The Rangers deployed to find Marcus Luttrell | Tony Brooks, Ranger | Ep. 107

special operations covert ops espionage the team house with your hosts jack murphy and david park [Music] hi everyone this is the team house episode 107 i'm jack murphy here with dave park we are here tonight with second ranger battalion veteran tony brooks he is the author of a new book leave no man behind it's out now you can go find it wherever books are sold on amazon uh there's an e-book go out there and take a look it is about tony's career as a ranger uh with a big focus on the uh follow-up to operation red wings uh which many of you know from the lone survivor film where a sealed platoon got ambushed and marcos patrell was the one survivor out there on the uh in the mountains of afghanistan and there's of course a big effort mobilized to try to recover marcus and to recover the remains of the seals that perished out there in that operation and tony was one of the rangers who participated in that recovery mission so tony thank you so much for joining us tonight yeah thanks for having me i appreciate it yeah um it's great to have another psychoback guy here to be honest with you uh i told him you guys could touch your tips yep sword fight it's coming hey it's only natural um just it just shows camaraderie uh if funny enough tony and i uh when we were talking and actually i read it in the book but um his uh old uh platoon sergeant was we're in the sniper section together when i was so that kind of dates dates me so so tony um one of the things that we like to ask everybody at the beginning of our show uh is like any superhero you probably have come from humble beginnings and what what is your origin story where do you come from what got you interested in the military you know start as young as you want yeah i think i mean i was never one that thought i would be in the military i was always the the nerdy kid who did well in school i was somewhat of an athlete but nothing extraordinary my younger brother actually was a military buff like he would sit and watch the history channel constantly and he used to always tell me you know after getting our fist to cuffs he would say you know i'm going to be an army ranger someday and it's like yeah whatever i don't know what that is but okay and i think that was the original seed that was planted but ultimately the reason i became a ranger one was 9 11. i mean 9 11 i was a freshman in college and it shook me up pretty bad and i was i was pissed off so this was my way to kind of get back at the uh the enemy so to speak and of course pat tillman was a huge influence black hawk down was a came out right after 9 11. 11 was also one that you know kind of got my juices flowing so to speak and uh that was that was what led me to to become in the army but i would growing up i was the one that just just get through school play sports you know i i wasn't really into the military per se so i didn't come from a military family so when 9 11 happened you were a freshman in college and then did you you didn't go directly into the military did you start thinking about it at that point uh i mean were you thinking about going to the since you're in college becoming an officer or what were your thoughts how how did those form it was actually on 9 11 i actually got on the phone and called my dad and i said dad i think i'm going to join the army wow um and he he didn't say no he didn't discourage me but he you know he paused and collectively just said you know i don't think that is a good idea to act that emotionally give yourself some time so finish out your first year you're already there finish out your first year and then make that decision well looking back on it i think what he was thinking was yeah the war is not going to last that long right so by then it's okay right but uh right so so you that was 2001 2002 you were still in college right and it was 2003 december december 2003 right when you sort of like pulled the trigger what what cut what led to that at that point in time it was actually before then but i i tried to get this you probably heard of the option 40 contract and i was not getting in the i was not going into the army without it so i signed the on the dotted line in early 2003 okay but they didn't ship me out until actually beginning of 2004. okay so i had to wait a whole year so what was so important about that contract for maybe any viewers who might be thinking about becoming an army ranger why was that contract important um i'm i'm like i said i'm a little bit of a nerd so i'm very analytical and i like to be very strategic in the things that i do and my thought was at least i'm guaranteed a chance um you know you know that's written in the contract so i can always go back to that and say hey here it is written down now we all know that that's not always the case that even if it's in the contract it sometimes doesn't happen however that was my best shot i thought i didn't want to take any chances of not being able to get a shot at ranger battalion right and uh youngins out there listen to tony he's on he's leading you on the right track here because we we got a lot of young people who are interested in the military and thinking of joining and the option 40 contract he's talking about when you go to an army recruiter it guarantees you a shot as he says to go to basic training in airborne school and then now it's called the ranger assessment selection program so if you want to go to ranger battalion that's the contract it's the same thing for buds or for dive school or for anything else like that there are so many guys who show up at boot camp and say well my recruiter said that i could ask for this it's like you don't get to ask for that we don't need that right now or whatever well you can ask the problem but yeah so so yeah you were smart about it you waited so then tell us about like your induction first off how did how did your parents respond and how did your brother who had always said he was going to be arranged or respond [Music] yeah actually my brother right after i shipped off the basic training he did the same thing no [ __ ] he had an option 40 contract and it was like his last week of basic training he had a prior shoulder surgery that we thought was good but in the last week of basic training after they got back from their field exercise is horrible you know they were getting a little smoke session and he dropped down to do push-ups and the shoulder exploded the surgery failed and he um they medically discharged him and so he he never really had a chance he he tried everything to stay in but at that point the military's not gonna damage goods yeah for sure for sure so what was it like for you then showing up because you showed up at benning i assume and started that whole process process uh what was that like for you i mean coming from where i came from it's middle class you know very middle america kind of town not a lot of crime you know everyone pretty much does what they're told uh newer buildings you know newer homes you know i wouldn't say people were rich but they were they were living a good life and um [Music] yeah getting to the military was a little bit of a culture shock um but you know i i'm the type of guy that's pretty laid back so i didn't i you asked me what i want for dinner and i just i want that one i'm not a picky guy yeah and i can kind of take things as they come and i think that's probably what helped me get through that process to be honest i'm very adaptable but i would say you know it was quite the culture shock more so not for me like me personally like my to me it was seeing the other people where they came from i mean you see people from all walks of life and some of them have had just awful awful upbringings and that actually bothered me to you know i was kind of sheltered from all some of that and at least growing up yeah do you see how hard other people had it yeah like at graduation i remember at basic training i actually i shed a tear actually i probably shouldn't admit that but i did i looking at some of my buddies that no one was there there was no one there to like congratulate them or because they didn't have anybody right i had no one right and that bothered me i was probably the biggest moment where i actually shed a tear um after basic training was because of the guys that had no one to hug yeah basically yeah and so after your ait your uh your one station you're turning your then you went on to was it still rip at the time or what was it called at that point in time because yeah you go directly to airborne and then to rip yeah okay and so what was rip like for you i mean i think it was basically like it is for everybody else it's just a it was a month-long smoke session um however i got the the joy of being put in the pre-hold where they were backed up and we had to stay there an extra month and yeah it was i mean i got pneumonia that's right when i was there and it was brutal we were putting these condemned barracks oh yeah yeah and that's where i got pneumonia from i was in these i mean they literally cut the chain on the building to let us in because they didn't have any place to put us and yeah i had it pretty bad but of course me being the person who i am i tried to hide it from everybody didn't want anyone to know i was hurting and i went had a friend drive me off post on the weekend to get treated and we drove far i said nowhere close these guys are all talking go far we drove about an hour out and uh doc the doc was trying to convince me to you need to tell your commanders you you might be uh going to the hospital soon thankfully the medication gave me work so i um just kept chugging along in the hold before going to rip i was pretty healed by the time i started rip so you finish rip uh and you get your dream assignment with a couple of your buddies actually right yeah to uh two wonderful sunny uh washington blm second battalion um and so you show up there and what like what was your greeting like when you got the second battalion the greeting yeah oh it was uh cupcakes and a party and a kegger yeah you guys get that welcome to the team yeah you're part of the family now yeah yeah yeah that's exactly how it went no it was uh they were deployed so i arrived to the newly minted tab spec fours who were angry they weren't on deployment and they uh they had some fun took it out they had no one to tell them what to do so they just you know played games we got to you know build things we got to run around buildings carrying cots and with our buddies on it we had fun so at this point in time both iraq and afghanistan are going right yes okay so when you said they're deployed they were deployed was it just your company that was deployed was it the whole battalion deployed and how were they deploying between afghanistan and iraq at that time yeah so our company was um in iraq at the time and i think what they were doing was two companies were in iraq and one was in afghanistan okay but my company was in baghdad and they were busy that was a busy busy time yeah so they came back and they were full of it yeah and that that was uh that was charlie company right yeah charlie company and so like what was your life of italian back uh how long did it take to come back what was your life there until because your your first appointment was actually to afghanistan correct yeah i mean as a private and battalion i think everyone has pretty much the same experience you just do what you're told and it's not it's better for you if you just do what you're told but um yeah you're basically the the whipping boy of battalion yeah and you know you work hard your your whole goal is to get a deployment under your belt and get to ranger school that is like the path at that time so you said you were working hard i think you mentioned i mean how long how many hours were you guys training and uh you know all different things like i don't even know what regiment was training and at that point but you were in the bottom that was about you're going to same time frame so you mentioned you were training a new book like 14 hours a day 12 14 hours a day a lot yeah so you know they go through these cycles these these training cycles where there are certain periods of time where you're training yeah 12 to minimum of 12 hours a day and you do that for a couple weeks straight and so the point i was talking about in the book was one of those really really tight training cycles where you know you're going from range to range to range you're not getting much sleep sometimes you're sleeping at the range sometimes you come back they're just you know trying to get every type of training possible done in this really short period of time so it was it was brutal i mean i i don't remember sleeping much during those days i remember getting back sometimes to the to the company area downloading our gear cleaning our weapons you know going to sleep waking up and going right back to the range and it was probably four or five hours of sleep so we're busy but i mean you're like living there you're living the dream now right this is this is ranger battalion i mean it's what you were expecting right um i kind of had some um idea that it was going to be brutal when you're private but yeah i didn't know it was going to be like that um out of curiosity since the your company had just come back from iraq and then and then or iraq and then your next appointment was going to be to afghanistan and they're i mean combat is combat but they're also two different operating environments were you guys more training for the place you had been or the place you were going or were was it just kind of general all-around training [Music] i mean it was very it was a general all-around training but we always knew where our next deployment was going to be and we would definitely alter our training based on where we were going like when we knew we were going to afghanistan we were hitting the mountains we were doing lots of ruck marching and getting out in the hills and learning how to walk through the woods when you're under night vision which is a learning curve right so yeah once you learn it you're it's it's not that big a deal but that that curve is brutal those first like three or four months when you're trying to learn your weapon and you can't see the you know you hit your hand in front of your face yeah um and we were using binoculars at the time so [Music] it's it's it's a brutal process trying to learn it you know i didn't always have these i didn't always have glasses i had great vision when i was in battalion as soon as i got out of the military i couldn't see a dang thing yeah you and you talk about how rough the training was i mean you guys actually had a a training casualty correct yeah it was uh our first few months in battalion um it was at a a street mount site so basically we were training to how to how to clear a street with buildings really cool site on louis and um essentially what what i've gathered is that after one of the iterations the privates run through and put the targets back up on the walls well one of the targets had fallen off of a wall and it was placed on the on a hot wall so the next time the group came through you know they were hit shooting at a target but it went through a wall so and you know i don't know all the details behind that but yeah it was brutal i mean yeah you don't expect it when you're you're training you know it's dangerous but you never really expect anyone to get hurt in training yeah that's kind of a kind of a wake-up call for everybody yeah yeah sure so you guys go through that cycle and then your first deployment is to afghanistan and were you guys really busy when you first like how long were you there initially were you busy before this you know before this mission yeah it was uh interesting times there in in afghanistan it was you know the wars kind of shifted in 2005 and it was more of the win the hearts and minds at that point and that's not that's not the 75th job so we were mostly idle like we did basically nothing for the first two and a half to three months before red wings uh we were just training every day going out in the range and shooting and clearing buildings and it it was not what anyone expected what was this a bag room it was a bagram yeah okay but the whole country was really slow at that time and for whatever reason that summer was just there wasn't much going on and you know we were pretty pissed off about it especially as new guys you know we got a deployment under our belt it didn't do a thing so it doesn't matter um so a lot of us were bitter because we were there for one thing and one thing only and that was you know to experience war pick some ass yeah but yeah but ironically once you experience it you really don't necessarily want that exact situation again you play it out one way in your head and it never goes that way yeah um you know it's always we're gonna just dominate and it's gonna be done but sometimes it's not that way um yeah we didn't do a dang thing until operation red wings hit we were close to going home with you know i called it pitching a shutout uh on that deployment tell us then about the the run-up to red wings like did you guys were you designated as a qrf for that mission did you even know that mission was going on i mean how did this come up on your radar initially yeah we we actually didn't um know anything about the mission uh about two weeks prior my squad was designated as primary combat search and recovery for the entire country of afghanistan basically they were trying to find jobs for us that were combat related because they weren't going to send a ranger platoon out to win hearts and minds that's like the dumbest thing ever thankfully they got that right um but yeah that was one of our jobs and we trained up for it and we never really thought we would actually do anything i think it was one of those like just go through the motions learn the job we know how to dismantle a helicopter we know how to work with the pjs and lo and behold two weeks later right after that training we get the call that a chinook helicopter just went down and you guys are going to go recover it and that's basically all we knew we later found out it was a 160th bird which we were all confused it was middle of the day and come to find out yeah it was the middle of the day and that might have been one of the reasons why right it ended the way it did um it was i mean obviously it was a lucky shot i mean i was right at the crash site and there's not many places they could have shot from to get a good view so whoever it was got really lucky now granted they those guys have a lot of fighting skills i mean i don't want to discount their skills because i mean look at look at right now they are taking over a country in weeks well i mean luring helicopters into valley systems and shooting them down is something that the afghans excel at right yeah well this was at the peak this was at the top of the mountain so a little bit different than their usual mo of getting him into a place where they could shoot down at them uh this guy had to shoot up there's no doubt about it so you uh you guys hear about this get spun up for this bird that went down um what's the process like then for is is it just your squad or is it the entire platoon that is designated to go in uh yeah our whole platoon got spun up on that one um you know we were getting word that this is like similar to robert's ridge so obviously roberts ridge happened a couple years prior to that and we knew all about it we had learned you know we had some lessons learned from that so we were we thought we were going into the same thing again um so that was our mindset going into it was this is going to be hellacious firefight when we get there um you know we're putting our gear together and rangers being rangers we don't need water we don't need food right more ammo right so we just loaded up on ammo and we were ready to go we had basically no intel we didn't know anything about the seals on the ground all we knew was that there was a chinook helicopter down it was a 160th bird it had some seals on board and we were going to get it and you know they sent us out with that intel that was so for the people who might not be familiar with this story this actually all started with latrell beats right murphy and um axelson axelson a uh four-man seal team recce team uh a sealed recce team that went out uh i believe was it for ahmed shah to to like find his ied factories or to do the wrecking on those um they got compromised by a shepherd or a goat herder or you know somebody um they let him go he reported on them and then they and then uh forces converged on them and so they called you know they called for a quick reaction force um and that's why the chinook the one situation launched during the day with the seals on it was as uh as a you know forced to save these and then the bird gets shot down do you do they know what it was shot down by uh we didn't at the time uh we had suspicions that it was a stinger is what we initially thought um the the evidence is still not 100 on it but i think what we've come to the conclusion is probably an rpg-7 and you know it was if you've ever shot an rpg you know they're not super accurate so he hit the the directly at the rotor mass and and it just went spinning out of control at that point so at this point do you guys know anything about latrell and his team or do you only know about the down china do you know that there are other americans out there yeah we knew there was someone out there but we didn't know it was seal team we didn't know it was a recon team um we just knew that it was a quick reaction for us going to help somebody okay we didn't find out about the recon team until we were on the ground at least at my level i was a private so um i had to do a lot of interviews to kind of get all this information but yeah we didn't we didn't get that trickled down to us yeah so talk to us about the infiltration then yeah that was a that was a fun one um the initial one was the the night after the bird was shot down and the weather was just absolutely awful it was you know raining and it was windy and we were flying up into the mountains and you couldn't see a thing out of the bird not one thing and it was having it was struggling to get up into the mountains so by the time we got pretty close to the mountain we were starting to head up the mountain they actually pulled us out they they they were worried about losing another bird so we went to jbad or jalalabad and we stayed the night and we were going to try again the next night and as you can imagine you know a platoon full of rangers who was told that you're going to help your buddies but we're going to pull you because of weather there was a little bit of uh anger in in that bird um all of us were pissed off like are you kidding me whether drop us here we'll walk in but um you know commanders do what commanders do and they were not willing to lose our bird i mean at this point you don't know if americans survive the crash if they're fighting off hostiles like you have no idea what's going on the ground right now with this bird and and the people on it is that correct no not at all um we did get some word that there was a a strobe on the crash site and that it was moving around so i mean there could be a couple things that could be someone who survived that could be the enemy gathering gear it could be a lot of things so we didn't really think much of it other than hey we might have some people alive on the crash site um so the next night is when we actually did our actual infill and that was something that uh it's tough to explain i mean i wrote about it and i tried to explain as best i could but we did a 110 foot rope through some fog and trees to the point where when we were gonna get on the rope when you looked down there was no chem line so normally you would look down you'd see kim lights right but it was so foggy and we were so high up you couldn't see a thing so i didn't know how high you were i got on the rope and just held on for dear life and was waiting to hit the ground so waiting some of the uh civilians out there this is a fast rope we're talking about like a braided nylon rope that you can grip like a fire hose sort of coming off of one of those back of one of the mh47s that you can see behind tony there on his screen and you're saying the rope was 110 feet long which is very much longer than we usually would use and that rope is just descending into the fog below and disappearing you have no idea where the where the bottom is no no one did i mean even even the rope master when he uh when he got to the rope you know they go and they give us the thumbs up he looked at us and did one of these oh my god no one knew what that meant were like what do you mean no and then he went so wow uh balls yeah that's amazing because again you don't you don't know you can't see it you have no idea what's at the end of that rope uh if it's a big hole if it's a lake i i mean you just don't or just an empty space yeah yeah exactly beside the edge of a cliff where everybody's like uh what what what was at the bottom when you got down there uh it was uh logged it was a logged area so there were a bunch of trees laying down on their sides um because when i landed i you know there was nothing to put my feet on so i just flopped over i was laying on the ground in between trees that were down because you know the afghans do a lot of logging up in those parts and you know obviously that had recently been logged because we were tree stumps and everything else down there um but yeah you gotta remember it's foggy and you have your night vision up right out of the way you don't flip it down until you get to the bottom so you we couldn't i couldn't see a thing if there's timber or logs down there i mean was there a pile up because guys obviously if they're falling you can't get out of the way and guys just start stacking yeah it was like nothing you i mean it would be like watching a circus i mean i i'm rolling around and i hear guys trying to get up next to me and people trying to run to the perimeter and obviously got senior guys like running up there and grabbing people out of the way because we're just coming down yeah one after the other the other landing on each other and and we actually did have one we had one guy our radio operator who was you know came burning in like surely imagine yeah with his radio yeah and i don't know if he was unconscious or not but the next guy landed right on him and compound fracture to his arm oh my god thank god you guys didn't have a mortar team with you you know i yeah thank god we did have mortars out there but i don't know if they i don't think um they may have had their 60 to be honest imagine that but we were we were loaded we were loaded down they i mean our chinook was at weight with like 25 guys and if you've you've ever been on a chinook you can get a lot more than 25 guys on one and still fly easily yeah well we were at wait partly because the elevation was so high right but also because we had uh i mean we had to carry enough body bags and i don't know if you ever carried a body bag a military body bag but they weigh about 20 pounds they are not light um i couldn't believe it the first time i held it i'm like what the heck is this lead um but it's a really thick canvas very large bag i didn't know so i i yeah it was news to me and we had to carry these things yeah that's that's morbid man and you know i'm i'm sorry you guys had to deal with all of that well i'm sure we'll get into that a little bit how far was your route position from the crash site you know i've been able to look at it on a map and i actually laughed because it was like two miles but it was two miles on the map right with elevation change it was about six miles and it it felt like 20 yeah because you know you walk 100 meters and you've only on the map gone 10 right because you're going up yeah yeah going straight up yeah and another another issue with this whole mission was the area we were we didn't even have proper maps we were using satellite imagery to to get to our location and you know obviously the point man is trying to make a route because they didn't tell us where exactly where they were going to land it was we're going to get as close to this point as we can get but we're going to put you where we find an opening or where something looks safe and we're just going to put you down right um and they didn't put us on exactly where they said they were going to put us right so it took us a little bit to get oriented and um thank goodness we had a good point man because he led us directly to the crash site right like spot-on well i imagine that they were worried about another ambush it's like hey we were down one bird there will be another one coming so you know they've gotta put you on the y or even you know further out you know a good terrain feature or two away so it's two miles straight line distance on the map you guys start moving during the day or or you can start moving at night middle of the night so it was pit it was you know around midnight that we hit the ground and your your squad leader or team leader that was a point man was johnny on the spot took you right to the crash site yeah there were two point guys that basically worked together one of them was uh sergeant conde of third platoon that we linked up with and he he's just known for his line nav skills so thank you condi for putting us on point i know you're probably going to watch us at some point so um yeah it's unbelievable that i mean i've learned land nab obviously i went to ranger school and i was a team leader so i i'm pretty good at land now but i this was something something else this is a different world out there and how long did it take you to move those two miles you know we hit the crash site at sunrise so you can imagine that that's a lot of several hours yeah five five to six hours yeah walking yeah no afghanistan is brutal terrain brutal and carrying all that gear i mean oh the ever-present question were you guys wearing body armor on top of all that we were yeah so that was another kind of lesson learned about that is you don't bring your plates um yeah so we had body armor which is uh yeah we did drop our body armor um the next day when we after we recovered the the chinook and they came in for the recovery we dropped our plates because we were only wearing the front plate we weren't wearing the back one thankfully so let's uh let's get into that then you know dawn comes you find yourselves at the crash site uh ranger platoon arrives what ended up happening that morning so the first thing was to determine well the pjs were the first ones exactly on the crash site and they've kind of led the charge on the recovery but they basically quickly came back after they saw the crash site and said you know there's no one alive so this is not a rescue anymore it's now a recovery and that was like you might you might as well have just taken a you know a k bar and slammed it into the side of my sidewall of my car um you know let out the let out the air for sure um and then basically from there it was we need to recover everybody and find all their equipment so we kind of staged and started that little sweep [Music] and you found there were there were 16 uh 16 personnel and you found 15 of them like fairly quickly right correct and then yeah it was uh i'd say within the first hour or so we had 15 of the 16 accounted for um but we were having a really tough time finding that last person right and if i remember how big a chinook is right you see it behind me yeah those are i mean those are bigger than a city school bus or a city bus right yeah and on the ground there wasn't much left and there's a good photo in my book that shows a few of the guys at the remain remnants of turbine 33 and the three guys covered the amount of bird that was left yeah so it's it was a definitely a sight that you just couldn't believe it yeah like how is this a shook how is this a chinook um it's unbelievable it looked like the whole like side of the mountain was basically burned up correct yeah it was a huge fire obviously a huge forest fire had occurred and yeah everything was burned and and you're not for the people who might not be familiar with like a ceasar like you're not just looking for the body in the sense that you don't know if this person is out there trying to uh escape and evade right now you don't know if they've been captured you you have no like if you can't find the body then it changes the entire equation for what the next steps are yeah we were definitely worried that uh someone was on the run and so we're just like we if he's not here where is he did they capture him is he you know ian eating right now in the mountains um so they said all right guys this is this is it we've got much more time we gotta find the sixteenth guy yeah and it took it took some new eyes from from uh the third platoon of charlie company and i'll be damned if within like 30 minutes one of the guys finds them in one of the burnt areas it was actually a downed tree that obviously fell after the forest fire and it was he was hidden kind of under the tree yeah and i i don't want to like get too gruesome or or like yeah you know or or anything you know make the gory but it it must have been an experience for you guys you know recovering these people that had been in a [ __ ] crash with a fire like it it must not have been easy for for everybody involved i mean no i would say you'd be surprised at how well you would perform when you know these are your buddies right um you're moving pretty fast and you know you don't have time to process your emotions really right so you're really just working work and working now after it's all done that's a different story right but uh in the moment actually you know i think we were so motivated to find these guys and get them home that it's it's it's hard to explain how you just get into this robot mode but i think a lot of combat veterans watching understand but for the civilians it's it's it's one of those things that you you try really hard to not show your emotions when you're on the battlefield because you know how it affects your buddies and everyone around you so the harder you work the less chance you have for any emotions to come out so i think that's kind of how a lot of the spec ops guys operate if you just keep working there's nothing to think about but i mean and also as hard as difficult as that is i mean you guys did the honorable thing and recovered all 16 of those personnel and got it back home and you know i don't think you or any of the other guys out there as hard as that is to deal with you know you all did the right thing yeah and i think a lot what made it really easy at least for me was you know looking at these guys and they were not much different than myself right they were most special operators right there in front of us and what i kept telling myself was if this was me they'd be out doing the same damn thing right they'd be out there helping us getting us home to our family so that made it easy and plus you think about the families back home like they deserve their loved one to come home right so there's a lot of motivation like to get them home now during this time do you guys have sufficient like isr uh and and coverage to make sure that you're not attacked while you're while you're doing this yeah i don't think i've ever been on a mission with more assets in the air you got to remember and a lot of people don't recognize this or know this but this was the largest search and recovery operation since vietnam and i think it's still to this day is i think it was larger than extortion um so we had multiple air assets i mean i think we had three at one point and that's unheard of i mean you're lucky to have one thing on station most of the time right but uh having three different i mean plus we had fighters in the sky i mean it was it was intense yeah you knew it was a big deal when when you could pick and choose which air asset you wanted to use yeah and you guys had i guess the a-10s were kind of smacking dudes down as they were trying to move towards you so they didn't even basically have a chance correct yeah we were we were actually you know recovering the crash site we had removed all of our gear had our weapons set on the ground because when you're you know doing a recovery you don't really you can't have any other extra weight on you you know people are heavy yeah so we had all that stuff down and we hear cracking of an ak and an air burst of a rpg and we're like oh here we go they're here so all of us run over to our gear throw it on and get ready like getting ready to maneuver and it was it looking back on it it happened so fast like within minutes you hear the a-10s you hear them fire their rockets yeah and then you hear over the radio yeah they're gone go back to work they're not going to be a problem you guys are good yeah those 810s when you hear that that's one of the greatest sounds in the world yeah i mean they were using not only their their cannons but they were using rockets they were getting a 275 millimeter and those things are you know the flechette rounds are they're huge yeah and yeah they basically littered that side of the mountain and i don't know why these guys were firing at us to be honest they were like a mile away so we probably wouldn't have seen them if they didn't start shooting from too far yeah so you get the the remains of uh the the seals and the pilots recovered um what's the next step to evac the bodies the remain the remains out when do you start hearing about this other patrol that's out there in american that's mia kind of what's what's the next step for for your platoon out there it was almost immediately when we finished recovery that we were told we need to investigate some transponder hits that were not you know a few like a mile away so we um quickly got our gear on and and headed out on patrol but um you know we didn't know exactly still at that point we knew there were seals but we didn't know that they were the recon element that was out there prior we eventually learned that i think the next morning we learned that um on our next patrol but uh this is vietnam-style patrolling that uh we joked that we trained this way you know during the global war on terror and then we actually did it and we had a you know we had a ranger school patrol base on my very first mission on my first deployment yeah and so when i got to ranger school it's actually kind of funny when i got to ranger school i was like oh so this is why we did this yeah you know um but yeah we we quickly right after recovery we were out moving again so for the recovery did a bird did a bird come in to to do the recovery how did you guys manage that yeah essentially uh the first sergeant uh created an hlz with a bunch of explosives and we waited until nightfall to bring in a black uh another chinook to x-fill them that night and and you and you guys are like oh they get like you're not getting on the bird you have a follow-on mission to go check out these transponders yeah we knew we weren't leaving um because we knew that there were no we hit the transponder patrol before the x-fil actually oh really okay yeah so it was right after we basically lined them up for exvil and it was still daytime it was middle of the day so then we did our follow-on patrol shortly thereafter um and we were beat we were beat up i died i couldn't believe it when they told us we're going on patrol i was thinking to myself i don't know about this you know all of us are dehydrated yeah we're exhausted we walked all night we you know recovered bodies all day yeah and now we're going on a patrol yeah and so you guys are fanning out through the mountains and the forests looking for transponders well you initiated movement that night yeah it was actually middle of the day right after the recovery we headed out on this patrol and uh seal team 10 joined us they linked up with us and we patrolled together and when i say patrol uh this this was not your traditional type of troll it was like you know we had two guys on the side of a goat trail and we were booking it we were just running basically it wasn't there was no tactical movement here um yeah we were asking for it essentially and we were told you know the way we're moving it's pretty likely we're gonna get in some a bad fire fight so be ready because we're we're moving fast and we're moving loud and we're not you know in a proper we're this is how how you shouldn't move but speed was our our tool at the time because we thought we might have guys that are alive still right you're you're moving to potentially rescue other americans that are out yeah so we're i mean it's crazy i mean you we don't we wouldn't even do this in a training environment right this was like an old road march where you're on the side of the road right and you're just booking down but it's a goat trail yeah and yeah the security was you know you did the best you could right but really for me i was trying to keep up the guy in front of me yeah um so like if they start shooting at us we'll fight how far did you have to move to that first transponder hit it was about a little over a mile but it was like straight downhill into a valley okay and so the movement down wasn't too bad yeah coming back that that's a different story and was the transponder still there when you arrived nothing there was nothing we found nothing we got to um yeah it was just an empty space where obviously they probably made a radio transmission from that spot or near it or a sat phone we don't know exactly what what caused this intel but but no boot prints no boot prints in the mud no expended brass nothing nothing we came up completely empty um then it was obviously a huge disappointment you know we just walked for nothing we didn't find our guys so we were told hurry up and get back we got to exfil these guys and clt 10 is going to go with them so they got to get back before the bird does so obviously at that point you know we're again basically running up the mountain at that point and i was beat i was carrying the the litter the skedco and it's not that heavy but it is when you're going up a mountain well yeah everything adds up and you guys i mean how are you doing on water by this point in time because even wearing like what is it a the two gallon or five gallon uh the camelbak's i don't know how you know two three liters yeah like i would have burned it through that on the first movement to the site and then working all day recovering bodies do you guys have water left no we were most i think almost everyone was out of water i had like a little bit just to wet my mouth um and it was freaking me out because that you know the one thing that you don't want to happen is to run out of water yeah and being i was the new private right i'm the young guy and i'm about to run out of water i'm like oh [ __ ] yeah i'm gonna have to ask my team leader or the tab spec for water now and you don't know that everybody else is already out too though uh just about everybody was out i don't think anyone had anything more than like half a bottle of water yeah um basically so yeah there was no water at that point and um yeah we were booking it up that hill thankfully the 160th guys when they came in to recover the bodies once we got up to the mountain they uh they restocked us for a little bit at least yeah so now it's nighttime so you guys have been on the move and working hard like expending massive amounts of energy for almost 24 hours straight correct so it's it's time to go home no no no they put us back at uh hlz up there and we created a patrol base and we pulled security for the night because they they put us down for the night because they're like we're gonna kill these guys if we keep pushing them yeah they're basically out of water they've got to recover but they said in the morning we're heading out again there's some other things we need to do and we're going to drop some ordnance on this uh this uh this village nearby which we almost were in the night before and this is apparently where ahmad shah had his id factory and they suspected him to be there so they were going to drop three 500 pound j dams on this mud hut it's weird i mean it's odd to me that they're gonna drop ordinance on anything when there's an american or amer at least you know that there are possibly four americans out there alive that they don't know where they are true [Music] yes um as i was in the patrol base that night me being the the young private i was i was a smart ranger so i always had these questions and i always had you know insight and i was asking things some of my team leader thankfully i had a good team leader who actually answered them and didn't just yell at me right but um i said i asked them i said isn't it weird that we're dropping bombs when we don't know where our guys are and he just stared at me yeah like no answer he literally just stared right through me like i want to answer you but you don't want to hear my answer right right um well i i have an even more obnoxious question is why send a recce out on this facility if you're just going to drop some bombs on it right without a reiki if you haven't heard from your recce team and you don't need their input then why didn't you just blow it up anyway just throwing that out there hey teach their own right yeah well i'll say this you know i don't know if they if they had intel on that building or not right now rrd was rid was on the ground so okay they may very well have uh had eyes on but okay we didn't get that information so i don't want to assume everything but that was just my thoughts at the moment gotcha okay fair enough i did not know the rod was on the ground so maybe they had confirmed so they were out in another location um what were those dudes up to you know i don't know we did link up with them the next that day so that night we did link up with them so i i don't know when they arrived or where they came from they didn't come in with us they just appeared i mean wrecking doing what reki does or r d does what already does right they just appear so i wish i could get a hold of some of those guys and find out where they came from but uh [Music] they were definitely on the ground for sure so now we're getting into day three yeah this was three days post crash and day two of us on the ground two days of you on the ground the second morning uh how much water and what how much water did the the chinooks bring you did the recovery team bring you did they restock you guys they had like three or four cases of water um like a costco size basically and um we burned through it right away oh sure didn't last very long um we each grabbed a couple bottles and that's what we had i drank one during the night i should have had another looking back on it but we all had a couple bottles of water for the next day now when you say bottled water you're just talking about like the little plastic bottle of water 12 ounce polar not like a like the the remember the in iraq the huge ones yeah or or not even the bottle but like a you know like the fuel can full of water um no no just the little plastic bottles of water boy you gotta love army supply sometimes yeah i mean i have a one of my photos in the book is actually shows you can see the trash on the hl's east we just piled it all up yeah you can see the water bottle sitting there yeah what what are the temperatures like at this time you know a year like at night and during the day uh hellacious i mean during the day it's it's triple digits and at night it gets into the 60s so you know it doesn't sound cold but i'll tell you what when you've been sweating oh yeah all day and it gets down to 60 it feels like 20. feels like it's freezing yeah yeah yeah i mean i was shivering i was like my teeth were chattering in the morning how'd you guys with your lack of water and the temperature in the day and the work and the movement had you guys had any had any heat casualties at this point surprisingly no one had a heat casualty at that time but we did have guys that were near their dropping point shortly thereafter sure so we're getting it so that next morning what was the what was the next orders that you guys got over the net what what came next for the for the patrol the next was we are dropping ordinance and basically you're going to chase the ordinance so what they did is they you know we heard the ordinance drop we felt it hit because it wasn't that far away and i mean it shook that whole mountain yeah three three five hundred pound bombs it's um [Music] a lot more than i expected i mean we were about i'm probably a mile a mile to a mile and a half away and you could feel it under your feet so as soon as they hit we were out chasing them because our job now at that point was we need to confirm we got our guy and at that point we still didn't know where our seals were we had no clue we didn't even know we were gonna go next they were just sending out patrols in different directions just trying to sweep them out as much as they could yeah what the hell are you gonna confirm of the guy after you dropped three 500 pounders on him you need to ask you need to ask the commanders above our level i mean even our commander when we got there he said so what do you want us to do yeah yeah this was a building and now it's a field full of cement and and grass and dirt and they said lo and behold i need you guys to ssc that site so okay so ssc means sensitive site exploitation and it means like if you go into a house and you search everything in the house you take all the documents you take computer like you search everything and basically they want you to do this to to a a pile of rubble a pile of rubble i mean to be honest it didn't even look like a pile of rubble it looked like to me it was like a farm field um with some chunks of like rock and cement and dirt and clay right um it didn't seem like a building at all right so were they doing this to target on that shot did they expect you i mean did they send you in with a handy rapid dna like sniffer that could pull all the dna odor from the no no we had we had nothing like nothing of the sorts um i think they wanted to find a body yeah which really three 500-pound bombs right but you know before we even got to that you know that patrolled down to that location was yeah it was downhill but it was some of the most hilacious terrain we saw the whole time yeah we were sliding on our rear ends down this mountain you know um it was wide open i mean we're sliding on our butts on a hillside basically if someone had a rpk they could have picked off a ranger platoon i mean easily yeah so to get down to that site you know we're basically running sliding on our butts and then we get there we find this this complete mess of a jdam site that our our commander who is now general work he he basically said are you sending us heavy equipment uh because that's what it's gonna take right we have we don't have gloves like we don't have gloves to do this we have shooting gloves right right so what did what did your sse consist of while you were there that is pretty awesome yeah it was uh you see anything no you don't okay um really there there was no ssc it wasn't possible there was nothing to sse right um you know we started moving rocks around and it was a complete waste of time um but we did find actually a hand there was a hand and my my one of my team leaders in my squad was poking at it with a stick come look at this guys look at what we got um pretty horrific to to see a hand especially when you get up to it you look down and the hand looks awfully small you know it was uh i would say best case scenario was a teenager yeah or or a little person maybe it was a little person you know the the infamous infamous [ __ ] um lawmaker it's possible yeah it sounds a little disheartening you know you don't go to war to see potential civilian casualties that's not what you want right no one wants that right so that was my first thought actually is like oh man we killed some civilians this is horrible so we were all sitting around thinking uh we just killed civilians great right that's freaking awesome but years later i found out from my platoon leader who actually went back to the same village as a company commander um actually he he left that he left red wings and became company commander for the company that was in the documenting restrepo okay so if you watch that that was his next deployment pretty unbelievable um and he found out that actually that j dam actually killed a bunch of insurgents so it wasn't it wasn't a civilian casualty like i thought right so that was a little bit refreshing but you know i lived like 10 years of my life thinking that i saw a bunch of civilians and i mean up to this point like you guys haven't been in combat so you haven't had that i don't want to say release but sort of that active part you've have you've recovered bodies which was probably or had some emotional you know weight and then you go and you think you know you feel as though we just j damned civilians which has emotional weight and i mean is does this feel like a heavy uh for you especially since you haven't been in combat yet yeah for me it was like i honestly this was the moment you know jack was mentioned earlier is this you were living the dream right this is what you thought it would be no well that's the moment i had it was basically right after that that night after that jdam site i was sitting there and you know talking to one of the team leaders and basically it was like is this what you thought war was going to be like no this is this is nothing that i thought it was going to be like yeah and it was i mean the whole mission was a complete failure right like we wouldn't even know about this mission if it was a success right so the whole the whole point we're talking the reason the only reason we're talking about this is because it was like one of the most epic failures in in spec ops history so you know we're sitting there on the mountain and i'm just thinking okay so we know 16 guys are dead we killed some civilians we still haven't found our navy seals and i haven't eaten and we're out of water this [ __ ] sucks yeah you know this is like this is horrible and so now where's the fighting where's the glory right and now now it's time of course for you guys to get on the bird and go home for hot sandwiches and soup right ice cream you know i i wish you know at that point we were starting to have heat casualties people were starting to fall out and docks running around with ivs and it was a mess [Applause] and i'm i'm sitting there joking with one of the guys who's about to be heat casualty i asked them would it be nice if they airdrop some pizza and uh he didn't like that because he was about to come to find out he was about to pass out yeah um so you know we finally got a resupply that night but that was another [ __ ] show was they went to go airdrop us water and food and they dropped at a valley over oh my god oh [ __ ] and we're like you gotta be kidding me yeah like we've walked for 24 hours like we're not going to get it yeah and the one that landed near us the chute never opened and it burned in so half of the stuff had exploded yeah um yeah so we were i'm drinking out of these like broken water bottles that were half full and we're just chugging these things and they re-supplied us the next day finally we ended up getting food and water but it was on the way down to that jdam site that we heard that there was new intel that's when we kind of heard about the seals so three charlie was on our way down was sent to a village to search for what we were hurt we heard was an american they had an american they were kind of chattering on the radio and um someone had come into a local base and said we have an american in our village so three charlie basically started running to that village while we were on our way down to that j dam that was the only glimmer of hope i think we had for the first two or three days there [Music] um but we also heard shortly after the sse that they found they found somebody they literally found a live american and i i can't even explain that's what that felt like wow after all that negativity and all that failure that we all felt it's like holy [ __ ] that someone survived all this and yeah it was like we were like partying and you guys got high five and yeah and not only did they survive you guys being out there having gone through all that you guys were on you know close enough to actually go and get him yeah he was he was not that far i mean far considering all the injuries and stuff that he went through sure i can't believe he made it that far to be honest um but i guess you know adrenaline does crazy things to the human body one second i'm sorry to interrupt i want to pick up right right back at that thought um i just got to take a 60 second break here to tell our viewers about one of our sponsors today and we'll pick right back up with this story um i want to tell you guys about bluebird botanicals they are one of the oldest cbd companies in the industry found that in 2012 they made a name for themselves through quality and transparency their first company to make third-party or to make third-party lab tests for all cbd products publicly accessible on 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go give them a look uh um help support the show we appreciate it so let's pick up right actually can i say something really quick yes sir yeah about bluebird actually so you guys know i'm a chiropractor right yeah i actually recommend that product to a lot of patients oh really and i've actually seen it in in a therapeutic sense that's works amazing so try it it's great no that's recommended yeah i like the drops a lot but when i'm i'm hooked on their their cream the cream with the menthol and this the full spectrum cbd very good like arthritis and stuff yeah i like that a lot um let's actually get to some questions okay before we talk about so i just want to give you some questions and then we'll get back into this okay uh jackson thank you very much for tony jack and dave where do you all see the future of ranger management headed in a perfect world what would be the next evolution of the 75th tony take it away i i mean i think they've kind of already molded into this uh counter-terrorism type force that is new to them they they went from you know airfield seizures to um to these direct action raids and i think the that's the right path given there's so many urban centers in the world if we're going to war again we're going to need that large urban force to go door to door and fight i mean it's urban warfare is the future yeah i think the ranger regiment you know they build themselves they call themselves america's premier raid force so that kind of says it all right there what they see their future as um so that that's definitely not going away i i mean i was there so i can't speak to it so much now that i was there when it was you know airfield seizures when it was patrol base and when it was making the change into the cqb and things like that and there were a lot of people at ranger battalion that resisted that they didn't want him to go that way so we were you know kind of serving two masters you know one you get in your rsi of you know your ranger whatever it was vehicle and go out and sit in a bear suit on a cold ass airfield in the morning after you know whatever and then you know and then you'd go do you know up drills and you know um mozambique's and stuff you know on the range or a shoot house um when i worked with rangers or you know in afghanistan iraq they had become later on they'd become so professionalized where they could become dog handlers they could become you know the interrogat i mean they just had a lot more going on which i think is fantastic now it's like a little army within an army yeah no i think that's fantastic but you guys obvious know a lot more than i do about that um and then jackson again what was the most professional unit you worked with uh rangers seemed to always talk highly of delta uh air force special operations command and or and uh hrt did you work with any of them yeah i personally worked with all of them i mean i worked with seal team six hrt i worked with uh yeah the pjs the assoc guys pjs obviously yeah and i would say the two that stood out to me the most one being delta far and away i think the best counterterrorism force out there and the other one is uh the pjs those guys you talk about knowing your job inside and out those guys were amazing so i i give a lot of props to those guys um jackson thank you again how critical were other soft elements of this uh of the seal oh how critical as in like critical uh were the other soft elements of the seals plans for the rookie of ahmed shah all due respect was their pushback on their planning ability you know i don't know the full details of that i think this has been written about i think ed derek covered this in his book and it's um i think a lot of the soft community actually didn't want to do this mission and the only people that actually accepted it was the seals so i think that that was the pushback was now this doesn't seem like a good idea for our guys so all it takes is one commander to say yes right right right i i think there were some people that told this told the seals that it wasn't a good idea but you know that's one opinion and the seals had their opinion so you know um yeah i think the marine the marine commanders in particular uh advised that they should have more more marines on the ground when nearby when they're doing this recce mission because of the terrain yeah and uh i don't i think they said no we're going we're going by ourselves yeah uh alejandra thank you buddy uh hey tony was talking to a mutual our ranger buddy of ours he wanted me to ask you to tell stories of bush diving in bac and rip ha ha oh that's uh yeah that's um i i think i know who who who asked that question uh felipe i know that's you so uh is essentially um we used to get a little rowdy on the weekends and i i fell into a bush uh on a walk back to a motel and you know you tripped over your own feet because you had one too many and the bush was the softest bush i'd ever fell into so so every time we would go back to this motel on the weekend we would jump into it and so we called it bush diving rangers being rangers yeah exactly um dickies discord's dailies thank you oh i didn't get a notification my malfunction yeah sorry about that hit the little bell icon and select all notifications yeah pro tip and alejandro thanks again buddy for afghan portion what was talking with felipe uh was talking with philippe p uh he mentioned uh during the insertion almost fast roping off the side of a cliff lol he mentioned you had a guy land on you while roping in injured your arm and charlie might yeah so i wasn't the one who was injured but um yeah i mean we it was a bunch of trees ground yeah and we were very close to a to a cliff thankfully not super close but close enough and um bert was the guy specialist bert a radio operator broke his arm uh john dugan thank you very much no segue for ball trimmers awkward next time we'll get you what we got we got you don't worry about it uh uh and then uh bpa izzy thank you very much for the donation i don't see a question and if so let's uh let's talk about the recovery then you guys on the ground had gotten word that an american has been found um what was the next step for for your platoon um after you know they found marcus and that was three charlie that found marcus they uh but basically the next job was you know where where's the rest of your team you know we know there's four of you so where's the rest of your team and you know marcus marcus did his best and he basically gave us a decent area to go search and it took a took a quite quite a bit of time to find the rest of his team so our job then was we need to get the rest of these guys but he he quickly told us that you know they're dead so he knew that it was there was no rescue it was it was recovery so so marcus told three charlie an area to search that got radioed over to your platoon and then you went search the area if i'm understanding right no it was really close to where three charlie was and they actually catch it okay gotcha but um but we we were still doing you know presence patrols hoping to draw out you know ahmad shah and his boys in case they were still around right so that's what we were basically doing at that point so one of the things i noticed in your book uh was that latrobe was very concerned about how many guys uh uh three charlie had with them because you know they he they had been under siege and he felt like that they were gonna he was worried you guys were gonna be out gunned right yeah i mean the the element that he came in contact with was pretty small that he saw now there were more guys but they were kind of hidden around the village so his concern was you know they've got a lot more guys than we do right you better have more like he never really said that he just kept asking you know how many guys do you have yeah how many guys you have and lieutenant english who was the guy who was basically interviewing him a former enlisted guy in kag and a green beret just an amazing guy he uh he suspected is what he told me so i just want to say that you know lieutenant english has since passed uh from cancer so i'm sorry this was interviews i yeah i mean what a great amazing human so i just want to say that i interviewed him shortly before he died um years ago and this was before i decided i was actually going to write a book and he basically said he suspected that the handlers that were with marcus were waiting to know exactly how many men they had waiting for english to say something so that he could you know tell his buddies so english never told him how many guys they had he just kept saying enough we have enough um so you know we were still skeptical that you know these villagers were protecting him right right i think rightfully so yeah interesting so what what happened so what happened in terms of the gears turning above you when pre-charlie calls back to command like jackpot like we we have one i i mean was the whole world moving for you at that point in terms of military logistics and and everything you needed oh yeah i mean it was yeah we had resupplies at that point we had other units moving towards us we had a marine unit that was moving to us on on foot so reinforcements are on the way and then the next part of the mission was okay we got to find the rest of this team and it was you know we knew they weren't alive so it was it slowed down dramatically at that point it was like to a crawl there's no more running around now now we're doing legit like patrols where we're drawn to contact we're trying to try to make contact and assault the enemy um and of course they were long gone because they're they're smarter than that i mean look what's happening right like what's happening right now as soon as we left what happened yeah now right at that time are you are you guys out there in basically a company size element um we were we were in a platoon minus element at my my location well i'm split up okay that's what i mean is like with english with with everybody if you would have consolidated about how many people did you have at that point there was a about a company arrangers out there i mean there were two platoons from charlie company one platoon from bravo company and of course all the other elements that were out there you know pjs you had elements of seal team 10 you had rrd we had green berets we had marines that were also in the area so i would say total probably two full companies of people so you guys you guys could definitely lay some hate then if you needed to like it wasn't it you weren't at risk of it becoming another like fighting retreat from from or or in ace from somewhere i mean it sounds that way but we were so spread out um you know you know we're a few miles apart so okay in that terrain you you have to be together in order to be effective right we were so spread out we were you know yeah we were ready we were pretty exposed i would say each element so what happens next so you they call jackpot or they they have latrell they find the guys um like oh do they now is it time to go home now do you get to go home for some cake and i just not quit not quite uh this was the point where we still need to find his team right so three charlie has an idea of where they are um but they weren't i mean latrell's description was not like this is the coordinates it was like this here you were there you like circled an area on the map and um we we trusted him so we sent three charlie there but one charlie my unit did patrols in other areas that we knew that they had passed by just to be sure that you know he just been through severe trauma so you you can trust him but you can only trust him so much right i mean we don't know how bad he's hurt at that point so we just kept patrolling and looking and crawling around in the mountains at known areas of where they had been and it wasn't it was a few days later before we found his buddies so you can imagine that that terrain's that bad i mean it takes days to search a little area on the map to be the whole time i was out there i just had no appetite i mean i was like snacking on things but i never ate a full meal really yeah um you know a little bit on edge from the days prior so you weren't very hungry so i mean i lost like 15 pounds in that week so just out of curiosity you went during school like when you went to range school after this you're probably like this isn't [ __ ] like i get two to three hours a night sleep i get a at least a meal or two a day like i'm cool with this no ranger school still sucks but i would say that it was still awful but at the same time i always had that to fall back on right right you know in the mountain i was in the mountains in winter it sucked and i just kept thinking well at least i'm not in afghanistan right right right at least i know i'm getting a meal today so how long does it take for three charlie to recover the other three uh seals it was a total of two days after marcus okay to get out to get everybody and they're still they're still matthew axelson was still not recovered at that point it wasn't until we got you know reinforcements from third ranger battalion who who basically deployed early because of this mission as soon as soon as this mission went down uh third range battalion was activated i remember when that happened oh really yeah yeah it was uh charlie company i believe was like a platoon or two from charlie company that got deployed they did like they got out there i believe was the sixth day or fifth or six years yeah it was like you know an rf1 recall yeah they called everyone's cell phones got them in there and rapidly deployed those guys oh yeah wow yeah i mean like i said it was the largest rescue and recovery operation since vietnam so i think the military treated this as we are not having another roberts ridge this is already bad we're not gonna get overwhelmed by firepower it's not going to happen yeah yeah no that's that's amazing so how how were you guys doing were people just pretty much sticking their errors how are you doing battle space deconfliction at this point with so many moving elements that did not normally work with each other uh i don't know how to answer that because because i i don't know that it was that i mean it was tough obviously there were so many moving parts yeah that and radio transmissions out there were just god awful i mean half of the time nothing would go through right you'd have to try satellite that wouldn't go through um so it was the line of sight wow you know i mean yeah it was tough the commanders had their work cut out for them for sure were there any blue on blue incidents during that point in time or surprisingly no i mean i mean we linked up with units on a patrol like we linked up with rd in the middle of a patrol and you know so i don't know how it all occurred but it was very well done by at least my leaders that i saw i mean i had i had some of the best guys on the planet i had you know lieutenant colonel howell i had general work and you know congdon who is i believe he retired as a sergeant major um these guys were cream of the crop so you know it impressive let's put it that way yeah so how did this operation finally start winding down i mean after you're out there five days everyone's recovered um what was the next step you know axelson still wasn't recovered but when when uh third ranger battalion arrived you know they they want to get us out of there we were just like a battered bunch of kids out there i mean i have a picture i think you guys i sent it to you but it was a picture uh right after the mission and we looked like we had a couple pigs that rolled around in the mud you know we all had beards um it was that's how it went it wound down it's like that we gotta get these guys out of here and get them replaced because they're beat to all hell yeah that's that's amazing and so what did 375 do when they hit the ground they immediately went after the the the area where they believed axelson to be and you know axelson you know this this is not like isn't common knowledge but he was not near his two buddies he was a little bit a little bit away from them so you know one can say that you know he may have survived much longer than we thought he may have been eating himself so that's why it took so long he's a stud right so he may have he may have uh you know made his way out of there what what was the estimated size of the force that they encountered you know there's so many conflicting reports out there but i i have seen videos of the taliban that the taliban has put out or how much jazz guys have put out and to my to my best estimation i think it was no more than about 12 12 men but you got to keep in mind and this is not to i'm not trying to like make marcus a story not true because that terrain right he could have put five guys against those four seals and that the superiority of position they had right it wouldn't have mattered it wouldn't matter if there were 50 or five right you're shooting down down on these guys and like just walking that train i'll just say this i don't know how anyone could have survived if they're ambushed from above i just don't doesn't there's no cover and there's trees but they're they're shooting plunging fire down on you right like you have to aim so our estimation is about 12. yeah so and at this time as you said that they are starting to pull your platoon out as 375 uh charlie company guys are kind of rotating in correct and we slowly like one platoon minus element after another were swapping out and uh we were one of the last of the elements because we had the company commander in our in our group so he wanted to be the last off the mountain i mean it's a it's a wild story i mean what what are some of your f uh i guess like concluding thoughts about this rescue and recovery effort as you know you kind of got on the bird and returned back to days you know i think one of the things that really stuck with me was what a group of men with a common mission can accomplish like everything was against us there was not one thing that was working in our favor and you know you put me on the ground by myself and i would have quit like there's no doubt in my mind like that terrain i remember walking into that crash site thinking you're never going to get there because you know i'm crawling up this mountain on all fours and the rocks are sliding out under me so i'd climb a couple feet and i'd slide slide down like 10. climb a couple more feet slide down another 10. and i did this for like it seemed like it seemed like hours but it was probably 15 minutes worth and the only thing that kept me going was seeing the guys around me just keep going everyone kept going and you know we're gonna find these guys and we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna bring them home so i think ultimately the the underlying theme is this like teamwork it's unbelievable you know i think right now in america if we can get more people that have a common goal we wouldn't have all this squabbling and bs going on right you know stuff would just get done yeah you know you know you bring up a really interesting point because i think a lot of times uh like the military particularly men in you know combat arms i don't want to say they're criticized but there's this like oh well you know you're supposed to be act like a badass like they like you know there's sort of this denigration of the whole you know chest thumping type of thing toxic masculinity yeah but like what you're kind of explaining is guys aren't really just doing that for themselves we all do it so that we all suck it up and every every individual who might quit at that moment looks to their buddy who's like it's no [ __ ] problem like we got this like right like we're studs it gives that sort of psychological you know tick to to keep moving i know i was thinking about this today as well for some reason that like men can be very competitive with one another sometimes to the point of stupidity but also very supportive of one another you know like that's my boy you know this dude he's got this you know no problem like ranger battalion especially in combat and when i think back to those days you know even the guy that i did not like personally and i'm like man i hate this [ __ ] guy but in combat you're on a mission dude that guy will run through gunfire to come and get you if need be you know you got it yeah yeah yeah yeah you don't get that in in the other places in the world right you got guys that you don't have to get along you don't have to like them right right but at the end of the day you're both coming home right that's that's ultimately what matters is you know the end of the day you're both coming home that's all that matters right yeah and i and we've had people on the set before and i mean i've said this like you know because sometimes people ask veterans who have been in afghanistan iraq is like well did you really feel like you were doing it forgotten country you know did you feel like this was furthering us interest or u.s safety and it's sort of like at that point in time you're doing it for the person on your left and the person on your right that's what you're doing it for nothing else matter yeah i you know you mentioned doing it for country and you know yeah when you're out there i i literally didn't think about that one time yeah all i thought about the americans the people that i was go i was going to rescue and recover right and the only time i thought about country was just a very very cool moment was on the 4th of july we were still on the mountain and you know they were the the air force did a show of force on one of the mountain sides right in front of us uh and you talked about a fourth of july fireworks show i pulled down my knot and watched it it was one of the coolest things i've ever seen so you know for me like that was that moment we were like america right yeah um but yeah for the rest of the time it didn't matter right it didn't at all yeah man that that's that's such an awesome ranger story and i'm amongst all this carnage and horrible things to talk about um you know just being around a group of rangers like that that they're not going to give up you know they're going they're going all the way and to be a part of that it's brings back awesome memories yeah i mean in the process of writing this book has been you know obviously jack you know this because reading a book is it's a long process and it's a lot of work um and then when you actually publish it it's pretty exciting but the thing that's even better is when your buddies call you and you you get to you get to reconnect with those guys yeah yeah especially the guys on this mission they're all like reaching out to me like thank you for finally telling our story thank you for finally setting the record straight that it was actually rangers who did this because most people don't even recognize that it was rangers i mean i know it's out there but it's not common knowledge and most people are actually really shocked yeah i mean there's a story floating around that it was actually an oda that recovered latrell they were there with him they were well they're with english but english was uh okay so they're joint yes and so they were they're absolutely there yeah okay gotcha and didn't latrell say something that like i'm never gonna hear the end about getting rescued by you guys yeah he definitely he kept his humor in the moment that uh he he looked at the ranger at the ranger platoon leader english and said oh man i'm never gonna hear the end of this one yeah yeah which is which is really cool because that kind of gave us i think a lot of people just knowing that hey he's okay yeah you know if he can joke about that right right yeah he's all right yeah yeah um you know i think dave maybe for the bonus segment it would be good to talk to tony about ramadi okay yeah and get into that but tony tell us about um you know a little bit about uh why you decided to write this book i mean i think you you mentioned that you know the story had never really been told before but you got out of range of battalion um you're a chiropractor now i mean what inspired you to really sit down and go through this process of right of writing this account and doing these interviews with all of your former teammates you know i over the years i kind of just done it for my own reasons like mental health reasons and you know i i thought i needed to write it down so i kind of interviewed people over the years and i i knew i wanted to write eventually i didn't know i want to write a book but i wanted to write it down and it wasn't until i you know i looked up i have two young kids i have a seven-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl and i looked at them you know and they're playing around and i just kept having that thought of am i ever going to be able to tell them about my service like am i really ever going to be able to sit down and explain this to them and i came to the conclusion that no i'm probably never going to have that conversation yo this one time i was on this mountain no not going to happen so that that was ultimately the kicker was you know i need to put this on paper so that my kids can know a little bit more about their dad no no i don't know i don't know how much longer i'm gonna be here like i could get hit by a train tomorrow right so that was my huge motivating factor um telling the story was a huge part of it and then encouraging other veterans to kind of tell their stories i found that like a lot of the war stories we read about they're like these like glorious battles right these amazing things that happened with these guys and that's great i love those stories but there's a lot of stories that just never will be told because they they weren't made into a movie or they weren't glorious yeah but they're important for history right they're important for you know our force moving forward knowing that this is what it was like during this time um i mean we see it with world war ii we see with vietnam there's all these stories my favorite book of all time is a is a fiction book is actually the things they carried oh yeah but you know what it told an amazing story about vietnam and i think i think it was mostly true uh with a little bit of extras right so you know there's a lot of good reasons to write a book and i think i i'm hoping that a lot of veterans start doing that i want to see more yeah that's interesting me too and i mean i think about your uh about the lieutenant you mentioned england who you know you know guy unfortunately passes away of cancer you know once these guys are gone that's it that's it they don't have that opportunity to tell the story and thank god that you interviewed him and were able to give him a bit of a voice in your book um but i would just add that to all the guys out there our generation tony of guys that you know they should tell their story for their kids and for the other soldiers out there the people who are thinking about joining the military and the veterans and for history yeah no i i think it's huge like obviously uh lieutenant english um his story obviously would have never been told right so he i mean he's he's a stud and the only people who know that are the ones that started with them right well now now i can say a lot of people are going to know about lieutenant english and how cool he was that's awesome i know that that makes me feel pretty good about it yeah no it is important i think i mean one of the you know jack and i love having people on the show and hearing their stories and part of our motivation about this whole show is is to capture history on the personal level on the ground level you know and and not you know not the nat geo special and that's a documentary and you know not the news reports but but but full stories not sound bites from the people who who lived it you know um yeah i mean i mean you don't hear about the the i ran out of water and ran out of food stores right right right but both of us you know both of us know what that's like you know and what how torturous that can be especially in afghanistan that terrain anybody who has has pumped over that terrain um it's brutal it's brutal and you'll go through a camelback like that so i just can't imagine what you guys you know and working all yeah in hindsight in hindsight i would have carried a lot less ammo because well there was no fighting right and it would have been a lot more water right yeah out of curiosity when you said that you know you when you were asking yourself would i talk to my kids about this or would i tell them about is that that you would not sit down and say this is what i did or is it that if they asked you questions that you wouldn't answer them do you have a reluctance to talk to your kids or you just feel like you don't want to introduce the topic no i think i think it's just i wouldn't go into as much detail as i was able to go into yeah like all the details you can write down versus you know i'm not gonna tell them what it's like to recover a human body right not gonna go into that detail right but in a book i can do that right and it brings a lot of perspective to that whole story right but um yeah it's it's a it's an interesting thought because you know there's plenty of people out there with amazing stories and yeah they'll tell parts of it yeah but this is a way to tell the whole story right i i have the same problem tony i i have a uh a daughter and uh she asked me questions about the army she knows i was in the army and jumping out of airplanes and this sort of stuff but i really struggle with like how to share that with her and what to tell her about that she's young enough that i kind of keep it barely vanilla and maybe maybe if she's still interested when she's older i'll tell her some of the more you know some real [ __ ] but you know it it is it's a as a parent i find it difficult to engage with the with my own kid on that kind of level yeah i mean you're not going to go into details right so yeah i think i mean you can hand them a book right i mean yeah when they're old enough well i'm also very hesitant to make her think that it's cool and make it sound really cool like yeah you need to go in because now now women can join the army and become rangers and do all this other crate which still i'm having heart palpitations about uh especially when i think of my daughter um but i'm like hesitant to make it sound too cool that she's gonna think this is something i should go do you know so i like pull the brakes though yeah exactly um and you know that's why i put some of the stuff i put in my book you know i go into things that suck yeah like it's not all glorious right there's this isn't you're not going in for the the video game battle right this is war like this is real war and so that's that was a huge motivator um not to discourage them but to to give them the full story right actually make an educated decision right an informed decision yeah um let's get a couple other questions andrew thank you for he retracted it but thank you andrew thank you again another retracted ppe is he retracted thank you uh ppa izzy uh what's the difference between an 82nd airborne and 75th ranger airfield siege uh airfield seizure asking for a friend um i have no idea i've never been in 82nd so i i would say that the the ranger regiment i don't even know if they do them anymore to be honest but when we did them it was we were kind of transitioning away from them so we were focused more on the urban combat but this was our you know our so at the time it was still technically one of our specialties so i think right now the the answer probably is the 80 seconds responsible for airfield seizures is my guess yeah i i i'm not 100 up to date i think they call it like strategic force entry operations or some [ __ ] like that now um i i believe they still train for them but the 82nd the immediate reaction uh force the irf and which under that there's the irb but anyway long story short as like an immediate reaction force the 82nd has kind of made leaps and bounds they responded to the uh iranians attacking the embassy in baghdad last year they responded to the riots in washington dc didn't get past uh the national capital region thankfully and then they just got spun up to go um stand by for afghanistan yesterday so like any second has come a long way as well so i i mean i'm not gonna i'm not gonna throw shade on those guys they're they're staying busy yeah i i think you're you're basically what it sounds like is they're transitioning into what ranger battalion was you know kind of when we were in right right um obviously it's it's all evolved since then but that sounds very similar to what we did so for the people who might not be aware when we talk about airfield seizure the idea the rangers used to be sort of the the premier shock troops i guess or what uh where if we were going to make entry into a country the rangers would do a low altitude parachute you know jump onto it and seize the airfield so that the military could bring in their aircraft like it's like a beach head yeah it's like a beach head that the marines would do uh only uh yeah fairfield um jerry jay thank you that's uh that's why i do recommend for a new guy try rock climbing if you want to go to special forces i was fine in afghanistan okay okay killer yeah uh i'm sure it wouldn't hurt uh andrew denvar i was reading about the vietnam veterinary core in world war ii it was interesting a lot of what they were doing was answer chris like what is that animal over there a yeah long pause can we eat it thank you andrew um so so during during uh when you guys were were hungry and thirsty were you guys tempted to did you see local game that you were tempted to or that you did like forage yeah so yeah when we were at the jdam site uh there were a few homes that had cows and we were very close to having bacon and a steak sorry not bacon we're gonna have a steak yeah we don't have we don't have cow bacon but um you know we we definitely talked about it and we were close but again remember the time the time this time in the war hearts and minds right so right they were very hesitant they said we're getting resupplied soon just you guys will be fine yeah hold on a second you you just uh nuked the hearts and minds off the face of the planet with three j dams um i i don't think i i we're a little past that at this point i i somehow skipped a couple of questions leon jones 12 thank you very much uh were there thoughts early on by people that uh were there that the official story wasn't exactly true or whether uh some seems like nobody wants to be the guy talk about a mission they weren't on yeah i mean i i don't i really don't have an answer other than you know the story that we know is all we really we have some evidence for other things but you know i don't know i really don't we've we've tried to investigate some of the stuff and you just come up dead end after dead end so you know marcus was there yeah um yeah i trust the guy yeah i don't think he has any reason to to hold on to his story for this long he told us the best he could right in my opinion right uh bpa izzy uh thank you very much message retracted guys must be uh bpa izzy thank you again do you think big army could accomplish a special operations missions we all had to regardless of lack of special operational status i mean i think some stuff but there are certain things that you know you you have to have specialized training for and rangers especially i think we're ideal for this specific recovery because of how fast we had to move not necessarily just getting through the terrain i think all units could have gotten through the terrain eventually but the the the speed we were moving and i don't know that many units could have moved that fast right you know we train a little bit different than most people back in the states and it's not just to meet our eib standards that's actually considered like the lowest you should ever be right if you can't do eib you're going to get kicked out of the range of time um so you know our our standard was much higher than the rest of the army so you know i'm not going to say they couldn't do it but i would say it would be very different right right so concerned yeah uh interferon recon uh thank you uh what would you give and teach units for future missions like yours [Music] um i i would uh basically teach them how to land nav without maps and how to take care of their feet and how much water they need to carry but um it would be a lot of you know physical training to be honest because it was physically it was i mean i did a lot of stuff you know a ranger school i went in the winter i did i was in ramadi but there was nothing like this i mean i've climbed a lot of mountains in my life but with body armor i've never done anything like this 9000 feet with body armor is something else yeah and you actually your feet well it's something we didn't talk about but your feet your foot was actually kind of hamburger by the time you got to the crash site right uh it wasn't my foot it was my my roommates okay sorry about that yeah his foot was completely hamburger like when he when i saw it i was like horrified yeah uh and all he cared about was he didn't get doing the next patrol like he was pissed yeah so he didn't care about his foot tony one last one sorry uh sorry guys uh and jackson thank you very much how different were are seal team six and delta on target uh i think it depends on the type of target but um i would say um where i worked with them was an urban environment i would say that delta force obviously had more training in an urban environment in my opinion um they they they seem to be more senior guys but um i worked with delta in the mountains i mean i worked with uh seal team six in the mountains and those guys moved as well as any others so you know i i think it just depends on the environment sure tony your book is titled leave no man behind it's out now do you have a copy of it to hold up you show folks i do i did and here it is bam where can people find it tony uh it's available anywhere books are sold uh i'm hearing that there's a lot of supply chain issues but barnes and noble amazon uh are all safe bets yeah it's it's out of stock you have out of stock on amazon right now if you get the the physical cop you buy it because it's selling out so well the kindle is not going out of stock no that's where i read it i read it on correct yeah you can get it now walmart actually has copies too so walmart's actually an easy one to get copies and uh there's an audio book also yeah the audiobook is also out yes cool right on so you guys have a lot of options out there i mean this story has never really been told before so i hope that you guys will go and check out tony's book and uh and hear about the rangers who are out there that that you know week and tony now you're you're you're a chiropractor now you went to school uh you have a chiropractic practice you know jack was uh if you want to plug that if you want to make that public on you you're more than welcome to yeah yeah i mean i i'm instruct i'm at structural chiropractic in redmond washington so it's right outside seattle um i i'm there if you need me i i do complimentary consultations all day long so um i if you need help give me a call well you should set up shop just a second battalion i'm sure and i mean all that it's true that wait um and then you do you have a web do you have products you have a website do you sell products that people can go check out uh i sell my book that's about it okay so fair enough my my thing is i want to educate people on health so perfect i don't have anything to sell you i don't have anything to show you um reach out and i'll give you some resources and uh tonybrooks.com doctortonybrooks.com and jackson tony brooks uh dr tonybrook.com and uh jack said that during the bonus segment we fell out ramadi but i thought that the unicorn would be a more interesting story if you're up to it because i think that's a great little slice of life during during this you know this whole thing we get we get into both of them unicorns yeah yeah uh the unicorn that's um well so we'll save that for our bonus section okay okay gotcha yeah so guys uh please remember to like share and subscribe to the channel all that good stuff check out the links down in the description to join our patreon so you can get access to the bonus segments uh there's we're on instagram we there's merch if you check out the link down in the description and next episode is gonna be with wes bryant he was a jtac um also wrote a really good book um about uh setting up strux cell operations in iraq uh to defeat isis so he's got some awesome stories to tell we'll be with him next friday so i hope you guys will join us yeah thanks everybody so check out tony's book leave no man behind uh and also his website drdr uh tony brooks.com and we and if you're a member of our patreon you get access to our bonus segment which we're going to have which is a little bit of wooing okay all right guys so we'll see you next friday thanks for

Channel: The Team House

Views: 610,648

Keywords: The Team House, Jack Murphy, Special Operations, Special forces, Ranger regiment, Marcus Latrell, Operation red wings, Army rangers, Lone survivor, Navy seals, seal team 6

Id: h6wuzm8p16M

Length: 116min 48sec (7008 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021