SERE Selection and Skydiving with Tiffany Hart

[Music] you're listening to the ones ready podcast a team of air force special operators forged in combat with over 70 years of combined operational experience as well as a decade of selection instructor experience if you're tired of settling and you want to do something you truly believe in you're in the right place now here's your host pj team leader former in-doc instructor supervisor entrepreneur and physician assistant brian silva what's up everybody brian silva here welcome back to another ones ready podcast you're in the team room with peace trent and our very special guest today uh tiffany hart seer specialist she's gonna be talking to us about her career field and her job and how much she likes to get her jump on but first i want to uh get a big shout out to eberly stock a really awesome company veteran owned based out of idaho and they supply really awesome lifetime warranty type of equipment that all of us have a piece of equipment from them or jacket or a pouch or whatever and they put out solid equipment they'll replace anything that gets damaged and make sure that you are comfortable in that ruck if you're getting ready for selection or getting ready for anything really just out in the mountains a day of backpacking or hunting make sure you check them out use the code ones ready like i said lifetime warranty they make really awesome products and you should definitely go check them out code one's ready so like i said we're going to be talking to see your specialist tiffany hart she's been in the career for a long time you might also know her from the bro wetz podcast so go check that out also make sure you give us a shout but very honored and glad to have her here with us talking to us about the seer specialist so uh if you don't mind tiffany uh i'm going to ask you just one icebreaker type question you know just a warm-up question because all those people out there and see her and i was talking to some people today they're like i didn't know cyr did things like that honestly but so what was the weirdest thing that you've eaten as a seer specialist and what would you say i don't know something that you like that you didn't think you were gonna like when you ate it i mean i feel like if you explain anything that we need people that are gonna think it's weird uh so i would probably say the two things that were probably the most disgusting were goat balls and banana slugs particularly i would i'm a steer away from banana slugs and actually it's funny because you guys had justin gordon on he's another seer specialist and it was that phase of training where you kind of did um rock paper scissors and i was the first to lose and jordan uh and gordon made sure he picked the biggest banana slug for me to eat so he's still got it coming i'm just gonna tell you that right now so uh you see but i think i think the best thing that i've eaten that i didn't think i would like for ants and particularly um you know like bigger and the more the bigger they are and the darker they are the more acidic they taste they have and they kind of taste like lemon drops and i particularly would seek those out and eat those all the time i said the same thing they're like sour candies those big black ants yeah that was a a delicacy when we were up there in sears school for fair child everyone had to try that and actually those are those are the things my students would always eat yeah it actually tastes pretty good that's the only thing ever i've eaten that in grasshoppers but no banana slugs or goat balls i i don't know if i really want to try that but there's probably still time yeah there's still time i mean why not try everything once right what about the eyeball do they have you guys eat the eyeball i don't remember you but there's only two of them so yeah unless you have a few rabbits so yeah everybody that volunteered in my group to eat the eyeballs they were like nah someone else we always do that all right so now that that's out of the way let's uh talk about more of your career and just kind of introduce yourself where you've been who you are and what you do um so my name is tiffany hart i am a serious specialist in the united states air force i joined the military back in 2007 and i went straight in as what we call a true blood seer specialist so it was the job that i picked to do when i first joined and it was the first and only job that i had in the entire military service that i have served thus far um i initially decided to join the military based upon the fact that i was pretty lost in life i had no clue what i wanted to do um it felt like at a very young age in high school that my future was mapped out not just from my parents but from a lot of people in high school thinking i should um go to college right after get married at some point during college maybe use my degree have kids and that was going to be my life and i didn't feel like that was going to be my story i felt lost i didn't know what i wanted to do my first year of college i luckily got a college uh a full-ride scholarship basically for track so i did that but it wasn't i wasn't as passionate about it as i was in high school so i took a year off and during this year break i ended up finding out a lot more about the air force researched it talked to a recruiter i initially actually went to go pj um based upon the information that i heard i was on a swim team for 12 years i broke many records obviously being a collegiate track runner and i didn't want to go into a medical profession so that seemed pretty much right out my alley but of course back in 2007 you know females were not allowed uh so i kind of asked him what the next best thing was like do and he actually took out a steer brochure that had dust on it and was like hey look at this and i looked at mainly the big things that i looked for was like the qualifications what i had to do to enter the job and i realized okay this is challenging this is what i like this is right up my avenue and also on top of that too i was i did a speech class my mom would always encourage me to do you know more public speaking and of course once i realized there was it was a teaching position uh that kind of suited my fancy as well so essentially what initially got me into the job was knowing that it was gonna be challenging i was gonna be outdoors a lot and that it was physically demanding and throughout time i actually fell in love with it i'm taking notes here steer the next best thing that's the official motto now for first year for from here on out well excuse me that was in 2007. my opinion has officially changed i feel like someone there's a tab that says the next best thing that someone's wearing right now you're not still thinking about the pj thing oh if i i actually got asked when i was deployed um i think it was by a pj if i can go into any job and go back and do it what would i do and i told him i would be a combat controller flip-flop shots fired no no it does uh because at the time when you first joined you just don't know and i was also with where was i uh i was with moffitt pjs so then again i don't know if they were you know what i saw is what i saw so [Music] oh yeah no it wasn't bad but you know you just what i said you saw what you saw only that i saw and i had a pjs operationally right so when you see that you kind of just assume big picture which is a bad assumption that they all do that which they do not so now hey when you weren't alone either i mean i didn't know anything about combat control i originally came in as pj found out about combat control while i was at indock so and then i swapped but uh so the with the seer specialist orientation course like obviously it is a a struggle for a lot of people at what point did you struggle like what were some of the friction points that you had the so the struggle that i had was pull-ups so before i even join before i even took my steer pass test i saw you know obviously all the qualifications and my upper body strength for me at the time was not strong uh i was a runner so that's what i had in the bank there so i remember attempting my first pull-up could not even do a single one um back in 2007 it was six to enter so uh i got myself a personal trainer and worked on pull pull-ups non-stop along with my push-ups push-ups were not bad but pull-ups was something that i really did struggle on and uh i get asked all the time what's the best way to get better at pull-ups and it's actually more pull-ups you know just creating that good muscle memory perfect practice makes perfect so if you're going to do a pull-up you'd better do it right not those little not those little you know kind of do them all the way down all the way up and uh it helped me i helped with my struggles and that was probably the main thing that i struggled with that was probably the only thing that i struggled with and which was good to have uh that one thing that i had to work on and i still work on continuously i always improve upon my pull-ups daily so so i mean did you were you know collegiate swimmer collegiate runner did did you have to prepare at all or did you just kind of come in cold going like well you know you're you're getting handed the dusty brochure and you're figuring out what sear is did you just go all right let's we'll do it live kind of thing with uh so i was a sprinter so anything beyond a 400 meter for me was a no-go uh so the fact that i had to run a mile and a half i was like are you crazy um so i will say that before i joined the only thing that i did to work out and the only thing i did to prepare which i am cautious about telling people this is because of my athletic background because everyone's body composition and their their background and their athletic ability is very different so i say you know you might not want to do what i did you might want to prepare a little bit more but i just did the past test every time i went to the gym i just gave myself that dear past um i made sure and sometimes that would be my warm-up and then i would just lift later on so uh and by the way i had no idea what i was lifting and doing anyway so it you know i was i don't know obviously something worked but the biggest thing is that that's what helped out is um i gave myself the exact test with the time uh limits in there with the rest stops in there and by the way when you actually give yourself the test it's a lot harder than just you know doing push-ups here and there and pull-ups here and there and then the run whatever you want when you actually do it the way it's prescribed it's much harder so i think train is your fight that's the best advice i can give there and that's what i did unknowingly at that time and it helped prepare me a lot you're right and that that whole test the past test is designed to do that it is designed to fatigue you and a lot of people make the mistake of training i'm just doing a lot of pull-ups i'm just doing a lot of sit-ups and push-ups and so on and they never actually tie any of them together and i i can i've probably done 10 pass tests with people that say they're ready to go and then they show up and they were like man i i don't know why i failed i i had no problem with this have you done have you done the full test at all nope i didn't try it i'm like dude how do you how can you do how do you do that yeah like what's the big deal yeah yeah yeah so tiffany did you um obviously 2007 age of the internet still uh did you and i think youtube was around then as well uh did you go on youtube or did you were you able to find any information on seer specialist so uh i mean i hate to age myself but i felt like the internet was a little bit more foreign back then right but i was told to look up go seer i think it was ghoster.com and they had information on there essentially they were showing components of the past test and how to conduct them appropriately which i thought was very helpful um and that's basically kai what i went off of i think they also had like a training program on there i could not remember remember it to save life but i think i do recall trying to do a few days of that and beyond that i know they had 64 4 information on there which is a survival handbook and i kind of started to read it and i was like there's no way i'm just i'm just gonna take it with you know one day at a time and whatever they give me i'll just learn it that way and uh beyond that is really kind of all i got i didn't i tried to google a little bit more but the only other thing that i really looked up was banana slug versus snake uh video because we we had a rumor that we were gonna eat banana slugs so my buddy looked up banana slug versus snake and that prepared me to not eat that insect anything about that same training vein anything about wrecking um specifically because i know the seer pipeline is fairly heavy on that you didn't do any of that kind of stuff uh prior to showing up no i did i remember i had a buddy who gave me his west point rock um it was super old school and he was like hey and i didn't even try it because it was about to fall apart so i did no rocking the first time i put on that rock was the myth that gave it to us nice uh thank god and this is why i also tell people like thank god i was this track athlete i had very strong legs you know we had a lifting program in college um i was able to adapt and kind of overcome i will say that i was not the best at wrecking when i first began right i was like middle of the pack but thank god for muscle memory uh and really good cadre and instruction i will tell i tell people this all the time is that even if you might not be prepared on certain things you might know how to sharpen a knife which i did not know how to sharpen a knife before i got there um you know or tie certain knots or rock a certain way or how to even wear a ruck they teach you everything all you have to do is be a sponge and soak it up you have to listen and then do it and regurgitate right and so that's all i did and i think for me it helped with me not going in with a lot of knowledge because i was the nerves helped me soak up that information i wanted to learn more i didn't come in knowing a lot of stuff and then blowing off their instruction which i've seen that happen before too so with the rock after we did i think it was a seven eight mile hike in government canyon down in texas when i did my test um i knocked about 10 minutes off my test time so i was pretty happy with that and rocking was my strong suit throughout one of my strong suits throughout team so i didn't have a problem with that nice pull-ups i was still you know working on right well like based on uh the the uh dusty pamphlet uh your dial-up internet searches and i'm sure your recruiter was just a wealth of information uh what was what was your expectations for what sear was gonna be and what was the reality and what if anything surprised you about what your actual job was when you first got on the ground and got run so what i was first told about sears i was going to kill rabbit i was going to teach and i would be put into a box and that was it and i was like this is very interesting job that i'm going into so obviously one thing that they started to integrate back in 2007 which we were one of the first teams for it is they started a preteen and this is where you had a couple cadre um kind of introduce you to what seer specialists actually did they would maybe makes you make you teach a lesson make you do a fire craft make you uh teach a shelter craft lesson and this kind of got everyone a little bit of taste of what it would be like to be a seer specialist and actually in fact because of them them doing that we lost about five or six really good guys because they actually realized what sierra is now or at least they did at that time and they laughed because they knew it wasn't for them so thank god now with recruiters right they now have this wealth of information and they are more in touch with the communities that they know and can explain this and there's you know podcasts like this that help me get the information out there um so luckily i had that little glimpse and when i got that glimpse and i went through svd i fell in love with a job so for me i was not surprised when you know we got to my first duty station which was still fairchild and i was actually applying uh the job and the duty like i loved it so for me that worked out very well so you get through the pipeline and you're you're an instructor like right away you just you know back seat front seat whatever and then you're in the structure almost yeah almost you uh you graduate i mean and you like maybe have a few nights of drinking and partying with your friends and family and then boom you're straight into the field flights and you're back to being nothing again by the way like you it was so exciting right like you graduate you're like yes about the top i've done it and then you get there and they're like you're not even really technically seer yet so sit down and let's learn and uh you start from square one kind of again and they said we're going to take everything that you applied in training and we're now going to use this to build you into this instructor that you as a young airman can carry these crews with higher ranking individuals who have a lot more experience and knowledge in the military than you do but you're going to be telling them what to do still so um basically you go through the certification process which is a six month time period it should be six months uh for some it's a little bit earlier for some it's a little bit later and then after that you're a full-on qualified instructor and then they start you off slow and then of course they you know it's like a call crawl walk run yeah i always thought that was really interesting how it was like a senior airman you know it was the same rank as me when i was going through school but uh there are a bunch of majors and colonels and you know super high ranking people that are pilots and you know top of the food chain type of guys you know all the fighter pilots and guys that have attitudes um and a lot of them have egos about themselves on you know whether or not they should listen to a seer specialist that's a senior airman but uh i saw it go kind of the other way um also whenever i we first went out there because a lot of them want their hand to be held the whole way they're like i don't know what to do i'm totally out of my element uh put me back in a cockpit in a chair where it's air-conditioned and i'm comfortable like they don't know what to do once they get in there and they kind of freeze so do you have any weird experiences kind of like that yes i mean um i think there's pros and cons to i mean being a female instructor in a way i know this sounds strange and i normally never bring this up but uh i never had a bad student really and i think that's contributed to the fact that when i had female students they saw a female doing the things that they were you know they saw me as a female teaching the lesson and um doing all the objectives and they were like oh and they had the confidence that they could do it very easily too and they did um and then i had male students who made sure to never to never complain and they had to outperform me right because yeah i was their female instructor which they were sad to you know to see that they're like man she's really good at her job because this is not happening um but it was good and yes there was a few times that i had students out there who never seen snow before uh was the first time ever seen a cow in their life uh on the way up there they were like i mean i had one student who talked for hours i can't believe it was a cow you know it just would go on and on and on and i was like this is gonna be a very interesting field experience and um i actually always appreciate those students in all honesty because those are the ones who listen intently those are the ones who performed uh almost perfectly out there because they had no idea what they were doing and therefore their keenness with my instruction was dead on and they did very well for themselves hey you didn't have to break any scar tissues or bad habits yeah right exactly exactly like i just want to make it i would say they do i would say the ones i had to break bad habits of were uh the ones who apparently did like cub scouts eagle scouts uh boy scouts anything like that those were some of the the ones i was like okay simmer down and then of course as you can imagine some of the fighter pilots that we're going through um i had one at one point in time i had to um you know professionally i had to professionally get on him of course for uh you know having his guys being late to a lesson and not um you know being the good element leader that i asked him to be and doing some of the things i asked him to do and i remember he's like do you mind just stepping out of the room for a second i said yeah sure and i was still in training at the time and poor guy one fighter pilot had a bunch of pj's dear guys and like tack keys right so that's all he's dealing with and um all i can hear through the door is i will not be held out by an airman and on top of that i will not be yelled at by a female airman so you guys better square yourselves away and i would i thought it was kind of funny because i was like okay and he ended up giving me the best uh critique at the end of the course uh because he ended up learning a little lesson in um being humble out in the field being replaced by my youngest airman who was a pj because he just couldn't do his job so it's amazing what you can learn uh when you're out there and you know it doesn't matter on your rank or your skill or your job you know i've had many different students out there who do really well or you know they learn a lot that's that's awesome you learn a lot about yourself and a lot of courses we go through because you're just mixed in with such a wide variety of people that like you said some people have never seen a cow in their life and some people have never been out in the forest or seen those kind of trees and mountains so yeah i think that's really awesome so you spent a couple years as the instructor and then uh as far as deployments as a seer person you know for pjs i guess and cct you get videos of like okay pj's are going to go you know being a helicopter fixed wing jump rescue people cct you're going to go drop some bombs sr you're going to go be sneaky and hide places and do stuff like that first you're specialists you're just talking about the instruction aspect so what do you do when you're downrange i mean you're not really doing as much instruction what kind of stuff are you doing well i mean when you think about it at the core of who we are we are still instructors um so there was still some instruction which when i was deployed it was back in 2012 so there was still like some army units out there who would actually ask for seer training uh there were some guys who had to get hris while they were in theaters so um there was some uh and non-governmental organizations who asked for like specific escape training or something like that who were going beyond the wire and doing certain things that we were authorized to give them training for so we did do a little bit of that but that wasn't much um i know justin had hit on it but we do a lot of advising out there particularly with personal recovery and that's kind of our niche there's we kind of get put into this personal recovery um you know aspect and the whole cog in the machine and uh we're there to kind of just help give information we're not there actively uh doing the recovery but we are there if anyone does need help so of course since we were given the students this instruction that if they were to get shot down or if they were to stitch whatever it might be find themselves in the ground we have this wealth of knowledge to know like hey this is where they should be going this is what they're doing this is a signal that they'll be using so therefore when we send in any type of recovery force um traditionally you know they're asking us like hey what are we looking for um and also too like getting information on that individual that air crew member and possibly passing anything pertinent along that could help um whether to find them or to help locate whether to give them medical support uh anything of that sort so what i've noticed sincere when it comes to deployments is a deployment is kind of all the seer guy makes of it and if you're constantly looking for work and you're looking to help uh you will always be employed so uh that's one thing i noticed because you'll hear sometimes uh that we will you know sit down in front of a computer and just review isa preps and epas all day and don't get me wrong i i've done a fair share of those because that is somewhat part of the job to make sure they're done correctly but at the same time uh you know there's a lot more out there if you're looking yeah that was one of the jokes from one of our previous podcasts talking about seer people and they just somehow because you're great at public speaking great at people getting people to like you because that's your job when you're out there as an instructor you know initially but when you're deployed you can mix into everyone you're like hey this is what i got to offer and then you can go out there and pretty much find yourself on a lot of different plate in a lot of different talks and a lot of different missions than you know like pjs because we're kind of stuck to our team and you guys are out there as like a more sole entity and you can be kind of farmed out to anybody that might need that kind of stuff so i thought that was really i mean i was kind of jealous about you know the amount of freedom you guys had of lateral movement back and forth across the compound but um and we always kind of joked about how you guys always had your own little compound at most of the places that we go you always had the best reintegration you know when you have a reason for everything right so it's our reintegration center which you guarantee you know that all the guys tricked out with like the best playstations or whatever like oh you know like you know an ip might need it because they want to decompress it's like okay that's what it is huh but it was great yeah if you had really good leadership out there you got to move around quite a bit um you know i got to rub shoulders with everyone up in master reef up north and the germans and help them actually establish their joint operation center um because they were going off on their own and uh they were gonna be in charge of their own recovery because recovery was getting pulled basically from the bagram area of afghanistan from them and uh they had their own extraction teams and they were coming up with everything on their own and so they sent uh me up there along with the jpa representative and we helped them establish that and that was amazing with the pr background uh and you know training that i got before i left and then on top of that too i even got to go down south and rub shoulders with the brits the apache pilots uh who are amazing and you know give them a little bit of um instruction on what you know based upon what we can give them and uh they appreciate it just in case they ever found themselves on the ground and it's stuff like that where you didn't think you'd be able to do it but when you get asked to do something if you just say yes i'm the type of person that if you're presented with opportunity just say just say yes uh because you have the tendency to look back and be like man why didn't i do that and most of the time you never regret it so is that part of that working yeah exactly you guys are good at it so you talk about pre-deployment training um like i said for everyone else it's kind of more straightforward you're going to this aor area responsibility and you know you're going to cover down on whatever there's mountains you know pj's going to train the mountains there's a river or something you're going to train in that so for you guys what kind of pre-deployment spin-ups and what kind of training do you guys get since you mentioned it um well if you got lucky you got to go to probably some like griffin uh shooting course beforehand that at least you knew so at least it made you look like you knew how to handle a weapon um because we're not like constantly shooting and handling them but they wanted to make sure we looked like we could so we don't embarrass ourselves out there um but they do post through some of that we have a shop called xp for experiential training and so these guys is kind of like their niche and what they do so actually a lot of it i got the breakdown of the chain um of how it works out there the entire cell and uh basically like you know basically what uh j1 or c1 right is and basic this information that you never got as a seer specialist before that is just kind of well known in the army community of course you know different ranks uh training and uh different training on basically the geography of who we're going to be dealing with and how you know they treat individuals and what we can and cannot teach one another so a lot of it was informational it wasn't as much hands-on training because we're not really doing much hands-on over there if since we're the right the ones rubbing shoulders with one another we need to make sure that we know and have the knowledge to speak appropriately on things and know and make sure that we are um we are given information to make sure it's to the right people and that's within you know the guidelines of all the uh security training that we get yeah and that's huge for those guys that are going out there just basically you're learning another language learning all about the culture and making it relate to the air crews or whoever's going to be out there like hey this is what they do so you can expect use this hand not this hand when you're waving to people or don't stick your your feet out the bottom of the helicopter because they don't like that kind of stuff or you know all that different stuff that we used to get briefing we're like i never would have thought about about that kind of stuff but you know that can incite and spark you know whatever kind of take happens because they just think you know to them they see you as using the wrong hand like flipping them off basically the same thing to uh to those people so all that stuff is super important whenever you go down range so i'm kind of switching gears a little bit here um where do you see the seer career field because i know you know everything's changing within spec war from every career field and the merger and all that stuff going on what do you see for seer specialists as far as the future well it's hard to say i've been i feel like now that i'm in the reserves i've been out of the loop just a little bit uh with some of the things i do know that because of the whole covet situation that they are um they are adjusting training just a little bit and what i mean by that is you know we have when we have students go through sear training they go through this 19 day course that is um level c so it's high risk of isolation and what they're realizing is that even though we group everyone in this high risk of isolation bubble not all of them need this very intense uh 19 day course that we have been putting them through so they're starting to group up people it seems to be in three different groups now that they are taking um like maybe osi agents or flight attendants or even just kind of like basic medics and putting them in hey you're going to get these five days of training i don't know if you guys ever heard of ecac before but it's evasion capture and it's kind of like the meat and potatoes of what they need to know and that's i feel like it's something similar to what i'm getting right now i currently train um heavy crews so well i mean i have refueler crews but kind of along the same line so the heavy guys right c130 c17 c5s um and then also the refuelers so you know kc-135 and now the kc-46 these guys you know when you think about it realistically they're they're not going to be really landing uh or kind of regressing out of the plane they uh and you know all the refillers had their parachutes taken away so they always joke about how there's basically a big bomb so why would they land anyway uh so traditionally these guys might get if they do under any type of seared training it's gonna be because something erupts in the location that they're at and then they have to go ahead and do their steer training so we're going to adjust that too why do they take away parachutes from you want to get a lot of this to save money whoa i like why i'm telling you right now every single 135 pilot that we ever had go through sear training is so disgruntled about it because they're like why have i even going through sear training uh apparently they took no joke they took parachutes off to save money so that they can like put more gas on the plate i don't even know i'm sorry refuelers you guys aren't worth i guess the 10 pounds of gas or whatever it's cool brand new platforms so they never break down and nothing ever goes wrong so it's fine yeah they're very nice planes i'll tell you that so uh the way ahead looks to me you know like we are adjusting accordingly to what's kind of happening in the environment around us uh and that's really kind of about it we are we're still saying like hey we're gonna give you guys the best training available and um but we're gonna tailor a little bit more to you and that's kind of about the way ahead now when it comes to whole spec warfare i'm not going to speak upon that in all because i'm not the most um educated on that i don't want to give away any type of false information um i read up on it sometimes but that's not something that's directly in my lane so i don't want to give anything cool i get one of my favorite questions as per usual so like brian's done i gotta get in my question so we get this all the time and it's brought my personal favorite question and it's gonna be your personal favorite question uh day-to-day life what's it like as a seer specialist what do you do i'm sure it's the same every day one thing we know for certain that when you went from active duty to like garter reserves uh your day got a lot better people bring you like lattes for lunch or whatever i don't know that's just the vibe i've been getting from that you don't have to do things if you don't want to yeah yeah it's like no i'm fine but yeah just give us like a general breakdown of you know a normal-ish day as a seer specialist uh active duty versus uh reserves as well please okay so well i guess it kind of depends so what i'm going to do for you is i'm going to give you guys a day in the life of a base level seer specialist because after you get away from what we call the mothership at fairchild you're most likely going to be just a base level see your specialist whether you are attached to a pj unit an rqs um or whether you're attached to an aircrew unit um you are that seer guy for that unit right we are we are support for them however they still need us to fly so we use that to our mansion um but essentially these guys go through you know sv80 and this long period see your training and every few years they need refresher training so what you're doing is when you initially when aircrew initially gets to their base you have to give them a local air survival training so you always give them that so you're given that often because you have people coming in coming out uh you'll teach emergency parachute training do refresher on that you'll do a refresher water survival training you'll do a refresher combat survival training or non-combat survival training depending on whether your guys are deployed or whether it's a training base um and you teach conduct after capture so all these you're teaching kind of like mini steer lessons for these guys traditionally we tried to tailor these down to like two weeks out of the month right so for two weeks out of the month or possibly even one depending on how many ear crew you have you're doing this refresher training for them um the other few weeks we traditionally reserve for your own currencies the fun stuff paperwork you know the air force is full of it um you know additional dues and stuff like that uh jump currencies if you do have if you are jump qualified depending upon how many qualifications you have you need to be up keeping those and staying sharp on those um any type of upgrade training as a seer instructor and then of course also like going to you know on tdys so that's essentially kind of what your your day is like is you're kind of doing anything and everything to accomplish those things for the month and it's kind of it doesn't have to be groundhog day because you're if you're in charge out there you get to make your own schedule essentially the difference between active duty and the reserves is that in the reserve you're doing the exact same thing but it's just everything compressed into you know however many days that your unit allows you to work which i will say this is that as a steer guy you're not working just the weekends and a 15 days a year i work today i traditionally work during the week if i do because i'm allowed to move my i don't have to work weekends they allow me to move it around and when i give mass training i will work on a weekend but traditionally i'm working anywhere from one to two weeks a month still as a reservist depending so you still work quite a bit and you can work more if you'd like but um you know you're quite busy if you uh do everything right that sounds pretty candy like i see those seer compounds that you guys have on all the bases there's something happening back there you guys are throwing ragers and i don't know you make it sound like it's all working no play [Laughter] no comment [Laughter] people won't get that right now but they will later on they will later okay so um you hit on that a little bit and something i want to talk about now which is not necessarily related to seer but you have recently become one of the personalities of a rather growing and successful media group it was brought up earlier your you know you and jesse wiseman are on the drinking bro edge you guys launched a couple months ago um as as with the drinking bros with dan holloway and ross patterson and jared taylor and you guys have got a very successful podcasts plural and business and then you also started up your own company called american heart do you want to touch on any of that yeah so um i think if you're looking to go into the military but i will say this there's a lot of people who do want to go into the military and they want to go in these particular jobs um and there's even seer guys that are active duty still in but either things are changing and evolving for them and they want to find themselves doing something different and working different avenues but still doing seer at the same time and so for me i end up taking a break from active duty and you know i guess probably one of the hardest struggles of being a female in a job like mine and with my husband being special forces in the army is that we're gone often if you know and our schedules kind of don't really fully mesh so the only thing that i found difficult is just if i really want to start settling down and trying to have a family and so for me it was kind of a no-brainer when i heard about the reserves and the opportunity that i could still do my job which i love so much but um you know actually stay in one place for a while as long as i really want um at a unit that i that i like and kind of pick and choose my schedule at the same time be able to work on some of these other civilian goals of mine as well so with that i got an opportunity to go on drinking bros a few times and they they liked having me on and they decided to start a female spin-off it was something that was highly requested for a very long time and so essentially jesse and i did an episode together and it went great and they were like cool keep recording then and we ended up coming out with our first 10 and we were on the charts for a while and that was pretty incredible um so that's a great avenue for me i've always i mean i'm an instructor so i love the sound of my own voice i think most you guys do uh so talking on a podcast was wonderful and of course us being two chicks we can talk all day long so the fact that i'm now doing that and then getting paid for it is is great and uh i also did have a dream of one day to be an entrepreneur and starting my own business and getting you know out part and going just working part-time allowed me to do that and i think i don't even think i would say for sure that my background in seer and just in the military in general has helped really groomed me to transition to that entrepreneurial role and being my kind of own boss and working in the business realm because you learn a lot of really good you learn a lot of really good work habits in your job that you apply because um but in this instance when you're at your own boss and you're doing your own job like everything's on you if you fail it's on you and so that's kind of how it was in training too like i couldn't blame anyone else if i failed except for myself because if i you know failed to train then i failed and so in this point it's the same thing so i kind of using that pressure that i felt back in the day to now and a lot of different aspects that i'm applying and it's it's great so it's working out and so now i feel like i kind of have a little bit of the best of both worlds and um i get asked often like hey are you gonna go back into active duty and that's the best part was i can um with sear being an undermanned career field i can go back and active duty um you know if i choose to later on at a certain point or if i just want to stay reserved and retire out of the reserves because it's tacking on to my active duty time i can do that as well so flexibility that you have and the options that you have are kind of limitless whatever you choose to do and i'm really happy with uh the path i'm on right now oh i agree and and you know for the listeners the reason why i asked that question is because we actually get it a lot of you know out of the special warfare career fields you know we each have our own niche job but how does that translate into the civilian world and stuff like that and people i mean all the time hey once you guys retire or if somebody only does six years ten years and they get out what are they typically doing and i mean like there's all kinds of answers there's there's contracting whether you're doing a staff job whether you're flying doing a you know isr sensor operator or other kind of contracting there's law enforcement there's the alphabet agencies there's all kinds of different things that we can do and and like you just took it and went the entrepreneur route which is also what a lot of people do so i think air force special warfare and the soft community in general really helps build and foster a lot of those characteristics that will enable people to be successful when they do eventually go out on their own totally on a soap box there absolutely um sorry you broke up there at the end um one thing i got i get asked often is like what are you gonna do when you um get out of the air force like what do you guys normally do and i'll be honest i was like well so you guys normally actually become see your contractors they just stay within that realm right and um but i've actually seen guys open their own businesses and become very successful um or i mean we had no joke probably one of the meanest guys who to work at resist resistance training to this date um and he was just like one of our he was just one of the flight chiefs that you just didn't want to mess around with and he became like a manager of like a human resource or something of walmart like he had to deal with customers on a daily basis and we're like wait a second you were how was this possible because you were not a friendly guy but he used all of his sincere knowledge and his background in the military and everything that he learned and he got up that you know uh the management position very high in walmart right away and he was making six figures uh so all the guys were like well i'll just work for walmart then but i will say the options are limitless whatever you choose to do a lot of stuff that you can do applies and we decided chief um when i was last at fairchild who was retiring soon and he was interning as a tattoo artist and uh he's in love with it and he's great at it too and of course you know he's going to be always employed let's see you guys and you know us in general and uh he's wonderful at it though and it kind of depends on what you want to do in the lane that you want to go in on but i think whatever you want to do could work yeah yeah one of the most important things that you learn from being in these career fields is how to be competitive and then how to get that extra edge i think all of us have been in that situation like we're around alpha type all day all the time and we're whether we want to admit it or not always competing against whatever like he's even with lockers like you go to another person's locker and like dang where they get all that nice stuff from how did you get your locker to look so nice why you always so set up like you know it's just everything that we do is just ingrained in us so you know when we look at starting business we look at the competition and we're like all right how can we do better what are they missing what can i do and provide that you know all these people can't provide but yeah i think i just wanted to throw that in there and we just constantly try to improve and make ourselves better just like you know the ones ready you're drinking broads uh american heart dot co just checking it out but uh super awesome like just constantly making ourselves better and becoming that person we want to be so yeah speaking of doing stuff absolutely you know getting better at things are you still skydiving your face off or what so well here's the here's the thing i know uh i've had i've heard comments before oh those deer guys all they do is just jump and they strap hangers or whatever else uh i'll say this uh i got i won't even say lucky because it was my own luck i created it myself but i uh was leaving i was about to leave fairchild i was trying to pcs out there i had a lot of time on station i have 70 years time on station so you know i was going to get out there quickly and an ad came open for edwards air force base which um was a test parachuting which was a test parachuting program but they also integrated that with seer so i would be a test parachutist but also a seer specialist so i'd get my base level seer knowledge in there and trained up on but i also get to skydive and i was like this is awesome and i didn't have you needed to have free fall for that and i said you know what screw it because worst case scenario if i'm the only one who clicks on this job i'll get it and it'll send me the free phone i had all my ducks in a row i clicked on it they had already non-volunteered two individuals to that job before me and they were like we are not non-volunteering anyone else because these two guys are bitter and i got the job and a lot of people were like how did she get this she's not even qualified for it and everyone's like she was the only one who clicked on it who had met almost all the qualifications except for that one so when i first got there immediately went through free fall school um and then all you know the jam schools and tested a lot of different parachuting systems a lot of different equipment we always had like tac p units and whatever i was trying to give us stuff to put on the proof for use list for them uh jumped with a lot of different different teams and uh it was a wonderful position because i have i loved to teach so i still got to do teaching but then also the last the other two weeks i was jumping so of course you can imagine you know we're jumping at civilian drop zones and you get qualified on what we call advanced parachute systems which is basically just your civilian parachute and uh you know you do some fun jumps here and there so i've actually not really done that many civilian jumps mostly jumps i've done our military and uh yeah i was a test parachute is fully qualified so that's something that the seer career field is like hey you need to upkeep those qualifications so i'll have units and the last unit i jumped with was the um pj unit patrick air force base uh squared away group they have a lot of uh great jumpers there a lot of really good guys and so i'm attached to them and i jump with them and uh give them training and also learn from some of the courses that they go through as well so so patrick's good does not have to pay for it and the government lets me do it and they pay me to do it i'll take it all day long that was awesome brian i love all right we're throwing shade at moffitt and and yeah building up patrick there we go patrick thumbs up who is florida california [Laughter] sorry i'm not so excited i'm just being honest that's okay because we know it we know people in all of them those guys out there in california just recruiting combat controllers not you know yeah by the way moffat was like forever ago and i was a i was a young dear you know see your guys so i and i only saw myself so so speaking of being young i know for me and i think the other guys too one of the things i always say to the new people is coming in is uh the only thing i can guarantee is that if you work hard and you keep saying yes like you said to everything um the only thing i guarantee is it's worth it at least for me it was 100 worth it so i kind of have a two-part question um looking back at your career so far was it worth it and why and then after that just your last piece of advice uh one piece of advice you'd give someone's gonna start the pipeline to not only make it through the selection everything else but have a really successful career career and come out the other side thinking it was worth it i mean to me it was absolutely worth it i'm the type of person that i don't like to look at the past and do the whole what-if game oh maybe if i would have met someone instead or finished my degree in college like i am so happy with the path that i took um it's seeing yes child opportunities when i s if i really want to sit there and name off everything that i've done and all the things that i've accomplished and all the places i've gone the people that i met it's astonishing and i get goosebumps because i'm like this is crazy to think that the these opportunities were placed in my path um because of a simple choice that i made so i will never regret it i'm so happy to be where i'm at now um and i would say the biggest piece of advice that i have for anyone going through train is mindset is everything i have seen the strongest of men fail and quit because of their mindset i'm telling you right now that the minute that you get quitting inside of your brain and you it fest it will just fester and it will become toxic and will take over you and all of a sudden now in your head quitting will be the answer for everything and that's dangerous because eventually it's going to end up that's going to be your fate um i was hand selected to go down to texas and um help out in the women and service review board because obviously they were letting women into special operations jobs and it was mainly just there to kind of observe the pipeline and see if anything like clothing facilities anything training need to change to integrate women never and i was like really made sure to keep the standards the same and i watched a pj i guess hell session or something like that and uh the cadre were telling me that this in fact was probably one of the easier sessions i've ever given before but these these guys just were really getting down on themselves and within the span of five minutes and them just doing uh push-ups and underwaters 15 of them quit and i and everyone was just in shock and they were like hey do you want to go over and talk to those guys and i was like yeah sure and i you know just kindly asked him i said hey do you guys mind me asking why you guys decide to quit and the guy when the first guy stood up and he said i gotta be honest i really honestly thought that i could not do it he goes i got into my head i told myself i could not do it even though my body was physically still going and that was major and all the guys chimed in they're like yeah i didn't think i could do any more like i felt like i was letting myself down if i let myself down let the team down and so what i'll say is the minute you get into your head it starts this battle this internal battle that you have to deal with so you should be your best friend you should be your best hypeman cheerleader whatever you want to call it um yes you're gonna fail yes there's gonna be hard times yes you're gonna be like man this sucks and that's fine we always joke through the suck because that's the best way to get around it but don't ever think about that quitting is ever an option quitting should never be the end story and if it is then most likely you're gonna end up there so that's the biggest thing i get that's some real stuff right there i used to ask them the same thing and i'd go over and talk to them because i was uh you know in charge of the pool session a lot of times and they just say moment of weakness sergeant you know i just they instantly regret it once they do that but once they do it there's no taking it back because the instructors are like no i saw you you grabbed the wall you walked over to the horn you know or whatever and like that's that's pretty much it we're not going to give you another chance when i we can't count on you for the rest of the session and also your teammates have that same feeling of like no we already saw you we knew what you were going to do like that's pretty much it you're choking you're pushing away from the instructor you're coughing and grabbing the side of the wall you know that kind of thing so that moment weakness really overtakes people and it's not like you said it's a slow process you kind of like scratch away the surface a little bit the night before because they they know that it's usually uh black thursdays is what we used to call it they know thursday it's going to be really difficult and they think about it all night and then when it finally happens they're like nope you know i'm pulling pulling chocks and getting out of here um but yeah i think that's really important to do and not get letting quitting into your mind is also really um a huge thing and it's difficult to do because you think about like okay i'm gonna think about not thinking about quitting like how do i how do i practice that trick is think about something else it's just gonna be yeah it just should never be an option yeah that's yes yeah and here's the thing too i'll tell you right now cadre and sierra are looking for heart they're looking for passion they're looking for the people who will not quit no matter what i recall on my first i was the first time i built a firecraft in my life and i had no clue the difference between a coniferous and a deciduous tree and i cut down a deciduous tree of course that's you know full of water and i'm going at this thing for like two hours straight but i didn't stop i just kept going and i didn't look at them and be like are you guys gonna call time yet and like i just kept going and they admired that so much that they worked with me i mean they didn't time our first few until later but they were like dude this girl has heart she has grit and she's not going to stop and that's what we want to see um and i'll tell you that's what they want because at the end of the day when you're a young airman carrying a bunch of students you have your own heavy pack they all have packs and one of them wants to give up or one of them gets hurt and you're tired and hungry and whatever you and when everyone else is quitting around you can't be the one that's like you know what guys you're right you you don't have to be the one who's carrying them you have to be the one who's um you know in charge leading the way and inspiring motivating so they just want to make sure you just don't have it in your dna you know so it should just never be an option out there boom and i think uh you know like your past like you said being collegiate athlete helped prepare you for that just that mindset of everything that you can do and for you guys out there another important thing you know follow like that put yourself in competitive situations as much as possible and make sure that you are just constantly sharpening yourself don't be around those people that are going to bring you down and they're fine with you know a mediocre type job if that's not the person that you want to be if you want to be something like seer cct pj sr make sure you're being around those people that are going to make you into that person and just constantly thinking about how you can make yourself better we only get a limited amount of time to make ourselves into the person we are and who knows something else might happen that will stop us from you know we get in a car crash or something like that you know god forbid and then it's over we never know when that day is going to come so take advantage of all the time you got and make sure that you are sharpening yourself as much as possible so yeah that was really awesome and uh thanks again for coming on and just wrapped up you guys have any saved rounds or anything peach trent appreciate you joining us yeah i appreciate it yeah thanks so much for having me appreciate it so um like we were talking about seer specialist if you guys are interested in this awesome career field they are in a more supporting role but like tiffany was talking about you guys have so many opportunities as a seer individual to just get your hands dirty be outside eat banana slugs eat some goat balls go ahead and you know test out what your capabilities are it is what you make of it um just like most other career fields but this one more so because you are your own entity especially when you're deployed or you're out there instructing people um you know i remember mike's your instructor and i'm gonna remember them for the rest of my life because they did an awesome job and their job is really important because of things they put you through you're not going to find at a lot of other places other than actual seer school with that type of mixture of individuals that you're going to find and then you know if you really want to grow your leadership style and skills that is one awesome way to do it because your specialist as a senior airman you're leading colonels majors you know whatever through the woods and you're pretty much their lifeline to the real world and they're going to trust in you no matter you know what you say you can tell them all to eat ants in which we did or you can tell them to you know whatever and they'll follow you but it's a huge responsibility for a senior airman to to take on and like tiffany was talking about you know she has so many opportunities from going to free fall school and making sure that she keeps on expanding her horizons not only with the stuff in the military and the reserves but those uh business vendors that she's up overtaken so tiffany or american heart dot co is the website for her and then the drinking borrowets make sure you go check them out follow like review all that stuff um a lot more a lot of entertaining stuff on there so yeah check out that that episode and uh the biggest thing i love that last statement about you know what you should train on for for those people that are going through it's just keeping that quit out of your mind and just constantly thinking about how am i gonna make this better and thinking about that next step keeping that quitting out of your mind um oh yeah and the last thing i want to make sure we mention again is the pull-ups thing make sure you know i get that question a million times a day like how do i get my pull-ups up how do i get my push-ups up you do them over and over again and you make sure that you're doing them correctly and then i think the rocking thing is worth mentioning again for those guys that are going out for seer guys or gals uh make sure that you're throwing on some weight if you don't have a collegiate background like she did but i think it's uh important to just throw it under that weight and know what it feels like so again um everly stock for those rucks since we did mention the rock make sure you go check it out these uh the code ones ready 10 discount um we don't get anything for it you guys get the discount awesome deal um so we want to work with people that are like that are offering awesome products to people that are going for this career so thanks again for listening and thank again for tiffany hart for coming on here and spreading some knowledge about the seer career field i definitely learned a lot and had a lot of fun so thanks again for coming on and we'll see you guys later go out there in express later

Channel: Ones Ready

Views: 37,505

Keywords: af specwar, be a pj, cct, combat control, combat controller training, indoc, ones ready, ones ready podcast, onesready, pararescue, pj, sof, special operations, special operator, special recon, special reconnaissance, special tactics, special warfare, special warfare prep, specwar, usaf special operations, usaf special recon, usaf special reconnaissance, usaf special warfare, SERE, SERE Specialist, SERE School, Tiffany Hart, Military Freefall, parachute test, survival training

Id: 1TSnZnvlCeI

Length: 61min 50sec (3710 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020