing the milk from the from in from in front of the somebody's old door or just insulting the neighbor or just being mean to somebody so they put you for something else so they always claim political prisoners not in socialism uh we don't have that everybody until the martial who was locked up for political activities was like that pretty much for something else for some criminal offenses they they could generate it so yeah there was um something that uh uh when they so they send us the ruby show that they kind of isolate the political prisoners there from the the general criminal population so it's like pretty much go like and uh they uh so we decided to go on the hunger strike and the way they broke our strike was uh in poland they say there is a law that after two weeks if you don't eat will forcefully feed you so what they did is like like a vacuum pipe almost actually so think i said god damn i ain't gonna come to my stomach and so they put this thing in your throat and they just put it the uh whatever the mixture they they gave you there and i remember i didn't know it was that bad but so i said i'm gonna i'll fight these guys so i find this today finally they overpowered me they hang up me to the chair but when i tried to put this pipe again i just broke the [ __ ] chair so they were fighting they broke that different chair this time i couldn't break out of it and they actually forced it later i learned how to you know deal with it so yeah i was like no big deal and just go ahead stick it put my my foot in it but the way they broke it is typical social is way but a sneaky so they go to especially the older guys say look you see this big pipe and i had to shove it back down your throat in your stomach again and and put it in why don't you just take it yourself just drink that [ __ ] and go to your cell so that you're like hmm that's pretty painful so i just like okay as soon as you just take a one sip it's like wow all right you just broke your hands right you just ate on your own so now we're gonna transport you to another prison the guy never had a chance the most likely to go to this prison cell he was just handcuffed put in the transport and drove drove away somewhere so there eventually there was only a few of us left and the car came from the church that this is pointless the the socialist socialists will never admit they hold political prisoners and you just waste your health in to stop it so we did eventually we stopped that and i totally forgot about it until i went to poland met this guy he said hey do you remember the hunger strike here i have the calendar here this this this you need to do it's like shitty i remember now so how long were you on the 100 hunger strikes i think it was three weeks we didn't even before the cal came in to stop it because they were going nowhere um yeah i need to look he gave me that calendar i don't have it here but uh to look into it this isn't interesting actually because uh the uh there there was things too that uh we did in present i can't sing word of [ __ ] i'm i'm not the singing person at all but i was singing like a [ __ ] in presence just like those political songs that from polish past from polish history they were very patriotic songs which socialists really hated so uh we in prison was at eight o'clock in the in the evening i believe it was eight o'clock in the evening we just opened the windows on the whole side an entire prison population from the even these criminals still join in but they get beat up and shut down very quick and there was there was they scorched them but not with us so we kept singing and that was so loud that that nearby town they could hear and actually that priest was coming and praying in front of the prison so uh yeah that the guards hated it because you know they were they're up have to answer they beat that people up they throw them and close the windows up as soon as they leave their windows got open again and people are singing in the south so there's so much they could do um that that yeah that was uh that's fine actually the the i i need to send that i send it to you because i have a they were so bad i guess for them they i didn't have any family at the time just my mom so they sent a letter to my mom complaining say hey come here and do something your son is not listening and actually i was showing to my wife rachel say look this look at this here because i knew that i had that i just couldn't but then i just by accident i found it so i had this document saying they're saying letter from prison to just come out and help because they i'm not listening to socialist guards was there any guards or any government officials that were like sympathetic at all or did they just they just had to toe the party line uh they had to tell the party line but there were some of the guards that they were not so vicious so they were they they just not they listened sometimes like there was even we were able to smuggle the camera into the present i'm sure that some of the guards knew about it and uh there are some pictures floating i think i've seen some of the pictures from the prison at the time and uh some of them like you know on the christmas time so we had this nerves say like well can you send us some how can we not have alcohol but we have this alcohol to clean the skin so i said well let's you know well just yeah so just put the rope down down from the first floor and she she came out just a big bottle of this skin cleaning alcohol just pull it out you had a party in the present okay can you get any better than that right i remember it in communist prison that was actually it was really bad if they caught you with this so you so you end up getting released when the pope comes back again they do this gesture they're going to let you out of prison right and then are you going once you're out of prison what are you doing um trying to find a job first so i said i need to do something i mean my mom cannot she's in a hard time she has a hard time too and i cannot be on her sitting and living on her from her money so trying to find a job and you can't because everything is controlled the government owns everything they own the job so if you i remember after struggling for a while i still continue my training so this is what i described earlier after the training coming out from sometimes in the evening it depends wherever we train as police pulled in they pulled me out the car drive me around threatened me for a while and just threw me on the street so this is when i said like you know what i can continue like this this is something that i eventually end up dead and and they did actually we find out later that uh later i found out around the same time that one of the my fellow prisoners uh was suicided then another one i was like i'm going to wait my belong and then the my images of america came in yeah so this is where i went and i said yeah i need to go get some help and uh i went to uh american embassy and said this is what's happening i need help and hell yeah i was like sure we need this this this and within three weeks i had i think within three weeks i had a visa out of poland to germany to the united states per month the funny thing is i also had to because i was still in the age that conscription age so they uh had to go and sign up like okay i'm not going to go to join polish military i'm i'm i'm not being sold by the military or anything and i remember i walk into this office and as i say i'm leaving poland i need you to sign this here so this [ __ ] sergeant just look at me say you look pretty strong but you know people like this should serve poland under this polish [ __ ] this polish uh symbol this polish eagle so you say dude ain't even polish eagle then [ __ ] you and your russian's body stole the crown from that eagle is a bar that that eagle doesn't have a crown on his head so that's your eagle but it's not mine i'm not serving out of this [ __ ] right there and but he already signed this i just left i remember she says armas leaving that that building then [ __ ] was still screaming and yelling and telling how bad we are that the bad first people are so and i came to to germany uh first in the little center that the united states created for us for refugees i'll learn about america we had people coming teaching us about america and eventually i remember still like so where would you watch do you have any preferences where you come to america i remember i was always cold it was out in poland i was so cold that maxi we we couldn't buy the good clothes so my mom put the newspapers in our sometimes in our jackets so just like just don't tell people don't tell anybody because they're not be bad on me but uh just have those newspapers inside will keep you warm and they did that would actually did the trick so i was always cold in poland and uh then so when they asked me i was like well everywhere where it's not called i mean if it is hard it's perfect but just not where it's called if you can so it's like what do you think about memphis do you know anything about memphis it's like no but i know that elvis presley was from memphis i knew that okay okay so we're looking for the place in memphis for you and that's where i came in that's when i landed in the united states with the 10 phoenix in my pocket and bag of clothes so you so you how long has it been since you left poland how long were you in germany for i was in germany maybe three months are they are they teaching you any english there no there was no time for that there's mostly like you know the the legal stuff what you need to do how you go about getting the english classes how you live what is the what the laws are what how how to be good a member of society and productive so there's that we tried to learn on our own i just remember both myself the english dictionary and uh that i lost somewhere on the way to where in the in the flight and uh but that was really good because kosaki finally even we came from like a normal world everything was clean everything was bright everything was uh nice people were nice and it's like that's that's the world i think that's what america is going to be doing so really i was really excited just to to you know to come to america at the time what year is it it's 1984 beginning it was i left 1983 like december 1983 and this is like beginning 1984. so you you get on a plane are you by yourself or is there other people with you there were some other people with me uh there was uh those group of people refugees from the communist social estate and uh but we were going to different locations so some of them were i didn't even know and once we get on this big jumbo jet it was like i didn't even know who these people were where they went so i uh eventually i landed in new york and i remember i just wanted to see this statue of like so great you know and uh yeah is anyone escorting you is anyone oh yeah yeah i mean it was like we didn't come on our own i mean when we came in there was part of the people waiting for us everything was provided that's they they help us to our destination memphis i remember this where i got my first apartment to they helped me get the apartment my first job and uh i was so excited i remember i i never knew what the air conditioning is right so i was watching the movies from america in poland when i was young and i see those boxes in the windows i thought they're just a boxer you can put the milk inside you know food because in poland it's so cold you just put outside the window your food your mail your stuff i say this is so cool they are so smart you know why in poland don't have this we could have this box behind the window we could put more stuff in it and then but then there's always land there's actually there's not the boxes for food it's just air conditioning so this one that keeps your house cool and and healthy and but i remember so when i moved to my first apartment i couldn't contain myself tell my mom say i call my mom say mom i'm living in the apartment and with climatization with air conditioning she's like what air conditioning i say it blows cold air if on demand if you want say oh my god how much do you pay for it can you afford these things i say no yeah it comes with apartments so yeah there was so uh i mean that that that that change was so drastic i remember going to the store first time grocery store in poland was very simple just grab whatever was left on the shelf and just run with it before somebody grabbed it from you it's like here you walk you see the cereal first i didn't know what the cereal was like what's this oh this is like a cereal like this i don't know what it is but i take one but then you look at these boxes they're also looking cool so nice it's like we'll try this one maybe i try this one so i have like 50 boxes then it was so the abundance of everything something i could not get used to it for a long time i always end up by trying to buy maybe like five six dollars groceries i end up like thirty forty dollars another damn spend all the money again because my first paycheck was i think was like you know forty dollars a week so i remember but of course people i wouldn't be able to make it without americans helping me so they uh i remember this 40 dollars usually by the end of the week because i had to save money to pay for apartment it was like 108 dollars i think for apartment electricity and everything uh i had maybe like i ran out of money at the end of it so i just have to wait for my paycheck as soon as i get the paycheck it's more cereal more food you know people are bringing me food too so um again i would not survive in north americans helping me who is that who were the americans that were helping you was it a religious group there was a religious group saint grace look church in memphis and these people are a christians and they how they help so many people and i think i feel obligated i need to do something to maybe reciprocate it now kind of late but uh those are awesome people and they are they're still there they still actively support people coming to america help them settle down i would never succeed if not their help i was very lucky the funny thing is too that i didn't speak english so they bought me a dictionary and and so i'm just trying to learn as much as i can i remember one day this one of the families like older couple older couple pick me up and say hey we're gonna drive you here today show you these are the main things and this so as we drive actually this is them they gave me the dictionary so uh because they're like they were helping us it was just that couple words maybe i think it was like designated to help us so the immediate dictionary actually i'm trying to show that i'm using it and i'm really trying to learn and i see this black guy walking on the street so i'm looking dictionary to say this is black man right so just look and say and the addiction that it says this is n so i say hey this isn't it it was like tim will crash the car oh my god no no dude why do you say that would you learn the word i say the dictionary you gave me right here so i have the dictionary here today with this lady still scratch that word and say black man you know i didn't know any better i mean for me i grew up in poland there was no no there was just only white people there so i didn't even know about the animals how animals it is when we the first black person i've seen i was maybe like 16 17 years old i said this is so freaking cool i never seen guy with its color of the skin so me and my brothers were like circling around this guy i'm sure this guy said what the [ __ ] weirdos but we were like holy [ __ ] he's really black you know i didn't know it but there was never any sinister feelings it was just curiosity and i said i want to be friends with them you know let's invite these guys to our club you know and actually we did that they show up so given the polish names one was yashu and one was something else and uh we became friends you know so but it was the first black people i've seen so so do you go to any classes to learn to speak english or is it just working no no at the time i was working already so for they the church providers like short menu i think it was a one month class of english where we attend you know let's have to learn was it hard was it hard to learn it was hard for me uh as you can hear it now 30 years later but uh yes that was uh it gives us some basics maybe but i remember you know like pronunciation good god that was killing me uh thank you there is no th word in polish so thank you for me to say it was like i couldn't i could just could not say it i was spitting i was just butchering the word probably friend of mine comes in and say hey just you know [ __ ] it just say thank you very quick say f instead of ph they won't even hear the difference if you say it fast so sure i did you know and i said i remember some meetings somewhere where this uh i think there's a priest or somebody who brought the cookies so i grabbed the cookie and as i tried to struggle with this should i say this guy from behind like thank you so it's like look it's like [ __ ] you you know it was like get quiet it was like that's not right they say something wrong this guy like disappeared behind it's like and finally one of the older gentlemen comes in what he is trying to say is and he looks at me and say thank you thank you you know i work on it hard that's so i'm better now but i'm still like you know that's my wife and there are words that i'm not allowed to say in public so like sometimes like hey take my phone can you put the phone in your puss it's like don't ever say that loud in front of anybody that's just say say my my my bag or something so it's challenging for you to say purse puss okay yeah like a little list of words that i'm not allowed to say especially around my wife so i'm because i'm doing that so what was the first actual job that you got once you're on the ground you're in memphis you got a you got an apartment it has air conditioning yeah what's the first the actual job this job was in the dealer it wasn't church i was basically mopping the church cleaning the toilets and there was something to get me through getting me familiarized a little bit with with america with get with english behind my belt and so basically i was working part-time as a janitor and this is where actually i start actually picking up english more irma had a bucket map in one hand and i have a little cartoon cartoon in my back pocket so and joey is going to the store and joe is going to the store joe is going to the store it means that he is going to go and buy some groceries basically in polish so i was translating it and so i did more cartoons i was picking up even more and more english and eventually i think they decided i'm good enough to venture find like a different job so the church helped me to get the job with oakley kizzy ford uh first time in memphis and i was oakley key z forward yes okay that sounded like a polish word actually especially when i had to translate polish to english and black so uh in iraq but um so i got the job up there my job was to pick up the uh the phone and they already knew that there's a guy who doesn't speak english but he knows the numbers so they say okay five six six seven eight nine ten so i'll just write it down i say thank you click i ran upstairs and i picked the part there was five five six seven eight and brought it up so the the the the the cars from different dealerships or whoever needed that part was coming into the door and picking picking it up and i was just the guy who just take the phone call get the number get the parts i was working really hard but got them those numbers i just kept mixing up so those guys coming up and like two hours later here [ __ ] we just got the wrong part that's not the part we wanted to the mechanic says that we just gave him a wrong part so they come to me it's like hey you know then we are you're working so hard we see it we don't want to fire you but you know you just need to get better but do you know anything about cars european cars maybe i was like yeah you know i have an idea but yeah yeah because there is an opening in another dealership and they are looking for uh mechanics for saab porsche and audi maybe i don't know if you would want to go and try that too you know that's i say yeah absolutely yes so yeah i know all the everything about cars how many people when you were in poland how many people did you actually know that actually owned their own car i personally didn't know anybody who owns the car i know some people who knew some people who were the guy and now you're okay so you're a car accident my father because he was a communist he he was allowed he owned the car there you go so that was the expertise that i had i know somebody who who knew somebody with the car uh so so i went for the interview and it was like my english was so broke i hadn't like even i didn't know what i was saying but i remember that the that so they brought they was like they needed a mechanic for porsche audi and saab and uh so they brought the the foreman from the porch first he'll he looked at me like and i know there's like blah blah blah which is like that we can't have a guy guy doesn't even speak english so the the audi mechanic came in he talked to me for a while and i tried to say my best but he's like i can see him kind of heads and now and then the sub mechanic comes again this big guy like motorcycle gangster and walks in she's like looks at me i take him my slave come with me as i started my career i became good i became good this guy i owe him so much uh he as he was he was running without the motorcycle gangs and uh he uh i remember he was very proud guy and and but i was able to actually talk him into look at jimbo carson jimbo look jimbo i can't speak english very well i need to learn this thing i have these manuals for saab if you can read it loud to me i can record it i can listen at home and i can match the words with the recording i thought he would kill me first time say [ __ ] i ain't reading [ __ ] i don't even know how to read well but then then i talk him into it and he says so we're sitting in his uh kitchen he'll keep he kept reading that manuals and it was i know that was hard for him i could see it i could tell it was hard for him but he did it for me so uh we become like really good friends and very often you know he came back drawing up there laying in the car so say hey jim are you working i say yeah he's working right here i'm just helping him out right there so he's like okay if somebody comes in just kick me i'm going to sleep and say okay he's sleeping great guy actually this is the first time that i was exposed to american american way of eating too because so i remember saying you know him to come over here uh we'll have a stakes and i'll just we'll just have a stakes and say okay so i show up and uh there's a big ass i think two stakes no three states with his girlfriend there so there's big ass three stakes are like [ __ ] we're gonna be eating it for a month i mean so like so who who else is coming here he said no just three of us i said what about the stakes yeah you can have one i mean the one is for you here you can pick whatever you want i was like i mean that entire steak you say yeah what's wrong with that i said dude i'll be slicing it and slicing it just so that thing would last me for a month in poland and i i just didn't know that you can eat just steak like that just by the slab of meat you cook it and you eat it that's like what the [ __ ] and i love steaks i'm addicted to steaks now so so that was i was exposed first time it's like yeah you eat the steak you eat the steak you don't you don't just paper slice it like this and because in poland you know it was i didn't mention that i just come back very quick to it the the socialism what did to poland is that once became very resilient to hunger because i i was going hungry to school quite often because my mom you had to you cannot buy food for more than two three three four days especially bread or something so if my mom didn't get up early enough around 3 o'clock 3 30 4 o'clock in the morning and stay in line which is sometimes around the block uh to buy a loaf of bread i think i had no breakfast so sometimes she was in a lie alright for a couple hours but then they sold out bread before she could get it i was hanging to school going to school but my remedy for it was i just find out those are richer kids from those especially those parties party members sons they have always food they have really good food so i just beat them up and i took their flange and i i i ate their lunch and i said like you want to eat lunch you break two sandwiches next time so i had so much supply that i actually i was like robin hood because i was like the poor guys that i knew up there and i was like okay you bring the sandwich to this guy you bring this out to this guy and you to me and if they didn't we just took their lunch and we just ate their lunch and then they usually they brought their lunches so how long are you working at the uh what was it the saab dealer it decided i worked for quite a few years and uh i think it was to the point that the war then i became u.s citizen too so for me it was it is still it is the biggest accomplishment for me people think you made to the serial training how does it feel about it well tell you how does it feel to be american citizen i tell you how to be american i'm a free man that's the biggest accomplishment on me that's not the seal teams i'm very proud of the of the trident i'm very proud what i did in the seal teams but it is not my biggest accomplishment i always look in this american flag and i'm american i'm not polish american i'm not something american there is no hyphen in front of this american i am an american and i'm proud and uh so yeah that's so you mentioned um you mentioned the first gulf war but then you at what point because i know you got into parachuting at some point oh yeah well how did that happen yeah i was i was at the time uh i said well i met the girl who made the parachute jump she told me well you know it's like you need to try it at least once i say [ __ ] i tried it once that was before the war before anything so i say well i just called the drops and i said hey can i make a parachute jump said sure come on over that was in memphis so i came and said how can i make the parachute jam well you have to see through the classes will be tandem jump i say tandem jump okay so i sit for the class you know that he explained you what to expect what to look we end up and jump [ __ ] i was hooked so i was like can i do it again it was pretty expensive but you know being single at the times i yeah you can do it again so i do one more time so like can i jump by myself like not right away but you have to go to the classes so tell me about it so here's well so you got you have a class most likely like on the weekend then monday you come you do one job maybe two jumps tuesday wednesday night within two weeks you get this enough just seven jobs because aff accelerated free fall at the time and uh so you made enough jobs then you can graduate to jump on your own i say [ __ ] where can we start i say we can start actually this thursday i say no friday i say okay so friday i came i had all the classes we made the three jumps saturday i made the next four jumps and i was i think saturday evening i was jumping on my own so it took me three days i was hooked so yeah i was skydiving actually this is funny because uh in memphis we jump from very high out into usually twelve thousand feet sometimes from fifteen sixteen thousand feet so so though i had a i accumulated a lot of free fall at the time so i decided to go myself for the aff jum master course i said i become the drum master i will be teaching skydiving and i did and actually i did extremely well i remember when in terms of oklahoma at the time the only issue i had again with my language because uh you know it's you have to do class you have to do class you have to be very thorough if you miss something the instructors usually there's the uspa commission people there's very experienced sky divers they pick up what you miss in the brief and they did that errors in the air which you didn't believe or you you said it the wrong way you taught it the wrong way so we had an agreement we were always partnerable so with one of the guys and we had the agreement you know if i ask you the question you answer it correctly so i don't have to because if you answer them correctly i have to reteach you because these people are watching if i don't catch your error or your wrong answer then they will go and do it to me in the air so we we are okay so we're up with that agreement and you know there is a point in the skydiving tour and we teach people eventually say like so there is a attitude that you have to make your decision either cut away the malfunctioning parachute if you have malfunction and open the reserve or you ride it the ground certainly that time was 2 000 feet you should buy 2 000 feet you don't have a good parachute and you need to make the decision to cut away as a new jumper and and and open your reserve if you didn't do it by this time was like you just should be riding it to the ground so we go through it and say i look at this guy and this commission is listening there and so okay now uh tell me what is your heart dick this guy looks at me so like what i was like you know tell me about your heart dick i see i can't tell that so now i'm getting amanda's like [ __ ] don't [ __ ] with me what's your heart dick and uh he says what do you mean what do you mean i said you know the 2 000 food hard dick i don't have 2 000 foot hard dick i was like i was like about to punch this guy i look up there and this hole is that they're laying under the table they're [ __ ] so hard i was so focused that you know it's a two thousand foot hard deck yeah yeah for me it's kind of like insane same thing so so he didn't tell he said nothing about two thousand foot hard dick but uh eventually i agree yeah and but i graduate from this course even regardless this hard dick and uh yeah so uh i was skydiving by this time but but it seems like coming from poland coming from not having food from being in prison from all these things that are going on it seems like when you get to america you've just got this this like drive just to live and make things happen and you're going to free fall and you get it done in four days and then i'm going to become a jump master and you're working as hard as you can it's like you have this open freeway in front of you you can be whatever you are able to be you know i can't say whatever you want to be because i want to be astronaut i'm 60 years old i ain't going to be astronomical with me but but but you can be whatever you are able to be there is nothing to stop you like different countries you are what's your background who is your mom did you do are you communist or are you belong to socialist party so we can help you but if you know you cannot be in these positions you cannot go to to college even if you don't have if you are not part of the socialist youth organization so so for me yeah it was like the entire world open i could be whatever i was able to be and there was nothing stopping me so even more even more makes me uh that stick to my word i want to be the best citizens i want to make this country the best it can be and and contribute to it so that's where the first person work him out and i just became u.s citizen at the time so i was like okay i can't build the jobs for these people i'm not the rich enough i don't have resources but i can fight for them so this is my country i'm going to go and sign up i had no idea how to do it i remember in post views i seen those draft cards sometimes that you you fill it up so i say i went up there i fill it up i send it out i packed my [ __ ] i was living with other sky divers at the time so they said what what's going on dragon where are you going i say i'm going to i just send out my papers and this is this is the first goal for the first goal right so it's 1991 yes the first gulf war kicks off yes you want to go fight i don't so you go down to the post office grab the uh what's that thing called the the selective series yeah yeah you filled that out i might shake your bags and that's right any time now so well nothing happens the guy's like drago you know i don't think that's the right way to do it but you you sure you want to go into war man there's a war going on up there i say yeah yeah i mean you have to help this i came here with nothing and everything i have i own to america to this country i need to do something and the best way i can do is going to fight for my country so yeah that's uh i'm waiting on the event they simulated sorry but this selective service doesn't apply to you you're too old so i was already 31 at the time going 32 and so i say i find my i will find my way into that war so somebody said hey why don't you go to recruiting of recruiting office as a sure i went to the uh army for in poland army is everything yes this is like army are you talking about army air forces for me at that time was everything was army so good to army okay this is me i would like to join military i would like to go to war it's like okay what do you want to do or say a fight there's like no no we're like at jobs or something you have any skills i say um no not really but i would doubt do whatever you tell me to do you know i just want to go to war hour when the war is over i will go back to my normal life but i i think just for the duration of the war i would like to join the military they say okay well let me see or they look at my documents they tell me what to bring so i bring all that stuff they did all the all the work say so okay so we put you as a infantryman i think it was infantryman and style and i say absolutely thank you so much i'm ready to go anytime and then as seals show up in our drop zone they were doing demonstration jump leapfrogs in in memphis so we started talking about it we jump few times together and say they're such a cool guys you know and uh so they um yeah it's like but you know before they join the army why don't you try the navy just go ask recruiters about seals i was like seals what's the seals yeah but the navy these cool guys knows i'm jumping they call themselves seals so i'll just go and ask hey i went the next door i said i'm applying here for army and they have all my paperwork but i met some friends who told me to ask about the navy and the i'm just asking about the navy who those friends are saying they're current themselves seals oh yeah yeah you know you can be a ceo it's like but i didn't get those paperwork from these guys we put you in the navy and you're okay then then we'll just put you in the navy you will be a seal then i say okay so i went down next door i'm going there so can i have it they were pissed they did not like it but so anyway i got my paperwork i show up up there and they look through my papers and they're like eventually well you know what we can guarantee you the zero that dice there was a different program at the time we cannot guarantee to you because you are way too old you are even too old to qualify for the sales but if you sign this paper here you join you go to bootcamp they will make you zero that's not no doubt about it oh yeah so i said sure you know that's enough i say okay but they said but now before you become a ceo you need to get a job you can select the job in the navy at that time there was no cl rating you remember that there was a you you go to bootcamp you get a go to a school get the job in the navy and then you go to if you like you you are assigned to go to seal training so i said well i don't know much what i want to do i'm parachuting something with how about being parachute regular cause it sounds good to me i had no idea what it was it stuck me in this field for like as an e5 for years later but i said like okay so yeah absolutely yeah make me serious and make me a at that time i was dating a girl too so they say okay but if you want to go to that school to pr school uh you will have to leave this week you will have to leave on a thursday we'll put you in the delay entry program and i think you'll be sworn on thursday you will leave on friday i believe that's i think it was like sure notice so i called my girlfriend hey we need to get murdered right now because i'm going to the navy i'm just like what i said i'm leaving to the navy i'm leaving this for this weekend so we went to the judge we got like the stem we got married very quick and uh then i show up on the in that got the uh sworn in and thursday i left to boot camp and didn't become that there was like no intention to make me a ceo but you know for that time i didn't really care i just wanted to join military i want to contribute to the effort i am american i want to fight for my country so whether being the parachute trigger whatever i just made the best out of it by the size the opportunity shows up i said why not to be a seal i want i try it and i did i passed all the tests so that was in boot camp and both they do that they do that day where they go okay if you want to try for seals you need to go take the test right now yeah there's a there's like a day that actually they're different jobs i think there's people that are coming and telling about their jobs so there are sales eod motivators show up and he talked about i just couldn't sit in this [ __ ] chat just get out just hey yeah yeah i want to go um so and now you're are you 32 years old at this point at this point 32 years old i think what the f what the hell kind of physical conditioning did you do throughout your life to get to get there and be in like good enough shape because they don't even let guys go to buds when they're 27 or 28 or something i don't know i guess i got to beat up a lot i just got conditioned did you did you work were you working out this whole time not really i didn't know how i didn't know that the physical demands of the seal teams at the time are just like just what about just in life like in like when you were when you were working in that freaking side kickboxing taekwondo yeah that's that's that was just basically what you're a mutant you're a freaking mutant well i just can't consider myself lucky that you know i was able to the and you know the test is really not that difficult to pass yeah there is still it's still something but yeah preparing but yeah so so so just so people know what you're talking about you say the test isn't that hard to pass the bait the seal test that we used to get to get a chance to go to seal training was like i think it was you had to do it's some minuscule it's like 50 push-ups in two minutes 50 sit-ups in two minutes yeah eleven eight pull-ups ten pull-ups eleven eleven pull-ups and then a mile and a half run in 11 30 and a mile and a 500 yard swim in yeah yeah or something like that my struggle was with the swim which i couldn't swim very well so uh but i took it i got it you know i passed it so i'm so happy i'm like oh yeah this is so cool and then i [ __ ] got the kidney stone a kidney stone yeah well that's right because you're a freaking old man yeah yeah yeah yeah so the kidney stone and that and i remember they that was so freaking painful i mean i never wasn't i was never beat up so hard it was so painful like this but uh that was so painful that i remember they gave me that medicine i think it was demoral it's like didn't work at all i said i need something stronger because i i just i'm i'm i'm about to go crazy i'm okay that pain is so so hot so they give me a morphine just like it went away but i remember this funny thing because the first time with this show i had no idea what it was i was lying in the bunk in the boot camp and that's just this pain came in i just fell off the bed and so they turned the lights on and within like three minutes i had this pool of sweat right under my nose all dripping i'm on my force this medic comes and says hey are you okay it's like [ __ ] do i look a cave to you can't move i say so they got me the hospital i passed it but that was not the worst thing there was things they told me well you know you're going through this medical thing we're about to give you the medical examination for sales but you had just had a kidney stone you have to wait the air i was like [ __ ] but you know my mindset was i want to fight the war in any capacity you know i'm i'm honored that i have that privilege to go and fight for america so for me this really matters so i said that's that's okay and so then i went to a school and the a school i met uh resident peace uh less barrios i don't know if you knew him but so les barrios uh he was a motivator in millington when i was going to the my parish dragon school i said look i passed the test i think i can easy past it again but i had this kidney stone and i cannot i just want to be a seal so it's in a way maybe there's some maybe paperwork can be done if you just say a paperwork yeah i think you can just go get your medical record from your your medical office bring it here we'll take a look at it so i ran up there and said what magic you will come up with i'm sure there's some paragraph or some regulation that will allow bypass the stupid kidney stone so i brought this record and i said that's right right there right there and it's like okay i just i want you to leave the room here i'll be i'll just call you in a second and i could hear rip so he comes back so the kidney stone uh where is that i was like right oh so he likes i don't see any i said i don't see any either you sure he had the kidney stone it's like you know maybe not maybe i didn't okay well he didn't so and i graduated from a school in millington i think we're under the second top you know everything that from bootcamp i graduated top recruit in this whole batch i was there i got a military excellence award i was like a first very first recruit actually uh who the top recruit from that badge graduating high school i graduated the second with the second highest score so i i had things going on for me and then i was waiting for my orders he said okay i send it out for it hopefully it gets approved and sure three months later got my orders too bad so that that's the rest of this rest of it is a history you show up at buds what was uh what was there any major challenges for you was like you said you were not not a great swimmer how were you on the rest of the water stuff well the the the the problem was that i could swim only on one side and i never swim with the mask on so you know they dump me in the pool and say i want you to swim here there's a side stroke side stroke this is how you do it and but you'll be swimming all the styles that will tell you to do it and i was kind of okay with it but when they push them put the mask on after the first couple laps i thought it would pass out i mean i was like hyperventilating i was blacking out i see the black spots in front of myself i'm about to die here but i said like if i stop they kick me out so i ain't stopping i say i know that if i pass out they will rescue me that's those guys everywhere they tell us that we are safe so we are safe so you know i was blacking out like fell about to black out having these black spots but it became easier and easier but i think by the time like the next hour i was like [ __ ] they ain't that bad so what is it just like some weird like claustrophobic thing on your face or something like that no i couldn't breathe through my nose and i couldn't breathe now how to breathe through my every time i to get breath i've sucked water with it so i think i i was breathing water and air at the time and i was coughing i was suffocating i was i was basically drowning i felt like i'm drowning and uh it's just i said i'm not going to quit but i'll just pass out and see what will happen if i have to but i didn't pass out and i got better actually by the time there was a fourth phase there was a pre-phase when before you class up for the uh for the serial training so by the time we graduate from the fourth phase move into our single class the instructors asked me to demonstrate the new guys how to swim the side strokes so i became really good i was never a fat swimmer but i was strong swimmer i could swim forever and you didn't you didn't come up with any injuries or anything being a 33 year old guy going through buds uh not at that time uh the the worst thing else was always tired i was looking this young guys like hey let's go to the bar it was like dude i can hardly move i can't go to the bar i'll still make it out to the bar here and there but that was just like really painful for me because uh again i was not the intensity of it it's not just the one time it was like one time like the seal training i think most of the people that one day can check out he may survive but it over and over and over it just wears your body wears you down and eventually some people quit so that was the most difficult for me because i did not recover as fast being 32 years old as uh as other guys so what was your first what were your first orders what team did you get i get to see all team two and uh actually they they uh i wanted to go to sealed in four because they i don't want to be called i know clt two at them at the time operate the the north part and the of the europe and in europe in general so i say i just want to go to like team four but friend of mine said like no no dude you with your language with your polish russian and you i speak japanese too so uh with with your languages you'll be good asset in this uh european team and stuff so i kind of like put the so i switched it from the team four to team two and put them for second and just like that please don't put me in sdv's i just for some reason i don't know i was i was not maybe that technical person at the time and the challenge is to be uh as the operator is twice as it is twice you have to be a seal but you have to have that expertise with this mini subs and with the the operation of it that for me i felt was overwhelmed by that what you need to know to be good operator in the sdv teams so um so i i chose two and i got my orders to see our team too went to boot uh went to jam school uh did you did you go to fort benning yes for me it was kind of fun time because uh you know like when i was growing up i was poor i never had a chance to go to like a disneyland or this type of thing i could watch over the fence how children were playing around it but i couldn't afford it so when i got into this tower i was like holy [ __ ] this is like a disneyland you know so i didn't care what the position he wanted me to jump but i just like running out of it and and yeah that's uh they kind of didn't like it but they uh but they are very rigid so i remember two of those that i had a lot of fun too because those i think you went through the same thing yeah so there is a dress for being so you still next to each other shoulder shoulders so close that basically usually cannot even move and then you just go to your line you grab the line they drag you just do the plf i could never do the plf right i was always scared of plfs so uh but anyway i found out that if you like tip one of them from one end it's like a domino effect they would just totally fall down and that was actually i thought it was amazing it was amusing it's like that's pretty good you tip one a little bit and the last guy just plugs down um my but my issue was that i don't like prfs so so just so everyone knows a plf is a parachute landing fall and it's a technique that you get taught for static line jumping where it's supposed to minimize your injuries because you keep your feet and knees together and you hit like you kind of like roll you sort of roll when you hit and you keep your arms kind of tucked in and it's supposed to prevent you from getting injured because when you're on a when you're on one of those parachutes you're still coming down really fast it's not like what you see in the movies when guys can kind of come down on a free-fall parachute and they flare and they just kind of kind of tiptoe away from it you hit pretty hard especially if you're a heavier guy the heavier you are the harder you're going to hit so they try and teach and plus the army's working with hundreds and hundreds of people getting thrown out of that thing getting thrown out of an aircraft every day so they try and teach the most simple way that they can teach hundreds and hundreds of of people how to fall without getting hurt now i also was not good at the plf yeah scoot the [ __ ] out of me so i actually i tried one time and just popped my shoulder and i like [ __ ] doing it more so every time i jump i just stood up i just but it was not a big deal because i actually had hundreds of giants at the time so i just jumped out just really landed just stand up and i was like so it's like there's they had those those black black hats they had those cubes plf private pli of plf i want to see pmy i was like roger there then i might throw my parachute and just roll on the ground you know they don't hurt i didn't want to come over so so that they they knew from me from not listening too good uh yeah those pls they were killing me so i didn't do them so you get to team two and what what uh did you get put in a platoon right away did you go through sqt first no i had to wait for sqt i had to wait for st though at that time it was sdt uh serial tactical training but uh when i show up in the teams you know like you you are the new new sailor i was a new seller everywhere i want the bootcamp to a school or you know the bots everywhere so formal so uh so you know i buy the book and everything so i show up and buy like i don't even know like five minutes later i'm hanging on the pull-up body my blues and the [ __ ] doing pull-ups running three miles [ __ ] that i do my prt in my thing and uh and it's like what the [ __ ] by the time i even you know realize what's going on i had like completed the whole prt in my blues and stuff so they were just like with the new guys yeah just sure so what he's talking about there is he shows up at in his dress uniform when you check into a new command you're in your dress uniform it's the nicest uniform you've got and you don't you know normally you'd wear it for like a ceremony so he shows up with that uniform on and they're like cool we're going to do a physical uh physical what is it prt or something let's see r physical readiness test yeah so you've got to take a physical readiness test the event tell me that hey they say get on the pull up yeah do the pull-ups okay go for the run now push-ups everything was so shiny you know i spent all night just making sure that there's no no wrinkles no nothing and here i am there's all this ragged up so anyway i finished that that's the welcome to it welcome to the teams new guy uh yeah but you know i just i said that that's okay i guess this is the the way it goes i roll with it and the the another surprise for me was uh very much so we came in there's a couple other new guys at the same time so when we show up in the team and they say hey hey guys at that time in the in the teams on every friday we had the kegger in the highway so it's a keg of beer and the guys were drinking beer so hey we new guys we just invite you for the kreger you know just i'm sorry you need to come and join us for the for the so i remember i was so taken like these old guys these old navy seals they are so cool you know like these new guys they invite for the beer and stuff and well i didn't know that were there just for the amusement of these all new guys then as soon as that not sooner than we just crossed the door of this bay we just get beat up taped up hang up in there on those [ __ ] chains up hanging like a bats while these guys guys are drinking beer and just throwing the insults on us and stuff say hey you know it's like once i have to be fair once every while they lower us down they stick this tube in our mouth from the dragon just pull the dragon into the uh beer in the dragon bag and just squeeze it as fast as you can so by the time you are drinking so much beer that you didn't care if you hang you upside down or not as long as they didn't leave you overnight hanging and that it didn't happen so so now i realize that this is that we are not there to just uh fraternize how to say it to rather nice fraternize with the old seals we are just there for the amusements and you guys they call us meat you know [ __ ] new guy so that's uh yeah that was the welcome to the team so but you know that's it i look at it figure out that's the way it goes so i i don't have a problem with that and i was waiting for my st getting beat up here and there and then and then that was fine and then we got to st at sdt pretty much pretty straightforward pretty straightforward but with me that was like there's me and another guy scotty lanton a great guy i love this guy um he led the teams later but uh so those two of us that were a bit different i remember so we went through st everything went a little bit problem with my english because i still have to translate everything all the commands you you you shouldn't move and you you know you communicate so far that's going to translate in my head in polish then and be fast enough to do it and react to it so it was okay so when they eventually came to the crypto and the the the radio communication equipment there's you know the communication class and we went to crypto and we were sitting there by the time we were about to take a test from this as i was like like two more days so the so today was the last class you know how to use the cryptographic equipment how to use all that stuff and um so that the next day supposed to be i think a final exam and then there's a then move to the next section of sdt so this guy comes in and one of the instructors comes in is like hey do you have a clearance it's like i don't know what it is so most likely you don't have it do you have a clearance and scared like well i'm not even u.s citizen wow come on with me you know so we went up there and said like so like look at us like don't ever say anybody that you went through this class you just don't say nothing don't say anything you you never sit in that class it's like okay you guys get your clearances then go we will do it and uh so so yeah we just see that so next day we see our guys watching running through the field you know with the equipment setting it up you know doing the crypto stuff and and i was watching it i was like [ __ ] i mean there's nothing difficult i could pass the test now science already already went through all this class i don't know it's a big deal but i guess they don't want us they don't want anybody to know that we sat through that class not having the secret clearance and uh and so you know i eventually got my clearance so i went to the radio shack upstairs in the sealed him too and passed the test as scott linton eventually got his citizenship so we all went whole platinum went up there and just using the platinum by this time and he got his crypto stuff too and uh we moved on so that my first platoon is i was remembering bixler good god i think if this guy didn't have a heart attack he had i think he might he will have it because of me because you know my english skills so it was uh they were not really that good so they reflect on everything i mean we you know whatever you do you know you get to communicate you have to communicate fast and very effectively and i just was lacking that english skills at the time the funny thing is that finally i made it to this platoon so i was not anymore [ __ ] new guy i was not anymore this is meat and we i remember so when you come back from press platoon or get back from the platoon from deployment you're like hey i got this school i'm going to sniper school i'm going to this school i'm going to this school so i said hey dragon so what school did you get you know just where are you going it's like ah dude i'm going to english 101 i think the next door up there this is [ __ ] the regular navy thing and so i spent the next three months doing actually english classes that was not bad because actually it helped me in my career in the future so basically so they legit sent you to english school yes yes and uh but that saved my career you know these guys were apparently they seen something in me they say well you know he bought your english language but he's were you having a hard time like communicating like in that going through the house and stuff yeah yeah trying to communicate with the rest of you guys yeah especially the communication going through the house and trying to communicate yeah so at that time i was still had to i still had to try i didn't tell them that but i had to translate from what i hear to my polish tank then i have to think of the solution translate back to english and say it so i i i manage that but it is so much easier later on when actually i get my english good so that just flow you know but they still have to be very fast because fast what was your what was your position in that opportunity were you a gunner 1600 i was the 60 gunner yeah i was 60 gallon i think for the next three platoons it's just um i like that you know i think that's a big big stink you easy to load because you don't have to worry about just jamming this little piece shooter magazines just put the tray in it and say i'm good to go where was your first deployment was it europe uh yeah it was in europe that was at the time uh actually we deployed to uh san vito in italy okay and that was when the uh grady got shut down likes we were looking at him and you know this has become brings to my mind too in seal teams you do every day you do something that can kill you i didn't think about it but it does i remember flying over the adriatic sea where we're actually on the lookout for this for for uh this pilot uh scotty lantern he was sitting in the in the he was a sniper so he's sitting up there and uh [ __ ] with his gun and we look at it and i think it was bill white look at say the puck say nothing his whole belt just dropped off so he was sitting on the ledge of uh i think it was who's scottie yes so the ramp is open he's sitting on the run finding with his gun his whole belt is gone so he just like i think it was a i think it was a bill white he just like sneak up or he can just grab his ass and just [ __ ] pull him inside this guy like what the [ __ ] he's like dude you almost fell out of that [ __ ] because you know those clips they were like easy to come undone i mean it's not really something i would say safe that they will stay close on you so yeah so so that was the thing and yeah this comes to my mind there's always there's something there's some situation that you can get killed and if you look over the statistics i think from the before the war i think we were killing like two guys in training every year as the average i think it was like when i when i'm looking out this guy died this guy was killed in training that's why i got killed and trained he was like one or two guys every year yeah for sure no there's definitely you're doing stuff every day whether it's parachuting diving shooting you're always doing something that that can give you a bad day or make you fall out of a helicopter because your belt came off yeah so did you guys did you ever do any work down in uh in bosnia yes we went there was no another platoon we went to bosnia to yugoslavia we spent time that was pretty good time she was like it was just good there was really not much to do at the time but just work out and get big so that was a really good platoon actually there was that this is where i met the strongest guy i think in the teams i i think i can think of chris s i i don't know if i can bring his name i don't have a permission i didn't ask him so just to be on the safe side but he knows who he is when he went to france france i mean this guy was lifting like what five plates the bench bench press so when we went to france we just got the french equipment he just bent that [ __ ] out of the hell out of their their pry bars when he picked it up this bright pry bar i mean the bar bend and those weights are falling off so all these frenchies guys they stopped working with us they just like whenever we rolled into their gym they just sit down like a bunch of the weird thirds so that they uh that was actually funny but yeah there was big platinum i remember so there was entire platoon i think over 220 pounds i think there's one guy maybe he was not but like all of us was over 220 pounds of course chris was way much more and yeah that's i remember for me i wanted to say i need to join this 220 pounds so i'm working so hard and i'm just like i have a pound below half a pound below like 219 to 18 and say [ __ ] give me that loaf of bread right there so i would just like i weigh my cells maybe i hate this few grams to get this 220 pounds i just chow down push myself into that bread myself like get on the scale 220 and a half it's like [ __ ] i'm 220 pounds club now i wish i could get to the 220 pound from the other side from the top so then what was it when when i showed up at team two what was was that your fourth platoon yeah i don't remember that i think so or your third fourth platoon maybe i think it was yours yeah i remember you showed up and it's like i remember i had to swim with you this before even with platinum so we just did dive that that swim and i said well you're a kind of big guy so i don't think you'll be swimming that fast so i think i'm straight with you i'll be all right and it's like okay look yeah when you look at me that's your boy you you swimming with the boy and i was like okay and uh so we get in the water [ __ ] you drag that boy you drag and drag me and that boy with you i just could not keep up i mean that was like where this [ __ ] guy is taking the strength from i mean you shouldn't be you're so big you shouldn't be swimming that fast what were you doing like a recall dive or something yeah i think it was a recoil dive yeah there was just like swimming from one place to another just a couple of lakes here and there i think it was a recoil dive so i remember you dragged me and the buoy to the [ __ ] water so bad that's like i think i would just over breed that goddamn break and and so that we get put in the platoon and um we had a freaking really good workup out there oh yeah that was good workout it was a really good platoon good deployment too i mean i really enjoyed uh this time we went to spain we we hijacked the russian tanker too that's that was you know now when i look at the bag after my experience in combat i'm sure you too it's like it's not really that big deal yeah yeah but at that time there was like holy [ __ ] we not only hijacked the russian tanker uh vulgar knife it was welcome left we i remember the funny things too is uh you remember we were doing shifts later because it was a russian tanker so there are those regular nations and just to clarify everyone for for the english translation when when drogla says we hijacked a russian tanker we actually didn't hijack a russian tanker there was a there was a tank or a russian tanker that was smuggling oil out of the gulf and one of the missions that we had while we were over there was stop people from smuggling stuff out of the gulf most of the time we were taking down little little dowels little tiny boats and we would take those things down we took down a bunch of them too but then this was the biggest catch that we got was this big oil tanker that we that we totally a russian flag tanker that we took down we got control of we turned it over to the the authorities but um so you know we didn't hijack it but we did visit the visits and searches the final thing is you remember we did the shifts later right because maybe it was not comfortable so let's keep seals on it so just bobbing on this boat you're bobbing on this boat and but i remember so when we took it down we came back and died then the next shift came back next day the the other squad that when they came back saying dude you just left bunch of weapons with them there is so much [ __ ] we took all this the weapons that you guys left i was like what the weapons did we leave up there i mean we searched that boat what are now to be as when they went up there they see those little butter patties the they just [ __ ] took it away from these guys so when we went back these guys are coming and said i spoke russian so yeah say hey mr uh please help us we have no teeth and we can't eat because these guys stole our forks and our knives so we can i cannot chew and and there's like really maybe two or three teeth sticking out of the mouth and there's like that's all they had so i remember yeah yeah we take care so we actually bring those butter knives or butter what do you call it spatulas and forks back to them so they can actually eat yeah i also remember those guys they were telling us that we didn't do a good job clearing or whatever they were saying because they still cause we we're like oh yeah they have they have butter knives and stuff like that and then they're like don't worry we secured it yeah and we were sailing that we were on a navy ship looking at the ship that we took down and i'm looking at i was like yeah you did a good job and i looked over and there's like a fire they were like good job you idiots so they stole their [ __ ] butter knives and thoughts about leave the big axes and i say hey you guys left this all this weapon here look at this look at this butter yeah that that was crazy too because just by sheer luck our platoon commander went to the naval academy and studied russian and so he spoke russian yeah we had another guy that was like went to berkeley and and he studied russian and then you so in a platoon we had three russian speakers yeah we took down a russian vessel yep that's freaking lucky right there ah that was awesome i remember just at the very beginning we passed the bridge and i remember this captain say hey uh don't cooperate with americans he's in russian like don't don't say nothing don't operate resist as much as you can mr fiona he understands it he'll say oh i see he said dragon take care of it just grab the guy by the scrub work your hand open the i also have a big chimney with the door as you open the door it's like a little tiny space so i throw in the russian like you [ __ ] you should say another word i'm going to squash you right here and lock you up for the rest of the journey you just look at this little tiny space here oh [ __ ] i better don't [ __ ] with these guys okay so no problem we never had a problem with this guy again so yeah that was a good time but i tell you i have to say one more thing here i remember you remember rob o'neil he was in my in our platoon my fairly good body and at that time we're like best friends and uh i remember he was a sniper on this op and he said drago i'm going to happen nothing to you i'm i'm i'm i'm looking over you and i remember as we moved through the ship as we searched i said like i know what up is up there ain't nothing [ __ ] is going to happen to me i know he'd take down that anybody who's on our way so it makes me look very comfortable yeah that was um we had a bunch of we had a tight group that was a good platoon yes and also you were talking about being big we were also oh yeah we also we we tried to get a platoon average of 200 pounds and we had to make up for some slack because we had some guys and we i remember we got to uh we the first place we went was spain oh yeah and i was trying to get to 250. yeah and i could same thing i was like trying i'm eating i'm lifting i'm squatting i'm eating and i was i couldn't get above like two i don't know 245 or something like that and then where we stayed in spain was they had an all-you-can-eat buffet for all three meals of the day yeah and i was like oh i got this and like three days later i was 250 i weighed in and i was like yeah 250. and then i went on a four mile run and i was like okay i need to lose weight this sucks yeah [ __ ] but you remember we were living like our doors were opening right on the beach so yeah just walking the sidewalks like i'm on the beach right there that was awesome i mean that that was awesome deployment i really like that and uh then the bahrain and uh there was the the christmas party i mean the christmas time came the new year came and kind of got us tighter and close together too there was the 2000 year so that was really really good time and i have very profound memories of it it's almost like in very nostalgic to me right now it's just uh so yeah um so we get done with that platoon i know i got back i i went to college you carried on um where did you stay at team two or did you go to a different team uh no because i think you remember when we came out we came out as a in 2000 uh as a as a platoon from seal team two we came back as a seal team four at least some of us so they remember the division 2000 that went by oh that's right right they made some adjustments to the way they were structuring the teams yes and so when we got back you i was informed you went to team four okay got it so are there all these uh uh upheavals and all that stuff eventually i ended up in one of the patterns that were we deploy to south america we're in puerto rico and we're like three months into deployment when they they call me my chief calls me and say hey um drago we uh you'll get back that just want you to pack your shed you need to help facilitate the polish chrome with our guys where were you where were you when september 11th happened uh i don't see anything too concealed two quarters i was actually watching it as it happens and i remember i was working out i was in the gym and i see the airplane hit the tower so it's like what the [ __ ] idiot some just flew into the thing but then i was as as the you know the news progressed and they said like there was a not there was a jet liner it was not the small airplane it just put my attention i say that's that's something there's something wrong here and then the second plane hit the tower i remember and uh i still have a hard time thinking about it it just brings me all these memories and and that i was watching the towers collapse so it just brings tears to my eyes i can uh i can't think about it i just at that time i just want to go and kill the savages so so as you're now now fast forward a little bit because you're back on deployment you're at team four you're in puerto rico you're probably going completely insane because you're in puerto rico instead of being either in afghanistan or iraq yep and then you get a call yes and i tell you make jealous everybody in the platoon so how the [ __ ] drago got this you know sales we are aggressive there's a war we want to be in the war and yeah so i was like [ __ ] hey this is just incredible i am i'm so damn lucky i can possibly achieve i can pack my [ __ ] right now i can no no no no just go go pack your shirt just take it take a stab there's a orders here blah blah blah so they say what will happen is we are like i think the half of deployment at the time so you just go for another half another three months just help settle down the things settle up the ground come back and join another platoon and do your work up and so i'll say yes i was so excited and i was african i learned the back that so so just so everyone understands so there's a there's a polish special forces unit they're called grom what does grom mean thunder or is that just the call sign it is a concept but you know you can translate grom actually as a tender it is standard it's standard this is acronym for uh actually grouper reacts i can't say this uh so it does it does stand for something impossible something but it also means thunder i mean standard yes there's someone who's sealed salem is like an animal right right animal cereal but it's not really what it is yeah so so the grom the polish grom had deployed to baghdad they were actually co-located with the seals that were also in baghdad and they needed someone to be liaison between the polish grom and the the seals that were there and of course everybody kind of knows or had run into or someone knew that there was a polish guy or a america an american guy that could speak polish that grew up in poland that was in the seal teams they track you down they give they they contact through your chain of command and boom you get the call how long did it take from the call to they you fly over there i think a week or a couple a few days because you know i had to pack my stuff i had i still have to process my orders and uh yeah i packed my stuff it was a fruit civilian aircraft too it was funny because i have all the guns everything and i'm flying civilian aircraft to uh to middle east and eventually um london in baghdad yeah it was 2003. oh wow the heat was incredible right when i unpacked my stuff i just stood up it's like that that wind blew i was like [ __ ] where's that aircraft here i thought i'm like the jet blast of uh some you know what month did you arrive i think it was may maybe so yeah that was hot it's not even hot yet oh yeah it's not even hot yeah i mean like june it's gonna come oh yeah and then july and august it's on so but even may you're like getting there like oh why it's so hot here where's the jet engine so you so you you show up you get to camp jenny posey yes so they they get into genie palsy and uh pastor robin so you know i'm getting briefed and uh there's like okay so this is what we expect from you this is what needs to happen so this is where i raised my first alarm i say i'm going to sit in the [ __ ] humvee and watch [ __ ] happens uh uh i'm here i'm going with these guys if they go so you know for the command our safety is priority so they're like you know well we don't know these guys really we we know they're good but you know we don't train with them we didn't train with them that much so we we set you loose with these guys i mean you're taking a we are taking a chances that you can get hurt but i said i had no other way i said i'm i'm i'm going with these guys i mean i i won't get any respect even from there i wouldn't respect myself just sitting in the house doing nothing so after a little debates they say okay you can go with these guys so for me it was good because i was double dipping i was going with the chrome guys and then i'll just switch my gear and just go back with our guys if i switch your gear you mean change your clothes did you wear the grom uniform no no no no no i wear our uniform but the change might not like if we use the magazines yeah yeah reload and go with our guys sometimes on the fly on the wheels on the fly because like we're at that time was with team five so the ground hit the target then we moved to another target just switch the cars and go with the power guys so i got some of those missions i think it's pretty good i think freaking living the dream no kidding i mean this is like so that's why you know like three months came in when i supposed to return it's like i hear nothing from my commands so like [ __ ] i ain't saying [ __ ] either so i keep going ever actually they are saying who wants to stay longer here because that we have this change but we could appreciate any change like you know i guess i'm i'm here so yes i stayed and like four months pass like nobody says anything five months like nobody says anything i was like [ __ ] happy as i can be i say ain't saying [ __ ] to these guys and uh so like in the eight months so this is like 11 months the deployment almost a year my nvg is broke and i said like guys i need some help can you guys loan me your nvgs they say well yeah we can you know as a platoon when we deploy our little gear is limited and we have something that can support the platoon on us but not to launch some other guys so you know it went for a while while i was trying to call my team i said hey guys uh so finally i got call my team i said i need nvgs in baghdad so this guy is like listen to it it's like what i say can you send me nvgs to back that who is this and so drago so you want me to send equipment to you somewhere in baghdad i say the compost you're composing so and who who you are say who you who the drago you are who i was like i'm just drago you know i'm still team guy and team guy it's like dude you don't even speak english do you want me to send the suicidal bomb vessel with it too you know just like basically they thought i'm just iraqi trying to solicit [ __ ] gear to send to somewhere to back that and so i can't really pace uh like dude [ __ ] if i can kill you when i get when i come back and uh and but anyway get me master chief online so they could master chief online say master chief i just need to get some ndgs i'm here my brogan say wait wait wait drago where are you at i say i'm in baghdad master chief it's like quiet for a second i was like uh and how long you have been there i say i'm like almost a year on deployment and uh dude you need to come back here because uh you know see your team such and such i don't want to bring the numbers here is about to deploy and we are next you need to come back as there was no way to go around it i mean i could when i go maybe so much but at that time yeah i had to come back so they they sent me i came back to little creek and uh the funny story so that then the next team is coming out so i said hey guys i can go at that time you get addicted to that stuff i mean you just you can't live in normal society just like dude i just left there i i don't like this place here so to to live like this i want to be there and uh so i said well i go with you guys yeah we can use you know just help us settle down with this you already been there for so long time and you're with chrome so we'll help us you will help us settle down with that stuff with grom and so i want that so jeff will take you for a couple weeks and uh for me as like yeah that's awesome it's a couple weeks of it as much as i can get so we flew up there and it's like four months later it's like hey drago you need to come back dude we are deploying two months or something like this and then you need to be back in to join your platoon so i say oh [ __ ] okay so i'm as master chief i'm on the way so i came back and turned around and came back again with uh uh with the with the with with my seal team four the funny thing is that on my on my the on this last story when i was there the the army guy comes up to me like i don't know him from adam i was like i'd never register even the guy he can say hey dude have you been here in 2003 i said yeah i've been here in 2004 yeah when did did you ever go home even well for a little time but dude actually i remember seeing you for for three [ __ ] years and i said well if you see me that like you have been here quite some time too you know these guys are doing awesome jobs so the army guys you know yeah with them but yeah and uh that was uh that was my my iraq time uh um yeah it was interesting like when we were there together and just to give everyone an idea of what was going on so the grom there there would be uh intelligence from various sources coming down and we would kind of go out and capture kill bad guys and sometimes sometimes just we were basically rotating back and forth between grom and the seal platoon grom seal platoon and sometimes it would be two targets and we just go out together and or if it was a really big target we'd go out together and maybe grom would be external security and the seals would do the assault or maybe seals would be external security and grom would do the assault and i i don't remember you're gonna have to correct me but i don't remember many of them speaking english not many of the time now everybody everyone speaks and speaks speaks very well but at that time yeah there was only me and uh who were this is why i was for me it was great because i was going on the missions with them i was doing assaults and the uh in the storm the the hideouts with them and with our guys so i love the thing but yeah they they did not speak english at the time yeah so so what i remember is like we would give our brief and you would stand there and translate the brief for them and then they would explain what they were doing on their target and you would explain what they were doing to us and then anytime that we were you know if we were if we were kind of doing something together you you were really critical for making the the connection between what the two elements were doing this is freaking a pretty big job you know what there was it was i think it was important at the time but eventually we matched so well that i remember sometimes was kevin hey guy hey drago is that guy is the grom guy he was our guy so i could say that's our guy you know it's hard to tell who is who because we're working so well together um yeah but you know talking about this english thing uh translation and stuff i am also i think besides being preacher and breaching in iraq known for my english skills actually for my uh actually i'm going to patent it i'm thinking about patenting it uh i became known for being the fastest english language uh instructor teacher to terrorists actually because i developed that course i call it drago's accelerated english language course for terrorists basically you give me five minutes with the terrorists because they always say remember i don't speak no english no english mistake no english mistake i i teach you five minutes later the guy actually could speak with better accent that i could ever say things so that's that's i think that i'm very proud of my skills and uh so that's that that that i'm thinking about patenting it eventually because that's you know it's it worked so well yeah uh it was it was awesome too like when i when i said that the translating between us and the grom you're right like we'd be out on the target and we wouldn't there would be very little that you would have to translate because we all knew what the mission is knew what we were doing we would interact very well together and just like just like seals i mean when you're out in a seal operation you're not talking about you're but you're basically especially on those types of missions you're barely saying anything so it was it was not like you were all the time having to translate but there was a couple times or or there would be times where it's like oh we need to know what they're doing what are they doing right hey dragon where are they going right now it's like oh they saw a guy they saw a squirter they're going to get them like cool roger that yep just just taking care and and bringing those two units together man it was an awesome working relationship that we had with the grom it was freaking awesome they were great guys i really enjoyed that work because especially there you know we have all the same roes but the interpretation of this arrow is well but maybe a little bit more loose or not so strict so they were strict they were they apply everything that needs to be applied to roes but they were also realistic about that stuff so uh it was pleasure to work with them uh the funny things was that if i mix it up you know i had that switch where i had the earphones the peltors with one connected the polish chrome one to us so if i switch the wrong strong way and it's like drago god damn speaking english [ __ ] or there's a switch the other one dragged we don't understand [ __ ] you just say speak polish i have to be very careful you know you you you can do things very fast in combat and then you have to just switch this thing the right way because which is the wrong way it's like yeah if we don't understand you what we don't speak polish drago so you're there for o3 you got there in may you're there oh four you're there my whole deployment which was from uh 03 like october 203 or something like that fall of o3 to some to spring of oh foreign and then you you went back for a little bit did you go back i went back with my platoon then i came back to seal team four and we are just in for us deploying and backing again back again for another six months so that was pretty cool uh the thing is you know what what it does to uh is i remember it becomes almost unreal this world here i remember uh i was talking to my girlfriend at the time and say hey um i need to go and to go home i'm tired now so it's like that's so stupid you're not your home is not there your home is here and blah blah blah oh [ __ ] okay well whatever you know but the the reality is that uh that place becomes your home when you think about this this world about people walking on the streets making groceries it become a dream almost like a state that's just like yeah it is there you know but like now you hear the fa when you think about the fairy tales some you know snow white or something it sounds really great but but it's just like a fairy tale so for me this war became a fairy tale it was just like a you know it's there it's awesome but i'm here and this is my reality and that was almost like a dream you know sometimes it was like i was dreaming being in normal world and and uh yeah so that's that become that world here become very distant to me become almost unreal because their my reality was the war and i liked it i mean that was at that time i thought i liked it but i have to tell you because you know my job i was i'm preacher so i remember after at the end of deployment the first deployment i started having a problems reading i couldn't read so i remember trying to read the sentence and my eyes were jumping so i had to read it over and over and then when i finished reading it i don't remember what i started sentence with so it took me sometimes five six minutes to get through a paragraph and i think this is because of the conclusion i mean we are exposed to these uh to this stuff and i did it was a couple times that i you know like we we suppose we are going explosive bridge through the door that we look at the intel pictures and there was like okay okay so this is how we plan you know we we prepare all the the briefs this is where we hide this is where the assault element is going to be there's the breachers we're going to go blow the door this is how we go well some of those pictures were not very accurate and i remember around the situation that we had uh i had the the assaulting stash there i went sent the recharge with the guy came back and i had no place to hide i was like [ __ ] this and you remember most of these uh uh most of these uh buildings or these uh hideouts were fans of their defenses and stuff so once we climb inside there's really no place to hide and i had to blow my that ship pretty much on myself it's like a [ __ ] hey i can't i'm not going to make your rook is running for looking for some place to hide so i just took a knee put the gun in front of my face and [ __ ] blow this [ __ ] out it i remember i didn't remember much after that i mean i got my force for my for my legs and i was bleeding from my nose and here then but what's what kind of like always puzzled me is like what the [ __ ] is my side i mean i have like the bruce like [ __ ] broke my ribs where that [ __ ] came from so the ground is like the dude you are on your phones who just have to kick you out of the way because there's no way to ride you know you were just you you were just there on your force and uh we so basically kicked me out of the way the key was so strong that almost broke my ribs but you know this is normal it's not that's something that you accept because that's yeah yeah as as a breacher man but those are those operations like those breaches that you guys were doing and i would usually position myself where i would be kind of would there be a wall i would sort of put myself on top of the wall on top of the ladder so i could see the breach i could see the building i could see if there's any enemy movement and then right as you guys would say turning steel i would duck down i'm actually ducking down behind the wall because there there could be frag and stuff like that oh yeah absolutely but but you guys were inside those compound walls and you're probably whatever eight feet 10 feet 12 feet away from the blast and so i like i said i get a little little bit of protection and i don't feel as much concussion the concussion is going up and then as soon as the breach goes i jump over the wall and go we go do our thing but you know you guys are just taking that breach on a nightly basis taking that hammer to the brain and look i know there's some of them where you know it would be really bad and it might knock you out but even the ones that don't knock you out even the ones that you just oh you just you just suck up that thing and it doesn't knock you out and then you go yep that thing is not good for you like those breaches are not good for you and who knows how many hundred hundreds of times you just took that took that concu took that minor concussion and over time it's definitely gonna it's gonna freaking leave a mark accumulates yes but as you know we're not aware so acutely of the issue then as we know now what it does to you and you you you right you learn you you know you get shaked sometimes of the ground just your feet go up there right sort of the blast but then you just go in you move on you you are old onto autopilot basically you know what to do you train for years to do it so this is what i like that i'm saying i was so effective i i enjoyed that skills i could apply as an nvc also that's uh that was uh that was great feeling but yeah it does and we're not that great feeling you know when you get knocked out or bleed from your ears and knows but uh but they're just the the the the the tactics and techniques like how effective they are and how well they work yeah when you said good feeling i was just thinking about like when i got to baghdad so you'd already been there for a long for i don't know eight months but i remember just being so freaking happy to see you and i was like because we already did a platoon together we already had awesome times together yeah and i just was like that's so freaking stupid that's another thing to going with your platoon i i i think this is for some reason i talked to other guys we feel [ __ ] safe it's like dude [ __ ] is not going to happen to us nothing is going to happen to us i think i think because that that the way your platoon was fired up the way you were fired up the way it was uh i mean i think the leadership has a lot to do with it how you feel about this that they've given up and for us it was just like [ __ ] i can operate like this forever all right so let's talk about when you when you get back home after you spend all these months and months over there and you were talking about how the the concussion like you're you're trying to read and you see the the freaking words are moving around and you get done with a sentence you can't remember what did you when when that when that first started happening to you what were you thinking i was thinking keep it quiet because they will move me out of the platoons they won't let me go to war so i just keep my mouth shut and say nothing so did you go back into another platoon at this point yeah there was there was after the first the first deployment uh sorry so i did two more uh combat tours with that uh but uh coming back talking about the returning uh from this there was like almost a year being deployed i remember i landed in norfolk and the guy said like okay hey go ahead and uh you want me to help you something i had all my gear and all the stuff from puerto rico yet because i just came back from i went to from basically from puerto rico to iraq so i had to get my old gear so i stuck my gear on the curb it was uh it was called and i was so tired i remember uh again i said in other words these guys are coming to pick me up so i'm good so he left shut the door and there was like nobody there you know the norfolk military airport and i [ __ ] fell asleep just like [ __ ] getting dark i'm freezing my ass off i say what the [ __ ] i don't know for a second where am i saying i'm not for what [ __ ] didn't show up so like my phone is dead so i was like [ __ ] i can't even call them it's getting [ __ ] night and cold there's nobody there so i was like hey it's trying to knock on the door hey hey can i need the phone so uh nobody shows up i was like i'm so [ __ ] cold the time i'm just saying i need to get inside because i'll get hypothermia i grabbed this [ __ ] big concrete garbage thing i was about to swing it into the window and this guy was like she opens the door i say dude i need to make a cow these guys didn't show up so so i kind of my phone is dead i can i don't even have a phone i don't remember because my brain is already so messed up don't remember uh the number two group it's kind of the team there's a weekend so that team is not there uh can call the group that's so they say hey uh and somebody's supposed to pick me up today a few hours ago and i'm still in the parking lot and you are who i say i'm drago where are you coming from i think from back that i said [ __ ] up we don't have anybody in baghdad yet we are not even there you [ __ ] need it and just [ __ ] hang up they thought they were just i don't know what they think i said that so um you know group two there's no not necessarily seals on the quarter like there's like anybody who are the logistic people so i call back again and say hey [ __ ] give me od the officer of the deck i need officer nick because i need to i just came back from back that i need to get back to the teams so you say they call od and say hey this is drago i just came here for a few hours ago it's a guy supposed to pick me up she don't have to pick anybody up today he just look oh hey drago we are so sorry i'll just send the track right now so we're on that we are on the way so yeah they sent the guy the tech came in and um great guy i really liked him uh so he he came in they load my gear we got team four they took my guns away so they they put it away they uh all my gear are just unloaded in my cage and i just have something just take me uh something into my mind like [ __ ] i haven't by this time the girl from the life to me she just said like you you are done she called me on christmas say that she needs to move on and i'm she don't have time for this [ __ ] so uh so i'm like she had my car and my stuff but i had so i have no car the car is parked somewhere in her place my my clothes are there everything i had was like cruise box world of things but was in her place so i said i just get can i take this key and stole the key from the one of those pickup trucks outside from that store i just like borrowed it and i'm glad i did because uh the guy work out we work outside he shuts the door and i say hey what's the code i need to get inside he said you guys are still sleeping in the [ __ ] teams in the cages you can't do that anymore there's new regulations you are not allowed to go sleep in the teams i said i have no place to go he said well tough [ __ ] man um he lived he just dropped the kind of life i was like what the [ __ ] so i tried to remember that the code uh i don't remember i can't i can't remember it so we have those little punching things because they stopped the quarter like do this some time ago and uh so i can remember that i said like [ __ ] but i am so hungry now i just need to do something i just need to grab something to eat so i i had no money but i put my credit card not credit card by the then have a credit card but my atm card it's like maybe 15 dollars so uh that's like [ __ ] i just need something i cut ten dollars out of it so what can i just say i hope so i drove to in virginia beach to ihop that's why the i think there was there at that time borders bookstore and i came up to this thing and i started got me those uh cheese blends i love cheese blends so that's from the from the i hope so got me cheese plans got me a coffee i signed out and took a fight and i got so sleepy so tired i just [ __ ] fall asleep up there and then next thing is the guy the security officer comes out hey what are you doing here i mean you are sleeping here i'm watching you in here for like five hours or so and this is like i think two o'clock in the morning uh hey i mean what's the problem i said like i'm looking at him i'm still trying to get that uh my wits together he looks at me it's like yeah the [ __ ] kicked you out then she i was like yeah the [ __ ] kicked me out yeah yeah so i said do you mind if i just go relax tomorrow morning and today morning i'll just go and uh you know i just buy some more food if i need to say no no you're fine just go relax and you know just don't cause any problems i'm sorry no no problem so in the morning i woke up and slept in the i hope so i woke up and uh went to group two get some phone calls and most of the guys were i think team four at that time they were doing something because they were deployed we were ready to deploy it again so uh once i get hold of somebody and then i get the code back to the team and then i was like this is not only me as abandoned that team gets this bunch of there's always some team guys sleeping in the cage because it's kicked out from the house his girlfriend kicks him out or has this problem or his there's no place to leave for sure so so you know it's like i moved into the in the cage and uh that was pretty cool because the platoon had you have all the cable tvs you have a shower you have a gym 24 hours seven and uh so it was only me but it's like a bunch of guys hey drago you should just bang on the door somebody would come out and just open the doors for you i didn't know anybody was here we were told that we cannot there's nobody in the teams anymore that thing is gone nah [ __ ] this just playing cards and doing all kinds of cook they're schools that's really cool and then you know we're just we deploy again but then i deploy again but that was the first uh my first comeback was not only that but then i find out that my checks are bouncing i look at the bank and they save no money at all i say what the [ __ ] so i go to them and they say drago you didn't fill your travel claims so travel claims i was in iraq without wounded i was not moving anywhere i was there for like eight months nine months and then you we were told not to worry about the travel claims well we just garnish your money so you aren't getting any paycheck you're just getting maybe like three whatever that proportion was that they allowed to leave so i said dude i'm so [ __ ] sick and pissed about that and uh i'm i tell you this i'm just going to make me a sign uh iraqi veteran i work for food and i'll go in front of that [ __ ] gate up there and start get some money because i need to eat so i said no no i didn't need to go that far you know it's just we loaned you the money and actually the chief mess you actually loan me the money so i can buy some food and pay some bills of course i paid it back but i was so mad i called this uh that those civilians they worked the travel claims in group two and just relayed it to them and they show up i yield them let's see so next thing the chiefs calls me hey drago you're not allowed to group two you have they call provosts and i think we have a problem so we just told them that if you show up in group two you'll be always chief assisting you and you go with chief up there so because you really scared these people out there i was like okay chief that's no problem and um and you know just work my way work my way out of this pay my some pay those travel claims you know fill the travel claims they did return some of the money and um it was all good you know that's uh um that's then i deploy again and again and uh the this with the eyes first i was i was coming with all kinds of theories like maybe my eyes are bad maybe the tent is dark so i use the flashlight i use this and i can't [ __ ] read so i just i just give up i say maybe i'm just not smart enough and i just like move on i was busy with other stuff so it came back later that how many more deployments did you do uh three two two more to iraq so what year was your last one 2005 2003 2004 and 2005. and then what'd you do when you got home from from that deployment from that deployment uh you know at that time i also you know before you even jump into that i i s like there's a certain transition period and there's a there's like a you know when you're overseas and especially for you you have one basically one purpose in life when you're over there like you get it you get your mission tasking you you figure out what the what the plan is you get your gear together you brief the guys you go out you do your hit you come back it's the simplest life yeah it's like a customer service the government customer service i would look at it but my customers were always bad and i got to kill them and then you but you come home and all of a sudden there's all these other things right there's the freaking travel claims and there's like apartments and there's all these other things that you gotta try and like deal with again and and sometimes just that is you're just not it takes a little bit of time to get used to what you were saying you were saying that the normal world doesn't really exist anymore and then when you come back and you get injected back into it sometimes it takes a little time to get used to okay there's this this is what this is what i've got to deal with i got to go stand in line at the dmv like a normal freaking human being which i have you know let's face it if you if there was someone in the way when you're you know it's like when we were when we were doing operations when we were driving if there was a vehicle in the way you freaking just knocked the vehicle off the road like you got plowed out of the way and then you drive on if there's a person that's in the way as you're moving towards a target you just freaking clear them out of the way it's just no factor yes and so you you get in that mindset of okay i'm going to make happen whatever i need to make happen to get the mission done that's the mindset that you get in and you get back and and you realize okay it takes a little time to realize that you can't just go you can't stay in that mode because that mode is not that mode is actually considered to be criminal and destructive and destructive in america in the normal civilian populace yeah i remember but my first feeling was even when i was sleeping in the ihop when i came back it's kind of relief too when i i'm just looking around i see these people eating or walking around saying that's that's that's the normal life but i was i forgot about it almost because it was so immersed into that combat into that um the time there that again this became like a dream then you come back it's like oh that's actually real you know that's uh but also big relief i never realized that that that thing over your head always well i can get shot we don't think about it it never bothered me but then when i came back i was like i'm going to get shot so it's like well first thing is i'm i'm good i'm okay now but then come the reflection you think about the guys that did not come back and that's it still bothers me and um that's uh uh i think they will always stay with with us uh forever that uh almost i don't know it's called like the the survival survival guilt that uh that's what they call it why me why him not me and um this is why i'm trying to cherish the memories of the guys that i knew they are not here anymore because you know it fades and i think they are alive in they still live in our minds so what we can do for them is just remember them because if we forget who we remember so they they're still alive they are alive in our minds we see them we remember them and we need to cherish this so it is so important to write the books about these guys who are not here anymore because who write they can write their own book we need to engage parents and that was just our parents of our guys look um they might not seem like a lot but you wake up and you know this the pain doesn't go away just live to land with it as a parent as a spouse but what you can do is just write little things that you remember uh you just you wake up it's like yeah i remember he was doing this and that when he was a little kid write this down because those memories are fleeting you might not remember it 10 years down the road but eventually if you keep doing this you will write the full picture the image of your child of your spouse who is no longer with us but it helps all of us remember it so it is important that you do that and uh hopefully people are doing it because you know that eventually become a book and maybe you want to share the parent or the spouse want to share with us the other person that we don't know because most of us know the guy the guy like [ __ ] warrior you know he goes up there he kills the bad guys he does what needs to be done but there's also another side to each of us and we don't know that side of these people who didn't come back so it is important that we help maintain that memory of these guys yeah there's um no doubt about that and even you know with with the opportunity i have here um talking to guys talking to veterans from other wars as well and just just hearing their stories and they still carry on the memories guys that guys from the korean war guys from vietnam that what you're saying is absolutely true and there's like i read a lot of books that guys have written and that's that's the memory that's what they left behind and they they remember and they account for the friends and brothers that they lost in combat and it's it's priceless it's priceless for us this is how we keep them alive you know that's how we keep their memories by keeping their memory alive because they live in our minds so so you end up doing another did your next two deployments were those back to iraq again yeah yeah and then when i came back i realized that you know i'm 45 i haven't at that time my girlfriend dumped me because my career was not really good i wasn't making enough money actually she actually said in the email that uh that really not that's not the place she wants to be in so i say [ __ ] i mean i'm i'm like hitting 45 i'm getting old guy and i don't have a don't know even girls you know i don't know i don't have anybody so i'm going to go and find somebody how do i find somebody i think the easiest way just go online and look for somebody so i remember there was this there's a site american singles and uh i said [ __ ] yeah i'm american i'm going to go and get me a wife so so american and i'm single this site's for me so um so i can't write very well right so i remember so we are going trying to finally i found the girl i was like she's so beautiful i'm going to go into let me see if i can wing to her i just need to tweak my age a little bit because she's so young so she's like maybe she's 13 years younger so i just tweak my age a little bit so wink to her just to write something she's got to look at it and she she went back she wrote she wrote back and she wrote so nicely so i said park if i write to her she just she just fired me right from the get cause she won't even talk to me so so i took the team guys hey can you help me write the letters what let's love letters so so we're going on we had guys writing the love letters to my present wife but uh just helping me out you know because when i write in the if i when i write this like is what i ask you know i be what i be your love letter was i like you yeah you like me yeah yeah me love you very much and so that wouldn't go well and uh so the guys kept doing it and so i'm looking at this i'm reading her letters and this is so [ __ ] awesome she writes so well she's so polished she's uh so educated then i find out you know she's air force academy graduate uh so i was like oh damn this like make it uh how many how many years did you chop off your age when you initiated this relationship i think five because uh and i'm glad i did because uh we're not talking here later so she had like a kind of limit if somebody contacted her about that limit yeah uh she's just like it's a disappear so you were 45 she was how was she 57 she was 37 36 36 so you you brought yourself down to a clean 40. yes uh like maybe 39 40. so i was strong i was i was still i still look young and also like she can tell but when she sees me she will like me so um so i i uh so the guys keep writing me but eventually i say look drago we wrote you like i think hundreds of these letters so i think you can what you can do right now is kind of paste and post you can just make any letter you want just that's you know that copy and paste so i'm like [ __ ] a bit worried about it but say okay yeah i have like every letter so she wrote me an email um and uh i tried to like make some things out and i guess it didn't go well because uh i sent a letter and says click she disappeared from that what i found out later is that uh she read that letter and the she's her friends and her came to conclusion that i'm either on drugs or drunk so that they work very well so he'll be better safe than sorry so she left i was like [ __ ] i think i [ __ ] up so that like that guy's looking say yeah drago you did [ __ ] that you just put the [ __ ] backwards so i like damn okay i need to start over again and then she shows up again well she shows up because i find out later that they offer her 30 30 more free days like a freebie so somebody else so she said i'm sure okay they said we're sorry about that last draco guy we apologize here's your money back and you get 30 more days to find a normal human being yeah okay yeah i guess you know something everyone but she shows up i was pretty desperate at the time i really liked her i really i loved him you know we talked for a while we wrote a lot of letters i mean my team guys wrote a lot of letters and she was lucky to me so um so then uh uh and she didn't respond so i was like was spending just just colony just just counting wait did you never had you talked before no just she was she's very proper she was like i'm not going to talk to you i don't know you even i don't want to give you my phone number or anything but eventually acquires her into calling me had you told her your life story had you told her that you had come from poland or were you telling her that you were a freaking uh hedge fund manager in new york or something no no i just told them i'm in the navy i'm doing well and you know just just try to just be very very uh vague about it i think that's maybe she didn't like it either but i'm just trying not to talk because if i say yeah i'm sorry i just came back from iraq so that my guy might be crazy or something so i tried to stay out of it but anyway the guys did a really good job you know they if they stay with me they could continue i think i would have no problems whatsoever but anyway i created a letter it came out as a druggie or some drunk person and then she's just like i don't mess with that so um finally finally got her to call me and i say look this is me this blah blah so i i told her about myself and she's like quiet for a second say oh you just don't speak english very well it's not you are drunk and drugs right it's like oh yeah yeah i don't do any drugs you know i don't drink only on occasions and maybe wine sometimes so we started talking about and then finally she agreed to come and visit me i was totally in love and uh yep we are married now but yeah that was that was a big thing that uh that uh yeah she thought that maybe i'm not not quite right in my head i was not but yeah we are married we have two children now and uh together uh a little girl 12 years old and the 10 years 11 years old boy so how did you wrap up your your navy career when i met her i went to master chief and i was still instructor at the time i was in buzz i said look i don't have any family i have this girl right here if i go to toward a deploy i'm i'm just really scared to lose her i've been there so many times so long time maybe you can find me some post that i can uh just get married i just wanted to get married since i want to secure this girl and uh so first they say okay we'll try to help you drago but the letter from command came in well for that position who is somebody who is really polished and who speaks english very well and drago is neither one i i seen this email that was shown to me so i say [ __ ] i'm wearing this girl anyway but eventually i was able to win they called that they sent me to ohio nrd and uh we got married of course and i retired from there and it was kind of i'm glad it happened this way because that transition kind of brought me back to reality you know this is not about just killing people and beating them up it is more also about the leading society being productive member of society so so that there was a good transition period for me that i could actually relax and join the society back again and uh not be a villain but be a good person and uh and yeah i got domesticated now so i'm the nice nice drago and uh and the life is good my wife she's she has master's degree in bioengineering she's about to do her phd and i'm here to support her so we're doing well and i just miss the teams definitely well you're always going to miss the teams and uh by the way you were you were you you may have felt like a villain in some way but i can tell you bro you were you were never a villain to me you you're always always freaking there always there every single time um on the good guys side so when you retired what did you do what did you do once you retired what year did you retire 2011. okay so before retirement uh i was like i was told i need to do this i need to do this and to do that uh you know when you come back from war i think there's some issues linger with you and it's like well i didn't really care about the doing the tab meetings about that i just wanted to go retire and move on with my life i didn't really want to really know what i'm going to do but i was good in the programming and the the software development and my wife said like what you need to do is put your resume here and start looking for the job so finally i said okay okay i don't have the formal educator i'm a seal i don't write software i kill people so um i need to do something so say no no no you do have experience you say you did a lot and she wrote she helped me write the resume at the time so i put the resume and i said my good luck yeah somebody willing to call me back then five days later to say hey we're looking we have a position here would you like to come and talk to us so i was like sure absolutely yes so i ran up up there and i got the job before i retired i already have a job like i think in two weeks before retirement i got the job so i didn't started yet until my but my on my leave i was working so my my retirement lead and uh and that's rolled in you know they're just getting more and more experience i learned more and more from the guys from the software engineers working with me and so my life is what it is right now i'm actually i i end up developing quite a few programs one of them is connecting with this is as you know my views my i'm very open about the socialism and how dangerous the socialism is that uh when any time i posted on facebook something about socialism they banned me they would just basically stop my account people were calling me names and i couldn't even respond to it because facebook was facebook was blocking it so i say [ __ ] these guys [ __ ] communists i'm going to go and they'll create my own facebook so i create connecting and we have thousands of people right now on the side posting there isn't no censorship everybody's welcome it's not that the the right left side says you know if you have if you like to say something and not to be worried about being banned or ostracized by uh zuken [ __ ] whatever his name is and or this other twerp from twitter come to connexing and you are welcome to to say whatever you like to say you know just please keep the violence down and uh not nothing violent but just you're welcome to speak be open so so it's it's connect zing z-i-n-g connect zing and what i'm i'm now a member of connect zing i'm on there one thing that i i was thinking about as you were telling her talking about everything today i mean it couldn't there couldn't be any better parallel between what you experienced in life and and starting this so at one point in your life the communist government shut down all communications inside of your country and completely suppressed the populace and what you did back then as a freaking whatever 19 18 20 year old was you said okay they're trying to stop us from communicating so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start a freaking newspaper and we're to go and we're going to run around in the background we're going to print it and we're going to distribute it out there to people so even as a kid you realize the importance of free speech pretty speech yes and so now you're in a situation where you you got banned from the the the social media platforms and so you did you're doing the same thing okay look you don't want me to you don't want me to speak you don't want me to have free speech okay here i go and so you created this website and this platform that people can now communicate and they don't have to have any fear of being being suppressed yes and it is important for me i i see that i think we are going the wrong direction that suppression of free voice eventually will destroy can destroy our country um the socialism has seven things in common whether this is adolf hitler socialism adult hitler national socialism whether it's bernie sanders socialism or policy socialism they all have one thing in common is intimidation violence poverty having a villain like stalin joseph stalin had the kulaks those wealthy passions they were villains they were always vilified adolf hitler had jewish people he vilified this entire group and pelosi have act seems to me like veterans and middle class so that's so the the villain is very important element of socialism but also political prisoners and political murders and the biggest hallmark of i think totalitarian social estate is where state entities are attacking and intimidating political opponents we had irs uh you remember i'm sure remember that attacking and vilifying the opponents and other state entities so this is where i think we are in a very dangerous spot and we need to act on it political prisoners you know then socialism they always say we don't have political prisoners because nobody sees for political reasons he sees for stealing a milk this guy states for just maybe driving on the curb with his car this guy sits for something else but there's no political prisoners but they all sit for political reasons and you know we have here general flynn i mean what happened to him you always find something that you can show me a man i'll i'll stick the paragraph to him so they will find something to intimidate political opponents and i think it's time to turn around our country we can have the things that are happening right now are very disturbing to me they're too much like that socialism that i experience and i just like i said earlier if people only took time to ask refugees from the former socialist countries in eastern europe and stood against evil you wouldn't have any democrats left in the office i tell you that it is so it is so bad i mean um i'm really concerned yeah we had some uh we had some vietnamese vietnam war veterans on and they certainly expressed very similar concerns they lived through communism they escaped communist countries and they hate seeing and they're they're they're sickened when they see similar uh similar things occurring here and they you know it's a warning it's a warning it is a warning you better hate it before it's too late if not too late already because yeah that's uh we we already have we're ahead socialist elections and seems like the rules are being implemented i was when i was talking to people about in 2008 that was laughed off it's like that's not going to happen here we have we have been we are having now right now implement the rules are being implemented allowing for socialist elections socialist elections i mean elections where communists marxists and socialists always win now on top of that and i know that you got that going on you also have you also have a foundation to help guys that we're in the seal teams guys that are in the seal teams if they if they run into hard times for whatever reason you have a a fund that people can donate to what's what's that all about as this navy seals fan there's 501 c3 navysealsfun.org not foundation is navy seals fund fund and this is to help our guys because there's a lot of team guys that leave the teams before their time before the retirement and they have pretty much no have no support or very little support um so and i've seen so many guys going with broken lies because they missed the payment here they missed the payment there the the the the the work they'd lost the job some of them the the whole life was collapsing in front of them so what we create is like no red tape uh uh charity that look if you were anytime at any time 53-26 we will help you we don't let you fall down and uh it's uh just no nobody gets paid so if you can look at our website there's a bunch of team guys with the same attitude with the same ideals that we we need to help each other and again they don't want to get paid they don't want the money it is not about the money this is something that we can give back to those less fortunate because there's a big problem look i was lucky i i came back i met my wife she was able to domesticate me and and and create a human being out of me again but there's a lot of guys that come back or or do they they get caught up in this uh uh in this violent cycle that you know the skills from the navy seal teams don't translate well on civilian uh in civilian life not many things or many some people have a hard time in the transition so what is happening with these guys is well you know what i'm i can't get the job but what i'm going to do i'm going to go get contracting i'm going to go overseas again you know should shoot some you know do pretty much the same job but when i come back with a lot of money i can get the regular job i can get with my bag with my family the guy comes back after six months with tons of money he's trying to find the job six months later he has no job and he has no money what do you do well i'm tired they're tired they just have no choice i say i need to get back i need to go back into that world again so and that cycle repeats itself we have a guys caught up in this cycle you know not everybody there are some people that like this lifestyle and they can continue on but there's many guys that can't get out of it so this is where we step in we want to go and help these guys if you want to get out of this uh we are here to help you and uh we we stay watch over you awesome awesome man look we've been going for a while now uh probably a good place to um probably good place to wrap up i know uh you know you know what we missed you know we didn't talk about was one of my funnest things in life was was introducing you to jiu jitsu oh that was a great thing and how excited you were you were so excited when you learned that you could choke people and you could arm lock people and i remember you got to a scrap somewhere we were you know out somewhere and you got into a scrap and and you i wasn't there you came back to me the next day and you you you had the you had a look of just joy on your face and you said choco choco and i was like what's going on man you said i got in a fight last night and i was like okay did you get in trouble he's like no no no no i choked the guy i choked him you were so happy and so proud and i and i was quite proud as well actually i have to do an ought to do something too because this is what they sometimes get old and misunderstand even within our community within our guys so you know when i used to fight when i was the way i grew up is you you fight until you destroy the guy that the fight is over not when the guy tells you okay well i got it you know that is over you know you are better and then as soon as you turn around he launched he launched edu so you just beat the guy until he doesn't move and then which is what you need to be careful with is it actually happened to me before that he'll then choke on his own tongue if you roll the wrong way now you need to go because the police about to come in so just if you're living there like he dies or not so the technique that i learned in poland is a pinup type so you just pin up they make a pin up out of the guy you you you put the pen through his lip into his tongue and pin his tongue to his lap so that way whatever he rolls in was once you leave he's not going to suffocate on his own tongue and people are like oh so so what what's what is it real yeah it is real because the then you can leave and safely guy in the in in that position and when he wakes up he just feel that he has a safety pin in edges and pin his tongue from his lab and go home versus being dead you know and then you get in trouble so so yeah that's that's actually good technique that uh a lot of people are thinking i think adopted i think because i told that quite a few guys there was also a good one where we were going through some kind of combatives training and the instructors they had like these boxes like taped on the floor and the purpose of these boxes was that if you had to handle a situation you know in a hand-to-hand situation those boxes represented the area that you needed to stay in because if you got out of that area you're actually interfering with other guys field of fire so it was almost a way for them to prove that look you just need to stay still and whatever if you can't do it inside of this little box here then it's probably not going to work and so they they did some things with me with with grappling and it was kind of funny but then they take you and they go all right you know you stand in this box and they put another like one of the instructors in the box and they said you know if you're in this little space like this you know these kick these kicks that you're talking about they wouldn't work because you're you're too close yeah they were demonstrated yeah and then so then they go up they go uh okay drago you know you're standing in this box you're not allowed to leave the box but try and kick him try and kick him in the head and uh i did apparently they didn't know that you had very flexible legs and why you freaking kicked this guy in the head we loved his books he was definitely out of the box it was freaking awesome um but you know i remember too i'm so glad that you mentioned about this because when you show up in the platoon i remember just came and i said guys i'm going to check out the entire platoon in five minutes okay so you started it and as the progress like within a 30 seconds you people are tapping out or pass out next next so i've seen like a couple guys quietly just inching their way out of the so you know you check out whoever was left up there including myself but uh that was actually good experience and uh we there we started learning and i remember i remember that i was not that technically i was pretty strong but not technically very well and i was wrestling with one of the officers and i remember i was trying almost everything i was pin i had to pin him down i was but i almost ripped his hand off and didn't work and didn't work he was laying there and i was trying everything i find like 30 minutes later he finally tapped out and gave up then you woke up so like well you know what i didn't want to go interfere with this but you're doing okay but if you take his hand just wait and just push a little bit down he'll be tapping out right away so i just like try it i say [ __ ] i wish i knew that i would spend 30 minutes trying to get my arm over and here's a simple technique to do it so so yeah that's that was pretty funny when he was that's actually scared me but because i didn't know it we were wrestling you were overwatching us and then that's i'm like i'm doing pretty good you know but he's not tapping out so i'm just wrapping him up and then i see you and other team guard other other guys on the platform just prying me out of sky that's like yeah stop stop slow i say stop for [ __ ] wow that he's stepping out and saying no he's not he's stopping out no he's not and then he say wait uh do you hear did you hear this i say yeah but what does that mean okay so well he couldn't breathe and he's going to tap there he has no way to tap out and scott said dude i couldn't breathe i couldn't tap out so i could say was i couldn't have a breath to even say stop and all i could do is and then uh and then then you start off so yeah it's like that's pretty cool actually i was like wow that's [ __ ] jiu-jitsu that works man yeah that particular individual was kind of claustrophobic and i remember i would train with him and when when someone's super claustrophobic like that sometimes i like to sort of uh give them some exposure therapy and try and make them more used to it but i remember him just he's going he's just like get off he get off me and he was so mad to get off me i'm not down with this and he's walking up so bad he was freaking away there was nothing unusual to see you know where there's having guys pass out who good times good times awesome uh right on echo charles yes speaking of getting after it speaking of jiu-jitsu speaking of you know maintaining the good physical condition which i'm really when you're telling me that you didn't like work out or anything bro you're a freaking mutant because you were strong-ish you're like oh strong like you're as strong as [ __ ] to wrestle with man that's just how uh when i was speaking to being strong yeah now that now that i'm speaking that so when we were lifting we were all trying to get jacked so so whatever if i guess there's nothing i i don't know if you necessarily brought this from the eastern bloc but but drago taught us this thing or would do this thing where we would lift when you're getting when you're getting your lift on he had this uh primal this primal noise so so whenever like the platoon was in a gym somewhere overseas you'd just hear guys going yachts actually you know in iraq yes every platoon came in who came through because i was staying there but platoons rolled through through bark that everybody was living with us and um every every single platoon i said okay drago we are screaming the ads for the [ __ ] months here what the [ __ ] means arts it's like i don't know it's like it means everything you know is it good it's good you know does it suck so he likes to miss everything yeah i was talking to my my uh kids and i was like oh yeah my friends coming on the podcast today and they're like oh whatever they don't care but then i was like this is the guy that originally said because when my kids would work out i'd be like hey look when you're gonna go for that big clean you got to get fired up what you got to do is give yourself a little watch so speaking of yeah there you go well that there's in power lifting there's that or some version of that and there's always that at the end maybe there's like a physiological technique for that tightens up when you if you're going to do it it tightens up kind of your your uh your posterior chain right like you got to make your whole your whole like rib cage kind of yeah like if you do it hard everything's going to get tight straighten up that spinal area yeah it's kind of like you know okay so that there's a method that's that has a name for it when you yeah basically also when you are beating somebody up and you add this to it this will discuss them even more yeah yeah fully but that there is a tech that technique has a name like to tighten up everything it's almost like there's a breath hold scenario you can call it brace for it or something no it's like an ep theory it's yeah it's an odd word i forget what it is but when you say that's that's like a it's like you're not totally holding your breath you're giving a little air it's kind of like you know when you get you know those uh what do you call the blood pressure things you know you pump it pumping pot and then you let out a little bit it's kind of like that kind of thing anyway i think it's a furrow technique it doesn't block completely or breathing it's just uh yeah it kind of gives you that extra pressure that you need but you still have that like pressure valve yes that's it's true yeah so maybe maybe just that's just how you kind of grew up you know in your mind you just it came very natural it's probably what happened it worked worked for me for i think for all of us because all the guys and the weather team five seven or whatever team showed up up there they all end up with ads makes you a little bit stronger actually i got the call into a long time ago i say drago what the [ __ ] that asked me is that people are always asking me and i have i don't know what to tell them i mean everything dude oh hell yeah one hour means nothing but it means everything yeah yeah it seems like a little deeper when i was in college i got knee surgery because i blew on my acl and before i got surgery i was like okay what's the recovery time and all this and they're like you know it depends and they ask me are you polish are you do you have any polish blood and i said no why i said because polish people tend to heal faster so they for real this is what the literally what the doctor told me polish and samoan so how come they didn't ask if you were samoan they did oh okay they asked you both yeah but drago doesn't have someone yeah less relevant we'll just say i'm just saying his durability may be attributed to his genetic you know scenario blood i'll look at the balance time and maybe hopefully that will help me get got through but also i think uh attitude i was never like i remember we said before the hell or during the hell week so why you are here what did you why would you come to birds and stuff well i want to try to be a best seller the best guy i tried to be a ceo i tried this i tried that so they came to me i said i'm not [ __ ] trying anything i'm here to be a ceo i just i will be a seal unless i get injured or kick me out so uh i'm not trying i'm just on my way to be a seal just like i kind of liked it but i got beat up for that you're definitely going to get to beat down for that one makes sense what do we got man um oops either way we yes we are on the path um so on this path not all of us are quite as durable or maybe we are i don't know but we got supplementation jackal fuel so we got stuff for your joints joint warfare we have a review we have an automatic review drago has been drinking the dak savage drink and what what what do you think i'm addicted to it for many reasons one is that the taste of it because uh i i was telling you earlier about those candies in poland there's a specific taste of candies that are so rare that you can actually trade this candy for between the kids and there was like a caramel white candy within the so this is it this is this is that candy which i was always addicted like dr pepper when i had the first dr pepper i said holy [ __ ] this is america you know it's like we were struggling to have one candy like this in here you can just go to the machine and get yourself one there you go so that i love the taste so so it tastes like america what america there you go it's odd because on the way down here i was thinking about it you know like a regular uh we'll call it for lack of a better term a traditional energy drink oh an old poisonous energy so exactly right so poisonous right and here's the weird thing everyone knows that it's so weird how everyone knows that like if they say okay so let's say you just did some jiu-jitsu you just worked out or something you're like man i'm thirsty or whatever you know let me go whatever now i need drinks yeah you were like you're not going to the soda machine you're not getting some soda pop you're not getting it energy like an energy drink traditional one that sounds like the last thing you want to drink you need maybe yeah but meanwhile meanwhile you can get america not only are you kinda in the mood for it sometimes um like right after like a hard workout it's actually good for you yeah but isn't it weird how everyone just knows that that an energy drink it's like known like it's a known thing it's mainstream already yeah it's crazy check well if you want to get those if you want to get some joint warfare for your joints if you want to get krill oil for your joints if you want to get some what vitamin d3 yeah which is all kinds of other also very good for you for many reasons malk which is protein disguised as dessert it's true anyways you can get all this stuff at jockofuel.com or you can get you can get the drinks at wawa out on the east coast or you can get the stuff at the vitamin shop yep all available there and consider getting the subscription so originusa.com you want a subscription to this stuff you can save some money free shipping by the way well that's kind of a big deal it's not even a by the way that's almost the primary reason okay maybe the primary reason is we don't wanna not have what we want when we need it yes but another good reason is it's expensive to ship stuff yeah but if you subscribe shipping is free and that's cool boom and you get it every month when you need you don't run out it's a big thing it doesn't seem like a big thing but try to run out are you going to know it's going to be a big thing anyway originusa.com that's where you can sign up right that's pretty much the main spot what is the subscription origin or usability.com that's the spot right there also at originusa.com is jiu jitsu stuff so we talked about jiu jitsu briefly we could have talked more oh yeah but you know very effective but yeah you want some ghees uh american-made ghees rash guards other jiu-jitsu stuff other athletic stuff too yeah origin usa yeah made in america by the way so drago i haven't really dove into this with you but we are we now have a company where we are making products in america we're making jiu-jitsu guys we're making rash guards we're making boots we're making jeans we're making everything in america i know that because i was i was following you right now well the freaking crazy thing is like like for instance jeans everyone gets a pair of whatever name brand genes and they think that they're getting an iconic american gene but they're not they're actually getting genes that are made in communist countries that's where they're made so we don't like that we like our genes to come from america by hard made by hardworking people so origin usa dot com arts yes yes also on that same sort of tip let me direct your attention to taco store dot com this is where you can get uh you know more apparel more representative directly of the path so discipline equals freedom good all these things that's where you can get it we have a subscription situation going on as well it's a good one a little bit different designs but still applicable it's just fyi so you can get this thing it's called the shirt locker if you want to get one of these cool t-shirts here's the thing because somebody there's a reason i'm bringing this up if someone went online and was like that you posted something and they're like hey none of these t-shirts are on the store on jacquardstore.com and yes and no but right well explain yes so people do understand yes they are on jocko store but they're only through the subscription scenario the shirt locker so that's the only place you can get them it again like if you do i mean if you even care about like the difference or whatever it's just they're the designs a little bit we'll just say they're a little bit more creative from time to time nonetheless um you know they're a little bit different they're cool they're fun uh you will get a new one every month damn there it is there you go uh you can subscribe to this podcast you can subscribe to some other podcast we got the the unraveling podcast with daryl cooper we got the grounded podcast we got the warrior kid podcast there's new episodes out by the way yes sir i was really slow in getting those out but they're out you can get your warrior kids listen to those you can also you can also join the underground jocko underground.com where we go in a little bit more detail a little bit of behind the scenes research yep also some good that a lot because some people ask like hey what uh do you guys do q a yeah still you know i'm wondering about this and this good questions but yes the answer is yes we do do the q a but it's on the underground exclusively to the underground maybe maybe not but currently we don't know yet well here's the deal we had people that signed up to be on the underground that subscribed to the underground that asked questions so we answered their questions on one of the first uh underground q and a's so anyways go to jockowunderground.com if you want to subscribe to that if you can't afford it cost eight dollars and 18 cents a month by the way if you can't afford that look we still want you to get the information you can email assistants at jacounderground.com we'll take care of you we got a youtube channel where uh echo puts videos up that he creates that he put more too by the way oh that's some new uh conceptual ideas okay so if you're waiting for echo's conceptual ideas they should be produced within the next 24 months because his work ethic is well it's solid dude it's not it's not he doesn't create videos varying levels of happiness maybe you should maybe you should go home get in front of your editing suite and just go accident maybe we'll get some more freaking videos that's what that's what he's doing yeah if you guys are legit you know that odds actually is part of my uh uh the drago's accelerated english that's the main motivator people hear that one time and they're telling you where their first born child is they speak very good english after that uh psychological warfare you can get that on any mp3 platform we got flipside canvas flipsidecampus.com my brother dakota meyer marine corps he's got a company where he's making things to hang on your wall we got a bunch of books okay the first book that i want to talk to you about is the book that i started off this podcast today i took one little section uh the the book is called and you're gonna have to help me with all this uh drago so the book is called camp posey the writer his name is how do i say it navajo novel so novel was a guy in the grom in the polish grom special operations guy i don't know too much about him because i can't read polish but the book is available and i ordered it but i haven't gotten it yet it's available on amazon so if you want to get this book look up camp posey and it it i i did look through it there's pictures of um i mean because he was deployed with us he was when you were there and i was there so uh yeah our pictures yep there's pictures of where we were there's pictures of camp jenny posey which is freaking brings back all kinds of memories for us because nostalgia were doing so much good work out of there a bunch of pictures in it and and you can get an english version so check that out camp posey have you read it oh i have read it yes i've read it both and i read in polish and english and it's very accurate i say i think it's it it gives you the the the the perspective from the other other guys who are not part of the sales but they are really good they they they and how they perceive seal teams right how they see us how what do we do in iraq and how they work so it's pretty good insight and the perspective on sales from the different vantage point and then what about this other book that you brought today which i haven't seen um so what's this called this is uh the title of translation is my 13 years in the uh grom okay so this is not my thirteen years this is this guy's that's a 13 right there yes thirteen that's exactly that's thirteen in polish so it's us you are on the english channel dragon switch mode so this guy was with us too actually the hame and the naval naval they were together in i think at the same time there so this is uh he wrote this book much earlier and same thing ages his view on the iraq war on the our working together with seals and that how this thing uh uh you know well i think it's is very interesting especially if you want to look and uh about us about sales and how others perceive us other forces do you know if this is this book available on amazon is also available on amazon it is also i will send you the links uh it is also available in english on amazon so and the and the english title is also 13 years my 13 years my 13 years yeah i do i'm just flipping through this one this one's got a bunch of pictures very that look very familiar as well yeah i mean that was the pictures taken when we were there yeah that's freaking awesome all right so we got these books check these books out um we and drago and i already talked about hopefully getting one of those guys or both those guys on the podcast at some point if they can come over here from poland or maybe you know what might we make an exception and do a not live like not face to face we have never done that before we've never done a a virtual podcast maybe we would do it for po for poland like skype or something yeah we have actually one of them i think we'll be traveling here too so that's all we need to know just that'll be awesome if actually he could trap and tell his perspective on iraq war why poland got involved in it and why poland was standing by our side uh in that war and why is poland standing by our side so be good to hear from yeah that'd be awesome uh a bunch of other books too i got a new book coming out called final spin you can pre-order it right now if you want the first to dish i don't think we've talked about that yet on final spin if you want the first have we if you want that first edition you mentioned it last time i think but yeah you didn't go look don't be coming up to me in whatever when the book comes out two months after it comes out and you roll up to me hey chocolate got your book and i look at it i'm gonna know you're gonna know we're all gonna know we're all gonna know you got the second dish uh pre-order that one right now leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocol displaying freedom field manual way of the warrior kid one two three and four check those out mikey and the dragons which is which is apparently the best the kids book ever that's what i've heard and then about face by david hackworth i wrote a forward on a new version pretty honored to do that extreme ownership the dichotomy leadership that's the og of jocko books that i wrote with my brother leif babin we got a consulting company salonfront go to ashlandfront.com we got ef online if you want online virtual training go to efonline.com if you want to come see us live go to extremeownership.com we got three events this year because we're having three events this year so if you want to come go to extremeownership.com it's a leadership a leadership seminar live in person we also have an event coming up called ef battlefield where we walk the battle of gettysburg we walk the battlefield there and talk about the lessons that were learned this is an unbelievable event we sold we we were only going to do one we sold it out we're doing two now hopefully so if we can get things scheduled we're going to make that happen go to echelonfront.com events if you want to come to that and if you want to help service members active and retired if you want to help their families if you want to help gold star families check out mark lee's mom she has her own organization and if you want to help you want to donate you want to get involved go to america's mightywarriors.org and if you want to hear more from us which is highly unlikely at this point but if you want to you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on instagram on facebook echo is at echo charles i am out jocko willink now if you want to talk to drago he's not on those platforms his his free speech has been suppressed but don't worry he's on the underground he's making things happen you can check him out at connectzing.com i'm also on there now too because well if drag was there and he's hanging out on there and i'm going to be hanging out too echo you got any final thoughts no that's it man good to see you again we met briefly downtown in my nightclub days with my good friend jeremy and he uh he introduced me to you back a long time ago he was like almost 20 years like a long time ago say hi to him this is a great guy oh yeah i love this guy and uh yeah i met him i remember dragging i was like oh okay all right he seems very nice but he could probably get nuts so okay good to see you again thank you this was nice to see you again and it was great to be here draco any other closing thoughts man um i say maybe make a small prayer in our mind for those guys who are no longer with us and maybe a few seconds of silence to honor them yeah and um i don't know when this podcast is is actually coming out but um today is is march 20th today is is mark lee's birthday and i mean just an incredible incredible man incredible seal husband incredible son and miss him and the rest of the boys every day so happy birthday to mark and drago man thanks for your service thanks for your service to the teams thanks for your service to the navy thanks for having my back countless times thank you for your service to america and and beyond that thanks for your service to the ultimate cause of freedom in the world you can't repay freedom there's people are asking me thank you this is the other way around jacob actually there's me who's supposed to say thank you to you to you to every america and for my freedom what i did in the teams in the navy is just a token flip for you cannot repay freedom you could that freedom is not for sale it is not there is nothing you can do to reciprocate that freedom that that we that i got from america i'm free man and that's awesome feeling it's something that i will never be able to reply repay and i just i believe that just keep serving in any capacity i can to our great america is important so i'm not done yet i've finished my military career but i'm still serving i'm still want to make america a better and safer place well i'm into that and uh i know i will always be proud to call you brother and to all the other people out there especially those that are out there wearing the cloth of the nation thank you for protecting the most precious thing that we have and that is our freedom and the same goes for our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all the other first responders out there thank you for protecting us here at home and everyone else just remember that freedom is not free and we cannot take it for granted there is evil in the world there is oppression in the world and we must be on guard for authoritarian and tyrannical leaders and like drago we must be willing to stand up and fight for our freedom and until next time this is drago and echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 925,731

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint

Id: 5V--ZFTcDrY

Length: 209min 5sec (12545 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021