#173 Jared Hudson - The War Against Evil: A Navy SEAL’s Fight to Save Children in America

Jared Hudson, welcome to the show, man. Hey, thanks for having me, brother.
Man, I can't believe we're just chatting. So we've been connected for like two years.
Yeah, at least two years. I didn't realize it had been that long.

So Eddie Gallagher connected us. I remember him texting me saying that you were a super good dude and that you're going after a lot of these pedophiles and human traffickers.
And, man, that's just a subject that, you know, it just doesn't, it never gets enough attention. And it's some heavy shit, so nobody wants to hear it.
But they need to hear it, and so we're going to crank this out. But former Navy SEAL, former law enforcement running the non-profit running a

tactics company i'll give you a proper introduction here shortly but but and uh man of faith i mean

it just you're just pumping out so much good into the world and and uh one of the one of the few out

there fighting literally the most evil that you can gin up. And that just, God bless you, brother.
Well, thank you, man. I appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here, man.
I love to see what you got going and your growth over the last few years. I mean, this is huge.
I don't think anybody knows it because not a lot of people see it. But from showing up here until now, I mean, it is, you've got a process, bro.
I mean, you've got it worked out. So it's actually a very professional, not just interview, but, you know, build a relationship and then you sit down for the interview.
So very impressed, brother. Not that it means much, you know, but I'm impressed.
That means the world to me. Thank you for saying that.
Yeah, no worries. I do want to give you something before we start.

You've already given me a lot of gifts,

but this is from the team at Covenant Rescue Group.

Oh, cool.

Kind of like at Christmas when we give a gift to somebody

and I don't know what it is

because my wife got it and wrapped it.

This is from the guys on the team.

They said, make sure Sean gets this.

Dude.

There you go, Crush Evil hat. This is awesome.
Thank you. Oh, yeah.
The black on black T-shirt. That's a buddy of mine, Stuart Hartley, came up with that one.
He said, you got to do black on black. Awesome.
Then. Patch.
Patch. Oh, yeah.
So we partnered. That's a Wooks knife.
We partnered with them, and they made us some cool stuff, some tomahawks and stuff. But that's actually a really good skinning knife.
I didn't use mine for something. That is cool, man.
Thank you. Wooks? Wooks, yeah.
You can look them up there. I didn't know about them.
They make chassis for guns and stuff. I got a few of their chassis for some rifles, but that wood on that handle, it's like Italian wood or something.
I can't remember. It says it on the box, but they're, hey, Winkler, I think that's how I mean it.
Winkler up in Boone, North Carolina, you know, does all the night for us. They sell them in their shop.
That might've been how I got connected to them. No kidding.
But yeah, they sell Wook stuff in their shop. Thank you, man.
Yeah, man. Patch will go awesome in the studio.
And yeah, I appreciate it. No worries.
Well, here's what I want to do. I want to do life story with you starting a childhood, go through your SEAL career, go through some of your law enforcement stuff but the majority of the interview the meat of it i really want to concentrate on the on the sex trafficking and how you're combating that and going after pedophiles and finding some commonalities uh of the of the what do you call them the assailants yeah or you know just uh therator, the- The pedophile.
Yeah, the pedophile, whatever you want to say. You don't call them MAPshed? No, MAPshed, yeah, yeah.
MAPshed people or whatever, yeah, no. That's good.
They'll keep that on the West Coast. Keep it on the West Coast and in Europe.
That's what they're pushing for in Europe. Are they really? That's what I heard.
I don't know how true it is. Nice, nice.
But yeah, I just want to re... We did a big podcast on this before.
It went crazy. But it's always...
I want to re-educate people, especially parents, on what they can do. And kids and all of that.
But we'll get there towards the tail end of the interview. So everybody gets an introduction.
So here we go. Jared Hudson, as a U.S.
Navy SEAL, you served as a SEAL operator with Naval Special Warfare. You were deployed multiple times to a variety of combat zones in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Full Eagle and other critical missions.
What is Operation Full Eagle? I think that's a great question. I think it was a big JSET program we did in Korea.
And then at the time, if I'm remembering right, now somebody could probably look it up and tell me I'm wrong, but at the time, I want to say Obama was there and they shot those missiles into the Yellow Sea and then we dove with the Rock Seals to get those missiles. I think that's what that is.
It was a J-Set that turned in and I don't know what nuclear weapons look like, but I mean, I see this thing that the Rock Seals found it and we're diving in the Yellow Sea. This thing, that looks like a nuclear weapon.
It wasn't, it was just a big missile. It's cool, man.
It was just weird, you know. Together with your wife and, excuse me, together with your wife and a shared passion for helping children who are victims of human trafficking worldwide, you've founded the Covenant Rescue Group, a 501c3 organization.
You are the CEO of your business, The Shooting Institute, where you have personally trained local law enforcement, military personnel, and civilians in self-defense. You are currently a law enforcement officer as a Blount County, Alabama Sheriff's Deputy, and as a Federal Task Force Officer with HSI.
What is a Federal Task Force Officer? Yeah, so I'm with Blount County Sheriff's Office in Alabama. So I'm a post, what's called a post-certified law enforcement officer.
And if the agency you work for is willing to partner with the feds in that way, this is the way the feds can take you through. For me, it was Title 19 law, I believe, if I remember right.
I do two weeks of classes for that federal law, and then you are deputized under Homeland Security, Marshal Service, Secret Service, ATF, FBI, whatever it is. In my case, it's Homeland Security to work child exploitation as a federal agent.
So that's a federal task force officer. I'm not a full board GS whatever federal agent.
I'm a post-certified state agent who is sworn under the federal service to work, in my case, child exploitation. You also serve as a reserve deputy for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office supporting special operations units and working as an investigator for the Johnson County Prosecutor's Office.
You're an Alabama Peace Officer Standard Training Commission certified law enforcement agent and certified National Wildlife Control Operator Administration Level 1, 2, and 3 Sharpshooter, in addition to holding other advanced law enforcement certifications. And lastly, and I'm sure is probably the most important to you, you are a Christian, a husband, and a proud father of three daughters.
That's exactly right, yeah. Yeah, so with all that, it's kind of like me and you talked about earlier, when you show up to Bud's, you remember it was like, hey, where are you from? Oh, I'm Jared.
Nobody cares. Everybody's yelling at you.
So that's how I feel when we read that.

So thank you for that nice intro. Hopefully my wife hears it and here's how awesome that

makes you sound, right? But no, the most important thing as we go through this interview and as we talk, I hope that people hear about me is when I am a born again believer in the person of Jesus Christ. I am a Christian.
And you've had Christians on this show. You've had guys that might not be Christians, but they at least have faith and believe something.
I mean, the most important thing to me is that because it's eternal. So I will talk heavily about that, but I do wanna preface it with this.
That means that I believe Jesus is God reincarnate. He's the son of God, as John chapter one says, in the beginning was the word, the word was God, the word was with God.
Everything was made through him and by him. And without him, anything that we see that was made, it wasn't even made.
Everything is through him. And he was the light and life of men, and the light shone in the darkness, the darkness couldn't overcome it.
That's the first five verses in John chapter one. But verse 14, the word became flesh and dwelt among men.
That's what I believe. I believe Jesus is God reincarnate.
And he came to this world, lived a perfect life, died on the cross and rose again on the third day for my sins, your sins, and it's through him we're set free. We have eternity with God.
That is the most important thing because it's eternal. I'm not always going to be a husband, a father, a seal, a law enforcement officer, whatever it is.
Sean's not always going to be doing these great interviews with interesting people. I would be at the bottom of that interesting list, but you're not always going to be doing this, but how you transact with Christ in this life is eternal.
So that's the first thing. The second thing, I'm a husband and a father.
Everything else set aside, God has given me my wife and my kids to guide, to direct, to teach, to protect, to provide for. And if I can't do that, then I can't even do all these other things.
And it's a scriptural principle. It says, be faithful in the little things.
This is the most important thing, but it's also something little because if I can't be faithful with the wife and the kids that God has bestowed upon me, then I can't be faithful with my business or with a nonprofit or with anything else. So those are the two most important things about me aside from all that other stuff that is interesting, but it's not important.
And I encourage your listeners, heck, even you, make sure that we look at that every day. I don't always do it perfect.
I mess up all the time. Look at that every day.
What is the most important thing? Who I am in the person of Jesus Christ and that woman and those girls that I'm called to raise right now. Those are the most important things in my life.
Thank you for saying that. Yeah.
A lot of people need to take note. You had mentioned born-again believer, Christian.
What does that mean? That's a good question. Andy Stump asked me recently, so what do you mean you mean by evangelical Christian? Born again believer basically just means what I just said, you believe that about Jesus.
And Nicodemus actually says to Jesus, he says, well, how can a man be born again? Is he gonna go back into his mother's womb? And Jesus says, no, that's not it. We were born into sin because we're from the line of Adam.
If you read scripture, you understand that Adam and Eve sinned in the beginning. Eve was deceived.
Adam disobeyed. Without going too much into the theology or the story, that's what we see.
Adam disobeyed. When God said, what have you done? Right? God comes, Adam and Eve, looks at Adam, says, what have you done? He said, the woman you gave me calls me to eat of this fruit or gave me this fruit and said, eat.
Everybody will say that he's blaming the woman. He's not.
He looks at God and he says, God, the woman you gave me, he blamed God. And that is what our nature is because we come from Adam.
We blame God for our shortfallings, for our failure, for our sin. That's what we're born into.
But through the person of Jesus Christ, who came and lived that perfect life, I talked about it in John chapter one, died on the cross and rose again. It's through his blood that we can be rebirthed into new life, no longer a life of sin, but a life of perfection and animosity or indifference towards sin, but only in the person of Jesus.
Why? Because he obeyed God to the very end. And we see that at the end where he says, Lord, I know everything is possible for you.
He really says, Father, right? Abba. I know everything is possible for you, but let this cup pass from me, please.
He did not want to go through the cross. However, not my will, your will be done.
That's what Jesus says before he goes to the cross. You can see that in like the movie, The Passion of the Christ, him having that conversation with God.
It's in all the gospels. Not my will, but your will be done.
And the scripture tells us he was obedient to the point of death. And we see that embodied in Job 13, 15, though he slay me, I will trust him.
That's what Job says. Even if he kills me, I'll trust him.
And that's what we see in Jesus. So the born again believer is, I live in sin and I die in sin.
But in the person of Jesus Christ, I am born into a new life. I'm born into a sinless life.
It doesn't mean I'm gonna be perfect even though I strive to be. I still sin.
I still ask for forgiveness and repentance, but I am now dead to sin and alive in Christ because I've been born in the new life under the person of Jesus. And that's what being a born-again Christian means based on the scriptures.
So were you always a Christian? Yeah. So when I was a kid- Because I always thought born-again Christian meant you kind of went haywire for a little bit and then came back.
Well, and that would be—that is true. We are haywire, right? I mean, if you're born into sin, you're born into complete chaos and utter destruction because the Scriptures say, none is righteous, no, not one, right?

None of us are righteous.

David talks about it in the Psalms.

All seek after their own gain, but they don't desire God.

God tells Cain in Genesis chapter four, I believe,

I don't mean to get into all this theology with you or whatever,

but Genesis chapter four, he says,

don't you know that if you do what is right,

it'll be well with you? Because Cain is sad because his sacrifice wasn't accepted before God. And God says, why do you look down? God's talking to Cain like a granddaddy, right? Like our granddad would talk to us.
He says, don't you know if you do what is right, it'll be well with you. But if you don't, sin is lying in wait at your door and its desire is for you.
It actually describes sin like a crouching lion hiding in the bushes, ready to reach out and grab you. But you should rule over it.
He had the ability to rule over it at that time because they were still with God. Does that make sense? God gives the ability, and that faith in God gives the ability to rule over it.
And that's interesting for us to see

is that sin's desire is for us, well, guess what?

We're born into it, so it's gonna catch us,

just like it did Adam.

So it doesn't matter how old you are,

you were born into sin.

And in order to be out of sin,

you have to accept the person of Jesus Christ.

Now, one caveat to that is people will say,

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Well, that's Abraham was a great example. In Genesis, I think, chapter 24, it says, Abraham had faith in God and it was accounted to him as righteousness.
So those people, even those people alive now who might not have heard Jesus's name,

God has given enough of himself to them that they can have faith in God that he will deliver them from their sinful, physical nature, what we see here on earth, right? What we see going on all around us, the terrible world that we live in that is destruction, right? How can we be delivered from this into the good things that we see, right? The creation that's in animosity toward us because we're the ones who subjected it to sin, right? Paul talks about that in the New Testament. So how can we be one with God? We look to God and have faith that he's gonna work it out in us, whether we know Jesus or not, and that was Abraham.
He had faith in what God was going to do, and then for us, now we've heard the name of Jesus, and we look back, and we have faith on what God has already done in the person of Jesus Christ. So really, it's not that difficult.
I mean, it really is pretty straightforward and easy. God created a world that could choose him or deny him.
That's it. It's that simple because that's what he decided.
Is that what, I think that's what, I think that's the only free will we actually have. To accept or deny God.
Yeah. I mean, that's, yeah.
We're created in his image. Am I what? You believe that too? Yeah.
Yeah. Because we're created in his image.
We can accept what he has or we can rebel against him. He talks about it all the time.
The book of Isaiah is full of that with Israel and his people rebelling against what he did. I think Isaiah chapter 49, he calls them a stiff-necked people whose necks were like steel rods of sinew and whose heads were heads of brass.
He was basically saying, you're a hard-headed and stiff-necked. You will not do what I tell you to do.
But he created us with his spirit, which gave us the ability to choose right or wrong, just like he has. He just always chooses right, and we always choose wrong.
Being born again is having faith in him, ultimately for us in the person of Jesus Christ, so that we can now become a new creature, as Paul says in the New Testament, and live a life hopefully free of sin, although that's not going to be the case, but we can strive for that. That's why he says, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.
I believe it's, is it Galatians that says that? I can't remember. So I say all that to say, I was six years old when I got saved.
My parents told me, I remember going into the room and saying, mom and dad, I believe that I need to accept Jesus in my life. They walked me through it.
My daughters, two of my oldest daughters at six, they came to me and they wanna be saved or they wanna go through the process. And so I spent three or four days going through the scriptures with them, talking about it so they understand who you are as a sinful person.
And then there's those people who are in their 30s or 40s or 50s or 80s. I think my great-granddaddy, I remember right, according to my dad, my great-granddaddy asked Jesus into his heart on his deathbed.
He lived a life apart from God and sin, but he accepted Jesus in his death. I think Charles Darwin did, as a matter of fact.
The guy that did the, you know, Charles Darwin, the scientist that, you know, he said where we came from monkeys. And I believe, I could be wrong, but you look it up.
I believe he accepted Christ on his deathbed. No kidding.
Yeah, but anyway, it doesn't matter at what point in your life you're in. You're born in sin.
You're going to die in sin. And God has given you the opportunity to be one with him and live life eternally.
And that's what I believe. That's what a born-again Christian is.
Hopefully, I haven't done a disservice with what I just said. Makes sense.
Yeah. People smarter than me could probably say it better, but that's what believe well thank you for for sharing that yeah so a couple more things to crank out here before we get to childhood so i got a patreon account there are top supporters they've been with us since the beginning they're the reason i get to sit here and do this and you get to be here as well and so one of the things i do is i I offer them the opportunity to ask each and just about every guest a question.
And so this is from Blaze. In relation to Covenant Rescue Group, what have been some of the reactions by individuals when they realize they are being rescued? Oh, on the rescue side.
So I'll give you a two-part answer to that. The first thing is most of the time on a rescue, and it's primarily women in sex trafficking, which is primarily what we work.
So not all women. They will say, uh, I'm not being trafficked.
I'm not a victim. They're like, there's not, they are doing what they want to do.
Uh, in some of them, that might be the case. I found, I heard an interesting, interesting statistic from a lady that we work with, with a well house who is a, uh, a forensic interviewer who said seven contacts, it takes seven contacts before a woman will be able to say, hey, yeah, I need help.
I'm being trafficked or I've gone through this process, right? So that's interesting to see too. We might be contact number one, we might be contact number five.
But that would be the first thing. The second thing is if once you see somebody who is like, yes, I need help, whether a grownup or a child, children always need help.
They're always exploited. We'll talk a little bit about that later.
The response is, it's like unbelievable relief because up to this point, they've had no way out, but now it's almost like they see a light or they see a way out. Does that make sense? And that's the only way I can describe it because I've never been in it.
My wife and my girls have never been in it. I've only seen it from the outside looking in.
I don't know what these people are going through in their life, but you can see that sense of relief of like, you can actually do this for me. And when you see that and pull them out of it, that would be the best way to describe it is just unbelievable relief.
You know, you had mentioned that a lot of these, a lot of women don't think they're being trafficked at first. And this is something that I always kind of play out in my head.
And because I've been loosely following the subject for probably over 10 years now. And first exposure to this was actually from a tattoo shop.
I got a lot of ink done at Miami Tattoo Company down at South Beach. Became pretty decent friends with the previous owner of that.
Her name's Amar Sierra. And she had contacted me about a friend that she had that was being trafficked.
And I don't know where I'm going with this was that friend didn't want to be helped. Yeah.
And I said, man, you know, I'm sorry, but I'm not a law enforcement officer. I definitely have the ability to, you know, do what you want me to do.
But if this person doesn't want to be saved,

then there really isn't anything I can do.

There's nothing you can do. And so what I want to, kind of where I'm going with this is this,

I know some people, it's kidnapped and all this stuff,

but are some of these women more voluntarily entering into the trafficking space? So the easiest way to look at it, we've done, I probably sat in front of an interview, maybe not 2,500, maybe not that many, but in the thousands of women, like 1,500 to maybe 2,000, maybe not even that much, but quite a few women. So'm basing this off of just strictly my interviews, and I'm not a forensic interviewer like some of these other people are that would be more educated on this than I would, but sitting in front of them from Haiti to Zambia to South Sudan to the United States of America, pick a state.
I've sat in front of them and interviewed these women, and I get the same common thing across the board for my interviews every single time I talk to them. They're almost offended that you would imply that they need help out of what they're doing.
Now, I've been told by ladies here in the Southeast, they're like, I have one lady tell me, honey, where do you think I'm going to go and make $1,500 a day? She makes $1,500 in the evening doing what she's doing. So there is that aspect of it.
Now, once you interview a girl, once you get a girl that wants to get out or a guy that wants to get out and they go through the process and you take a forensic interviewer to go down through it, one thing that will also say we've seen every single time is that woman who might be 25 or 30 or 35 doing this right now, she was victimized when she was 4, 5, 6, 15, 16. I had one lady tell me recently, her kids are in the room with us.
She goes, I mean, ever since I was a little girl, I remember sitting in the room and watching my mom do this. Her mom was a prostitute.
And so she grew up in it. And so she started doing this when she was 15 or 16 and saw she could sell herself.
And something what we don't realize in our culture, like a lot of people love Reba McIntyre, right? No, not talk trash to Reba McIntyre, but you heard the song Fancy, Don't Let Me Down. That's exactly what she's singing about.
That is what human trafficking is. It's a woman who's selling herself to the highest bidder, to whoever's going to pay the most for, to elevate herself in life.
Sometimes it's out of poverty, right? Sometimes out of poverty they're doing it. Sometimes it's out of this is all I'm worth.
It's a scriptural principle. Going back to scripture, Proverbs says that a man of understanding is able to draw out the thoughts and the things that are inside each person, which is deep water.
So what it's talking about is that understanding counselor. So some of these forensic interviewers can draw this out.
You don't just get that at the first initial, hey, you need help, I'm gonna rescue you. You generally don't get that.
I've never gotten that. So is this similar to, would this be similar to trying to help a heroin addict that doesn't want to get clean? And a lot of them are heroin addicts.
A lot of them are, it's the drug community is tied closely to the prostitution community, which is tied closely to human trafficking.

So one thing I will say is every drug user is not a prostitute.

Every prostitute is not a human trafficking victim.

That's where it's going to be my next question.

However, I would say that every prostitute that I've met, at least that I've met, is a drug user, right? That are selling themselves, actually selling themselves like, I mean, they'll get high as kytofentanil or heroin or whatever it is they do. Part of it is so they can do what they do.
But every prostitute I've met has been a drug user, but not every drug user, prostitute, not every prostitute is a human trafficking victim.

The reason we focus on the kid piece, what we do, the reason I focus on child exploitation is by the letter of the law, right? Both federal and state laws in every state in the nation with the exception of two, maybe, maybe Washington and California. every state if it's a child that's being impacted somebody under whatever the age

in that state is 16 18, whatever the state law age is, that is a human trafficking victim because they're a child. They don't have the ability to say no or push away.
Does that make sense? It does. When they're of age, they're not always human trafficking victims.
And I will also say the letter of the law doesn't always define human trafficking victims very well. But we don't always find human trafficking in prostitution, although it's closely tied to it.
We do always find human trafficking in child exploitation, which is why we focus on children. Another question.
So what would distinguish the difference between just a regular prostitute and a prostitute that's being trafficked?

Yeah.

Some people would say that, again, you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, which I don't agree with this, but you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, that that woman is trafficked in some shape, form, or fashion, whether it's poverty, whether it happened earlier in her life, and this is what led her to where she is now.

There's still an active choice for her to leave or continue. We'll just use the state law.
If somebody is actively selling her, so somebody working as a pimp, maybe a husband, a boyfriend, if they're actively selling under most state laws or under federal law, that you're now looking at a true human trafficking victim. This lady is not receiving money for her services, and it's no longer misdemeanor prostitution crime.
You've got somebody who is holding her and selling her maybe against her will. She'll say it's not against her will, but selling against her will, and then they receive money for it, and she doesn't necessarily get paid.
So that would be a good example of what we see here stateside and overseas. But most of the time, it's children that are stuck in that spot.
It's kids who are in that. It's not grownups as much.
And I think it's our digital world that's allowed for that. You don't see as many.
We still see them, but you don't see as many. They'll call them Johns or whatever, pimps.
It doesn't matter. You call them whatever you want.
A lot of it's symbolism without substance. Most women will use digital, you know, like the phones, the apps, because it kind of protects them.
They'll receive money before somebody shows up. I mean, they're very, and heck, you got some chicks, they'll make $1,000, $1,500 a night just getting dudes to send them $10 on Cash App or something for gas money.
And then they'll never show up. Say, send me 10 more and I'll show up.
You get these freaking clowns out there that just keep sending them money. Well, they'll make a bunch of money a night just basically scamming dudes, which I think is hilarious.
But that is where you see trafficking, and if there's somebody strong-arming them and selling them, that would be human trafficking. It's rare.
I got another question. Sorry, I wanted to save this to the end, but the questions are just coming.
You do. I don't want to forget them.
But many girls in the porn industry are considered to be trafficked? Because it's my understanding that it's essentially the exact same thing as prostitution. There just happens to be a legal document that says, yes,

you're going to give us, you're going to sign this release form and have us film this. And it is to my understanding that if there is a contract signed for filming, then it's no longer considered prostitution.
Bro, you're hitting the nail on the head. Now, prostitution as we see it now, I believe is still a federal crime, but it's just not prosecuted, right? But yeah, they're working on behalf of somebody.
That would be a form of human trafficking. And most of those women are in a position where they don't want to do it.
OnlyFans would be the great example of kind of where it's gone to. People wouldn't look at OnlyFans women and say that they're trafficked.
A lot of them are doing it themselves, right? A lot of them build their accounts. They'll sell pictures of their feet or they'll do nude pictures or whatever it is on OnlyFans.
And a lot of them will say, well, that's not pornography. Well, it is.
It's pornography. And they'll say, well, I'm not a prostitute.
Well, you are. You're just selling pictures of yourself as opposed to selling yourself physically.

But we wouldn't look at them and say

they're being trafficked, right?

Because it's not against their will,

even though they might have a husband

that makes them do it.

There's all kinds of weird situations out there.

That's the same way with the prostitution industry.

It's just women are more willing

to physically engage and get paid for it than the women who just want to sell pictures. There's literally no difference in it.
Yeah, you know, I wasn't even talking about the pictures. I mean, I- Yeah, you're talking about actual act.
Oh, yeah. I've been, because I've been wanting to dive into, sounds weird.
I've been wanting to dive into the porn industry and expose some of the shit that's going on within there.

And one of the things that I had just come across is I found this former porn star who's now a pastor. And I've been kind of looking at his content a little bit.
And he was talking about the contracts that these young girls sign. and it basically says, we're going to do anything we want to you.
You're going to sign here. And then they get in the middle of the act and all this just disgusting shit starts happening to these girls.
And they're like, sorry, you signed the contract. You see that in Hollywood with movies.
I mean, you see that with some of the movies in the 70s. I think Caligula was one of them where they said some of that happened.
Look at Blue Lagoon when the girl was 15. Was it Brooke Shields? That was a whole big ordeal.
Those folks had to testify before Congress. So it's been going on like that for a long time.
So yes, that is a form of trafficking. Legally by laws, is it a form of trafficking? No, probably not.
It's not something I can go out and make an arrest and prosecute somebody on as a law enforcement officer, as a prosecutor, right? Nobody can go get them on that. But yes, that's a form of trafficking.
So the biggest thing is, is we don't actually know what trafficking is. We have what we think.
It's the movie Taken, you know, girls being taken against their will. But sometimes they willfully do something, they make a foolish decision or whatever, and then they're stuck in it.
And I've seen what you just mentioned more often than any of them overseas, wherever they might give their passport up, right? Hey, yeah, hold my passport. And that's kind of how they keep them at this brothel or whatever.
And before they know it, they're being soft traffic they went there on their own accord they say i'll do this because i can make some money but now they can't get their passport back or not and i mean some of the shit's just you know downtown miami yeah oh yeah dude and it's it's just hey show up to our condo and oh bro we get i mean i see news i've seen newspaper ads we can bring it up and right here in nashville I mean We can go just down the road in Nashville. Anywhere you go, there's not a city.
Everybody's like, oh. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, when you have, have you dealt with this at all by chance? Yeah.
I mean, because I'm not going to lie, I got fucking mixed feelings about it. I mean, I think it's fucked up.
You know what I mean? But at the same time, it's like, well, I mean, pornography is an industry. It's not like that you just got, it's not like you just fell for this.
I mean, you've obviously seen porn and obviously sought out a way to make money selling yourself on camera. That's right.
And so is it trafficking?

No. Are they, you know what I mean? I mean, I fucking hate to say it, but part of me is like, you got yourself into this mess.
Like you fucking got yourself into this mess. You've seen porn.
You've seen what they do. Why are you acting surprised now? There's a lot, then there's a lot.
Some of this shit just has to be, I think, like, sorry, you made a fucked up decision and now you're going to have to live with these consequences. And there's a lot of that, right? There's a lot of, because there is no criminal nexus to really do anything.
There might be a misdemeanor prostitution charge. I think Texas recently made it a felony to pay for sex, which is crazy to me.
Is it morally wrong? Yes. Is it criminally wrong on the books? Yeah, most of it's a misdemeanor if it's this level of prostitution or even pornography to some extent, I do believe has a federal nexus.
But all of that being said, it's really a moral issue. I don't think it's anything that you can go after criminally.
Now, here's the caveat to that. Most of these women that find themselves in that position, or even a lot of the men that find themselves in that position, were sexually targeted or abused as a child or at a younger age.
So there might be a level of victimhood there where they're at this point where this is what they do. I don't know because I've never been in that world to the point that my mind has been shifted to think that this is all I'm worth, right? But there is that aspect of it.
And for us, what we try to go after, going all the way back to what I was saying a little bit ago, a person of understanding draws out the real issues at hand. When it comes to prostitution, when it comes to pornography, when it comes to any of these things, the only thing that we can do is give a safe, on the rescue side, like he was talking about, the guy who asked the question, to give a safe environment for the advocates of organizations that these are women, generally speaking, who are people of understanding.
They might have been in that position. We create a safe environment for advocates to go in and do this, sit down and talk and interview these ladies to try to get them out of this without any law enforcement interference.
Because as soon as we say, yeah, this is human trafficking, we want to make a case. Well, it's our constitution that says that the accused has the right to stand before the accuser and a jury of their peers.
Well, what do you think most of these women want to do if they truly are a victim? They don't want to sit in front of their accused. And here's the thing.

You got people saying, well, then they shouldn't have to.

Well, yeah, well, then we're going to do away with the U.S. Constitution.

It was put in place for a reason.

So there is the bureaucracy of the U.S. Constitution.

That is a good thing.

I do believe that the Bill of Rights is a good thing, and it protects us tremendously.

But oftentimes, when we call something that, kind of like you said, is it human trafficking or is it not? Maybe, maybe not, but this woman doesn't want to testify. Perfect.
We can't do anything criminally with it. And it's not on the law enforcement agency to be an advocate on this victim's behalf if she is a victim.
And so that's where the NGOs get involved. The problem with the NGOs, they advocate on this victim's behalf, but you've got to get that trafficker.
Well, I can't because I can't get your lady to testify. So that's kind of the, that's the dynamic you run into.
So again, what we focus on with law enforcement agencies and with our law enforcement credentials, with the guys in our group, wherever they're sworn out of. We build cases specifically targeting individuals who are going after kids because we can get those felony arrests.
We don't have to have anybody testify on that because we're the ones who are testifying on it. We're the ones who set up the operation.
We're the ones who provided the training to the law enforcement officers or the law enforcement agency that set up the operation that made these arrests. So we do decoy-based operations to catch these individuals that are targeting kids.
And guess what? When we rip their phones, when we, all that stuff that you talk to, was it Ryan McDonald? Ryan Montgomery. Montgomery, I said McDonald.
Ryan Montgomery about, they rip his phones and find all this data. Well, that's how the law enforcement agency now has a probable cause search warrant or a subpoena to rip this person's phone.
And now they get all of this information of where they're abusing kids. The youngest I've seen a guy having sex with his own 18-month-old daughter.
He showed up for a 14-year-old girl. We arrested him based on that.
We ripped his phone and found out this other thing over here that nobody else knew about. That was a couple of years ago.
And he got, I think the FBI went forward with him and charged him federal. No, it might've been Homeland that went forward with him and charged him federally.
He got state and federal charges. So I say that to say, that's why we focus on that is because sometimes this problem already exists over here and it's going to take counselors and the person of Jesus Christ to fix this issue.
I don't think we can fix it with legislation. But with the kids, we have legislation in place, and we can target the individuals who are targeting others.
Our goal is to get predators because that's what these guys are doing. They're preying upon all of these people who are weaker than them, and in particular women who might be in a bad situation.
Yeah. Well, thank you for clarifying all that stuff.
We're going to dive in a lot deeper a little later on. But for now, I want to dig into your life story.
So let's just start right at the very beginning. Where did you grow up? I grew up in—I was actually born in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Lived there for a little while. My dad's side of the family was there, but then grew up in Jefferson County, Alabama.
North Jefferson is the area. Normal kid, like a middle-class family.
Granddaddy had a farm. We lived kind of in like a little neighborhood.
So a little bit of country kids slash suburban, you know, played football and, uh, baseball for a little bit. I didn't play baseball in high school.
Uh, did track some, uh, wrestled, did all the, you know, all that, uh, all that stuff growing up, hunted and fished and, uh, went to church. I mean, that's what we did.
And, uh. How many brothers and sisters? Two brothers and a sister.
We're all relatively close in age. And I think my youngest brother and sister, they were in the ninth grade when I was in the twelfth grade.
So what was that, four years? They're four years younger than me. Are you the oldest? I'm the oldest.
I'm the oldest of the four kids. And then one of my brothers is an engineer.
My other brother is a master welder, and now he's on the sales side. So he does a lot with welding and gas.
And they're both in the business world. and then my sister she actually recently started working for us we hired her as our office manager

which was pretty cool to be able to do and she came on board and started running things in the

office running schedules recently started working for us. We hired her as our office manager, which was pretty cool to be able to do.
And she came on board and started running things in the office, running scheduling and all that for our team at Covenant Rescue Group. So, but yeah, grew up with him.
Dad is a pastor, an ordained minister. He pastors at Hayden First Baptist Church in Hayden, Alabama.
And, you always being rooted in the faith. 19, became a firefighter and was in paramedic school, or not 19, when I graduated high school, firefighter paramedic school, and at age 19, went on a mission trip with the church and felt called to do something different.
And that was kind of my track into the SEAL teams. Came home talked my dad about it too no kidding yeah how did that happen going online without Express VPN is like not having a passcode on your phone you're just making it insanely easy for anybody who steals your phone to also steal your whole digital life every time you connect to to an unencrypted network, like in a hotel, your online data is not secure and hackers on the same network can try to steal your personal data, like your passwords.
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I went to Africa, and I just, for whatever reason, the Lord laid on my heart. You need change your trajectory do something different and it was the military was kind of in my heart and mind and um what was it what was going on in africa like how did that even just enter your head so we we went over i went with a with a church gardner first baptist church where um where my wife and I go go now in Gardner, Alabama, we went with GFBC to, I can't remember where we were in Africa.
It was close to Angola. And we're putting wells in, right? Doing wells.
And I remember saying, we put a well in one village. If I'm just giving you a very specific thing that kind of triggered that in me, putting a well in one village.
Here I am, an 18-year-old

kid, 19 maybe at the time, just turned 19. And this guy comes over from another village, and he's pissed that we put a well in this village, and he starts beating this old woman.
So here I am, just some freaking 19-year-old kid from Mount Olive, Alabama, Garden of Alabama and I go over and you know grab it hey you're not gonna start and then

all the man it spun up this big thing. Hey, we're not here to do that.
You can't do that. And it kind of pissed me off.
And I'm saying, well, he's just beating this old lady with like this stick, this like, almost like the things you hit the horses with, you know, like a, not a whip, but, you know, a horse stick. He's hitting her and beating her, but he's mad because we put a well in her village right here, and he wanted it in his.
So that being said, that kind of challenge, I want to do something where I can actually do something about this if I see it. And I remember thinking that.
And so I talked to my dad, and we went to the recruiters at the time. Bush had just started those contracts.
This was like the 04, 05 timeframe when those contracts came into place. So graduated high school, of course, this would have been 05.
And I looked at them all. SEAL was, you know, all special operations program.
My dad said, hey, if you're going to do something military special, but do something special. He said, you need to do special operations if you got the option to do it.
Don't go just to go to the military. Do something special.
Remember in Buzz, they had that thing, you know, be somebody special. You remember that on the old grinder? Yeah.
It was funny that dad, he did say that. He said, do something special.
And SEAL was the hardest contract. Out of all of them, he had the SEAL contract.
I think Air Force PJ and Combat Control was the second hardest. They had an X-ray contract.
I contract i think was the army green beret and they had something for rasp or some some whatever the ranger contract was and the marine was just uh go marine infantry and then they had just started spinning up marsoc for the raiders um there was kind of a process there but i don't think it was a contract so i said all right god i'll do whatever you want me to do and i to do. And I'll just take the hardest one.
If I pass it, that's where I'll go. So I took the

ASVAB, the run, the swim, the pull-ups, all the stuff for the SEAL contract and passed it, got the contract. I said, well, this is where God wants me to go.
And, you know, marched down that road to be a Navy SEAL. Right on.
Did you have any family in the military? No, so I had an uncle that was in the Army,

and my granddaddy's, my great-granddaddy, and my granddaddy, my dad's dad served in the Korean War. My great-granddaddy, my mom's granddaddy was World War II.
He was in the Army, went in on D-Day, and his brother was a Marine. I think he was in Iwo Jima in Guadalcanal, if I remember right, from what they said.
So I had that, but it was kind of distant. I remember hearing some of the stories.
And then I had an uncle who was in the army in the 90s in Bosnia time frame. I think he deployed to Bosnia, but that's it.
I mean, we weren't, I had another uncle that was a Marine, but we weren't really a military family. It was just kind of hodgepodge hit or miss.
But I went to the military and did the SEAL thing just at, I hate to say happenstance, just the route that God directed me, but just kind of went through that door. What'd you think of Bud's? Dude, it was, I actually wrote a small small book big surprise right team guy writes a book but it's only 40 pages so i got a bunch of buddies make fun of call it a pamphlet that's called the pamphlet armor of god through the eyes of a seal um and and i and i write about it in there um and it's kind of interesting when you're going through stuff and thinking and writing your thoughts on paper, which I haven't historically done.
I'm a terrible writer. But it kind of popped out.
I'm like, that was, it wasn't that hard, but it was the hardest thing I ever did. Does that make sense? The physical standard, you know, it wasn't, I mean, I couldn't meet it now, you know, nearly 40 years old.
I old. But at the time, I remember the standard wasn't that hard.

I don't know if you remember that.

But it was the hardest thing I ever did.

And I was thinking, how could that be?

It's because, and this is what I believe,

it's because they make you bad at what you're good at.

They want to see how you respond to your own failure.

And that's the difference in the selection process.

That's what I saw. And that's what I thought about it.
And this is now years out, looking back on it. I was not going to make it through Buzz.
I was like, this is impossible. And 2 Corinthians 12, 9, where God is talking to Paul, He says, my grace is sufficient for you.
My strength is made perfect in your weakness. It's when Paul asked that the thorn in his flesh be removed three times and God says, you're going to keep it.
My grace is sufficient for you. My strength will be made perfect in your weakness.
I was having some issues. I'd failed some runs.
No, not, yeah, yeah. I'd failed some runs.
I shouldn't have failed. Got really good at swimming.
I wasn that great at swimming. And I was like, God, I'm not going to make it on this.
I should be able to, but I'm not going to make it. And he said, hey, don't quit and I'll see you through it.
And he did. His grace was sufficient.
His strength was made perfect in my weakness. And that's...
Was there something in particular? Well, I tore my calf muscle in first phase. And that really...
Oh, really?'s, uh, was there something in particular that, well, I tore my calf muscle in first phase and that, that really, yeah, that, that negatively impacted my runs. I went from, uh, running pretty well, you know, being able to do the four miler and, you know, 25, 26 minutes to where like, when I got to third phase, even at, I'm talking third phase, like we're done, we're ready to go.
Uh, I've got dudes pushing me down the down the beach. I mean, my legs just would not go as fast.
But I tore that calf muscle in Hell Week, and it never was the same. It still is not the same.
What did you find to be the toughest portion? Probably the cold water or shallow water blackout was easier than I thought. You know, you're doing the 50-meter underwater swim.
I did a little shallow water. I think most everybody in our class did right on that one.
But I was talking with Stumpf about that recently, and he was kind of laughing about it, talking through at least what they looked at on the second phase side. But that was hard, but not as hard as you think.
But I would say the cold water across the board, I was not, I'm an Alabama guy, you know, was not prepared for that cold water, those hypothermic conditions. That'll make you, you see that movie, The Hateful Eight, that Tarantino movie, you know? Oh, man.
So this is, it's not a very good Christian example. let's put it that way but he's like man a man in the cold will do anything to stay warm i can't imagine a tarantino film being that's right had this dude out in the snow butt naked you know anyway he's like doing anything to get a blanket you know to warm up and that's that's what you feel you know they're in buzz i mean that's that was probably the the hardest thing for me i hated being cold i still hate being cold yeah what class were you uh so i classed up with 264 uh you probably know you know trump system jared ogden um he did some stuff on the discovery channel yeah i did i've met him yeah he's got a target system yeah the target system yeah i think it's uh triumph systems he's a great dude i still talk with some but he uh he was our OIC.
That's why I say that. So that was 264, and I went through Hell Week with him and then got rolled and then graduated with Class 267.
Okay. Yeah.
Graduated BUDS and SQT with 267. Where'd you wind up going? Still Team 3.
Team 3. Yep, Team 3.
Checked into Team 3 and checked into basically the tail end of that Sauter City deployment.

So my OIF, you know, whatever is not – I mean, it's just checking into the tail end of deployment.

It didn't really do anything.

Went to Germany and for two months with Group 1 as they did the transition through, which was pretty neat,

meeting a lot of the high-level brass, driving them around, working with them, and then went – Oh, I'll bet I'll bet you love that. Yeah.
Dude, I'll be honest with you. It wasn't that bad.
Are you serious? The reason, I will say my experience was different. So if, I don't know if you hear it, because you live here in Tennessee now, but I have a little bit of an accent to most people, right? So a lot of these Master Chiefs and a lot of these- You may not have noticed, but I got a little bit of an accent.
A lot of these master chiefs and stuff, these guys, they like love the country kid, you know? And so I was always treated pretty well. They enjoyed riding with me.
They, you know, taking them to wherever, Stuttgart, to the tent special forces group thing out there and the the SIF, and all that stuff, and so I'm just driving them around, and they just love talking, and talk to them, and I was just this country kid, you know, just talk about anything, talk about Auburn football, Alabama football, you know, and talk about hunting, fishing, and they just, I never had any issues, it wasn't bad, it was just, it was easy, and then went to, met with my platoon chief in Germany. He came through, interviewed us, and he slated me for sniper school.
He told me, he said, you sound like you'll be a better sniper than you will be a comms guy, because I don't want to hear you on the radio. So Benny sent me to sniper school, and that's where, I mean, I was probably the team six months at that time.
No shit. So you got sniper like right away.
Right away. Got sniper school and that's where i mean i was probably the team six months at that time maybe

no shit so you got sniper like right away right away got sniper school and went there and man loves sniper school was the most fun training like it's like what i was made for is because what i grew up doing as a kid um so anyway that was that was that that portion of of of the of team three so when you say oif i I mean, you rotate in Iraq and out of Iraq. Yeah, it sounds cool.
I got OIF like all the 06s get OIF. Does that make sense? Just go there and get a badge and leave.
I'm here. Let's talk about sniper school as a new guy.
Again, it wasn't the Lord. The Lord blessed me tremendously.
It was fun. We did van fights.
I mean, all the Hazen stuff, the new guy stuff. I mean, we would fight and all that, which was fun.
I mean, here I am, this kid from the country. We had a fight club when I was, we'd have a wrestling team, so we all wrestled in the off season on our own.
And we started a fight club. We got in trouble for it, but this is what we did.
Well, now I'm getting to do it and I'm not getting in trouble for it. We're grown men having van fights or fighting in connex boxes or whatever.
And so that was cool. That was fun.
Sniper school was great. I learned so much that I didn't have a clue.
I could shoot, but I didn't have a clue about it. Let me go ahead and tell you.
Even going that, I went to that third test of the 300 Win Mag. You know, you got to do 90% on snaps and movers.
You're shooting an 11 inch moving target, you know, like waist to shoulder, 11 inches wide at 800 meters. They said, we're going to teach you how to read wind and shoot that.
I'm like, where I come from, you don't teach anybody to do that. That's just luck.
Yeah, I remember saying that and thinking it, you know, but going to that school and learning the sniper craft was just a blast, you know, and is in Indiana. The guy I mentioned earlier at some time, I remember I was talking off camera or on camera, Troy D.
Hart, a buddy of mine, I met him in Indiana, going to church there one day, and he showed up on base. It's a regular army base, and we have our little compound there.

And this guy shows up in time and everything.

And he said, here I am, some guy with long hair and sideburns.

And I said, hey, are you the pastor of church?

He goes, no, I'm picking up people to take him to church.

I said, all right, wait, I want to come right away.

And he had been praying for about six months, he said,

that he would meet a seal because he knew seals were on that base. And I happened to the guy he met and then he's been tied close to the community ever since no yeah and that was 2007 i think 2008 so anyway um can you walk us through kind of your pipeline at sniper school yeah so it's changed it's changed now you got pick um pick pictographer pictograph whatever it is so we did that at the strand because it was west coast guy and the east coast guys do whatever in virginia beach um and then you have what's pick uh pictographer or pictograph where you take a camera you know like and you have to you know hold the button so it lets all the light in because you know it's the old school old school picture stuff.
So you have like light up a tag on a car in complete darkness without night vision

or without shining a light on it. And it's basically surveillance-based stuff, right?

That would be the PIC portion and learning how to use that equipment.

Do you mind if I elaborate a little bit?

Yeah, please do.

So PIC is the first course into the sniper pipeline, and it's basically learning how to use cameras, not be detected, no flashes. You should be able to take a picture in, what, 100% darkness, zero visibility, and then they teach you how to kind of compress that in and send it over a communications unit, SATCOM.
Yeah, whatever the communications platform they have at the time. Has this changed now? They have a different comms platform, but that's it.
So, yeah, so basically you get in, observe a target, conduct surveillance, send that surveillance over the net to somewhere else. And I would say that's probably the majority of sniper missions is surveillance.
And so you need to know how to get that data and be able to send it over comms. And then, so after.
So you're better. That's a great description.
It's the only portion of sniper school I actually completed. So you've got PIC and AS, and it's a beneficial portion.
Because like you said, even any surveillance operation, that's what we do a lot of wherever you're at. And that's important because that helps you build targets.
Scout, you go from P into scout. And again, the pipeline has changed now.
I think it's more meshed together. So pick was, was it two or four weeks? It was about a month.
It was about a month. I don't think it was a full month, but it was pretty close.
Somewhere between two and four weeks. And then you go to scout.
Scout was six weeks, if I remember right. And that's stalking.
So the East Coast guys are stalking in the woods. It's the easiest thing in the flipping world.
And the West Coast guys are stalking through La Posta. And I mean, they're like watching, seeing trails where you're dragging your sniper bag behind you.
You see the dust trails kicking up out there in La Posta where you're stalking through. And you stalk up, you set up a hide site, but you still haven't shot a rifle yet.
You're not a sniper. You then set up your camera that you learned all about.
You set your camera, you take a picture of the target. You have to read a certain card they'll hold up, you know, a card, you get the picture, you read the card, you tell it to them.
They're watching your spot. You know, they got the instructor in the field who's within five yards of you or whatever, and they're looking in that area to see if they find you, find your camera, find any of that.
So that's the scout portion. So it's now implementing pick with staying hidden really, really, really well.
You're actually, you got your ghillie suit, all that junk. And that is scout.
And then finally you go to sniper, which is at the time, I want to say it was, it might've been eight weeks. It might not have been, it might've been six or seven weeks, but I think it was two, it was two months was blocked off for that.
So altogether, it was like a four month program. Started in December for me and I think I graduated in April.
And the sniper was great. So you're doing stalks.
You're no longer taking pictures. You're taking shots.
It, it was, it was great. And it was a lot of fun and a lot of good dudes that you're there with.
And you're just, you're just stalking around the woods and in Indiana, taking shots. You're shooting yard lines every day, uh, 300 wind mag.
Uh, so the, the Mark 13, the Mark 11, it was just, it was phenomenal. And then during, it wasn't deer season at the time, but when you go back to do stuff at sniper school, help instruct or whatever, they're doing deer season, you're hunting in Indiana.
I mean, it's just, it's fun. Farthest shot you took at sniper school? Farthest shot in sniper school was a little over 1200 meters.
I want to say it's like 1300 yards plus or minus. That's the furthest shot you take, which was interesting because that's when, I want to say of all people, I think it was Chris, Kyle, and them developed long range target interdiction for the West Coast and the East Coast because the furthest shot we took in sniper school, especially when we got to Afghanistan, it was like a chump shot.
It was like, oh, 1,200 yards, that's great. It's an easy shot compared to some of the shots we're taking.
The furthest person I killed was 2,345 yards. You killed somebody at 2,000, how far? 2,345 yards.
Holy shit. I missed them four times beforehand, but blind squirrel finds a nut every now and again.
So we, so got that. And then some of the guys in the hide site, some of them are still in.
I'll try not to say their names. We'll get there.
Don't go there. We'll get there.
But that was interesting to see. The furthest sniper school shot did not compare to what we were shooting like regularly in Afghanistan or even I think sometimes even in Iraq.
I mean, guys are taking, you know, some 1,500-meter plugs. Damn, we did a lot of sniper stuff in Baghdad.
I don't think anybody took a shot over 50 yards. Well, yeah, especially with a lot of CQB-based stuff, you know, you won't.
Well, these were— You're in sniper hides. Yeah, these are sniper hides.
We just. No, Afghanistan, I think.
I shot one dude from like me to you, and I'd already shot him once. No kidding.
Before from a sniper hide. Yeah, I cleared up on him, and he set up with his AK, and I cleared around this little wall on him.
I shot him in the sniper. You'll get there, too.
Where was that at? That was in a place called. Well, it was close to Kalat would be the big area.
It was pretty far. It was like a day's drive from Kalat, but it would have been close to Kalat.
Okay. Yeah.
Okay. I think it was called Karam Kale maybe.
It doesn't matter. We'll get there.
We'll get to all that, the combat limits. So you get through sniper school.
How did you graduate? Top of class? No, no, definitely not top of the class. A guy named Brian Clayton was at the top of our class.
I think he got the gun. He did great.
I actually did pretty good on the stalks. I stalked one day in just a flannel jacket and a pair of blue jeans.
I stalked all the way up, stalked around the instructor's little thing there and set up. So I did good on the stalks because it's pretty flipping easy.
I mean, if you can stalk up on a deer with a bow in the woods, that's what I was doing in Alabama, like kind of slip behind trees, find a spot, jump them, climb up, shoot a deer. If you can do that, you can stalk up on a bunch of flipping team guys with binos.
I mean, that's easy. And so it's stalking around.
But that being said, I didn't, I'm maybe middle of the class, you know, is where I was. I was not, it's funny how the Lord works.
I go in, oh yeah, man, I can shoot. I mean, it's all this arrogance of who I am and how great I am and all this.
I grew up in the woods, you know, then then all of a sudden you realize, no, I suck compared to these guys. But yeah, I think Brian graduated top of our class.
There was a lot of good dudes in our class. But I graduated and that's where I decided to have been dating my wife for a little while at the time.
And graduation day, the family all comes. You can have family up, friends up, whatever.
So they all come up, shoot sniper rifles. It was a fun time.
I invited my dad, my brothers, and her dad. And me and him were fishing in Troy's pond.
And I'm back fishing. And that's where I was at.
I said, hey, I want to ask Lauren to marry me. Can I ask your daughter to marry me? And he said, you're going to have to ask her about that, son.
But after this weekend, it's perfectly fine with me. He said, we're not fishing.
He loved the guns and the fishing. That's awesome.
How did you meet your wife? My dad being a pastor, her grandparents went to their church, and we kind of knew of each other through that. And then my brother and his wife hooked us up on like a blind date one time when I came home on leave.

I came back from that Iraq, Germany thing that I told you about.

I came home and they kind of hooked us up on a blind date and we hit it off and started dating.

Six months later, I was asking her dad if I could, eight months later, I was asking her dad if I could ask her to marry me.

Nice. Nice.
You guys have been married ever since? Yeah, we've been married 16 years, yeah. Congratulations.
Thank you. Made it through the SEAL teams.
Made it through the SEAL teams. Yeah, she was with me the whole time through the SEAL teams.
Just not the, you know, buds portion, but she did whatever it was. Man, you don't hear that very often.
You know, it's really weird. I don't know if I'm just choosing.

I don't know what the hell is going on.

Everybody that comes on here lately from our background has had a successful marriage.

Really?

That's good.

It's awesome.

It's such a rarity, and it's just interesting that the latest group of soft veterans that have been on this show have not been divorced. But so anyways, I'd like to, what do you, what is the, for you and your wife, what's the secret to a successful marriage? Christ.
Christ. Yeah.
If, I can't draw anything, but let's say this is her over here. And my wife's a great woman, by the way.
I mean, she's unbelievable. Very, of everything she's good at, she's very wise.
And I think a lot of women are probably this way. But she's very wise in letting me know what relationships I should foster, whether business relationships or friendships or whatever, and which ones I should cut off.
She's very perceptive of people. I'm not as much.
So she's helped me a lot in that. So she's a great woman, but set all that aside.
If she's here and I'm here and Christ is at the top and we're both seeking Christ, you know, that's been something we've seen. We're going to grow together, grow closer together as we seek him.
If there's anything else that you seek, because we're never going to lie on everything. I love everything that's awesome and cool.
She loves things that are stupid. That's the way we look at it, right? And so we're never going to be going toward the same thing.
I want to hunt and fish. She doesn't care about hunting and fishing.
She just wants to spend money at stores. And we're never going to coalesce on that.
But if we both are growing into Christ, first and foremost, Matthew 6, 33, seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you, you'll grow closer together. And that has been what's held us together for 16 years.

It's been phenomenal to see.

She's a believer like I am, obviously.

So that is an easy question.

That's what keeps us together.

Perfect.

So what happens after you leave sniper school?

Leave sniper school, go to team three, combat deployment,

or do a workup, normal workup.

And now in an engagement relationship with my wife at that point in time, do the normal workup thing, slated to Afghanistan, go to Afghanistan. It was the Wild West at the time.
I didn't realize this. I'll have to go back and look.
Like I said, I talked with Stump recently. He said, you got a bad memory.
He said that deployment was 10 months long. For some reason, I was thinking six months, right? Because you know, normal team deployments are six months, but, and he was right.
It was a 10 month deployment, I think from February till November was when the whole team was gone over there. Were you with him? Yeah, he was.
So he had done, he put me through second phase and then he did his, it's not LDO. He was explaining it to me, but it's going to do an officer thing.
I forget what it was called, and he checked into Team 3. Because, you know, he was over at a development group, got shot, went to Buzz as an instructor, and that's where I first met him.
When he left Buzz as an instructor, he went to, and the only reason I remember this is because he literally was just telling it to me like last week or the week before, he went to Team 3 to do his team AOIC or whatever it was because he was trying to do that officer program. So he went to Afghanistan with us.
But anyway, we did that deployment. It was the Wild West.
It was what every team got signed up for. I loved it.
It was great. lots of you know just lots of gun lots of gun

fights It was the Wild West. It's what every team got signed up for.
I loved it. It was great.
Lots of, you know, just lots of gunfights. Lots of gunfights.
You know, you're getting bored. You're getting rocketed.
Killing bad guys. Well, I'll tell you what.
This sounds like it's going to get really interesting. Oh, does it? Okay.
All right. So let's take a quick break.
When we come back, we'll pick right up with Afghanistan. All right, sounds good.
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We're getting ready to get into, would you consider this your first deployment? Yeah, I mean, it's, the Navy wouldn't consider it my first deployment, but yeah, it's my first combat deployment for sure. Okay.
So, yeah. Let's go there, man.
Yeah. I mean, you had to be pumped, right? You went to Iraq, but it was kind of just nothing.
Checked in at the end of the Iraq deployment. Nothing.
Because, I mean, literally there, I was there for, you know, a week, you know, and then went straight over to, where did we go? I can't even remember where we went through. Doesn't matter.
Went to Germany and did that. So I mean that's my experience with the SEAL teams and now it's sniper school work up but now we're going to war.
That's what every team that signs up. So did you know you were going to war before sniper school or did you know that after? No, we found out after because see, you know, and I don't, I think they still do a similar training pipeline or program, not training, but a deployment cycle would be your professional development.
So ProDev, you know, my ProDev was Sniper School and then ULT unit level training, which is your, you know, assaults, MAR ops, you know, land warfare, all of that stuff. And it was at the front end of that, they kind of tell you where they think you're slated for each troop within the team, which a troop's two platoons, but each troop within the team, they kind of tell you where you're slated for.
But I think they kind of decide over that unit level training, who's going to get to go where. And they told us sometime during that process that we were slated to go to Afghanistan and do the— it turned into the commando mission and some of the VSO stuff that teams did later on in the 2011 through 2016.
Can you explain what the VSO thing is? Yeah, so VSO. Civilians.
Yeah, so VSO would be, it'd be more like a Green Beret mission, right? Where Green Berets go in, they live with the indigenous people in an area, and they try to build white space in these, you know, villages they're living in, right? So it wasn't, it was kinetic because everybody knows there's Americans here. So they would come in and they would always try, it was very defensive in nature on the VSO side.
And so you're trying to build white space so you could bring conventional military in, set up the stuff and start developing these areas that is really, they were, I mean, they were out there. They were, it was just, you're just in the middle of nowhere with these folks living on.
I mean, their electricity was a guy bringing a battery the size of your end table right there, you know, and plug his lights up to it. And that was their electricity, well water.
I mean, it was biblical times farming and stuff like that. So you would live in the villages with the people and you would try to, you know, build white space, pushing the Taliban out.
So that's just a real, you know, layman's way of explaining what those VSO operations were. Well, this was at the front end of that.
It really wasn't VSO operations. It was also commando missions.
So that's the one for one, hey, we're training the Afghani commandos or whatever, you know, that you want to call them, the ANA or the ANP, and we have to go out on ops with them for specific targets. So not going after real high value targets, some Taliban commanders and stuff like that, but we're working one for one.
This was at the front end of that. So we initially started off not having to do one for one operations.
We were doing unilateral ops on our own all over the country, but especially within Siege of SOTIF. And then it kind of got, we got keyhole to doing the one-for-one operations with the Afghanis.
What do you mean one-for-one? Do you mean one Afghan per one? Yeah, one Afghan per operator. Holy shit.
So it didn't start out like that. It was, we're on our own.
And then it was, got to have partner force with you. We might have four partner force guys per one.
I'm sorry, one partner force guy for every four SEALs or something like this. You just have a few partner force guys.
Then it turned into literally got a partner force guy, got me. It really wasn't great.
It wasn't terrible. They would normally call attacks in on us.
They're doing stuff like that. We'd set up to do a KLE, a key leader engagement.
We'd come in at night, set them in the daytime. Sometimes we'd go to areas where we knew we could get a Taliban commander and we might capture or kill that guy.
Again, all lower level targets. It's just not like you're going after bin Laden in any of these, but you're going after valuable people maybe for this area, for whatever the big machine, the big green machine being the Army or big blue being NSW there and say, hey, this is who we want to go after.
This is what we want. So a lot of sniper missions, a lot of cool stuff on that.

I'm trying to think.

I lost my train of thought.

I apologize.

Oh, the VSO.

So that was the front end of VSO because we were living with the ANA and their compound.

We were living like, we call it the Alamo.

I didn't have a shower for like 65 days.

Just well water from a pump, no electricity, eating crap. We're living with it, but we're also rolling out and opping.
So, I mean, it is complete freedom. It's the Wild West.
It's like Josie Wells. It's the way every country kid from Alabama desires when you sign up to go to war, right? And it was literally freedom.
I did. I felt like Josie Wells every day.
If everybody's, hopefully everybody's familiar with Outlaw Josie Wells that listens to this. You're just out doing the work.
That was really cool. Then we built a fob up and moved out from that area right next to where they were, but we moved out from there and then had more conventional come in and really started setting up.
Fob Tapper was the name of the Fob in Nabahar, a place called Nabahar. Eddie was actually there.

You're talking about Eddie Gallagher earlier. We did turnover with their platoon, Ogden.
Yeah, Ogden, Jared Ogden. He was there.
We did a turnover with them. What part of Afghanistan is this? It was right on the border of Pakistan.
So it's like it would be eastern, you know,

maybe a little bit northeastern. It was a little bit south of Ghazni.
I could show you on a map, but it's just a place called Nabahar. Karamkel, a town right down from that, was a little bit of a Taliban stronghold until we killed some of the Taliban leaders in that area.
Let's talk about your first... It sounds like a lot of shit happened on this deployment.
You got a lot of action. The op tempo sounds pretty damn good.
So let's just talk about your first operation ever. With the DEA, it was the DEA FAST team, and we were out of, this is before I went to Nabahar and we did the full turnover.
We did a, I forgot where the op was, but they were burning the poppy fields. Remember the DEA FAST team? Yeah, I remember that.
It burned the poppy fields, and it was us, Bravo Platoon, Alpha Platoon, the whole task unit. and we did a hop where they went in and burned the poppy fields and it was uh us bravo platoon alpha platoon the whole task unit and uh we did a hop where they went in and burned the poppy fields found all the the stuff they're sending out i think they said like 70 of the world's opiates came from afghanistan at the time i don't know if that's still true or if it was true at the time that's what they said and uh we set up sniper over watches and uh did the clearance in the village for them.
And they came in, they cleared alongside us and stuff, but they came in and dealt with the opiate side. That was the very first operation.
And dude, I was so, I played high school football. The only thing is, you know, it's like the pregame nerves, your first op, you know, I'm kind of nervous, you know, a little bit but also super pumped um because this is it you know this is game day and nothing crazy i don't remember we might have you know ran into a few guys and shot a few guys i didn't shoot anybody on that op but i remember like this is it you know this is what it's all everything is culminated to this event right the time to prepare is over because the time to perform is now i was motivated super stoked um your team guy with a beard you know and all your patches and you're you know cool guy here this is it and uh so i just remember being super excited about going on that first stop flying in the birds there and uh going in early morning like nautical twilight maybe three or four in the morning and getting set up and going through it.
And then daytime, key leader engagement, going through the stuff, weapons caches, burning poppy fields, doing your biometrics. We had the guys there with the, you remember the biometric things that do fingerprints and blood and eyes, doing all that stuff.
And so that was my first operation. And I think I got pictures from it.

If I can find them, I'll get Stephen to send them over to you.

That'd be great.

Dude, just tickled pink, you know, like a kid on his first deer hunt.

Just super excited.

That was awesome because it was freedom.

It was freedom.

Now that, you know, this is the day after the election. So- Praise God Trump won.
My gosh. I'm kidding, man.
Wow. But what I want to ask you is, you know, military recruitment's been super low.
Yeah. Like catastrophic.
That's getting ready to reverse. And so what I want to ask is now we're going to get all this interest of young men that want to go into special ops units.
I mean, I'm sure you get a ton of messages about this. I do too.
And with the coming influx, because I'm sure it's going to happen now that it's— Command and treat a worthwhile person. Yeah, exactly.
Now that we have somebody that actually backs our military.

Yeah.

What advice do you have for somebody that's joining a team?

Man. We always get a lot of people that want to know how to integrate into a team,

especially at that level.

What would your advice be?

Man, that's a great question.

I would say the team is... the team is more important than you and that's hard for a lot of people especially in our society to get past um and that's a learned trait but the team is more important than you as an individual so if you're looking to go join that team but you can't get out of the mindset of me, me, me, me, me.
You might wanna wait for a new level of maturity to set into your life, or you might wanna reassess what you're looking at doing. So that would be the first thing, right? Team is most important.
The second thing is if you believe what I believe, and then maybe this should be the first thing. If you believe what I believe as a Christian, pray and seek God's face about it.
Because if he prepares that way for you, or if that's the way that you decide you go, he's gonna prepare that path and you're gonna take those steps and you're gonna be successful. And if he doesn't have that way for you, you will not be successful.
And so pray and seek his guidance. If you don't know the Lord, if you don't believe what I believe, ask God to reveal himself to you.
We'll be in the person of Jesus Christ and he can draw that path out for you. That would be, that's what I tell guys when they call me that first part or that part I just told you about the Lord and Christ.
But the second part that I don't tell many people often is the team is more important than you as an individual. Elevate that above yourself.
And if you don't think you're able to do that, you won't be successful. Great advice.
Do you have any hard lessons learned in a new guy? Yeah. This wasn't as a new guy.
And I didn't see this until after I was out. I'll give you two things on this.
My chief, Mike Birkenbach, he's retired. He's a red squadron guy.
Came over as chief of my last platoon at Team 3 before I left. And, man, I just, especially after that combat deployment, all this, I gave that guy unbelievable hell, you know, just as a, you know, just arrogance.
I mean, if you just really want to be honest, if I'm being honest with Jared or being honest on the show right now, arrogance towards him, towards, I mean, this is what we did. I mean, I was, and he was probably one of the best operators I ever worked with.
Of course, he came from development group, you know, and he was there. But I mean, he was unbelievable.
He was fair. He was a good guy.
And I'm not saying that he was right about everything that he did, but I did not honor him in the way that God calls a Christian man to honor those who are over him in scripture, right? That would be the first thing. And the Lord laid that heavy on my heart in 2015.
It was a group, Life Action, who came to my dad's church. My wife and I were there, and this pastor was preaching.
His name's Shane. He's preaching, and he's talking about getting right with people that you have wronged and being man enough, or is to me and women are enough to own what you've done that's wrong.
And man, the Lord just kept laying Mike Birkin, Mike in my heart, Mike Birkin. He was still on the teams at the time.
And so I went out. I left it out of the left service, went out and called him.
And I can't remember if he answered then or if he called me back later, but I said, hey, man, I just want to let you know I'm sorry. This is like three years after the fact, two years after the fact.
I said, I'm sorry.

He said, for what?

I ain't talked with you in a couple years.

What are you sorry for?

And I laid it out for him.

So the Lord has laid this on my heart, and I can't move on unless I get this right. And we've rekindled that relationship somewhat.
I talked to him a couple years ago when he retired, came back to his retirement. But to me, that was the biggest regret I have of the SEAL teams that I could have done something about.
Not that, to be honest with you, the bureaucracy of the teams and government in general, set all that aside. There's plenty of stuff we can nitpick and say is wrong that pissed me off about SEAL teams, that pissed me off about the government, whoever was elected, whatever the bureaucracy was.
Jared could have done that better. So that was my biggest regret and probably the biggest thing I learned, but it wasn't until after the team.
It wasn't until it was too late. The biggest thing I learned as a new guy, a million attaboys can go away with one single uh-oh.
Long story short, I shot, set Sniper Hyde, you know, three three or four rooms deep and scope cleared and could see the guys in the town you know and I was a sniper on the gun there was another sniper there was that's not I'm gonna be on the gun dude he's like no no you're good yeah yeah you'll be on the gun you're you're you're better shooter than me and all this I remember and I won't say the guy's name some of them are still in but these dudes walk across the little field and got my little uns on the thing i mean dope set they're like 425 yards easy flipping shot 300 wind mag few rooms deep nothing nothing something hits me in the face man i shot you know those parapets that are like the porch you know that the parapet like you're out on the porch and they've got the little mud walls.

Yeah.

I'm four rooms deep shooting.

Well, my scope sees over, sees in, but my muzzle, I was freaking punching that.

We wound up going out and successfully completing the mission by killing the guys we need to kill

and doing the stuff we need to do.

I fired three shots into a wall at 30 you know, 30 yards where I was, you know, at a great sniper hide. And all them attaboys, all them good sniper things, you know, all that stuff, it completely goes out the window when everybody finds out you shot the wall three times.
Damn. How did you redeem yourself? Oh, I don't know.
Just continued to work to work you know continued to try to do the right

thing you know but shot that wall he was and park looked at me he's like he said bro i think you're shooting the wall i'm like there's no way that third shot something hit me in the face i shot the wall oh what do you do you did that 300 wind mag rattling out can you explain to the audience why you are three or four rooms deep?

Yeah, so it's funny you mention that.

I do this in the police academy, work in CQB. Angles and distance are everything, right? Whether you're in a building fighting with somebody or whether you're in a sniper hide.
So if I can fire a shot from this window right here, looking over a target, you might see me, you might not, but everybody's gonna look up, oh, there's a guy on that window. But if I can shoot through that same window and be four more windows away, it's gonna be a whole lot harder for you to find me.
So again, for a sniper or even just an operator doing CQB, I want to use all the angles and distance to my advantage

because there's nothing that I can do

all the way up here where I'm being seen

that my rifle can't do better

from back here where I'm not seen.

And so that's why we were three rooms deep.

I guess that porch would have been

technically a fourth room

where we were firing out through the rooms,

out the doors, and I hit that parapet.

It would have worked great had I not shot the wall. Yeah.
It would have been phenomenal. Sounds like it.
So let's move into your first operation where you got to kill. Let's move into your first gun.
Yeah, I mean, that was, I'm trying to think, building white space. I can't remember if, I think we just drove ATVs.

Remember those side-by-sides we had?

So I think we just drove those from the FOB

that we were building up where we were staying at.

Sometimes we'd take helos to certain places,

but I think we just drove them the whole way.

I know we drove them back.

We go out, it's dark, you know,

it's like two in the morning.

Unilateral, we're looking for these specific people, some guy that was making HME, you know, the homemade explosives in that area. And we set up a sniper hide, me and a guy.
I won't use the name. He's still at, he's at red right now.
He might be a warrant officer now. That's how old we are.
He's a warrant now. So he, we set up on a hill and we're told, hey, let everybody leave the village unless you see anybody leaving with weapons, engage them.
And if you see anybody coming into the village with weapons, engage them. And that was pretty much, and we're in the south sniper hide.
Stumpf and his crew were in the north sniper hide. And then there was a couple other guys on the west.
And that's where the mountains, that's kind of, they set up. This was a real flat, salt flat area by this town, and I cannot remember the name of the town, but they're doing their clearance.
So we set up, they go through in their clearance, they start on nods, they finish at daytime, they bring in the key leader engagement, so they bring in the leaders of the town, they're talking through them, they found some weapons caches and stuff, And people leave the town and this guy burns in. He had his AK slung.
He had the saddlebags on his bike that you could see the, I thought it was HME bins or whatever it was. And it was actually empty jugs.
I guess he was going in to get HME, but he had all the mortar fuses and all that stuff to hook up the the ieds that's what he is so um

shot him off motorcycle at 600 meters and uh um your first kill was at 600 meters yeah 600 meters

it's about 650 yards so maybe just inside 600 meters damn he hit a turn uh i shot at him a

couple times you know that 300 wimick you know and racking that bolt and he when he hit a turn

I'm sorry. He hit a turn.
I shot at him a couple times, you know, that three-in-a-way back, you know, and racking that bolt. And when he hit a turn, I found a spot where he was going to slow and kind of turn toward me.
And I shot him through the gas tank of that motorcycle, and that hit his leg, and he gets out. He's, like, trying to figure out where it's coming from, pointing his AK, looking around.
I just dialed. I had my dope dialed up.
I dialed my dope down real quick, just flattened it out so I could hold in my reticle. Them old Night Force scopes with the Mildot, it didn't have a horse reticle or what we'd shoot now, but I just dropped it down, held in my scope, and center punched him.
When I did hit him in the belly, he crawled behind this thing, and uh we broke down the high side and cleared over to him and he was behind this like old uh broken down wall you remember you know how they had like half built buildings out there old rundown it was like something like that um and he he kind of sits up around the corner with his ak from about me to you and you know i threw up the uh it was a scar the time, a 7.62 scar heavy. We're the first ones that we're testing.
I think the Rangers were testing them. We were testing them.
I deployed that thing and shot him from about me to you in the head with that and ended him. And that was, that was the first kill.
So that was... Point blank with a scar in the head.
Yeah, dude, I got, I don't know if I've got pictures of all that stuff in employment. Because remember, you have to take pictures of guys, and then you have to bring them in.
At one time, I had pictures of that stuff. I mean, it's not something we generally share.
We probably won't put that up. No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Don't put it up. We can't get himed up.
But it was no joke. The .223, you shoot somebody that hit it like canoes their dome.
This thing just like Gallagher busting a watermelon, that 7.62. But yeah, that was my first kill.
And then we got a few little ticks. What did you, hold on.
How did you feel about that? I mean, strong Christian faith since childhood. I was tickled pink.
I mean, that's what we had signed up for.

I would say now, looking back on it, did it make any real difference in my life whether I would have done that or not?

No.

Does it make me any more of a man or any less of a man if I killed somebody or not?

No.

But this guy, that's the way I guess I rectified myself as a Christian man.

If I'd met this guy in a coffee shop, maybe I'd tell him about Christ and try to share Christ with him.

But Scripture tells us Paul says that God has put every man exactly where they are in the exact time,

in the exact place, in the exact moment so that they might reach out and find God. It's our own rebellious hearts that keep us from being able to see what God has for us to share.

And then when you're killed or when you die of old age or whatever it is, you have received every bit of time that God was going to allot you to accept him. That's what scripture tells us.
And at this point in time, my job is not to pray for this man's salvation. My job is to kill this man because if I didn't, he's going to go place an IED that one of my buddies are going to run over in a little bit or some poshtun kid is going to run over while they're out there playing with the soccer ball or whatever.
So that's kind of how I justified it. But I do struggle with now knowing what the government is, especially after the pullout in Afghanistan and working that.
I know we might get into that in a little bit.

I struggle wholeheartedly with why we were there politically.

But at the time, I didn't know it.

What year was this?

This was 2010.

This would be 2010.

Oh, this is later than I thought.

It might have been 2000.

Well, maybe it was 2009.

No, it was 2010.

That's right, 2010.

It was February of 2010 is when we went there. Yeah.
Yeah. What about being there bothers you? Being there in the moment didn't bother me.
Missed my wife. Didn't have kids at home.
Looking back. The reasons we were there, the military industrial complex, the issues that we see, I mean, we see it going on in Ukraine right now.
You've been to enough places in the world. I've been to enough places now, multiple deployments where we can see that I would have been willing to fight anybody who wanted to talk trash about the United States of America going and doing the patriotic thing as a young man.
But now as an older man, and I see the real reasons we were in some of these places, and I see how we left it, that's what bothers me. It bothers me that I, I won't say I lived or believed a lie somewhat, but there is a little bit of that wondering and thought process there, if that makes sense.
It absolutely makes sense. When do you think it flipped? Because we had to go because, obviously, it was a 9-11.
For me? What point do you think that the U.S. interests in Afghanistan flipped? Man, I don't know.
I would have to say probably when, because I came in, when I checked in the teams, it was at the tail end of the Bush administration, so I didn't get to experience much of Bush.

I would say it had to be within the Obama administration.

For me, it's when I noticed it because it was—I mean, we could get nine layers of air.

We could get air coming in to take a Pashtun guy who was injured out,

but one of our guys would be bleeding out and dying, and you couldn't get anybody land to save them. So they elevated the Pashtun life over ours on one end, but on the other end, look at what they did in the pullout.
They absolutely let those people get crushed. And so I can't understand it.
I don't know if I can understand why they do what, when I say they, I'm talking about the system, you know, the whoever's in charge, the administrations. I don't get it.
We're not there to win. We're fighting a global war on terror.
What is that, the global war on scariness? You can't fight something that's not an enemy. We're fighting the Russians.
There's an enemy. Or we're fighting the Taliban.
There's an enemy. But a war on terror is just like drugs and law enforcement.
The war on drugs. You can't fight a war on drugs.
It's an inanimate object. And it's obvious.
We've been doing it since the 80s, and it's getting worse, right? The same thing with a war on terror. So that is where I really struggle.
I'll say at least where it flipped for me where I started thinking this was probably COVID to see how the government acted during COVID to see how many guys they kicked out and kicked to the curb and what they pushed that we now know was a lie. And we don't have to get into all that, but that was probably where it really clicked for me.
Man, it's, I didn't always trust the government but I really don't now because they've been caught with their pants down and then Afghanistan pull out, that was the nail in the coffin for me. Yeah, me too, man, me too.
When I saw what was going on there, that just solidified all the beliefs that I had.

Or how about when they smoke a carload full of kids?

They're trying a guy like Eddie Gallagher for killing a guy in combat,

but they smoke a carload full of flipping kids and some basically social workers because they said it's ISIS, and then they lie about it.

Oh, you're talking about the USAID workers that they tried.

Yeah, and then they lie about it.

Yeah, they lied.

It was a drone strike.

There's a lot of people who are because they said it's ISIS. And then they lied about it.
Oh, you're talking about the USAID workers. Yeah, and then they lie about it.
Yeah, they lied. It was a drone strike.
It was a drone strike. That's right.
A drone strike, the car. It was supposedly, was it the, who did they think it was? They thought it was the ISIS-K guys is what I was told.
I just remember, because we were getting people, pulling people out in the process and I got a call from a buddy. Were you there? When that happened, yeah, we were in.
I think I was in, I can't remember if I was here getting ready to leave or if I was in Istanbul ready to go into Tajikistan. But either way, I got a call from a buddy.
He said, hey, you hear what happened? And I said, what? He kind of explained. I said, yeah, the ISIS-K guys, they smoked?

He goes, yeah, no, it was a carload full of kids and some, his exact words were social workers.

But I mean, he was probably trying to say what you just said, USAID workers.

USAID workers.

But I mean, and then they lie about it.

Yeah, they lied, told us it was an ISIS leader.

And then it came out, no, actually, Biden, you just killed a couple of kids and some USAID workers. And it's like, well.
But nobody fucking cares, right? Nobody cares. Let's prosecute Gallagher.
Yeah. For killing a fucking ISIS, a real ISIS fighter that was actually ISIS and actually a grown-ass man.
Who was shooting at him, not too much. Yeah, exactly.
And that's- Not a bunch of fucking kids in a USAID worker. And that is really where it was the straw that broke the camel's back for me to really look into.
And now you go into some of the interviews that you've done, some of the people you're talking to about what we've given. I've talked with buddies in Congress about what we've been doing in Afghanistan.
And a lot of these guys at the political level, they don't even know. And I think a lot of them don't care.
But a lot of them are obtuse to what's going on because the bureaucracy hides it. That's one of the benefits of Trump going in is he's going to deal with the bureaucracy.
I hope he will. That's drain the swamp.
That is crush the bureaucracy, which keeps the politician

from knowing actually what's going on

and keeps the guy on the ground

from getting what they actually need to do the job.

So anyway, all that being said,

that is, I don't know where the flip

or the switch happened.

Maybe there was never a switch

and it was always that way.

But I know for me,

when I started seeing the writing on the wall

was probably that 2019 to 2021 timeframe of COVID into Afghanistan pullout. It's sickening.
It's almost embarrassing to say that you're a part of it. Yeah.
Yeah. I wouldn't disagree with you.
But let's move into your sniper kill, the farthest one. Oh, yeah.
What were you guys doing? It was another task unit size, so two SEAL platoons, clearance and overwatch. Being a sniper, I can't remember what we did, but wherever we inserted, we cleared through this little area, climbed this mountain.
We're doing overwatch of, you know, another village that they were clearing through. And then they did a key leader engagement.
And it was kind of supposed to be a Taliban stronghold in that area. And they were getting to a lot up north.
We didn't have much going on where we were as hot, flipping miserable. And these guys come out course they're armed to the teeth they got their their rhodesians on and their ak's i think one of them had it wasn't a pkm but it was one of those ak's with a long barrel and the big bipod legs you know um and it was uh but it but it wasn't a pkm it was just a there's an rpk is that what they're called yeah um, they ride out together on a motorcycle, and one of the snipers shoots at him and misses, and then I start shooting at him.
And the guy that was with me, Greg, he just starts lazing with the big Viper. Remember the big Vector? Yeah, yeah.
One of those humongous things. He's like, hey, you know, 1,700.
So I had my dope set, and I remember doing the holdover, and I could see that big roffus round from that 50 bmg going you know right or left and they slow turned and Greg um I'd rattled through four shots and then on the fifth one I remember looking at Greg said uh 2345 send it he's just giving me the laser that was the last one so I looked at my card. I cranked my dope to what would have been 2350, put the wind hold on that I thought, which was just, it was actually a little bit.
So if they're going this way, my wind hold was actually this way. I remember being on about the second mil dot.
I remember seeing it vividly. Like I could draw it for you, right? That one thing, but I closed my eyes.
I'm a natural point. I aim's good.
Please Lord, let it hit. Boom.
boom i remember watching the trace that big bullet go through the sky i thought i shot over him it went through his front leg went through the bike went through this the leg on the other side and blew up on the other side uh you know the roffish rounds and explode in the hip and he fell over and i was like oh man i thought it went i saw the trace and it dropped, you know, the, the vapor trail of the bullet, you know, for anybody who's listening and falls over. And I was like, see, I gave him, I don't know.
I can't tell. We couldn't really see, you know, at that distance.
And, uh, the TU commander comes over and said, Hey, how far was that person that you just shot at HUD? And said, a little over two clicks. He said, that's a long shot, son.
He's calling for a medic and a mechanic. And so he laid there and bled out and they were actually able to go get his, some of his ID material, his guns.
He just laid there. Nobody came back for him.
They got his bike when they cleared over and cleared the, I guess, cleared that side of the village. So that was my furthest kill.
Definitely not the furthest one out there, but it was like a mile and a third. So it was, like I said, missed him four times.
Well, blind squirrel finds a nut every now and again. So, you know, it worked out.
But yeah, that was, and again, you know what, we were doing that for the specific job that God put me in that place to be a sniper at that time. That's how you justify that.
He didn't put me in that place to be a missionary or anything else. I was in that place to be a sniper and protect my guys who were literally clearing the village to go over there where he's going to plant his IEDs and to set up an ambush on these guys.
And it's my job to make sure that they get home to mama and the babies. And so that's what we're there to do.
And that's why it's important to understand you can't, Proverbs 19.2 says, zeal without knowledge caused you to miss the mark. You got so many people that are zealous for so many things, but they have zero knowledge about what actually went on.
I could have all kinds of zeal about the political climate and what's going on, but if I have no knowledge of what's really happening, I'm going to totally miss. This is what I know.
This guy is trying to kill my buddies and trying to kill me. So I've got to kill him.
And that's just the way it is. Yeah, yeah.
Is there anything notable on this deployment that you want to bring up? Brendan Looney, this would be the only thing because he was such a solid dude. Brendan Looney died toward the end of the deployment, September.
I think we rotated. By the time everybody rotated out, it was November 1.
So a month and a half left, Looney died. How did he die? Hilo crashed.

Hilo got shot down. That was, I mean, as you know, most of your buddies, most of my, Hilo is very rarely.
At the front end of the deployment, we had an augment that Andy set up with gold because he was connected, and then we didn't interop with him, and then some of our guys attached to them. That's when Adam Brown died at the front end of the deployment in like March.
Oh, shit. Yeah, so that was – so it started off that way with us being kind of tied to them.
That's how we got in early and started doing the rip and some of our guys doing the augment with gold. Adam died, and then Green Beret died in the middle of deployment.
We had to go out, and he got shot and drowned in a river river and we had to go out and look for him under a dam, if I remember right. That was the last time I saw Looney.
And then Looney died a couple months later in that Hilo crash. And then there was a couple other team guys that died that I didn't know really well, but I'd met them.
And a young guy who I knew, he was a couple training classes behind me. If I remember right, I literally ate breakfast with him, or not breakfast, but just ate dinner, but they cooked eggs and all that stuff.
You could choose what you wanted to in Kandahar. I ate with him the night before, and then he was on that helo the next day on that turnover op or whatever it was.
So that was hard because it wasn't everybody's first time to experience loss. Team three had suffered a lot of loss from Mikey Mansoor to Ryan Jobe to Mark Lee to now all those guys,, Brendan Looney.
So team three had suffered loss and a lot of guys had experienced it. But at least for me and a couple of the guys who this was really our first real combat deployments, I went through training with him, his good buddy, that was hard.
And then, yeah, yeah. So that would be, that'd be the hardest thing.
Damn, damn. And Dennis Miranda, by the way, is a guy that I ate with.
I don't know if I said that a little bit ago that I kind of knew through a few training classes. He was at Team 4, I think, doing the turnover.
He died as well. Yeah, man.
How did the team kind of recover from that? Or did they? It's surprisingly really well. You know, there's one great thing about any accusation anybody wants to level against a SEAL team.
And I love all special operations. I'll never talk trash about Delta, Green Berets, you know, MARSOC, SEAL teams, any of them.
Because it takes a special person. And even in Scripture, God upholds men of war, real men of war.
And it's a special operation. I don't care what anybody says.
Conventional forces just generally are not doing what special operations are doing. We're always at the front end of the combat.
Some conventional forces are, but all of special operations are generally, if there's combat going on, they're gonna be somewhere there and near it. And God holds a special place in his heart for the Warriors.
So all of them do the same. I can't speak to those other organizations though, but what I can do is speak to the SEAL teams, in particular, Group 1.
Bro, what they offered and what they do for when you do lose a friend, a close one, what they do for the families is hands down the best community I've ever experienced or been around. My wife still talks about that and we were in it for a short amount of time.
It's not like I did a 25 year career in a tie. The best community to have around you when something like that happens.
I mean, you had guys coming out to Danny's from all the know all the east coast teams development group stv out and you know hawaii or orga where the guys were coming in to danny's just to to honor brendan looney and hang his picture on the wall there you know danny's is a uh danny's is a what was a seal a team bar team bar in Coronado. A lot of tradition there.
Yeah, so they did. You'll never hear me level an accusation against NSW about how they treat people, especially when loss happens.
So they did very well. And the team recovered well, and we moved on because it's what we do.
That's the hardest thing for, I think, us to understand. Mama and the girls, when daddy dies, they live with that forever.
The team, yeah, you remember your boys, but it's the machine that's going to keep going. And I think a lot of times we forget that as team guys.
We forget that they're giving up everything in their life. They're giving up daddy.
They're giving up my husband versus the team. You're a cog in the wheel.
And yeah, your boys might give up a friend, but you're a cog in the wheel. And that's okay.
It's not a bad thing. That's just the way it is.
And you mentioned guys that get divorced. I think that's one of our biggest issues is we're all about the team, all about the machine.
And then we don't realize we're a cog in the wheel until we realize we're a cog in the wheel and we're out. And Mama and the girls have been sitting here on the sidelines the whole time giving you up and you've been giving the best of yourself to this machine that's going to keep going whether you're there or not.
They're not going to keep going whether you're there or not. If there is an accusation I can level against our community, it's that we fail to realize that our most important job is our wives and our kids, not the SEAL teams, not the boys.
And that's hard to hear and hard to say because I'd die for these guys, but I'd most certainly die for these girls too. They need a daddy to be there for them.
It doesn't mean that you're afraid to die. You most certainly go out and do the job, and if you die, you die.

That's just the way it is.

But if I can be here for them and not be off with the boys hanging out,

going out to the bars or wherever with them, and I can be at home with my family, that's where I should be.

Did you come to that realization upon your return home from that deployment?

No, no.

I knew that beforehand, and I didn't have kids at the time. Yeah, I mean, it's a scripture.
It's a Christian principle. And so I was rooted in that.
And I would say any angst I had, it was that the team always wanted you to do this. And it's like, no, I need to be here with her.
And then when you have kids, I need to be here with them. And it's hard for guys like us because I definitely wanted to be there with the boys doing X, Y, and Z because that's how you build rapport and trust.
It's just the culture, I guess, of it. And too many guys don't realize they're just a cog in the machine until they're out and they're no longer a cog in the machine.
Did you do another after that yeah yeah you did another deployment yeah so um we did it was it was an odd at the time i was mad because i wasn't going to afghanistan with the other guys and it was a year-long deployment um that we did we rotated in and out that's when we did the korea yemen bahrain the cree mission out of there uh took down some ships during that time. That was pretty cool.
The Gulf of... When were you in Yemen? 2000 and...
2011, no. 11, 2012.
2012, because 2011 was finishing our... Because extortion happened August of 2011, and that was at the tail end of our workup, and then we deployed December of that year, 2012.
Yep. We were down in Aden? Yeah, so the way they broke us up, they split up our platoon.
We initially all went to, is it the Gulf of Aden? Is that where the, yeah, so we initially went there. We landed at some, I tell you what, Dave could probably tell you better.
It's some air base. Our OIC could tell you better.
There's no Russian air base, just landed there in the middle of the night, offloaded. And it was the same time that some guys from Dev Group got in that gunfight in the street where they're going in to get their hair cut, and they got in a gunfight.
And that was a whole ordeal. So it was around that same time, and I think it was February of 2012ary of 2012 landed and then they split the platoon so half the platoon stayed there the other half of us we went and did a uh mission with sdv running sniper overwatch for them out of bahrain and we stayed on a ship for a few weeks running sniper overwatch for sdv and then we went back to bahrain running Sniper Overwatch for SDV.
Let's talk about that. Yeah.

It's cool now. It wasn't super sexy.
I'll tell you one cool thing. You know, everybody, when I was making fun of, you got the guys that you combat swimmer.
Oh, you got microscopic bubbles coming out of your mass. They're going to find you.
Remember that? You know, you're with a diver. You can't have the bubbles.
Dude, that freaking SDV machine would off-gas underwater like you popped a balloon the size of this room underwater. Humongous bubbles.
But I remember being able to look down on Nod's and see the glow of the SDV, you know, while running Sniper Overwatch for them. And then we had a half and a bath that was kind of running for them.
I can't talk too much about all that they were doing,

but they were probing certain areas from my understanding.

And we were just making sure that they didn't get rolled.

There were Iranian vessels in the water, you know, floating around,

pointing guns at us.

We had some pirates that we dealt with, you know,

sank a few little pirate dinghies with the minigun where they get up close to the SDV. I mean, it was pretty neat.
No kidding. Let's talk about that.
Let's get a little more descriptive. Just basically, these guys would get in these certain areas, and they had the door gunners in the helo that we were with and had the little minigun.
And most of the time, as those guys would come up, a lot of them would jump out of the boat and swim away because here comes this big helo. And whenever that happened, you're just like a wood crate, like a john boat or something almost.
I mean, it wasn't anything special. You just zip it up with a minigun and blow it to pieces, let it sink right there, and carry on with life.
So they couldn't, I guess, continue to do what they were doing. Now they're just stuck out in the water swimming around.
Right on. Where were you guys doing shipboardings? We're doing shipboardings in the same area.
And then in the Red Sea, we went to Jordan and did a J-set with them and did a ship in the Red Sea with their Jordanian CTU, I don't know, some kind of tier one unit. I met King Abdullah while we were there.
I mean, he shook our hand when we flew in. I thought that was really cool, especially now with all that's going on.
Yeah. Went to, I guess it's Kasadik.
I don't know what it was called, Kasadik at the time, where they got the tubular assaults and all that stuff in northern Jordan and Amman. Got to go to Petra while we were there.
That was cool to see. But I did train in Kasadik or in Amman and Aqaba down there, and that would be where we did some of the shipboardings down there, and then we did— What were you doing ship—are these real shipboardings? No, no, no, no.
These are all—so these are all J-sets. Okay.
All of them were J-sets, with the exception of one shipboarding that we did out of Bahrain, but that was separate from all these things. These were hook and climbs with their tier one units on, you know, just ships they had in the Red Sea that they set up to do it on.
So, and I never done, we did those in the teams going through training. I never done a lot of, we did some in Korea.
And that was cool. Especially since I was a hearse cast master and I didn't have to be in the water doing the climb.
I would do the rope on the deck. So we did a lot of those with the rock seals too and the snow.
I mean, it's like what you see in the movie. So those were J sets.
The one real ship boarding was done with the Kree out of Bahrain. No kidding.
Why were you boarding that ship? It was a, that's a great question, like depleted uranium and some weapons and stuff. I want to say somebody fell in the drink and, you know, it was just like jumping across onto the boat.
Somebody fell in the drink and he's out now. I won't say his name, but he fell in the drink and he's fine.
And then another guy, I think somebody shot two guys on that boat um that were armed and it was just kind of like the houthis vessel board they just did in january very similar to to that just a different sea state and a different vessel so that was that was the no shit so you guys boarded a ship oh yeah yeah. Depleted uranium and weapons on board.
Team 3, 2012, yeah.

And got two kills.

Yeah.

I don't even know anybody that's killed.

No, I mean, no, I didn't get those kills.

That was, I'll find, I'll text somebody when we leave here,

and I'll find the name and see who the team guy was.

But, yeah, they did that.

That was 2012.

And then we had guys in Afghanistan,

and kind of culminating event for that one was... Hold on, hold on.
So you went back to Afghanistan again? No, no, this is a troop of Team 3 in Afghanistan. Oh, okay.
We lost Warson, Feeks, and I went through training with Pat. We lost them in a hill crash.
Dan, that deployment i think i was we were doing the stv thing at the time dan kick-started that uh ied or i guess he didn't the guy in front of him did you know dan crenshaw uh had that id go off um or tripwire whatever it was blew him up so nobody knew how dan was going to be you know, because we knew he was in the hospital. He had his eyes and all that.
So that had happened. Then we lost Orson and Pat.
And so that was kind of, that was heavy. That was very heavy on the team because literally now it's, and then the year prior, we had lost inust of 2011 extortion went down we had we had done an augment with all those guys or or an interop in a in an augment so we knew a lot of them d rock came from a bravo platoon from my first platoon when i checked in he was there before he went screened and went to development group and uh then we had buddies went through training with Nick Spihar.
I talked with him the night before he went. So a lot of loss in a very short amount of time.
And that was heavy on the community as a whole, but also on us at Team 3 because we were all, we all knew those guys pretty tight with those guys. And so it was literally always like one funeral right after another.
You're constantly nailing your freaking tridents into a coffin so that was uh that wrapped that deployment and then benghazi happened we were overseas when benghazi was going down and everybody's getting word on that spinning up and ty woods was a buds instructor when i went through and so i remember his i mean it was just like god man hits keep coming for the you know for for us people we know. So that was pretty much what rounded my career out.
I checked into sniper school after that, left team three screen, positive for development group and or for green team. And was my chief, Mike Birkenbach, told me, say, hey, look, if you stay, you're going to take a slot.
If you get out, you need to decide now, and you need to decide good. And so I said, I'm going to get out.
I'm going to go to the reserve. We're going to go back home.
And that's where they found I had type 1 diabetes. And that was another year and a half process.
And get my benefits, retirement IDs, the health care for the family, all the stuff that they all go back and forth and fight on because I could have been in the regular Navy. Couldn't be in the SEAL teams with being insulin dependent or couldn't be a SOCOM or JSOC operator and be insulin dependent, but I could be in the conventional military.
And so anyway, all that being said, it worked out good. I got everything I needed and got into law enforcement.
So you decided to get out before you found out you hadn't type 1 diabetes. And the reason they found out I had type 1 diabetes is because I was doing my medical process out.
What was it? They said it was the anthrax vaccine. And I've had some doctors tell me, well, no, there's no way it can be that.
I have a lot of other doctors tell me that within the system that were like like doing my blood work, finally, no, this is the anthrax vaccine. So that's what I hold it to because the hardest part they had is I'd, unlike even my evals, it said, suggested to screen for development group, high performer physically.
I mean, they're like, hey, how can this, this is what the Navy said. How can this guy be this high performer yet he has diabetes? Because everybody's mind goes to, you know, Wilford Brimley, I guess, with diabetes, right? This doesn't make sense.
So if he's a high performer, we can't medically retire him. So I broke my back a few times for the workups, deployments, all that.
I had some, you know, knee surgeries and TBIs from Afghanistan IEDs and RPGs. And so they added all that in and that's where I was able to get my benefit.
Now I say that tongue in cheek because a lot of people think that means you can't work, you can't do anything. That's not the way it is.
I mean, I can still perform. I can still do the job a lot.
I just can't be a SOCOM or JSOC operator and be insulin dependent. Yeah.
That was the ultimate thing. Shit.
Well, what made you decide to get out? My wife's school was paid for. She's a nurse.
My wife is. But her school was paid for, but all the schools in San Diego were impacted.
We couldn't get her into school there. We looked at, hey, if you stay in to green team and and go through that process you know what that lead time is going to be and it was easy for her to go to uab right there in birmingham alabama and so i said look i'll go to the reserve team you'll go through nursing school i'll do two years of the reserve team let you finish school and then we'll get back in the navy and go to the east coast that was that was the plan yeah Okay.
Did you have any kids at the time? No, no kids at the time. But that was kind of our plan, and the type 1 diabetes, just the Lord used that to change my trajectory.
And I don't complain about it at all. I mean, I can't complain at all.
We've been blessed tremendously. How was it coming home once you were out? It wasn't.
Nothing at home. It's not even when you were out.
Just how was it coming home from knowing you were going to be done? You feel like you're out of prison a little bit because you're in the government. You know.
I mean, it feels good, but nothing changed at home. Everybody had gotten older.
Everybody had gotten jobs a little bit, but I mean, home was still home, but everybody

had just grown up now.

We weren't high school kids playing football and fighting and rolling yards or whatever

it was anymore.

We're now adults with jobs, and we can't goof butt around all the time.

So that was the only thing because the home I left was still the same home, but I was at a different place in

my life. And so was all my friends, my brothers, my sisters, everybody.
So that was the only

difference. And then just went back and started trying to figure out what we're going to do for

work because I'm going through my medical process out of the teams, which like I said, it took till

2014. Did you have trouble reintegrating into civilian life back in with your wife? That would probably be a better question to ask her, but I would say no.
And she, I think she would agree with me. And things happen so quick, you know, with the medical, with going through that process, and then doing some anti-piracy contracts with Tronic Group, realizing that I wasn't going to be able to do that with where I was medically deploying and getting into law enforcement.
From law enforcement, starting my MBA, starting, you know, finishing, trying to, I say finishing, starting my MBA and finishing the MBA, starting my business. We just did a lot of stuff in a short amount of time, and there never was a difficulty transitioning.
It was just- No shit. So you didn't have any addictions, depression, anxieties, sleeping problems, none of that.
Dude, I had no issues that I can, and I will tell you this, I mean, I've obviously shared my faith. I really think it's the person of Jesus Christ that, I mean, it says he gives you peace which surpasses all understanding.
It says he is the only peace giver. He's the ultimate healer, Jehovah Rapha.
If there was any of those issues, I think that he effectively dealt with them for me. I never had anything like that.
I was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, testicular cancer, went through that surgery. And that was a whole process.
But we had kids that came from, they just said it was common in guys our age, OEF and OIF, you know, basically like our age group. It was a common thing, and they believe it came from what's a depleted uranium.
And those office rounds are depleted uranium. I didn't know that at the time.
I mean this, but they're depleted uranium apparently. And at least that's what somebody told me, one of those doctors said.
And it was in the IED jammers. You remember those things that you run on, like, the trucks? Dude, you're the second person to tell me this in, like, a week, and I've never heard it before.
Maybe the Lord's telling you you need to go get checked out and make sure you're good to go because, I mean, that's it. Now, but here's the thing.
That's just what they say they think it comes from. They can't say it.
But I think what I had was called a, if I remember right, a stage two common seminoma, and it was testicular cancer. And they just had to remove the one testicle.
So, you know, my buddies used to always say, hey, you're one nut for being a princess warrior, bro. That's what they used to tell me.
And so I went through that process, and my wife was pregnant at the time, and it was different going into the—it's like a place where you get in vitro or whatever, like one of those clinics, but we'd have to go in to save semen in case we wouldn't have babies later if the surgery on me went bad and wound up making me infertile or whatever. So we're in that process, and here she is, eight months pregnant, and we're in this place where she felt really uncomfortable about it because we're in this place where people are struggling to have kids, and she is.
She's a small lady, but she was obviously pregnant. But we went through that process, so that was a thing.
And I did some work for the NACOA stuff, one of the few wildlife control operators who could shoot in the cities. I did it in New York, did it in the Hamptons, culling wildlife.
I was looking at go doing wildlife biology stuff and getting all out of the tactical world. But when I had my first kid, just doing deer deployments didn't seem like what I wanted to do.
But but i mean we were shooting deer all over the nation guam um culling animals ungulates pigs and deer wait so what what was the point uh so basically i thought maybe you were talking about going after poachers or something no no no not going after poachers. So basically, you can look up the organization.

White Buffalo, a guy named Pete Chambers, who's still in the SEAL teams.

A buddy of mine went through training together.

His father-in-law runs an organization, is like a PhD wildlife biologist.

They call him the deer doctor.

Tony DiNicola.

Dude is a great dude, like phenomenal dude.

Me and him don't believe like the same as he's not like conservative, you know, like me or or christian like me but he's a he's a fair reasonable guy i could have a conversation with him uh but he's wildlife biologist and they would do control you know like uh wildlife control well he asked me to help come teach a class because we connected through pete um and i taught a class and he said hey would you be interested in? And took me through a few interviews. I did a few shoots with him, went up to his place in Connecticut.
And next thing you know, I got, he hired me in and did animal control all over the nation, went to Guam. I mean, when I say animal control, I'm talking like, I was with him one night.
I think I was just spotlighting for these two nights and he was shooting, kind of teaching me what to look for and stuff. We killed 330 deer in two nights in Brookhaven National Laboratory.
So, I mean, it's areas where there are massive animal, like deer and pig problems. Gotcha.
Ungulate control. And so, that's what they call it.
The animal is called an ungulate. I did some cool stuff with pigs in Michigan, worked with him and Michigan State University.
So it was really neat. It was a cool transition away from the tactical world, away from the law enforcement world, because now I've already left full-time law enforcement to go into this because this opportunity seemed better, given all that I was dealing with medically and what my wife wanted, wanted to grow the business, and did that for a few years.
And the Lord just kept bringing up the tactical stuff. And I wound up leaving that full-time to stick with what we know.
So you already had another law enforcement career as well by this point. Yeah, this is 20.
So when I went, I did full-time law enforcement for one year and this opportunity came available okay uh and it paid more money and it got me out of night shift work and all of the stuff that you deal with within full-time law enforcement that i know you're familiar with i mean you deal with law enforcement guys let's talk to one of your guys about law enforcement and kind of what he's dealt with so i know you're kind of familiar with with the stuff there. I was like, hey, if I can make more money and have a better schedule, then that's what I'm going to do.
And so I left to go do that. What year were you a cop? 2014 into 2015.
Because I left the SEAL teams in 2013. This is before it got bad to be a cop.
Yeah, it wasn't bad to be a cop at the time. It was still hard to get in because so many people submitted for it.
Sheriff, me and him don't always get along, but I like him. He's a nice guy.
I think he would say he likes me too. His name is John San Diego at Shelby County Sheriff's Office.
I think he's probably getting close to retirement now. I talked to him not long ago on the phone, but he was a chief deputy at the time.
And I'll be honest with you, whatever anybody wants to say about, let's say him as a law enforcement leader, because I think leadership in law enforcement is one of the biggest issues. That dude, all I can say is that if it wasn't for that dude, I wouldn't be in law enforcement today.
He got me into law enforcement. He gave me the opportunity that honestly, yeah, seal, yeah, degree, all that stuff, it would have still been very hard to get had he not made some calls and got the wheels of justice turning, for lack of a better word, to get me into law enforcement, even going through all my medical stuff.
Interesting. So I'm very appreciative of that.
So then you started TSI, right? Yeah, so TSI, I started it when I became a cop. You know, I was just doing like training for women and stuff on the side.
What prompted you to do that? Well, when I was in the teams, actually, and I started going through the process of like looking at getting out even before the medical stuff, go back to that guy, Troy DeHart in Indiana I talked about. I know he said, hey, man, we can make some killer money on the weekends training women.
I've been doing this. He had an RA instructor.
He was a cop, and he had worked his way up through the system at that time. He might have been the chief prosecutor at Johnson County.
That's where I wound up going to Johnson County and getting sworn. But anyway, he said, let's do this on the weekends.
I said, all right. So when I transitioned out and then they found the medical stuff, I'm going through that, I would fly into Indiana, teach on the weekends with them, and make some money.
And that's where we started TSI. He actually came up with a name, the Shooting Institute.
He's worked with me ever since. He's worked on government contracts.
I've had him. He's like one of him and a guy named Mike Rebels are the only two cops that have ever been able to work on a JSOC contract as instructors.
So he helped me kind of get it going and started up and ran it. And then he's like, hey, you run your thing.
So there's another company called the Shooting Institute out of Indiana. That's not us.
We work with those guys some, but that's not us. Our Shooting Institute is the Alabama flag with a bone frog in the center of the flag, that red X with a bone frog.
Anyway, that's what I've done since 2014 and did the wildlife work when i left it full time i left because i kept getting called back to do swat trainings to do government trainings and all that and there was enough of that that i told told tony thank you for the opportunity but i'm not going to go the wildlife biology route i'm going to go back to my roots what we're doing and spend more time at home with my wife and and now, you know, Everett was born in 2015, so one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. So I left that and started doing the training.
Right on, man. Right on.
Well, Jared, let's take a break. When we come back, let's get into trafficking stuff.
I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source.
It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world. And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter.
And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign super bad.
She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan Show. And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind-blowing.
And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to.
And here's the best part. The newsletter is actually free.
We're not going to spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows.
The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that. But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief.
Sign up. Links in the description or in the comments.
We'll see you in the newsletter. All right, jared we're back from the break we're getting ready to get into your non-profit but we had a pretty a we started a pretty interesting conversation downstairs about um about i had asked you if you were going to run for sheriff again and you had had mentioned, you had said, if God put it on your heart like he did the first time.
And then I kind of cut you off because I want to talk about this. When you say God put something on your heart or told you to do something or led you to a certain direction, I mean, what does that mean? How do you know it's God? Well, that is a great question.
How do you know it's God? One, in Proverbs, it tells us a man's path is before him, but the Lord directs his steps. We know that the Lord can only direct our steps if we are in him.
So the first thing is continuing that relationship with God. So I ask you in my heart to be my savior, right? But I spend time in his word every day.
I spend time praying every day. So for me, and I'll tell you the amount of scripture that I read daily, I write a commentary for each of my daughters each year.
So I'm on, well, I did one for my wife. I did one for my oldest daughter.
I'm on my middle daughter right now. I've been doing that for the last three years.
So I've read the entire Bible, a little more than the entire Bible, and wrote something on each chapter in the Bible. Like each chapter, I find something that stands out to me or I find a description.
So it might not be a commentary necessarily. It might just be something that stands out in my life.
How does this apply to me now? I've done that for the last three years. Now I've always read, generally speaking, read the Bible throughout the entire year.
Like read the whole Bible in a year ever since I was, heck, probably 14 years old. So I read a lot of scripture and I learn something new every time.
I don't know it more than anybody, but that's the first thing. God speaks to us through his word.
Going back to John chapter one, in the beginning was the word. The word is actually logos is the word that's used in the Greek translation, I believe.
And it means a couple of things, but the two primary focuses there is it's the written word of God. It's the plan of God.
And it's the spoken word of God. That's actually what it means.
So we have the written Word of God in the Holy Bible before us. And if you do a study on the Bible, you see everybody's like, oh, what about the translation and all these interpretations? No, it's actually pretty ducks nuts across the board.
You're losing me a little bit. Oh, sorry, sorry.
You're losing me a little bit. Just how do you know it's him? First, you stay in his word because you hear his voice there.
So when you hear his voice elsewhere, you know what it is. So my wife, give an example.
My wife doesn't have to say anything, but I know what she's saying to me. Does that make sense? Because I know her, because I'm with her all the time.
I know God's voice because I'm with him all the time. I read his word.
I pray to him, God, guide me in this way. Do this, do that.
Forgive me of my sins. I converse with God.
I read his word. I know what he sounds like.
And that's what's important. And we have it at our fingertips.
You have it on your phone in a Bible app. You have it on your Bible.
So what is the feeling? What is the feeling? Because I feel tugged into certain ways, too. I'm a believer.
I've not read the whole Bible. I don't know Scripture, but I do.
I feel like my faith is very strong. With that being said.
That's a great, that, what is the feeling? So, you know what I mean? I mean, I just, maybe I got a thought in my head to go pour a drink right now. Yeah.
It's not from God. I haven't drank in two years, two and a half years.
Does it align with his word? And the only way you know if it aligns with his word is if you read his word. So what does the Bible say? You just drink and you said pour a drink.
Proverbs 31, I believe it is. It might be Proverbs chapter 30.
The Proverbs woman is telling about it. And that woman was Solomon's mother, right? She's telling him what a good woman's like.
And he says, don't linger over wine, Solomon. Don't desire it for those who are hurt, for those who are perishing, for those who are anguishing so that they can forget their anguish.
The Bible tells us what wine is for. It also tells us on another end that a wine gladdens the heart and a feast gladdens the heart.
So we see wine for two different things. The scripture tells us that.
Paul says, don't be filled with, or don't be drunk with wine because they would drink to worship Dionysus, but don't be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. Why did Paul say that? Because what do we know wine does? What do we know alcohol or drink does? It alters our mind.
It alters our state, which is why a lot of guys, you see it in the teams. They're going away from drinking because it creates more issues than it helps because we're not in our right mind.
And that's what Paul's saying. Don't be drunk with wine because you don't even know what you're doing.
Be filled with the Holy Spirit and do the things of God. And it's not something that I can say, this is exactly what God sounds like.
But when you know him in your life, you see him in your life. And most of the time, it lines up with his words.
So I could sit here and say, God told me this, this, and this. And generally speaking, that's not God talking.
That's not God talking. If I'm telling you that God's something that God's telling me to tell you to do in your life,

God will speak directly to you. But the only way you hear it is in his word.
Otherwise,

everything else is confusion. Let me, hold on.
All right. Maybe that was a bad example.

Maybe I want a new car. Let me ask you this.

What was it, when you say that God put that on your heart or led the way or whatever to run for sheriff,

how did you know?

How did I know?

What was it?

So when I ran for sheriff.

Was it a feeling?

Was it a voice?

Was it a bunch of signs that all happened at once?

What was it?

I would say all of the above, and I'll try to tie it into Scripture.

I never would have run or been involved in any politics.

The Lord put that in my life.

He just kind of placed it in my life with a specific individual who said,

hey, have you ever considered this? And I laughed and I said, no. That stayed in my heart.
The Lord kept bringing it to my mind, the issues that we had, that I had with law enforcement leadership. Kept bringing it to my mind.
I read in Scripture how leaders, God places leaders. He stands them up and he tears them down.
And this was something I thought, man, this is the largest sheriff's office in the state. There's no way.
I have no way in to this. This is a big task.
And I keep reading scriptures on how he sets up things and he tears them down, sets up kingdoms and pulls them down. He can put whoever he wants into a position.
As I'm reading this, I thought, well, I complain about law enforcement leadership all the time. Lord, is this what you have for me to do?

So then I seek wise counsel. Scripture says that.
It says that we should seek wise counsel. My dad, some of the pastors at my church, guys, this is what I'm looking at.
This is what I think. What do y'all think? Because where I'm running at, I will probably lose.
It's a heavily Democrat county. It's an impossible task.
There's an incumbent Democrat in there. And it's going to take, according, I met with a previous sheriff who lost to the incumbent Democrat, the guy who's Republican for him.
He said, you're going to need at least half a million dollars. I got to come up with a half million dollars to run a county race that I might lose.
These are all things that we're seeing as to, that would turn you off. Does that make sense? I can't do this.
So as I wade through it, it stays on your heart. The Lord keeps it on your heart, whatever it is, you know, for each individual person.
And for me, it was, I can do this. I need to do something about it, even with people saying you can't.
And guess what? I still ran and I lost. And I told people that.
God hasn't called me to win. He's called me to run.
That's what I would tell people. He's called me to run for sheriff.
If I win, great. But if I don't win, he's called me to run.
I'm going to do this the best I can. We raised $600,000, just under $600,000 for that campaign.
That was one of the prayers and provisions I asked for. God, I don't know how to raise this campaign money.
I asked that you would help us raise it. We raised like $560,000 more than any other sheriff's race in the state.
And we raised it and campaigned well. People were like, holy cow, man, you're running a sheriff's race? This is like a Senate race.
It was just, I can't explain the provision of the Lord. So that's how I see him providing, and I know, okay, I'm responding to the appropriate call.
Oftentimes, if the provision stops, well, maybe God's not calling you to do it, right? It's the same thing he told the disciples. So you're being, you are being guided along the way.
Oh, 100%. You know, it's never hit these little milestones or accomplishments or whatever it may be that align with what you think the goal is.
That's why Proverbs says that a path is before a man and the Lord directs his steps, right? It's each step. Jesus says in his prayer, he says, give us this day our daily bread.
He doesn't say give us our weekly, monthly or yearly bread. We look at God in James chapter four, I believe it is.
It says, don't say we're going to go to this city and do trading and that, and we're going to make all this money and do it. He says, because you do that in your own arrogance, say, if the Lord wills it, this is what we'll do.
So it's always about God, this is what we need. He provides here.
Okay, God, this is what we need for the next step. And as long as the provision's there and you can keep stepping, that's the Lord directing your steps.
But at any point in time, if those steps stop, it doesn't mean that it's over. There might be some turmoil and some friction, but it means that we have to sit back and look, okay, God, is this what you actually have? And then once you reassess it, God will give you that answer.
And it's different for each person. God came to Saul, who became Paul in the New Testament, in a blinding light.
And Paul said, who are you, Lord? He says, I'm Jesus, the one you're persecuting. Why do you kick against the goads? Saul was killing Christians.
He's changed the name to Paul, and he goes and he talks, goes and spreads the gospel to the Gentiles.

God came to, who was it? He came into the whisper after, it was a whisper after the storm. I believe it was Elijah that he came to, or it might've been Elisha.
Just a small, calm whisper after the storm. He said, I saw the tornado.
I saw the whirlwind. I saw all this, and you weren't in it, but you were in the whisper after the storm.
It's that the call, the word from God is different for each individual. So for Sean Ryan, it's going to look different than it looks for Jared, but you're going to know it.
And one thing I always have told my wife, she goes, well, Jared, you say you know, how do you know that this is the voice of God? You know it. The question that we have in our heart most of the time is, are we disobedient to the call or are we obedient to the call? Because most of the time, the call is not something that we really want to do.
That's the hard part. Now, you just mentioned, hey, get a new car.
These are just the natural things in this life. Let me try to think of another example.
Okay, yeah, yeah. Let's say, those are things of vanity.
So let's say, man, this is tough. Well, they could be the things of vanity, but it's not that having a new car is bad.
I don't think God cares whether you have a new car or not. Are you gonna glorify him in that new car? And one thing that we know, it says this in, it might be Ecclesiastes, but it says, Lord, don't give me so much that I forget who you are and profane your name.
And don't give me so little that I have to steal to provide for myself and my family and profane your name. Give me what I need right now.
Most of the time when we have that sexy car, the vanity things, we forget God. We don't rely on him because we rely on these things that we have.
And that's almost a curse because it removes you from looking to the one who provided the car

as opposed to looking to the car. It talks about that in Isaiah.
It says that the man, he puts wood in a fire to burn the fire, cooks meal over it, and then he takes another piece of wood and he carves an image out of it and he worships it and says, you're my God. That's what he's talking about.

All right.

That's what we do.

Let's say you feel very compelled to help somebody. Maybe it's a lot of people feel tugged or pushed or moved to help somebody in need, or maybe somebody that they think might be in need.
And so I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that have been extremely generous and wanted to help maybe a heroin addict or maybe a trafficked woman or just anybody in need. And then you go down that road only to find out the entire thing was a fucking scam.
And so kind of what I'm asking is, and that's happened to me, that's happened, I'm sure that's happened to just about everybody. Where you, you know, it kicks up a lot of resentment and it's like, man, I thought this was what I was supposed to do.

So kind of what I'm asking is how do you differentiate or do you? I don't think you do. You don't differentiate because it's better to give than to receive.
So let's say it is a scam. That's between them and God, not between you and God.
If God called me to do this for a person, if I felt urged or pulled or in my riches and wealth, I give to somebody and I get scammed out of it, that sucks. And I want to look at that.
And maybe I'm wiser the next time. Again, I think I said it earlier, Proverbs 19, 2, zeal without knowledge because you missed the mark.
I say, man, I missed the mark on this one, but now I've got a little bit of knowledge on what to look for. And then the next time I don't miss it, but was I obedient to God? You see, the outcome of the thing is not so much the important thing.
That is on God. It's the heart getting to the outcome that's the process.
So going back to what you said earlier, so it's really just every step of the way, you're looking to say, God, is this it? God, is this it?

That's it.

You're always open-handed asking God,

God, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing?

And as long as he opens the doors,

as long as he's guiding you through it,

you will hear his voice.

The one caveat to that is you've gotta be in his word.

You gotta be spending time with him. The only example that I can use really,

you know your wife better than anybody, right?

You and your wife know each other very well.

And you kind of know what she wants

without her saying what she wants a lot of times.

And that only gets better with time, right?

Look at my parents, been married 50 years.

And it's hilarious seeing them

because they literally, they know each other that well. It's unbelievable to see.
Me and my wife, 16 years. I know what she wants without her having to say it a lot of times, and I don't always give it to her, right? Sometimes, and then sometimes she'll ask for things even though she doesn't want to ask for things.
I'm like, hey, help me out. Tell me what you need.
It's that same thing with God, but you have to be in tune with God like you are with your wife. And the only way you can be is to read his word and pray to him about his word.
And I can't even describe it. He will guide you.
So if I'm saying, so the run for sheriff, he put some people in my life that spoke it into existence. I sought good counsel.
Like when I say spoke it into existence, that's a bad, I shouldn't use that. That's bad phraseology.
They just said, hey, have you considered this? We could use you here. No, I haven't, but I started considering it and praying about it.
The Lord opened one door, go to this threshold and say, hey, I'm looking at running for sheriff. What do y'all think? These guys are praying.
And it just kept steamrolling to the point that, wow, we've got a campaign for sheriff. Wow, we've got a heck of a team.
Wow, we're going to win this thing. I mean, that's what it was.
And I lost by two points to the incumbent Democrat on election day. And that was hard.
Okay, God, what was all this for? My wife was asking, what was all this for?

And two months later, all the people that supported the campaign started supporting Covenant Rescue Group, the nonprofit, which is what brought me on full-time with Covenant Rescue Group.

And so now I know what that was for because it was a local grassroots effort.

It wasn't tied to PACs or certain political things. I did really well in the republican party because i was running as a republican candidate and made a lot of connections that actually put covenant rescue group on the map as opposed to being a small hand-to-mouth organization put us on the map to the point that they had to bring me and a handful of other guys in full time to be able to effectively use the funds for the work it was being presented for.
And so the aim I had was sheriff, but that's not the aim God had.

God had to put Covenant Rescue Group on me, and God might have it for something else. I don't know.

He might have that unsuccessful campaign for something else. I was just the conduit through

which that was used to grow Covenant Rescue Group.

And so that's, you always see the culmination.

And it's, I wouldn't get too wrapped around the axle

about simple things, you know, should I buy this car?

Should we buy this house?

Those were bad examples.

Yeah, if God's giving you the funds,

but even people out there will say that.

Me and my wife, we pray about everything.

There's nothing wrong with praying about everything, but if you got the money, get it. There's nothing wrong with it.
But if it starts to remove your heart from the God you worship, if you start to worship it like the guy worships the idol, the piece of wood that he cut into an idol, that's where you have to say, no, I don't need this anymore. And that's kind of the purpose behind that.
That's why the scripture is saying. So when you hear the call of God,

it's not always a loud voice.

To some people, it is.

It's not always a dream.

To some people, it is.

It's not always the small, calm voice at the back end of the storm,

but to some people, it is.

Interesting.

It just depends on how God's calling you.

It depends on what you need.

But the only way you know it's his voice

is if you're in his word. You've got to stay in the Word of God.
So how did Covenant Rescue Group come up? That was because you and your wife started that. Me and my wife started it in 2018.
So I was doing the wildlife work at the time, transitioning to the tactical work with TSI, you know, when I had some contracts with the government coming in. And we were doing pretty good.
And so we would take our, you know, whatever profit we had at the end of the year and use it to go like support OUR. I'd go do operations with Operation Underground Railroad guys, went to Haiti with them some.
Far-reaching ministries, did some stuff with them in South Sudan. And so, I mean, we're just trying to support wherever we could.
Another organization that's no longer around called Orphans Secure, started doing some stuff with them and just volunteering time, you know, and trying to pay for things. And then they would pay for some stuff.
Everything was just kind of hodgepodge together. Just felt a call to human trafficking because I'd kind of seen it in law enforcement a little bit and got involved there.
What was your first experience with human trafficking? My first, I would say probably real human trafficking, Haiti with Operation Underground Railroad was my first real experience with human trafficking. I saw it really what we target more as a law enforcement officer running domestics where you see some of the stuff people live in or serving warrants where you see some of the areas people live in and you see these kids living in unbelievable squalor, but their parents, drug addicts or whatever, would sell their kids.

They would physically and sexually abuse their kids.

I mean, it's terrible.

That is human trafficking by law, but in my mind, I didn't know that to be human trafficking until now, understanding what it actually is. But they would sell their kids.
I mean, they would sell their kids to their buddy for sex for, you know, 200 bucks. That's the type of people we're talking about.
And you see that in law enforcement. Cops that are listening to this, they will tell you, yeah, they see it all the time, all over the nation.
How common is this? Oh, it's super common. Wherever you go, it's super common.
Kids selling themselves, people selling themselves. And a lot of it's drug and alcohol related.
I mean, we know that. We see that being an issue.
But, yeah, it's very common. It's very common.
So that's where I really started seeing it. I had a heart for it.
And I would say Operation Underground Railroad in Haiti is where I first saw, like, holy crap, this is legit. These girls are being held against their will.
They're holding their passports. They're from Dominican Republic.
And, you know, I did some work with them. So people were just giving us money.
Like people that, you know, wound up supporting my campaign later. They're like, hey, you're doing good work.
And they would, you know, from church or, you know, that I knew they're writing us like five and $10,000 checks. And so you were sitting with me and my wife, like took it to my CPA.
What do we do with this money? I mean, do I give them an invoice from the shooting institute? Or how does this work? He's like, no, you need to start a, you need to start a family foundation, a nonprofit or something. So that's where we looked at a couple different routes.
We started the nonprofit Covenant Rescue Group, got our 501c3 status in 2019, and we're off to the races primarily looking at overseas stuff. And then when COVID— Why? Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I don't want to come across like there's something wrong with that.

But one thing that does kind of captivate my interest is, you know,

I've looked at a lot of these nonprofits, and I do want to say, too,

it gets tricky in this, probably, it gets tricky in any nonprofit space,

but there does seem to be a lot of, I'm just going to say it, shit organizations out there that are in the combating human trafficking space that don't really do anything. And that seems to be kind of a mask.
But why are so many of these nonprofits, why are they so concentrated on Haiti, Philippines, Thailand, Colombia, Venezuela, Sudan, all these places, but not here in the U.S.? Because it's easy to find there because of prostitution. Remember when I said that all prostitution is not human trafficking, but human trafficking is found in prostitution? So they're able to go to places, and a lot of times you get symbolism without substance.
You get, hey, we're fighting human trafficking here, and really it's prostitution. You see that here.
Law enforcement agencies do that. Hey, human trafficking ring, you know, 72 human traffickers rolled up.
That's a prostitution sting. And it's not human trafficking as we know it.
And we kind of talked about that a little bit earlier, kind of some of the issues that exist there. When you go overseas, you have more leeway to work than you do here stateside because most of what organizations do stateside is illegal.
The vigilante stuff, all that is illegal. So that's why you see that.
And there's a lot of awareness stuff that people raise a lot of awareness about. I think a lot of people are aware about it.
We just don't, nobody knows exactly what it is. Do you have people being strong-armed? Yes.
Do you have kids being stolen off the streets? Yes. The immigrant situation really adds more to that.
The illegal immigrant situation puts more people at risk for that. But other than that, you're not at risk of your kids being snatched and thrown into a human trafficking circle and never being found again.
It does happen, but it's unbelievably rare. But the statistic, and these are from the DOJ, the American Psychiatric Association.
They kind of coalesce and have a few statistics. I'll see if Stephen can send them over to you so you have them.
But the amount of kids, I'm going to dial it in here to kids specifically. The amount of kids, if I remember right, it's 37% of children who are abused, sexually abused, or anything like that.
It is from somebody who is known. Close to them.
Yeah, yeah. They know that person.
No, no, no. 37% is family.
37% is family. 50% is somebody who knows them, a coach, a teacher, anything like that.
37% is a family member. So an uncle, a cousin, a father, a mother, whoever.
And then that other 10 or 12%, 13%, whatever's left is just a random person. I'll send you the actual statistics.
I'm probably a little bit off on my numbers there. I'm just going off of memory.
But that is very interesting because when it's family-based or when it's a person of trust, somebody who knows the kid, it looks different. It's reported differently.
Maybe it's never reported. How many of these things are never reported? And then you see that lead into the prostitution, the pornography, all of that.
Man, I'll tell you, Jared, ever since I started doing this show, and just, I mean, life stories is what I'm best at, I think. And the amount of, especially guys like you and I, who've gone to special operations or the agency or wherever, I'll bet it's over 50% of them that I've interviewed that have dealt with some type of sexual trauma as a child, abuse.
and I'll bet it's 50 that have come out and said that while on camera about their childhood yeah and then there's also a pretty big portion of the interviews where they've they've told me like hey i don't i don't want to talk about this because it's been rectified i've forgiven my dad or my grandpa or whoever it was and so they don't want to talk about this because it's been rectified. I've forgiven my dad or my grandpa or whoever it was.
And so they don't want to. And these are men.
These are grown men who talk about this. And, I mean, shit, the episode we just did on Monday with Dale Stark.
He talks about it, you know. Growing up in California and getting on the skateboard scene.
And so many men have come on here, and women. Yeah.
You know me, Park. You brought that up.
But it's alarming how it seems to be more common than not. It is, and that's what we've learned, and that percentage is higher.
And then what that drives people toward, and what that does to them for the rest of their life, you're looking at something that, I mean, how do you reset from that? My dad, again, the little girl that we found, her dad was 18 months old. Her dad's having sex with her.
She's not old enough to necessarily know, but she knows i mean that's there's something that happens there for the rest of that person's life and can you can they work through it and deal with it yeah but it's it is more common than not and i don't know that i don't know that we're seeing any more we're seeing it more now than probably it used to be seen but i think it's probably the same amount right yeah? Yeah. It's the same problem, different people.
But looking at the kids, it is people that know them. So that looks different.
So I would say here stateside, we really didn't start getting into that. We focused on overseas initially, like everybody does, because it's easy, it's easy again.
And when COVID happened, you're talking about the call of the Lord. We as an organization, I set the board down and said, we're not going to be able to go overseas like we were because of COVID.
Like literally shut that down, like just close the doors on it. However, I'm still law enforcement.
We're tied to law enforcement. Me and Mike and some of the team, we're going to go out and see if we can't start doing some operations with local law enforcement agencies.
And that was a hard swing because there's a mass of arrogance within law enforcement. They don't want to do that.
So how we hooked it, we offered free tactical training on the front end, free pistol training, the nonprofit covered through TSI, my company. Pistol, CQB, whatever it is, we'll give you one day of free tactical training.
But here's a trade-off. We've got to be able to do our sex trafficking operations program training with y'all and set up an op and make y'all run it.
And that's how we started doing that. So that was the Lord.
How hard was that to sell? Not hard with the tactical training. And then it was about a year worth of that.
So you, your model, you gift a law enforcement agency a training, a one-day training package, and the only thing they have to do in return is give you access to? Let us do the child exploitation training. Yep, their jurisdiction.
We do the child exploitation training with them, and we're not making arrests or prosecutions. We bring the prosecutor's office in and we say, guys, this is how you set up these types of ops.
We help them set up that op, and they run that op with our oversight. It's like a ground branch type of model where you got, where we just- That's what you were doing at VSO operations.
That's exactly, VSO stuff, great. Combat advisor.
That's exactly right. And so that's what we do.
That's what we still do. Fucking genius, man.
So you get in, you make friends with them, and then you teach them, you take them on an op, you turn it over, this is how you do it. That's it.
And so one of the agencies we first started with, we made 11 arrests with them initially when we were there. No, no, no, that's not true.
We made 19 arrests with this agency initially when we were there. They're making it over two nights of operations.
We gave them the tactical training and all that.

And they have done, I want to say,

six operations on their own now.

Maybe it's four.

This is a couple of years ago.

But they've arrested like 190 people

doing these operations.

190?

Yeah, yeah.

Just one?

Just under 200.

Well, no, but over all of the operations

they've done over the past few years.

So this is one law enforcement agency. One law enforcement agency.
190. Yep, close to Indianapolis.
So with that being said, put it this way, I'd love for them to be over 200. I know they're under 200, right? That's still a lot of people.
They've done five operations, and they've made this many arrests on people showing up to target kids and they've honed it for them. So we give them a, hey, this is your template and then they can hone it to match their prosecutorial jurisdiction to match their agency so they have a successful apprehension and prosecution.
And that's what we do as an organization. We're not out there kicking doors and making arrests.
If we are doing that, I'm doing that in my purview as a deputy where I'm sworn in Alabama or as a TFO with Homeland Security, if they say, hey, we've got this we wanna do, or any of our guys that run their cases that are sworn within our organization, which are most of our guys. So we might do that with our agency, but Covenant Rescue Group is a funding platform to fund this training and then an operation for a law enforcement agency to show them this is how you can target people who are targeting kids in your community, and it happens in every community.
We always get, buddy of mine's a sheriff down in South Alabama, said, hey man, you'll be lucky to get one down here, but you wanna offer a SWAT training to us? We'll do it and let you set it up, but I don't think you're going to have any success. We arrested six in two nights with him.
He was blown away. They had one hotel and it was like a little meth monkey hotel.
It was one of the ones, a motel with the outside doors. It wasn't like it was a nice upscale place.
And we arrested six dudes showing up for children at that hotel. You were the one that said that you didn't think you were going to pick anybody up or the sheriff? The sheriff told me that.
I'm friends with the sheriff. Why didn't you think that? Because people don't believe this exists when they're a community.
Everybody thinks, oh yeah, that's big. That's a problem in Miami or that's a problem in LA with the ditty parties and all that stuff.
That's where everybody's mind goes. But what they don't realize is what you just said, 50% of the dudes that you had come here, sit and talk.
It happens everywhere across the nation. And the guys that you're rolling and the ladies that you're rolling on these types of decoy operations, they have real victims.
They have real victims, but most of them don't break the law to get caught for anything. You'll never find that kid who's a victim because what recourse they have.
This is my dad. Are you going to go to the cops and tell them my dad? They don't, again, they're a kid.
This is a person of trust in their life. It's a guardian over them, right? And so this guardian is doing a terrible job and they're abusing this child.
They're exploiting this child. They might be selling the child.
A lot of it's child porn production, yada, yada, yada. But you have to find a way to catch them and this is how you catch them.
And when you make that arrest, you then find the victim. And I can't tell you how many phones.
We've gotten warrants and ripped the data off the phone, and you've already had a podcast about that, kind of how to find these guys and all of the stuff that they're into. And you will find victims every single time.
And our goal is to teach law enforcement agencies how to target these individuals who are targeting kids. So they're showing up for a 14-year-old girl, but in reality, they're messing with their nine-year-old niece.
Does that make sense? And that's what we do, and that's what it's morphed into. Going all the way back to the- Let me break it down a little bit more.
So I want to backtrack and talk about how you found those six individuals. But before that, what I want to ask is, you know, you're talking about finding victims and these victims don't want to come out.
And you're talking about little kids who consider the abuser to be their trusted guardian. Yeah.
And so what I want to kind of, where I think you might be going with this is, you know, people are probably wondering, well, why wouldn't they want to dime their dad out, even if he is their dad, because he's being raped? Right. But, you know, what I want to say is these kids don't understand.
Look, this is normal, everyday life to them. They don't know any different.
They don't know what life would be like to not be raped by their dad every day, multiple times a day. They have no idea what that's like.
That's just their reality. Am I correct? Yeah.
I mean, no, that's it. They've accepted that this is just, this is life.
They don't have any other perspective other than just what they've lived. From what I've gathered, you just hit the nail on the head.
And you've interviewed guys. I mean, how many guys have you interviewed on here where this is them telling you what they've gone through and you said some of them don't want to say it? Probably the first time they've talked about it with anybody, maybe outside of their wife.
Maybe they talked about it with their wife. Maybe they didn't.
But I mean, it's not something that people, yeah, we can just make it better by diming them out and now I'm rescued. No.
And then the other problem is, is kids are scared. Even if I'm being treated poorly by those who are taking care of me, where do I go when they go to jail? Let's say they do realize that this is something wrong.
They get put in jail for it. Where do I go now when they go to the state, most state systems have a DHR or something like that.
And there's a process you have to go through. So it's not like a rescue where like you're all of a sudden united with a great family.
There is no good answer. That's not like a fairy tale.
It's not a Disney movie where it's all of a sudden better at the end. Every situation when it comes to this is bad.
And sometimes it's worse than the previous situation. A real world example, a young lady, I won't give her name.
She was 14 when she ran away from home. 15 when she was picked up.
16 when we found her locked in a cage in a backyard up in the northern U.S. We'll leave it with.
But she ran away from home from her mama and her stepdaddy because she was being sexually abused by her stepdaddy. I'm trying to remember this right.
Sexually abused by her stepdaddy. Her mama was in and out of jail in Texas.
She ran away, ran back to Michigan, and she lived with her dad and her brother. She wasn't being sexually abused by her dad and brother, but they were physically abusing her, putting cigarettes out on her, that sort of stuff, physical abuse.
So she ran away from them and got picked up by some 23-year-old kid slinging dope on the street. And so he picked her up.
Now she's his live-in girlfriend. He's banging her, all that stuff.
And then he would sell her to his buddies. Now, she's being trafficked.
She's underage and being trafficked. But for her, this was the better of the three lives she lived.
So that's the hard part. And then when we found her, she was locked in a cage in the backyard.
Went and talked in any way. Without going too much into that, she's— From her boyfriend? Yeah, her boyfriend.
He would leave during the day. He locked her in a cage in the back.
Yeah, we had a little marijuana going on back there. Yeah, yeah.
Wait, did you say what kind of cage? A cage. Locked in a cage.
Yeah, like a chicken coop or something. I mean, she could stand up in it, you know, but it's like a— We had a little marijuana grow hidden back there in the fence in the back and she was locked back there.
And now she was a runaway. So technically she wasn't like, and we had to tell some of our board members that, like, can we get videos of her reuniting with the family and all that? There is no reuniting with the family.
That's why she's here. And that's where that percentage comes in that most people don't understand is it stems from a family issue.
And then there's a lack of trust for law enforcement and it going all the way back to having to have somebody testify for a crime. Well, most of these people, especially kids or young women, they're scared to testify because, well, this guy's going to get out on bail.
He's going to get out and he's going to come find me and kill me, even though that might not be true. We get that all the time interviewing people.
I don't want to testify. So we have a good system, but we have a system that sometimes is not good when it comes to dealing with these things, and it's very precarious, but you hit the nail on the head with it's not as easy as, oh, yeah, if your dad's raping you, just turn him in.
If your mom and dad's selling you, if your uncle's selling you to his buddies for sex, just turn him in. It's not that easy.
Man, yeah, I think a lot of these kids, they don't even realize what happened to them is wrong until long after it's happened oh for sure and uh well you know that better than anybody i mean you've interviewed you interview enough people to talk with them and see when hindsight's 2020 and they might be able to talk about what they realize it's kind of like us with afghanistan and iraq and all this stuff we're ready to fist fight somebody over talking bad about the U.S. and what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan back when I was in the teams.
Yeah. But now I'm more apt to sit.
Yeah, it's a different perspective. It's the same thing with these people, just on a much more damaging level, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened to that girl in Michigan? How's she doing? Man, I had no idea.
So, the state, so most states, if they have a missing kid or something like that, a runaway kid, and that's how we found her, they would work in one of the sheriff's offices up there. The state, like DHR, Child Protection Services, they'll take over.
They'll find a next of kin or they'll hold them in it. Again, sometimes that creates more of a problem than just where they're at even.
Damn. So, I mean, it's, again, there's no good answer.
So, her, I know that DHR, Child Protection Service, whatever it's called in that state or in that county, I know that they dealt with that. What the disposition of that was, was i don't know let's go back to the town where you the sheriff didn't think he was yeah yeah i don't even got six yeah walk us through exactly that entire operation how did you how did you i mean we're in a we're in a is this a town is this like a small town oh yeah it's small it's uh henry county's Henry County, Alabama.
So it's a small county. So it's a small town.
Nobody thinks this is happening there. How do you, like, you come in, you give a training course.
Then what? So I've known this sheriff. This guy just got elected sheriff.
I've known him for a while, and he's a good guy. His name is Eric Blankenship.
But anyway, so EB says, hey, dude, let's do the tactical training, but I don't think you're going to get to hook anybody. I said, well, just let us teach you the process, and we'll get what we get.
This is not a prostitution sting. Law enforcement commonly does prostitution stings, and the reason they do that is because prostitution across the nation is a misdemeanor crime, but that gives them their probable cause for hopefully a felony drug arrest, maybe finding a certain person's forbidden or a warrant.
So they're looking at a pretty shoddy, pretty shaky misdemeanor case, although they've got it, to hopefully lead to a bigger case. Does that make sense? That's why they do prostitution stings.
And then sometimes they find human trafficking in prostitution. We don't like that.
We like building a felony case on the front end to hopefully find victims, whether they're of age or underage, of real human trafficking. And so we show them how to do that.
And we say, this is not a prostitution sting. We don't care about drugs.
We're not looking for drugs or murder or warrants or any of those things. If we find them, great.

We still move forward with them like we normally would.

But this is our focus,

and it's solicitation of a minor with an electronic device.

And I'll give you this county in Alabama

for the Alabama state law.

It'll be 13A6122, 13A6124,

solicitation of a minor and travel to meet a minor

for sexual purposes,

because they're gonna show up to the location. And then 13A6153, I believe it is, which is human trafficking one attempt in the state of Alabama.
It meets state law for human trafficking one attempt. Those are the three felony charges we're looking for.
The last one that we might get is 13A6111, which is transmitting obscene material to a minor. That's like if somebody sends a nude picture of themselves or sending those bad images to a minor, right? And these guys reach out to us.
So we start off with a decoy-based operation on a sex platform. Let's use it, Backpage used to be the big thing.
I'll just say Back. You remember when Backpage, you've ever heard of the feds? Shut it down.
But you can run ads on a bunch of different things. I won't name the places that we run ads normally, but you go to one of these sex sites like Backpage and you run an ad that says, hey, it's a girl, it's 19 years old.
And these sites, by the way, they allow us with our law enforcement email to run these ads without getting kicked off. what we'll do is we'll have somebody reach out, hey, are you available for a QV for a quick visit and or how much for a quick visit? And so we have our law enforcement investigator that we're teaching how to chat, teaching the lingo, and we're just kind of over their shoulder.
Hey, you need to say this, or maybe we're on the phone with them showing them what to say and send it back. Yeah, are you cool with young chicks? They're going through the process because we have to establish an age.
We're already on a sex site, so we know what they're there for, and we have to establish an age. If we chat 1,000 people, I like using the 1,000 people as an example.
If we chat 1,000 people, 900 of them won't answer you back when you tell them that you're underage or you're young, if you tell them you're 15 or 14 or 13, whatever age that the prosecutor requires in the area we're in, because it's different, not just per state, per county, per jurisdiction. So most of the time, 900 of those 1,000 people won't even respond.
Or they'll tell you to pound sand. Let's say, you don't need to be doing this, and they won't answer back.
A hundred of those people will entertain it. They'll entertain it.
So 10% will converse back and forth, entertain. They might say, you don't need to be doing this.
Let's talk. But still, they're entertaining it.
10 of those thousand will show up to the door, will show up and buy again. Those are the ones we're

looking for because now they've committed the overt act. And now we've got a solid airtight case that they can't wiggle out of.
They're going to get prosecuted. So we have the apprehension when they show up and we have the prosecution.
We also do mobile stings. We do vehicle takedowns, but they're still showing up to meet us in a vehicle.
And that is how we target these specific individuals. Now, when you target that specific individual, our probable cause case is generally built off of messaging through a phone or whatever messaging platform.
So, we have to tie those messages together. That's easy.
We have that. But when we do that, we get a warrant to rip the data off the phone.
Now, you're familiar with that with your work with the agency and all that stuff. So we will rip the data off the phone via warrant, sometimes via consent, but very rarely do we get that.
Most of the time, it's a warrant based on our probable cause arrest. And we rip the data on the phone.
That's where you find the victims. You find other people they're messaging.
You find other kids that they either receive child porn. So you see child porn distribution, child porn production and distribution, and you start finding other victims.
And that's where you find individuals who are truly nefarious. And then also not just kids, but also women.
We had a guy who was rolled, he had a woman locked in a trailer that he was performing sex acts on. She was an illegal immigrant.
And he would snatch her, lock her up for three days, do all kinds of stuff and release her. And then it just kind of intermittent would do this.
And she had no recourse. She was afraid to go to the police.
She was in her 30s. Why was she afraid to go to the police? Well, she thought she'd be deported, right? So that's real victims.
Those are real trafficked people, people who were suffering. Now, she wasn't stolen and put in a circle and sold all over.
She would be released a couple of days later, go back to her family. But this is what was happening to her because she had no recourse.
So you find victims in this. Now, the rescue doesn't always look what we think it looks like.
That woman was just like, thank you so much. I can breathe now and go back to my normal life without this guy doing it, doing this stuff to me.
The other thing we see is a lot of illegal immigrants. If we did, we arrested seven last week with a couple of agencies and three of the seven were illegal immigrants.
So they'll be deported. We've seen that tick up even more and more.
The six that I was talking about down in Henry County a couple of years ago when the sheriff said, you won't get anybody, two of those were illegal immigrants. One, we did a pretty extensive interview with, I say we, the Homeland Security guy in charge that did an extensive interview with.
And one of the interesting things that the guy said, he said, hey, I can show you exactly where I crossed the border. I crossed with some really bad people.

We're like, what do you mean really bad people?

And so he started, he said, all men describing who they are. I mean, we have terrorist cells in this country that are crossing the border.
So there's some of that stuff that you're able to dig deeper into and that then the FBI or Homeland Security, whoever, will get a hold of and be able to run that in a little bit deeper. So these operations are kind of a, they span out into multiple things where it might be child exploitation.
It might be prostitution-based human trafficking. It might be, it might go to labor trafficking.
It might go to a terrorist cell that is moving people across the border or a terrorist cell that got moved across the border. So it might just be strict illegal immigration and we now can deport somebody.
So it kind of flowers off into a bunch of different petals, child porn production and distribution. And so that's why we like running these operations, because generally speaking, when they see it, they're easy to do, and it gives the law enforcement agency the most bang for their buck there at the local level.
The feds then have the ability to adopt that case. And whatever state you work in, the U.S.
Attorney's Office generally wants to adopt a solid state case. So if you have a solid state case, they'll look at it and say, do we have a federal nexus here? We have a federal nexus with this one because we've got child porn production and distribution with this guy and his 18-month-old daughter.
And then the feds will step in and they'll be able to levy some heavy charges, prosecution and sentencing on that end to coincide with what this guy's already getting at the state level. Because every state doesn't have that same heavy lever to pull when it comes to maybe child porn distribution.
So the reason I say all that, that's how everything works together. It's not always perfect, but the goal is to just target these individuals who are targeting

people. So the reason I say all that, that's how everything works together.
It's not always perfect, but the goal is to just target these individuals who are targeting kids.

And generally speaking, when you find that, you find they have other victims, other people they're targeting.

Damn, so just webs and webs and webs.

Yep, a never-ending web is what it feels like a lot of times.

Damn, damn.

What are some of the commonalities you see in the victims? Women. All women.
I would say that the biggest demographic that's targeted is women. And then if it's never grown men are targeted, boys are targeted, but women more so than anything.
DOJ and American Psychiatric Association's statistic on this end is for every male-female encounter, opposite-sex encounter, primarily male to female, there are 50 victims before the perpetrator's prosecuted. 50? 50 victims, yeah.
That's the statistic. I think they said plus or minus 10% in their study, and this study's like 15 years old.
For every same-sex or primarily male to male, it's 150 victims plus or minus 10% before the perpetrator is prosecuted. So you might get an apprehension.
You might actually make an arrest, but if you don't have a prosecution, you've done nothing. It's symbolism without substance.
And that's what they're saying. This guy might've been arrested for it, but the 50 victims come before prosecution.
The 150 victims come before prosecution, not before arrest.

They will still have victims even after they're arrested.

Shit.

Damn, man.

Damn.

Is there more adult women

or more minors?

Well, I would tell you

on these style of operations,

the only way we get

the felony charges on the front end, which is what we want, is to build a case based on minors. With that being said, man, it's probably on the victim side.
I would have to talk to our victim advocate about this because she tracks with us probably more than I do. But I would say it's pretty 70-ish percent minor.
So it's heavy minor, but I mean, you still got 30%. 70% minor? Probably when you see victims, yeah.
I would say the vast majority are minors. Again, because they're not going to talk.
A grown woman's more apt and more liable to say something or talk than a kid is. But a kid generally is not going to say anything, especially if they trust this person.
And we see it with coaches. When we see coaches, pastors, doctors, it doesn't matter any side of the aisle, Republican, Democrat, left, right, doesn't really matter.
It is sin. It is unbelievable wickedness, and they are targeting the weakest in society.
The most prolific, I guess would be the word, I forget his name, but one of the most prolific child predators in the U.S., I think he was out of Indiana, they asked him, they said, what do you look at when you target a kid? Is there a demographic? Is there a boy or girl? And I think he concentrated more on boys. I think he primarily a white demographic because where he was at in Indiana.
But he didn't seem to see, he said that that really wasn't what he looked at. He looked at two things.
One, does this kid have a father? Where was the father at in this kid's life? And was the father a threat? Two things he looked at. One, does this kid have a dad? That's round.
Two, is the dad a threat? That blew my mind. I'll send you the video link or I'll get Stephen to send it over so you can see it.
Was the father a threat? And it's like, holy crap, be a threat for your kid's sake. Now, everybody talks about the mama bear thing.
Hey, don't go, and mamas will protect their babies,

but this is what he said.

They said, what about a single?

I said, no father, what about moms?

He said, no.

He said, I would befriend the mother.

And he would be that guy who was, hey, look, it's,

you're doing great.

And he said, I just really try to be involved in their life.

If she had a kid I wanted to target.

And then once I built that rapport with a mom,

hey, look, go out, go to dinner, go spend some time on your out, I'll stay with kids tonight. And that's how we would groom kids.
Wow. So it was truly a father that he would try to, or that he would look at that would ward him off, for lack of a better word.
Now imagine if that father that's supposed to be warding people off is the one who's actually doing this to their kid. How many of these victims are molested or raped or exploited by, how do I say this, the, what do you call them, the abuser? Yeah, the perpetrator, the abuser.
Perpetrator. How many of these people would you consider, at first glance, you'd mention doctors, pastors, coaches, teachers.
How many of these perpetrators are what most people would consider upstanding citizens? I would say about 80% of them. Are you serious? That's the whole reason they don't get caught and they're not targeted is because you're generally speaking not going to catch them doing something with drugs or getting rolled for drugs.
You might get the guy who shows up to pay with drugs. You will get those people.
But generally speaking, this is the only thing they're doing that's outside the law. and nothing within law enforcement is targeting these specific people unless of course you get a tip

or unless of course they find them on some digital platform going after kids, which is – that's hard to do, and it's few and far between. These are individuals who are not, generally speaking, breaking law.
We will get gang members showing up looking to steal a girl and take back – and that's a process. I'm not saying we don't get that, but I would say about 80%.
Yeah, about 80% are just regular, everyday folks that you would never, never guess. We are seeing that shift and change because of the illegal immigration thing, right? So we don't know much about these illegal immigrants.
We don't know their background, where they come from. We know they're here working.
They might be here working, but we don't have a lot of information on that individual. But the ones that we do have information on, about 80% are regular folks.
What about some of these DAs that don't prosecute criminals? I mean, are you guys running into problems where you put in all this work and then you have like a Soros-funded DA that's not gonna do anything to these? Yeah, no, so for us, because we work closely with a prosecutor's office most of the time, we bring the prosecutor's office in because again, we need an apprehension and a prosecution. We haven't had too many issues.
We've had some issues, but most of the issues we see wind up existing between the current law enforcement agency that we're working with and the prosecutor that we're working. They haven't.
They haven't a rub or a rift for whatever reason. It's never because they don't want to prosecute it.
That's one thing I have seen is that across the aisle, for the most part, Republican, Democrat, whatever it is, when you are actively going after those individuals who are targeting kids, most everybody that we've worked with has been all for it. If we have an issue, a lot of times it's been more so on the law enforcement agency side, not always, but on the law enforcement agency side over the prosecution side.
And again, there's an egocentric thing there for most law enforcement agencies. They want to say, we're doing this.
They want to say, oh yeah, yeah, we're doing this. We're doing it.
No, you're not. We know you're not because we literally go all over the nation and we see people tell us all the time, hey, we're doing this and we show them what we're doing.
Like, holy crap, we're not doing that at all. So that's probably where we run more into an issue.
But once we make the case and we get an arrest and a prosecution, it pretty much goes straight forward pretty easy. Defense attorneys will molest a case now.
Defense attorneys will, they will really negatively impact a case and try to get anything thrown out for any reason whatsoever. And I do struggle with the profession of attorneys.
You know, I mean, I struggle with that. Defense attorneys will grab anybody, they'll charge these guys, whatever they're charging, make a lot of money, and they will try to poke holes in a case.
And our goal as an organization is to train the law enforcement agency and the apprehension side, the cops or the sheriff's deputies or whatever, and the prosecution side, the district attorney's office. Hey, this is how you make a rock solid case.
So it doesn't matter how many rocks they throw at it. They're never going to break the glass.
They're going to poke a hole in it. You've got a solid case.
Do you see more success when the federal government steps in or local? No, local. So think of it this way.
The federal government, a government period is not good at much of anything, right? We know that because we work for the government. That being said, they do serve a purpose and they serve the purpose of hopefully on the criminal side, protecting victims and putting away the criminal without reigning on our God-given rights that come through ultimately the Bill of Rights.
We'll make this succinct in just a second. The federal government is a macro sort of thing.
Then you have a state government, which is kind of a 30,000 foot view, a little bit smaller than the federal government, but now it's a little bit smaller. And then the federal government can't do what the state laws can do, right? So they have to have, and that is very broad, and it's very difficult on how broad it is.
The state is now still pretty broad, but we're getting a little more pinpointed and focused for that specific targeted shot. But the local agency, that local prosecutor's office, that local municipality or sheriff's office, they're the ones that know the nuances of their community so that not only when we make this arrest, we get this individual showing up to buy a kid, the prosecution knows what we need to say in the chat, what the age of the victim needs to be, all of this stuff to successfully prosecute the case.
I'll give you a real world example real quick, but I won't name the locations. We had a location or two separate locations, two hours apart from each other, the same state.
So the same state law governs these two locations. One location, the prosecutor says, I have an older black female demographic than I'm going to get for a jury pool.
He said, even though these women vote Democrat, they are unbelievably conservative, the older black female demographic. And they will not.
They do not care. If we chat as a 15-year-old girl, even though that makes state law, right? If we chat as a 15-year-old girl, they're going to have a hung jury.
They're not going to true bill this thing. They're not going to all be unanimous on, yep, this crime was committed.
We need to move on. We're going to have to at least be 14-year-old.
Okay, so we changed how we chat. Even though we met state law at 15, because of the jury pool that this prosecutor said he was going to have, we had to change it.
He said, now, if you chat as a boy, he could be 22 years old. Well, that's not within state law to do it, but he said he'd be 22 years old because it's a more conservative group of women, that older black female demographic.
They're going to throw this guy under the jail because it was outside the realm of what they agreed with morally. They're Christian women, churchgoers.
The homosexuality was the unforgivable sin to them. Most of them were married when they were 15, so they were not going to roll a guy for trying to have sex with a 15-year-old girl.
So we see that two hours away. I'm talking, this was, and I love this example because it's a real example.
That's the most important that I had to deal with at the prosecutor's office.

Two hours away, the jury pool was a predominantly white female jury pool, middle-aged, like 40s to 50s age range female. That was the predominant jury pool.
So they look at that. and if you chatted as a 18 year old girl throw that guy under the jail if he's showing it by her

because it's that Me Too movement that, you know, they're more liberal, they're more left-leaning, they're every female's a victim sort of idea, right? This guy's shown up by a female, throw him under the jail. But if it was a guy showing up for a 15-year-old boy, they still might say, yeah, he's showing up for a kid, but they were more sympathetic to the homosexual man because they were more left-leaning.
No shit. So just because we match state law doesn't mean that we can get something because we've got to prosecute.
This person's going to go before a jury of their peers, right? So when I get subpoenaed to testify in a grand jury, when I go to grand jury in states that have that,

I have to tell them what we're doing.

Well, that jury has to say, yeah, this guy's committed a crime here. We've got to be able to put them away, and you've got to have 100% on that.
You can't be hung. So it's not just meeting the law.
It's not just, hey, we got the law. It is, do we have a case that's going to stand up in front of a jury? And that's our constitution, which is great.
We're just building these cases so there's never a victim because we've seen that with real victims of human trafficking. They don't want to go before, and they don't want to testify before a jury or stand in front of their accuser.
So do you get all these statistics and demographics of the jury and meet with the DA before you set up shop? Yeah, before we do the operation, yeah. So you know exactly what you're looking for, what you have to find to get a successful prosecution before you ever set up camp? Like six months ahead of time.
No shit. Yeah, we're were booked out through i think august of next year with agency all over the nation that reach out and we will sit down and have a meet our uh executive director mike rebels he's been in law enforcement 30 years he'll meet with them and then i'll sit down with them and we will zoom calls or if they're local you know near us we'll drive to them but yeah everything you just said we sit sit down and we hash out, look guys, this is what we do.
This is what we're looking for. We need your guidance on what works here.
A lot of times we'll study the state law and we can't figure out what state law we want to go with. So we'll ask the prosecutor, hey, which one of these charges you want to go with? And he'll say, neither of those, this is actually the state law we want to use.
And so that's just like, oh, okay. So we have to spend a lot of, there's a lot of prep work to be able to do this.
Isn't something you just go out and swing for the fences on. It's a process because you've got to work with that local prosecutor and that local agency for a successful probable cause felony arrest, apprehension, and then the prosecutor.
It's very calculated. Yeah, very calculated.
Very impressive.'s it everybody will say oh we we want to be targeted in law enforcement everything law enforcement does like let's say the prostitution stings it's a buckshot approach we send some rounds out there and hope we catch a felon in the process maybe we get human trafficking this is not that this is very sniper in approach this is very this is the target I'm shooting at If I get any of these other things over here, great, but I am going after this specific individual right here. I'm going after the 1%.
Remember when I said the 10 of the 1,000 that actually show up? I'm going after the 1% who are showing up to buy a kid because I know that that 1%, they're the ones who are slipping away all the time. They're that buck who's slipping for the guys that hunt.
They're that buck who's been slipping around and smart and been watching and are able to slip around the edges of the field without ever getting busted. That's the ones we're going after.
And that's what we teach them to do. So it's very targeted.
How do you find what departments you're going to work with? Because you do this all over the country, correct? We do, yes, sir. It used to be they would reach out, or I say they would, we would reach out to them, like if we had a relationship through somebody and offer the tactical training, and they're like, yeah, we'll do this.
Give us a tactical training for free. Now we don't even offer the tactical training anymore unless they specifically request it because they're reaching

out to us. Hey, we've heard about your sex trafficking operation program.
Will you come

in and teach us? We want to do- No kidding. Oh yeah.
They're reaching out to us and that's

kind of where we're at. Most of it's word of mouth, but it doesn't cost the agency anything.

That's why we raise money. That's why we're a nonprofit.
Everything is paid for. So the only

thing it costs the agency is their manpower and their sometimes overtime hours because they're

Thank you. Everything is paid for.
So the only thing it costs the agency is their manpower and their sometimes overtime hours because they're working, you know, training and then two nights of operations. Wow.
How many inquiries are you getting, let's say, a month? Man, I would say a lot. That would be a question to ask Josh or Mike, but they get a lot.
we get a lot of inquiries of just hey can y'all come here and do this or that and 50 100 not 100. i would say probably somewhere around somewhere between 20 to 30 because we can only do one a month we can only do so it's impossible to service them all yeah so think of it this way there's 3 100 sheriff's offices in the nation plus or minus we use the sheriff's office example we will never we're doing one a month based on the funding that we have what we bring in we do one of these a month we will never be able to hit all those sheriff's offices but it would be nice to hit the majority of them because again if you look at your return on investment, we're trying to work ourselves out of a job.
Because if I can teach this agency, if our team can go in and teach this agency what to do, we don't want to go back to that agency. We're not wanting to return.
We have sometimes, they'll say, hey, do you mind coming back and auditing what we're doing to see if we're doing it appropriately? We'll go back and give them some pointers. But our goal is to fire that one shot, have some success, and go to the next agency.
Fire that one shot, have some success with them, and then let them hone it and continue to do this on their own. And it's not something they need to do every day or every month.
They overfish that hole, for lack of a better word, right? They need to do it twice a year, do it once a quarter, do it once a year, you know, whatever that leadership wants to do there, but it gives

them something they can do that is impacting the community around them in a positive way.

So going back to that micro, as opposed to macro, they're trying to impact their community in a

positive way. And the closest form of the government to the people was the most effective form of government, right? That's John Locke, the second treaties of government, right? And so that's what this is.
The closest form of government is going to impact that community the best. And that's where we really like to focus.
And then the feds can get involved on the top end. And if there's something they can adopt and take over and take federally, great.
We have those connections to help make that happen. How many people are on your team? I would say we have a lot of subcontractors that we rotate in every month per operation.
We probably have about 50 subcontracts we rotate through, GRS guys, MARSOC guys, SEALs, SF guys. So all from the special operations community.
A lot of them are sworn in other locations. A lot of them are law enforcement officers somewhere else.
We have some federal law enforcement agencies, federal law enforcement agents and state law enforcement agents, both retired and active that rotate in and work with us. So about 50 subcontractors.
And then full-time on our team, we've got, I think we have, well, Josh just left to go back to full-time law enforcement. So we have six full-time people on our team, and we have one, two, three part-time people.
So we have about, we have basically nine employees total, to include myself.

Damn.

So we run pretty thin.

Yeah.

But it takes us full-time people to set up and prep these operations,

and then we rotate in the contractors for whatever agency we're working with

and whoever's available.

We rotate them in each month.

And generally it takes about 20-ish of our people, 15 to 25 people, to pull off an operation, depending on how many people the agency we're working with has. Man, I'm going to try to get you guys up here at Williamson County.
Come on, man. I'm serious.
Yeah, put us in touch with them. We'll come up and make it happen.
I definitely will. Yeah.
And especially being as close to you out of Nashville, you'll pull quite a few out of Nashville. That's one thing that people don't realize, that if you're within an hour of a large city, you'll pull people from that large city showing up to target your kids.
And that's what we're trying to do, trying to even act as a deterrent. They've already caught a ton of people here.
They caught a soccer coach. There it is.
They was drugging little boys and doing that. They caught a priest.
So you've already experienced it. You've seen it.
It's rampant. Now, one thing to say on catching these guys, you've got the vigilante groups on YouTube and all that.
They'll talk somebody in. The MMA guys will beat them up.
They'll make them drink their own piss, all that stuff. One of the things that we've seen is a lot of times, and we see this a lot with people we go after, and this is hard because you want to deal with it appropriately, but it's not criminal in nature.
A lot of times you have autistic kids that are on, so there's something wrong here. So now you have something we got to deal with because I don't care what you have.
I don't care what your mental disability is, whatever. You better not be targeting my kids.
Does that make sense? I mean, because that's going to negatively impact their life. We've got to deal with it, but we don't deal with it.
It's not criminal in nature. We don't beat them up.
We don't make them drink their piss. We don't put them in jail.
And working at the local level, the micro level, we generally see that works better as opposed to just this random blanket. Hey, we're chatting these people in.
A lot of times they're entrapping them, and then they're showing up and beating them up, and this person is a guy with a mental disability. The law enforcement agency that's local generally has probably dealt with him before, and they can say, oh, hang on a second, who are we looking at? Because we normally know who's showing up before they get there through all of the stuff we can run, and they're sitting here looking at, oh, this guy right here.
Yeah, look, we need to figure this out. We deal with him all the time.
He's got this mental disability. Let's do it.
And so now we can get the family involved, deal with this appropriately because it's not criminal in nature, but it's a problem. And it's a problem that has to be dealt with.
That's the other good part to this as well. We can deal with those things more effectively at the local level than you can at a level like at a state or a federal or just an organization in a random location chatting people in because they don't know the nuances of that community.
Yeah, yeah, makes sense, makes sense. Well, Jared, I think we're kind of wrapping up the interview.
And so one thing I want to hit, what do you need to scale out? What do you need to do two of these, three of these, 10 of these a month? Well, it's basically based on people. So our burn rate a month for our organizational full-time people is basically about $30,000 to pay salaries, interest, just the stuff to run.
To do an operation, forget the burn rate side of it, it's about $50,000 per op. So like local in the Southeast, it might be 35 grand.
We went all the way out to New Mexico last year, it was like 84 grand. So the average to pull one of these trainings and ops off is about $50,000.
That's pay, travel, all of that stuff. So to scale, if we wanted to do two a month, we need to be able to bring in $100,000 a month.
Now, this is what I generally say to people. If you want to support our organization, you don't have to be the person that can write a $25,000 check, $100,000 check, a million dollar check.
If you can do that and you want to do that, great. Hey, we would love to have that support.
But we really operate on people who have a heart to do the right thing. And they say, you know what? I can give up my Starbucks two weeks out of the month and write a check for $20 a month.
That is, if we look at where most of our funding comes from, it comes from hundreds, if not thousands of people all across the nation who write checks for $20 a month or sign up for a direct deposit for $20 a month, whatever it is, or $100 a month, and they send that every month. That's really what we operate on.
It's truly a grassroots effort. We do have big donors, but most people can't be big donors.
Praise God, Trump just won, you know, because in Kamala's, you know, country, we probably wouldn't be able to donate anything. We'd all be sucking wind.
But with that being said, we do operate on a grassroots, you know, effort. So I don't even think about the cost of the operation.
What is, what's some stuff that parents can do, you know, to educate their kids and just to make a safer environment to keep from getting trafficked? That's great. So this thing right here, this phone, okay, we've all got them.
Our kids got them. My kids are too young to have them yet.
When you give your kid a phone, I literally had a buddy call me yesterday asking about this at an app that somebody back in and started targeting his daughter out of. His daughter's 14.
You give somebody a phone, you give them access to the world and the world access to them. Whether it's 3G, 5G, internet.
If it has those capabilities, somebody can go after your kid. We've even seen it on the game and headsets.
You've seen on this, I think a game called number blocks maybe as a recent one we've seen. We've seen these guys target kids talking through the headsets to them, playing Fortnite.
These individuals are out there. They might not be looking to steal your kid physically or sexually abuse them and all that.
They might be, but they might be looking to steal their digital footprint. They might be looking to extort them.
We call it sextortion. Maybe they send a picture, especially young girls will send a picture and they'll hold it over their head.
Hey, send us money or we're going to plaster this over everything. And so it's a scam, right? So they're

stealing their digital fingerprint or their digital footprint. They're getting into your family's life.
That's generally what we see with that. However, sometimes they are trying to steal your kid, but they don't have to show up in a free candy van.
Through these right here, they'll steal your kid's heart and mind, and they'll talk your kid right out of your house. So monitoring those phones, monitoring those social media accounts and platforms, staying involved in what your kid's doing there.
I think that's the most important thing you can do and the best way that you can protect your family. Don't worry so much about what you might see out and about with other people.
If you see something, say something. That's what they always used to say.
The problem is, I don't know the nuances there. But what I do know is with my kids, I've got to be very vigilant.
I've got to be a threat, going back to that guy I was talking about. I've got to be a threat so nobody's going to go after my kids.
Monitor what they're doing on that phone. Monitor what they're doing on their social media platforms.
Roger that, man. Well, Jared, is there anything that I'm missing that you want to talk about? Man, I appreciate you having me here.
I think we've talked long enough, and hopefully it's beneficial for everybody and your listeners. Thanks for having me.
It's been very beneficial for me, man. And, man, I just, what a great model that you've developed and sounds to be extremely effective.
And, man, it's just, it's been an honor to get to know you today. And I can't wait to get down there and go on and op with you.
Come on, man. I hope I get you up here to Williamson County because, you know, I got kids here.
Absolutely. But God bless you, brother.
And all your links and stuff will be down below.

So anybody that wants to donate, get in touch with you.

I'll be donating.

No, thank you.

Yeah, man.

It's been an honor.

Man, pleasure, man.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Thanks, brother.

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