#172 Travis Haley - Blackwater Sniper's Controversial Moments in Deadly War Zones

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Speaker 4 Travis Ailey. Welcome to the show, man.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me, Sean.

Speaker 4 It is an honor to have you here. And I've been trying to make this happen for a long time.
And I've been really looking forward to this. And seriously, it's an honor to have you sitting here.

Speaker 4 So thank you for making the trip.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 I left contracting for the agency in 2015 and started a training company

Speaker 4 that didn't last very long, but

Speaker 4 you and then another guy, Dom Razzo,

Speaker 4 were

Speaker 4 I looked at everybody that was doing this stuff and the level of professionalism that you have and

Speaker 4 the attention to detail that you put in all of your content, your marketing, your advertising, your products is just second to no one. And it really, really stands out, at least it did for me.
And so

Speaker 4 it's pretty surreal to be sitting here with you right now because I did, I studied all of the stuff that you were doing very early on when I was in that game.

Speaker 2 And it's really cool, man.

Speaker 2 You've built an empire and it's very inspiring for me and a lot of other people.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 2 very cool. Thank you, man.
I acknowledge that. Yes.
So my plan worked exactly as planned, I guess.

Speaker 2 It did.

Speaker 4 It did. But

Speaker 4 everybody starts off with a introduction here. So

Speaker 4 Travis Haley, you're a prominent figure in the defense and firearms industry known for your extensive military service and contributions to the tactical training and product development.

Speaker 4 You're a force reconnaissance marine combat entrepreneur and an eighth-generation gunfighter.

Speaker 4 In 2011, you established Haley Strategic Partners, which focuses on designing cutting-edge tactical equipment and offering science-based training programs.

Speaker 4 You also serve as a mind architecture and self-improvement coach helping others find post-traumatic growth and shares not just how you, excuse me, not just how to be a survivor to life, but a beneficiary to it.

Speaker 4 You're a husband to a superwoman, a father of seven children. the founder of seven successful companies, and an adventurist and extreme athlete.
As I mentioned before, you are a very,

Speaker 4 you're just a phenomenal businessman and

Speaker 4 started several companies, CEO'd several companies. And I remember, I remember watching magpole training videos hours and hours on end when I was,

Speaker 4 when I was overseas, I was just, we would just loop it.

Speaker 4 And you're a pro snowboarder. base jumper, windsuit pilot, rock climber,

Speaker 4 and the list just goes on.

Speaker 4 like I said, honor to have you here. And, you know, something that I wanted to just cover at the very beginning is:

Speaker 4 you know, when we were downstairs, we had a discussion about veteran suicide, and you had just lost your 36th close friend, not just acquaintance, close friend. And

Speaker 4 I've lost.

Speaker 4 I quit counting.

Speaker 4 I don't want to know the number, but

Speaker 4 I just wanted to open the floor for you on that because it sounds like it's pretty fresh. And

Speaker 2 I told myself the same thing at one point as stop counting.

Speaker 2 Just stop paying attention to it. And

Speaker 2 it was really hard to stop paying attention to it. You know,

Speaker 2 when you get that call in the middle of the night or an email or text next day, hey, bro, you know what happened. And

Speaker 2 so instead of running away from it, which I think I did for a long time in the very beginning, because I'm sure we'll get into it more, but I did not know how to deal with loss.

Speaker 2 I didn't know what it was. I didn't know how to define it.
And I

Speaker 2 started

Speaker 2 instead of running away from it, diving into it and saying, how can I

Speaker 2 maybe do something to prevent this from happening more?

Speaker 2 And you're not going to stop it, right? It's not going to stop. But we've got to change the message somehow, some way, and

Speaker 2 help people reframe the situation that's in their life, the circumstances that's happening to them at this point in time as they may not understand them.

Speaker 2 I mean, I've had my dark moments where I get reckless in the past. I've, you know, knock on wood.
I've never, I've never had suicidal, like, like, I'm going to go do this right now.

Speaker 2 I, I, and so maybe I'm blessed, or maybe I'm not blessed. Uh, maybe I, maybe, you know, some people have had those situations in their life.

Speaker 2 And, uh, and even that, I had a friend last night call me, and

Speaker 2 uh, he was on the edge, and he's having bad anxiety, panic attacks. And then he said, Yeah, I even put a, um,

Speaker 2 I think it was a

Speaker 2 44 magnum in his mouth and couldn't pull the trigger. And I, so I immediately asked him, was it wrong that you put a 44 magnum in your mouth?

Speaker 2 And it's like, yeah, moment of silence. And

Speaker 2 he's like, I said, think about the answer before you say it. When was that? He said, while back.

Speaker 2 I said, was it wrong that you did that?

Speaker 2 Because we're still having a conversation right now. And he says, no.
I said, say it again. And so we work through it from a mind architect standpoint to start to understand the meaning of an event,

Speaker 2 a decision that you might make or a word that you might say that's incorrect. Like, look at depression.
Everybody's depressed nowadays. Well, maybe you're not depressed.

Speaker 2 And maybe the best way to solve a problem is to identify there isn't one in the first place.

Speaker 2 Every time we want a lone time or we want to like off-gas or I just need to get away from it all, man, I've got these anxieties and problems. I think that you could look at it as a word.

Speaker 2 A lot of experts are now starting to talk about this more.

Speaker 2 It's a compression state.

Speaker 2 that you want to go into to compress myself to off-gas the chaos and corruption of my day or my experience that i had it's not but you'll label it as depression versus compression so if we can just maybe identify and and define the words more that we use

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 the spelling right that's why they call them spells because you're casting a spell every time you say i'm depressed are you or you just need some compression time to because you need that time um and i think we don't understand that and so we just get more depressed and more anxiety comes on.

Speaker 2 And then next thing you know, I'm like, I want to end it all. I don't want to be here anymore.
And

Speaker 2 next thing you know, we're creating organizations of trying to stop suicide. And I've even talked to the guys a long time ago.
I haven't talked to anybody recently at mission 22.

Speaker 2 But, you know, 22 vets a day die. Now it's up to 40 right now.
As we speak and sit here, it's up to 40. Well, why is it up to 40?

Speaker 2 Maybe we're reminding them that it's okay to commit suicide instead of saying it's not okay. How about rebrand your company?

Speaker 2 I said this one time.

Speaker 2 They said, rebrand it next year is mission 21 and then mission 20 and then mission 19 and mission and they were like they laughed at that but um so if anybody hears that now i think that's a good idea is to talk about how do we get rid of it not just acknowledge it exists and that's what i'm trying to do the best i can

Speaker 4 i'm curious did you struggle with we don't we're not going to get into this full blown now we'll wait till the appropriate time, but I am curious, did you struggle with drugs or alcohol or both?

Speaker 2 No. No.
Luckily, I've never done that. Never dealt with it.

Speaker 4 You know, I think that, you know, with the veteran suicide stuff,

Speaker 4 I think a lot of that,

Speaker 4 I don't think, I know a lot of that is coming from

Speaker 4 shitty decision making under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I mean, you know how long it takes to pull a trigger. a fraction of a second.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 you can have that thought, you know, with not a clear mind mind. And

Speaker 4 all it takes is a fraction of a second to pull that trigger or swallow those pills or

Speaker 4 drive off the road or jump off a building or, you know,

Speaker 4 and I think that is,

Speaker 4 I know that's what's getting a lot of guys is

Speaker 4 not having a clear mind.

Speaker 4 under the influence of drug and alcohol, drugs and alcohol. And, you know, it's, it's

Speaker 4 not that that cures everything, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 I don't, I don't think coming off of it is going to cure depression and all these other things, but I think that I think the majority of these seem to happen when somebody's under the influence and they're not in the right state of mind.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 maybe that's one of the things that we need to be spending a little bit more time on

Speaker 4 to get to the real root of the problem, you know, which is, which is the suicide is what we're trying to

Speaker 4 to get, you know, to

Speaker 4 clean up, to stop.

Speaker 4 And, but I don't think that's going to stop until the drug and the drugs and the alcohol

Speaker 4 stop. And, you know, you had brought up another statistic this morning, Travis, that

Speaker 4 you had said you have the numbers, I don't, but you had mentioned, and I knew this,

Speaker 4 how many people died in

Speaker 4 in

Speaker 4 OIF and OEF?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the global war on terror in 25-ish years now, I guess, is somewhere around 9,200 or 9,300. And don't quote me on exactly that number, but

Speaker 2 it's over 9,000.

Speaker 2 Okay, if we look back to Vietnam and Korea and World War II, we knew what the numbers were there, right? You had what, 45,000, 52,000. And then World War II is like, what, 400 plus thousand men died.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Damn, that's pretty good. Global war on terror in 25 years.
We've only lost nine.

Speaker 2 I mean, it sounds shitty to say it like like this but we've only lost 9 000 plus people okay technology better medical facilities i mean we can get air air medevac you know very quickly nowadays um

Speaker 2 so like people would say well that's not that bad but then you add the suicide numbers which we're starting to see a lot of numbers come out and i'm gonna fact check them um

Speaker 2 Apparently, like two months ago, it peaked 140,000 GWAT veterans in 25 years, whether whether you serve somewhere in that timeframe, have committed suicide.

Speaker 2 So, in theory, our actual death toll of the war, again, not everything is combat-related. It could have been some family issue, childhood trauma, something like that,

Speaker 2 drugs, whatever that influenced that decision, but they still are considered the GWAT number. That's why I'm kind of fact-checking the number itself.

Speaker 2 It could be 140, but how many are actually combat-related? Hey, I can't handle the trauma and the nightmares anymore, kind of thing.

Speaker 2 You'll never figure that out. But if that number is true of suicides alone in the last 25 years, that means that we're almost at 150,000 dead in this war on terror.

Speaker 2 And if I can personally say I know 36 of them that are good friends of mine, maybe that's true.

Speaker 2 And that makes me want to fight harder.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 I just want to rephrase:

Speaker 4 I think it is drugs and alcohol. I don't think that is the only problem.

Speaker 4 I think when you all of this, you know, operator syndrome, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, CTE, and it all gets compiled together and you add drugs and alcohol on top of it, which is a, you know, obviously

Speaker 4 people think it's a coping mechanism.

Speaker 4 I think that's what I was alluding to is, is it,

Speaker 4 I think that's the, the icing on the cake that, that

Speaker 4 unfortunately is, is like the last straw, you know.

Speaker 2 I think there's another issue starting to happen too.

Speaker 2 So I've never had a drug or alcohol problem. I don't have an addictive personality.
It's weird.

Speaker 2 I've tried.

Speaker 2 It doesn't work. I'm actually allergic to alcohol.

Speaker 2 And that's happened in like the last year and a half. Like I, even if I had like a glass of wine, I got really big into wine and making my own wines for a while.

Speaker 2 Can't do it anymore. And I'm happy because I don't like waking up like that.
Plus, I have a TBI and I think there was some stuff going on there that was activating it and

Speaker 2 certain dyes I can't have, et cetera.

Speaker 2 But another issue is not to say that I haven't had a problem with drugs or alcohol, but I've tried them. I've done all the experiments.

Speaker 2 I think besides Ibigain is one of the few things that I haven't done. But now I'm hearing guys coming back.
And when I do it,

Speaker 2 I do it very, very,

Speaker 2 very traditionally. I have shamans that everything is free, nothing is paid for.
Because in that world, and I believe this, if you pay for that service, you take away the spirit of it.

Speaker 2 You can interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2 so it's hard to find guys like that but now i got dudes coming back saying bro i just got back from south america i just did my 12th ibogain or my 12th ayahuasca trip and i'm like

Speaker 2 that's not how it works bro you're now using these medical treatments that we have really found a lot of great things with from psilocybin to all these other uh subjects that have um i mean dude woken me up like

Speaker 2 I found myself in some of these situations, but they were like six day long, not one second of sleep for six days, very little food, cold plunging in the snow, running through the mountains, getting beat down by 80 pound soaking wet, you know, Native Americans that put these right of warrior passages together to off-gas you from combat.

Speaker 2 And when you find out you study ancient warriors, you'll see how much that we used to do as warriors to off-gas ourselves from the chaos and corruption before you were allowed to go back to your tent, your teepee, your family, your village.

Speaker 2 The medicine men would keep you there and say, you're not ready to go home yet. The Romans did it.
The Spartans did it. The samurais did it.
Every known African tribal warriors did it.

Speaker 2 Natives of this country, every tribe had their own process, and it was based around medicines, but it was a graduating process.

Speaker 2 It wasn't like, we're just going to keep giving you Ivy Gain until you're better. I was like, that's another problem on that end of the spectrum I'm starting to see now.

Speaker 2 And on the other end, it's like, I'm just smoking weed every night and doing heroin now or taking pills because I can't take the pain. And then it's like, where's the balance?

Speaker 2 And so we need to find that balance as well.

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Speaker 4 I did not realize you were into plant medicine. Yeah, I did.
I did the IV game.

Speaker 2 Nobody's aware of it until now.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, now everybody knows.

Speaker 4 But, you know, it's interesting that you say that about psychedelic therapy because

Speaker 4 that is, and look, I'm a huge, anybody that listens to this knows I'm a huge proponent to psychedelic therapy. It changed my, it changed so many aspects of my life in a positive way.
But

Speaker 4 I'm like you. I don't,

Speaker 4 a little bit different of a philosophy, but but I don't abuse it. I'm very,

Speaker 4 I don't know if ritualistic is the correct word for that, but I

Speaker 4 take it very seriously.

Speaker 4 Sometimes I think I take, maybe take it too seriously.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 because what do you mean by that? Well, because,

Speaker 4 man, this is, I'm actually going to start to contradict myself here, but

Speaker 4 because where I was going is that it parts of this reminded me of kind of the beginning of the opiate crisis within the veteran community veteran community guys got a little bit of relief from pain you know from this stuff and then they realize oh shit it numbs our mind my mind's not racing anymore i'm in you know and i i started to see this within psychedelics too where

Speaker 4 people want to live in that realm and not

Speaker 4 take what you need out of that realm and then go live your fucking life here in reality, you know, and

Speaker 4 that realm becomes like some type of escape.

Speaker 4 What I was going to say

Speaker 4 when I say maybe I take it a little too seriously and it gets in the way is

Speaker 4 more and more of these studies are coming out

Speaker 4 about micro-dosing and

Speaker 4 maybe having a

Speaker 4 low-dose psilocybin tea, you know, in the morning.

Speaker 4 I don't do that because I, I have to set my space up the way I need it to be.

Speaker 4 I have to do all of the rich things aspect that I, because I think that it's a, it is a, in my opinion, it's a medicine that demands a tremendous amount of respect. And

Speaker 4 I, I

Speaker 4 live by a code that does that. Sometimes I think that code

Speaker 4 gets in the way a little bit because I need days off in the ass end. I need days off in the beginning.
I like to prepare myself and part of me thinks, hey, like, just do it. Just get the benefit.
But,

Speaker 4 but then I see, I do see people abusing it. And, um,

Speaker 2 and I wouldn't say micro-dosing would be abusing it. If you have a, a system or a plan and it's working for you.
Um,

Speaker 2 where,

Speaker 2 and a lot of people will take micro-dosing overboard. You shouldn't feel a micro-dose.
You should, it should be just on the edge to just give you a heightened sense of things.

Speaker 2 And this is where a lot of people are like, God, I can't believe you guys are talking about this, man. Like, that's so taboo in your world.
It's like, no, it is our world.

Speaker 2 That's the first thing I tell people that are very confused. Like, wait,

Speaker 2 you do plant medicine?

Speaker 2 Like, just like the last 3,000 years that I've been able to study in warrior cultures, yes, before you go into battle, especially when you get home from battle, the rituals, you look into some of these, dude.

Speaker 2 I mean, I went down, I think it was with the Pima Indians in Arizona, and they put me through a sweat lodge camp. Worst pain in my life.

Speaker 2 And these guys have hooks on their, I'm sorry, not hooks, scars on their chests.

Speaker 2 The chief of the village, again, beautiful long black hair, 80-pound soap and wet dude, just wearing like jean shorts and flip-flops and running us through the whole scenario.

Speaker 2 You're butt naked inside with six other dudes in this buffalo hide tent. They stoke the fire for three days.
It's like, it's pretty cool, the ritual aspect, and it's all helping, it's giving.

Speaker 2 It's, it's, you can tell everybody's there for you.

Speaker 2 It's not, hey, I'm, I'm paying you to go to, to this $10,000, $12,000 camp in South America to have 90 other people laying on the floor going through the same experience as I am.

Speaker 2 It is just you and only you.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 then I ask, like, Chief, what's, I'm curious, the scars on your chest. He's like, and he eventually tells me it's another passage, another rite, a ritual, rite of passage for become

Speaker 2 a warrior.

Speaker 2 And at a certain age, they hang themselves with hooks and they hook themselves through their chest muscles and they hang from an oak tree in the village and they hang there for three days and they have to take the hooks out themselves in order to come off of this rite of passage.

Speaker 2 And then once they do, they're good. I'm like,

Speaker 2 why is your chest so fucked up? And he's like, I've done this seven times as a medicine man and demonstrator. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not a warrior.

Speaker 2 I'm not a warrior.

Speaker 2 I would never do that. So you hear some of the craziest stories from these guys that are still doing it to this day on reservations.
Not all of them do.

Speaker 2 It's like you have the, you know, the

Speaker 2 still the small warrior groups inside of every culture and then the rest of them. And same with us, right? You have the small warrior groups inside of the culture and then all of us.

Speaker 2 And what they do is they introduce you to the spirit aspect of it. And that's what I look for.
So even if I'm microing one day, it's because it's for me. I'm going to be out in the mountains today.

Speaker 2 I might just run up to Sedona, meet my buddies. We'll go paramotoring through, not on medicine, but we'll have this night, this, this campfire, this,

Speaker 2 you know, we'll, we'll bathe in the, in the mesquite trees, which mesquite trees release a natural DMT into the water.

Speaker 2 That's what the natives believed. And so they would, we would bathe in the freezing waters, we'd lay out in the sun and meditate and journal, and then we'd go fly.

Speaker 2 I'd have this amazing flight.

Speaker 2 And then we'd land and we off gas, hug, high five, man, we'd go back to our lives. Like that's a, that would be maybe even a full, full journey or maybe just a micro dose.

Speaker 2 Um, some days, if I just want to be really creative and I just can't get that spirit to work inside me, I will turn on that, that frequency just a little bit,

Speaker 2 but I won't abuse it. And that's the thing is people don't understand the divine feminine, divine masculine aspect of all of these drugs.
Ayahuasca, they call her grandmother for a reason.

Speaker 2 She's going to take you on a journey. Psilocybin, it's a divine feminine drug.
It's going to take you on a journey.

Speaker 2 DMT is even on the feminine side. THE is on the feminine side.
But LSD acid or ibogaine, that's divine masculine. You are going here whether you like it or not.

Speaker 2 And so it's to understand that Shakti and Shiva aspect, the old ancient world of divine feminine, divine masculine, you have to understand that in order to really, I think, get the full benefits of it and be with good people that can share and just give to you.

Speaker 2 Damn, that's hard to say.

Speaker 4 I've not heard that.

Speaker 4 The feminine and masculine.

Speaker 4 Where did you hear that from?

Speaker 2 Just in my studies. And

Speaker 2 this wasn't medicine studies. This was like ancient warrior studies

Speaker 2 to, because everybody has divine masculine and divine feminine. And, you know, that's where our love and our

Speaker 2 even protecting comes from is on the feminine side of the house, our words in which we use or the fight or the flight or

Speaker 2 the more masculine aspects of what we would do to protect somebody, even a female. We all have the same thing.
And so that's where a lot of the divine, you know,

Speaker 2 that comes out of these plant medicines

Speaker 2 is on that wavelength. And I think if you know that about it, it makes your journey so much better.

Speaker 2 Like my biggest journey I ever had, which was last year, maybe a year and a half ago.

Speaker 2 Needed to really unlock some stuff, needed to really, you know, break down some darkness that I had that was residual from something in the past.

Speaker 2 Plus, my father just died, and that messed me up pretty bad.

Speaker 2 Still does. Sorry to hear that.

Speaker 2 You know, greatest hero of my life. And all of a sudden, it's gone.
And it's like, wait a minute. And I don't know why.
I just struggle with it.

Speaker 2 I just did a podcast with a good friend of mine, Mark England. He's a mindset coach

Speaker 2 and breath coach. And he helped me unlock that problem about it was it was my dad's helped so many, so many more millions of people than I could ever possibly fathom helping.
And when he left,

Speaker 2 I wanted to celebrate him. My family didn't want to celebrate my father.
And so I did this podcast with Mark and he did a four-step process on me to help me slow the story down on my head.

Speaker 2 Cause like we get tight, tight, we get high and tight going back to kind of the PTSD a little bit and some of the things that we hold on to.

Speaker 2 It's in our chest. We're trapped in our chest.
And if we can't unlock that breath, we can't,

Speaker 2 we can't switch from being high and tight because we don't know what it's like to be low and slow in our breath, that's going to get you.

Speaker 2 So a lot of these guys need to learn to unlock that before they go on a journey. So we would even do massive breath work stuff.

Speaker 2 That's where the cold water comes into play to really get somebody to take it seriously.

Speaker 2 And then we have them dial in their breath, and then we'll start educating them on what we're going to be doing at this point in time.

Speaker 2 So, like on my last one, it was like seven grams of psilocybin, which is what they consider a hero's dose.

Speaker 2 And then that wasn't working.

Speaker 4 I think five grams is considered a hero's dose.

Speaker 2 Five is a hero's dose. Seven is a warrior's dose.
That's right.

Speaker 2 So, I did seven. So, I did a warrior's dose.
And

Speaker 2 that wasn't working for me. It was taking me on a journey, but this is where the coaches come into play.
We had UFC movement fighting coaches there. So we fight all night long as well on the medicine.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 go through the mountains, through Bryce Canyon, and run through the snow and the mud and barefooted and just silkies, man. And you're like, how are we out here living for four hours in nothingness?

Speaker 2 It's just like,

Speaker 2 it's a different world of mindset, you know?

Speaker 2 And so then that wasn't working for me. So they said, hey, he needs divine masculine.
So they dropped in some more.

Speaker 2 And that was that was the LSD. And my life has changed since that moment.

Speaker 2 More so than any other experience.

Speaker 4 What changed?

Speaker 2 The ability to see myself,

Speaker 2 my past life, my

Speaker 2 which is what I've been living in. You know, not necessarily a past life, even though I saw some pretty gory, like the most real combat I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 2 My hands hurt so bad the next day. Hold on.

Speaker 4 When you say a past life, are you saying a past life or like

Speaker 4 my previous career is a force reconnaissance marine?

Speaker 2 So both. So I saw a past life image of me standing on top of a pile of bodies with blood soaking through my hands around a katana.
And I remember screaming, How could one man do this?

Speaker 2 And that scared the shit out of me.

Speaker 2 Then my past life started to come.

Speaker 4 Why did that scare you?

Speaker 2 I don't know. What did you think it was?

Speaker 4 How did you process that?

Speaker 2 I felt like I was just a murderous.

Speaker 2 It was the most real.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't know what it's like to be in a sword fight, but I was like, now I know what it's like to be in a sword fight after that, that experience, that vivid, like just real

Speaker 2 screaming, they had to hold me down at times.

Speaker 2 They had to put a buffalo hide blanket over me and pin me down

Speaker 2 to try to just calm. And they're very good.

Speaker 2 They know when to speak and when to be in there and when to kind of touch you and just kind of make you calm back down.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I could see then my current life, past life, you know, being in combat, family, traumas, death, everything.

Speaker 2 And then I started realizing I'm living in my past lives when I should be living in my path

Speaker 2 life.

Speaker 2 What's my path? My path is created by my past. And that was the first time I've been able to actually see that.

Speaker 2 It's the first time I've been able to breathe through with coaching and hearing, you know, my best friend Byron going,

Speaker 2 ride the exhale.

Speaker 2 Ride the exhale. And by seeing all that,

Speaker 2 again, showed me who I was and what I was living in and where I should have been living. And so now every day I wake up,

Speaker 2 I will think about what is my path moving forward, not reminiscing on my past

Speaker 2 or worrying about something.

Speaker 2 you know, being in fear of my past and being in anxiety for my future.

Speaker 2 And that's like the now concept. Everybody understands the now concept.
Everything happens right now in this moment, in this time. It's not my dad's time anymore.
It's not my ancestor's time anymore.

Speaker 2 It's like the problem with our country. When's somebody going to step up? It's you.
It's your time.

Speaker 2 And hopefully, many moons from now, our grandchildren will be reading about the history that we created in this country to keep it free, to keep the world free.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 those are things that

Speaker 2 I couldn't really see a whole lot. And now I'm seeing a whole clearer message about what do we do moving forward.
It's not about what I did.

Speaker 2 That doesn't define me. My traumas don't define me.
My childhood traumas don't define me.

Speaker 2 What I'm doing right now does.

Speaker 4 What do you believe happens when you die?

Speaker 2 I think I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Speaker 2 Now, not to say I'm not a man of spirit or a man of God, because I am.

Speaker 4 Are you a Christian?

Speaker 2 I am. I am.
I was raised Catholic.

Speaker 2 It's kind of funny. I went to Catholic school, didn't really get along with the...

Speaker 2 Because I went to Jewish Community Center after Catholic school, which my sister hated.

Speaker 2 And so it was this conflict. And I got caught saying Hail Marys in Yiddish one day and they kicked me out of school.

Speaker 2 Because the JCC guy, this, I forget, I think his name was Tommy, big old jolly fat guy drives up in this little Volkswagen van and picks me up every day from Catholic school.

Speaker 2 And Sister Pat would just stand there with her, you know, her nun suit on and just like, just scowl at this dude. And he would teach me, he would teach me, you know, to speak a little Yiddish.

Speaker 2 And he taught me Hail Marys in Yiddish. And I was out of the, I got a math problem wrong one day in Catholic school and she's like,

Speaker 2 go to Mother Mary and do your Hell Marys. So I'm out there, I'm doing them and all of a sudden I feel this ruler on my shoulder.
It was like old school Catholic, you know, ruler stuff. And

Speaker 2 parents came in and that didn't work out too well. So then my mom's like, well, maybe Christian school will be a better thing.
So she sends me to Christian school.

Speaker 2 And that was good. And that was, that was good.

Speaker 2 I got in a fight with the teacher about dinosaurs one time because I went outside and grabbed a fossil and she said, well, that's because the government put those fossils there to make you think dinosaurs are real.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, I thought they talked about beasts in the Bible. Like, so I was confused.

Speaker 2 And then I brought a link of 20 millimeter shells from my dad's Air Force time as a pilot and they kicked me out of school for a show and tell

Speaker 2 because you're not allowed to have live rounds in school. So anyways, I've studied religion.
I've really tried to make a habit of it. You know, I've been to some big universities, went to Cornell.

Speaker 2 Oh, I just studied the Promised Land, Judaism, and the Palestinian conflict.

Speaker 2 Really started diving into the Quran and reading it and trying to understand it.

Speaker 2 And then started even playing with Buddhism for a little while to understand, not to practice, and to realize, well, what are people's motives and intentions? Because you know how it is, man.

Speaker 2 Young and dumb. We're in the military.
Go here and do this. You don't know anything about the people.

Speaker 2 You never were really given good intel.

Speaker 2 And so I wanted to try to change that in my life. So for my kids that are growing up, if they decide to serve, which they are,

Speaker 2 I can educate them from a different place than what the education I got. And I think that's important for people to realize.
Because look how many Muslims that

Speaker 2 we would trust our lives to. We have.
We've had best friends, man. Look at this freaking Afghani pullout, man.
Like how many dudes on some of those teams that

Speaker 2 you know the story there.

Speaker 2 But there's a misperception. I'm curious how if you

Speaker 4 love talking about these, going down these rabbit holes, but if you're a Christian, then how do you, what I'm curious about is how do you tie in multiple lives in different time periods?

Speaker 2 And that's where I don't, I mean, I wouldn't consider myself the most die-hard Christian in that regard.

Speaker 2 I would say that there's definitely an afterlife. And that would what we would consider heaven.

Speaker 2 Some people would consider that the next density. You know, like we're in a density right now, just like rocks and plants are in a density and animals are in a density.
And we're in the next density.

Speaker 2 And the next density we move on to is a higher, a higher self. That's heaven.

Speaker 2 So I love, I love dabbing into those stories too, and listening to those people kind of talk about how that works on their scale, you know, the frequency of the spirit world.

Speaker 2 It's like, so, and it's all the same, you know.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 so you, do you believe that you'll go on and have another? So this is kind of like reincarnation.

Speaker 2 Right. That's

Speaker 2 that's the density aspect, which again is confusing Where most people would think, oh, if you're going on to a next density, what is that? That's like this, you know, spirit alien world.

Speaker 2 It's like, it could also be heaven. It could be in that next world.
And we're put on this earth to get our PhD in a very hard place in the universe.

Speaker 2 And we're judged for how we respond to it. We're judged for how we help people, how we love, how we show our compassion, how we are able to be vulnerable and

Speaker 2 have the courage to be imperfect. And I think if you do all those things well, you'll be rewarded to the next life or density or heaven.
So, and I know some people that, that,

Speaker 2 you know, I are die-hard in that case wouldn't be like, no, you need to pick a side. It's like, well, I love studying everything and I'm still trying to figure it out at this point in time of my life.

Speaker 4 Where did you come to,

Speaker 4 I guess maybe conclusion isn't the right word because

Speaker 4 I'm still looking into it.

Speaker 4 When did you come into this thought process? How did this happen?

Speaker 2 I think it's been in about the last five or six years of my life.

Speaker 4 Did it come in with plant medicine?

Speaker 2 Actually, it came in with my fiancé.

Speaker 2 She's diehard Christian, mega church upbringing, mom, dad, you know, own a Christian bookstore.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 she can recite the Bible like the back of her hand. But she's also looked into a lot of these other things and

Speaker 2 has not changed her mind about God or spirit, but it's just more information to understand and to take in and have fun exploring versus being absolute about it. I'm just not an absolute person.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to say, oh, all religions are bad except Christianity. Shame on us for thinking that.

Speaker 2 You know, why are we so special?

Speaker 2 You know, faith is faith, spirit is spirit. And when you have, like I said earlier, like if you're a man of spirit, a man of faith,

Speaker 2 well, that's going to help with a lot of things, like being more resilient to things,

Speaker 2 to trust the process. That, like, hey, man, first thing, first thing is, is the facts.

Speaker 2 Nobody gets off the spaceship alive.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So enjoy it while you're on it and make the best of it. And if you only get this one in 400 trillion chance or whatever it is to become a human being,

Speaker 2 I'm going to play the most magnificent game I could ever play in that short ass amount of time that I have. That's why I have a dragonfly as my logo.

Speaker 2 It's because I I realize that short life that it has. There's a lot of great aspects to it from the warrior side and the survival side.

Speaker 2 And it's a symbol of life because its lifespan is only about 30 days when you see a dragonfly flying around.

Speaker 2 And so, well, how can something be one of the oldest living creatures on the face of the planet?

Speaker 2 Again, depending on what you believe in, how can it be the most adaptive, most efficient, the greatest hunter on the face of the planet for its size and its capacity and what it does?

Speaker 2 How can it be all of these amazing things and only live for 30 days?

Speaker 2 I can't answer that question, but what I can answer is like, or ask like every student that comes to our programs or or every person that I encounter, I say, what are you going to do with your 30 days to make the world just a little bit better place than what you came in it?

Speaker 2 And that's what that means to me.

Speaker 2 You know, because my dad gave me that as a kid when a dragonfly landed on my finger one time and he told me I had good luck and

Speaker 2 then taught me all the significance of it.

Speaker 2 And that was the thing that stood out to me the most was how short our lives really are and how much conflict and how much diversity and everything else that's in this life that we're being tested on.

Speaker 2 And so, I will always make sure that,

Speaker 2 well, I mean, we were talking about haters earlier, right? I will always make sure that I'm hated and not being a hater. It's much better to be in that world.

Speaker 2 I feel sorry for the ones that are so full of themselves that all they do is hate on others and create common enemy intimacy in the world. That's the biggest problem we have.
That's not godlike.

Speaker 2 That's not, that's not good. And I think if, you know, and I'll speak a lot to God, but I think one of the things that God made primarily over everything else is good.

Speaker 2 So, and I think there with good comes truth, with truth comes love,

Speaker 2 or love comes from good too, and then uncertainty. You don't know what's going to happen next.

Speaker 2 So I think I like to live in the uncertain world where I don't have an answer for everything because I realize that if I, if I try to be too certain about something in my life, I'll drive myself batshit crazy trying to figure out what's going to happen next to me.

Speaker 2 And then I have to realize like, well, if I, if I knew what was going to happen tomorrow morning or knew what was going to happen even tonight,

Speaker 2 what would be the point of being alive? What would be the point of waking up tomorrow if we already knew what was going to happen?

Speaker 2 So I don't think certainty is a problem that should ever be, uncertainty should be a problem that's ever solved.

Speaker 2 And so when I study religion, I go, don't be so certain about it. Let's just keep exploring.
Let's keep looking into all of these crazy thoughts and things and plant medicine.

Speaker 2 Man, dude, I've never touched drugs or alcohol and stuff in my life.

Speaker 2 I was a pretty straight-laced kid growing up. I was a troublemaker.
I mean, bad

Speaker 2 attempted murder type trouble that I got into. Wow.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me and DJ actually have a weird, I noticed listening to him, have an interesting kind of pathway there

Speaker 2 where I was

Speaker 2 extremely curious, adventurous to a point where I would, hey, we'll see what happens to this mailbox when it detonates with these types of chemicals or this or that or whatever.

Speaker 2 Pipe bombs on cows or, hey, there's somebody that needs help. Let's shoot at them.
that that's getting hurt. Shoot the person that's hurting the person that needs help.
And that was my situation.

Speaker 2 I wasn't bad, but I was extremely curious. And

Speaker 2 that put me in a lot of bad places. And I probably pissed my parents off and stressed them out more than anybody.

Speaker 2 But it was all good. That was my upbringing.
And so the religion was different because I was bouncing around from JCCs to Catholic schools to Christian schools.

Speaker 2 So I think I've always had this kind of everything in my life. And I was never grounded in something.
So maybe, maybe my next

Speaker 2 journey in life is to maybe find, you know, something to ground to. Interesting.
And so I'm on that, I'm on that path. You're a deep thinker.

Speaker 2 And medicine has certainly helped me think of a different world of spirit and code. And it's like, okay, there's

Speaker 2 something we can't explain here. Is that just medicine doing that to me? Or is that God? No, that's everybody sees the same thing.
So it might, that's a godly thing to me.

Speaker 2 There's a spirit world to that. And I love that, man.
So constantly asking questions and exploring.

Speaker 4 You know, you mentioned something about, I don't know, maybe 10 minutes ago and you had said we were talking about, you know, kind of setting the stage for psychedelic therapy and how serious we both take it.

Speaker 4 And I'm, you know, I'm curious,

Speaker 4 you had mentioned something about when things start getting stirred up, you go do it.

Speaker 2 You,

Speaker 4 I think you told me you're running eight companies,

Speaker 4 obviously very busy, father to seven kids, a wife.

Speaker 4 You got a lot of shit going on. So what I'm, what I want to ask is, you know, when you feel that stuff stirring up, how,

Speaker 4 and you're, you,

Speaker 4 and you're not just going to a clinic, you're going, you're embedding with a, with a, with, with some type of a tribe. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And you're the only one. So how long does it take you to

Speaker 4 set aside the time to to work on yourself with that?

Speaker 2 Well, I think that's the biggest problem we all have is the lack of time. Um,

Speaker 2 now, and try to keep this as succinct as possible.

Speaker 2 There's a instinctual nature to every human being, right? We all have an instinct. We're all born with something.
We're not born with knowledge.

Speaker 2 We're not born knowing how to do something, but we're born with some type of instinctual thing that they call conation, not cognition. Cognition, I believe, comes from conation, your instinctual self.

Speaker 2 And in your conation, you have four action modes. Fact-finding, how you gather and share information.
Following through, which is how you arrange, organize, or systemize.

Speaker 2 Quick starting, which is how you deal with risk or uncertainty. And then implementing implementing how you handle spaces or tangibles, how you build.

Speaker 2 So like to give an example, if I said, hey, man, if we had a box from the store and it's a desk or something, we had to build, like got parts and letters and instructions, what's the first thing you would do?

Speaker 2 Would you, A,

Speaker 2 open up the box, pull the instructions out, start laying things out and do an inventory of every part and piece and make sure it's all there?

Speaker 2 Would you start organizing every A and B and C's and D's and then start organizing into a system of how I'm going to start building and then read all the directions and go, okay, and then come back to step one?

Speaker 2 Or are you the guy that turns the box and looks at the picture and dumps the shit on the floor and goes, I can do this? You know, that's what your instinctual makeup is.

Speaker 2 How you problem solve that is exactly the way you problem solved it when you were 12 years old. You do the same thing today.
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Speaker 2 That's the thing that that kind of upsets people is that you're going to score high in two of those categories, higher than the others. So for me, I'm a mid-range fact finder for,

Speaker 2 that means I can go either way. I can read a book, but I'm not going to probably read the whole thing like front to back.

Speaker 2 I'll highlight stuff and post a note and make notes in it and come back to it later. I'll have 16 books open and I'll come back again.

Speaker 2 God, I'm never going to get these books done. But eventually I do.
And eventually I get the same amount of information as the person that just reads one book front to back.

Speaker 2 Um, that's just how I do things. My systemizing is a two follow-through.

Speaker 2 Like, if you said, Hey, Travis, call me tomorrow at three o'clock, like, all right, Sean, I'll see you tomorrow, talk to you tomorrow.

Speaker 2 Dude, don't expect me to call you tomorrow at three o'clock because I'm going to probably seize the moment elsewhere. Something's going to happen.

Speaker 2 So, why do I carry my stupid EDC Apple watch to go, hey, Siri, remind me to call Sean tomorrow at three o'clock? Now, why did I do that? Is it because I'm a procrastinator?

Speaker 2 Is it because I'm like going to just forget?

Speaker 2 No, it's because I love being raced against the clock because i'm a seven and quick starting i love risking uncertainty i love the uncertainty of life um and so if i understand that

Speaker 2 now i'm going to take a risk it doesn't mean you're not going to take a risk if you're higher these categories and lower here it just means you're going to probably systemize fact find like the jump master that's like come on dude we got this you've got 16 pages of weather reports and you're asking the freaking nav again for the winds at altitude we got it let's go let's jump that's the quick starter talking yeah i think i see the drop zone stand by You're like, Tayley, don't do it.

Speaker 2 That's the quick starter, right? 60% of the time, it works out every time. And then you have the,

Speaker 2 you have the, uh, the fact finder that's really diving into it. So I think

Speaker 2 coming back full circle, it depends on how you instinctually operate. So coming back to a guy like me that has seven kids, seven companies, well, eight companies now,

Speaker 2 how do I manage all that? I love the risk and certainty of all those things. I'm good at being a jack of all trades.
I'm not good at sitting down and systemizing one thing. I love to build teams.

Speaker 2 I love to build products and development systems. I love to sit down and go, okay, here's how we're making this product.
There's a 16-step product phase to all of this. I'm going to write that down.

Speaker 2 I'm going to build that and then start building on teams and teach them how to do this 16-step product development phase.

Speaker 2 And then, all right, engineers, ID guys, go ahead and start developing shortcuts to that system. And then next thing you know, efficiency starts happening.
That's what the quick starter does.

Speaker 2 that's the entrepreneur that's the musician that's the creator that's the the the artist that just wings it and like like probably your buddy you're talking about earlier um where your systemizers are guys that i want as my cfo that's right because my cfo if i walk into grant's desk and i look at his desk and i go how the hell is he getting any work done with a clean desk like this right his stuff's always organized but he'll come into my office and go how the hell is haley getting any work done with a messy desk like this you see the conflict that just happened in the workplace.

Speaker 2 So I think if we can all understand our instinctual strengths, which every one of my guys, my gals are psychologically evaluated on this conative scale, it's a test called the Colby test, K-O-L-B-E.

Speaker 2 It's an alpha test. Kathy Colby developed this many years ago.
And it's a test you can't lie on. You cannot lie on it.

Speaker 2 It'll put you in transition if you try to

Speaker 2 lie on this. But if you've ever taken like a Myers-Briggs or like those star point tests or some of of those IQ type tests, those are cognitive based tests.
You can lie on those.

Speaker 2 So like, I know a lot of Intel agencies, like we were working with the Australians, and they give their guys neuroticism tests. And so I took the test and I scored 98% neurotic.

Speaker 2 And the dude's like, bro, we didn't think you were a neurotic guy. And I'm like, yeah, I lied on your test, man.
And he's like, what? I was like, it's a cognitive based test.

Speaker 2 I lied on it because I want to get a job with you guys. I want to be in it.
I want to be a case officer with you guys. And he's like, holy shit.

Speaker 2 I was like, yeah, you have neurotic case officers running around that are neurotic, that lied on your test. You need to give them more of an instinctual-based test that you can't lie on.

Speaker 2 So that's why I like working with the Colby Corporation.

Speaker 2 And so, out of hundreds of employees that I have, all of them, I can walk into any department and know exactly what everybody's cognitive instinct is. That's my job as a leader.
I have to.

Speaker 2 Because if I can go up to you and say, let's say you're the high fact finding, systemizing engineer, and you're like in building a CAD model, you're into it.

Speaker 2 And I walk in and go, hey, Sean, come with me real quick. I need you on a project.
You're like,

Speaker 2 like right now? Like, yes, right now.

Speaker 2 But I, but, but, like, inside, they're saying that. Like, don't, please don't make me stop what I'm doing.
I need to finish this system.

Speaker 2 Where if it's me and you come in, I'm in the middle of something, I'm diving really deep. You're like, Travis, come here, I got, I want to show you something.
All right, man. Hey, what's up?

Speaker 2 So you'll see that in people. You'll see that in your kids.
And when you can see that and you can understand their innate motives and intentions and innate force and talents,

Speaker 2 I can now direct my teams better. I cannot have as much conflict in the workplace.
I can have collaboration.

Speaker 2 So, going back to the question of how do I manage all that stuff, I do it by really making sure that everybody's operating in their instinctual strengths, not just their cognitive base strengths.

Speaker 2 That's your resume. Your resume of life is your cognition.
That's what you've learned. You're going to learn and continue to learn.
And you'll keep filling out that resume. All right.

Speaker 2 You didn't know how to jump out of an airplane before you went to free fall school. You were taught to do that, cognition.
But what made you really fly better than maybe somebody else?

Speaker 2 Your spatial awareness, your ability to implement and see and mimic somebody else. Like watching the instructor in front of me, I could be like, okay, what's he doing with his elbows?

Speaker 2 I'm going to try that. Next thing you know, it starts working.
Or gripping a gun. I sit there and watch the great ones back in the day, like, how does freaking Robbie Latham doing that?

Speaker 2 Man, I'd rewind and like VHS, like,

Speaker 2 like, okay, and I'd replicate it. And next thing you know, I'm shooting well.
That's the good implementer. Some people can't do that.

Speaker 2 So even teaching somebody on the range, I'll find out every class, we go through a co-nation exercise. I have a guy that's an implementer.
I'll show him. I'll point.
I'll touch. I'll feel.

Speaker 2 I have somebody that's a fact finder. Hey, put the gun away.
All right, let's go back to the three points that we talked about in class. What was the first element of the grip?

Speaker 2 It was something about friction and this bone, and I forget the name of that bone, the trapezium bone. What does that do? Oh, that's right.
It traps. traps the hand.

Speaker 2 Okay, what does that do as you extend the gun?

Speaker 2 That's what I'm missing. What is it doing? If you think about lever systems and class one and class two levers, pair of scissors does what versus a pair of nutcracker does what?

Speaker 2 Two different tools because the pin's in a different place. Don't put your pin back here when you grip a gun, put your pin up here and grip a gun.
And what do you have? Leverage. Good.
Try that.

Speaker 2 I don't even show him.

Speaker 2 He looks the same as the implementer down at the end of the line because we've taken and put cognitive and cognitive-based outcome training into a firearms program versus just saying, just keep going, you'll eventually get it.

Speaker 2 Just get a better grip. Like, how? What does that mean? So I've implemented that across my family, across my companies, and it allows me to trust everybody more with their instinctual strengths.

Speaker 2 And if they mess up, I go, hey, quick starter, why'd you screw up? Because I was being impulsive, boss. Good.
What are you going to do next? I'm going to build a system for myself. Why?

Speaker 2 Because I use my quick starting as a crutch instead of working on the thing that I'm not good at. like setting an alarm to call you.

Speaker 2 Because from here on out, if I set that alarm right now to call you tomorrow at three o'clock, guess what happens to all my other tasks? It's a race. I have to be there for Sean at three o'clock.

Speaker 2 So I'll knock out this, I'll knock out that, I'll go back in and finish a project, I'll go and spend some time with my kids.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, my life becomes so much fuller because instinctually, that's what I want. I want to be raced against the clock.

Speaker 2 So when we brain map this and put it on EEG systems, you will see stress

Speaker 2 in me trying to organize and systemize.

Speaker 2 Even if I love it, you will see no stress and flatlining in my delta, beta, alpha, theta waves in my brain when I'm about to sling load 450 pounds on a towards jump out of the back of a C-130 and a full wall locker jump.

Speaker 2 My heart rate actually goes into almost a resting heart rate when I'm in those situations. But me reading and writing and doing taxes,

Speaker 2 okay, man, what the hell is wrong with me? You know what I mean? So once you understand that about people, I think it becomes easier.

Speaker 2 And that was a big struggle for me in the beginning, starting starting businesses, quick starting all over the place and failing and getting fired and like, dude, you're not doing the right thing.

Speaker 2 You're moving too fast, slow down.

Speaker 2 That system alone has really helped me help people. Interesting.
And then in return, I can sit here and say, I can successfully manage

Speaker 2 almost successfully manage seven kids. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Speaker 2 But the companies, it's like, yeah, they're self-sufficient because I let them have that

Speaker 2 self-sufficient nature by giving them the trust that they're going to operate in their cognitive instincts well and help others identify when they're not operating in their cognitive instincts well.

Speaker 2 That's why I don't care about how much you know because knowledge is just potential power. It doesn't give you any power.
The plan of execution gives you power.

Speaker 2 And that baseline, understanding myself instinctually, okay, now what do I know cognitively? And then how do I affect that with my affect, my emotions?

Speaker 2 Because that's the three elements of life, right?

Speaker 2 Your instinct, which grows your cognition, which your cognition then helps develop your emotional state.

Speaker 2 What I know, what I've seen, what I've done will make me kind of anxiety, make me happy, make me whatever. Like that's, that's the order of those things.

Speaker 2 And I think if we understand them as leaders of organizations or family members

Speaker 2 and as individual operators, imagine how many less people I would have fired in the team that couldn't get the, hey, man, if you just keep tumbling for 10,000 feet, bro, you're not going to be on the team.

Speaker 2 You're not going to be on jump team. Sorry.

Speaker 2 You know, if you can't figure out how to breathe on pure oxygen and you're having trouble and you're in hypercapnia constantly because you don't know how to fin, because you never go to the pool and work out, you're fired.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, I could have taught them differently by using their cognitive instinct. So it's complicated, but when you get into it, you're like, man, this is actually extremely simple.

Speaker 2 Why aren't we thinking or teaching like this?

Speaker 2 Imagine if they taught your kids in school with their instinct versus just giving them the shit that the Department of Education gives them, which hopefully that changes.

Speaker 4 Interesting. I'm definitely

Speaker 4 one to that.

Speaker 2 That's one answer that helps me balance. Then, of course, off-gassing and doing the other things and trying to make sure I stay as healthy as possible.
I used to love all the extreme sports.

Speaker 2 I can't do them all anymore.

Speaker 2 But anytime I can get out in the elements,

Speaker 2 that's my off-gassing.

Speaker 2 Thanks for sharing that.

Speaker 4 Well, Travis, so I want to get into your life story. So we'll go childhood, military, career, transition out, contracting, what you're doing now.

Speaker 4 And then who knows what we'll get into about rabbit holes in the middle of all that but um i got i got you something

Speaker 2 it's probably the only reason you're here actually that's it i've been waiting on these

Speaker 4 vigilance league gummy bears made right here in the usa and i got you something else so

Speaker 4 Your EDC was awesome, by the way. Oh, yeah.
But have you heard of the up phone?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I've been watching you talk about this, and I've been very curious to dive into this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, So there's a whole slew of features on that phone. Eric Prince

Speaker 4 developed it. He got a guy that helped develop Pegasus.
Are you familiar with Pegasus?

Speaker 2 Yeah, a little bit.

Speaker 4 The computer virus.

Speaker 4 One of the guys on the dev team of Pegasus helped develop that phone. So there's just, you know, everybody's worried about big tech and

Speaker 4 people spying on you and big tech following you and tracking everything you do. And so that

Speaker 4 is the best answer that I've found thus far. And,

Speaker 4 you know, I don't,

Speaker 4 we have a lot of heavy conversations around here that we don't want anybody listening in on. And we usually throw our phones in a Faraday box or something.
But with that, it's got a kill switch.

Speaker 4 It throws up a piece of plastic in between the battery and the

Speaker 4 phone, so they can't, they cannot listen. Wow.

Speaker 4 And then you can even download your social media apps on there. And there's a feature that

Speaker 4 enables it enables

Speaker 4 the social media companies to not track everything that you're doing on your phone. It's got an integrated VPN.
It's got an integrated version of Signal on that phone. Wow.

Speaker 4 It's, yeah, a lot of cool features.

Speaker 2 That was my biggest question. I'm sure a lot of people will look at this and go, can I operate it as a normal phone? Yeah.

Speaker 2 That I'd be using like an iPhone or a Samsung device or Android or whatever else. Can I still have my lifestyle or do I have to use this for something else? Like, that was my big question.

Speaker 4 You can still use it for your lifestyle. And

Speaker 4 it works with a bunch of different

Speaker 4 network providers. Okay.
I don't know exactly which, mine's with T-Mobile, but

Speaker 4 they're going to eventually work with all of them. But if you go to the website, it'll tell you which ones

Speaker 4 you can use. So it's not its own service.

Speaker 4 It's a device.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I thought you might like that. Absolutely.
And perfect.

Speaker 2 Yeah, somebody offered me gummy bears yesterday on the range, and I was like, nope, I'm going to go see Sean tomorrow.

Speaker 2 I can't do that to him. Right on.

Speaker 2 Thank you, man.

Speaker 4 Well, Travis, let's start getting into your life story. Where'd you grow up?

Speaker 2 North Florida

Speaker 2 in the swamps, farm boy.

Speaker 4 What town?

Speaker 2 Little town called Denellin, Florida. It's

Speaker 2 an Ocala area. And then there's Crystal River.
Crystal River is where the Bandatees go and the springs there.

Speaker 2 Okay. So if you're looking at Florida, well, I guess it'll be like this from the camera side.
It's right in the crook. So you got the panhandle of Pensacola, you know, Panama City and stuff is.

Speaker 2 And then Miami down here. We're right in the Gulf of Mexico side of the house.
So,

Speaker 2 you know, lots of river life growing up on the boats, fishing with dad and swimming.

Speaker 2 Love the water, scalloping,

Speaker 2 hunting, big, big hog hunter,

Speaker 2 hogs and knives kind of thing back in the day.

Speaker 4 Brothers and sisters?

Speaker 2 One brother, yeah.

Speaker 2 Sister died in a car accident when she was,

Speaker 2 when I was, I was young, five years old, four or five years old.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 yeah, big athlete, played, played multiple sports.

Speaker 2 Tried to letter in as many sports as I could in my senior year just because I'm trying to be a jack of all trades.

Speaker 2 Wanted Wanted to be a recon Marine, forced recon Marine, since I was about nine years old. That's when I remember seeing or hearing about it.
It was like nine or 10, actually.

Speaker 2 And my brother's almost six years older than me. And I remember seeing a Marine walk into his high school wearing dress blues.
And I wanted to be an A-10 pilot. My dad was a pilot in the Air Force.

Speaker 2 Grew up sitting in the seat next to him flying.

Speaker 2 Like I was soloing and ready to fly at 17 years old. And

Speaker 2 had an opportunity to play football at big, big university in Florida.

Speaker 2 Turned it down, joined the Marine Corps instead.

Speaker 4 No kidding.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, turn it on. So

Speaker 2 was lucky. Was again, like I said earlier, I was a troublemaker.

Speaker 2 You know, I loved fire.

Speaker 2 I love fire.

Speaker 4 This is bad, dude. What kid does a love fire? Horrible.

Speaker 2 Got in some hot water. You know,

Speaker 2 one night some some people were breaking into houses and and they were you know meth heads tweakers and and uh

Speaker 2 we decided to go out and stop them you know it was a bunch of kids camping out wearing camis and uh we how old were you i was 15 i think at the time had a sawed off 10 22 ruger no stock no barrel like we didn't know back then man and uh and it was black as night just about one o'clock in the morning

Speaker 2 and uh

Speaker 2 they said shoot at him, shoot at him, get him out of here. So I just,

Speaker 2 I mean, 50 yards at night just to shoot to make some noise to scare him. And I see this body drop on the dock.
And I'm like, oh, shit.

Speaker 4 And are you serious?

Speaker 2 Yeah. And my buddy's like, dude, you hit that dude.
And gave me a high five. And then that they ran out screaming.

Speaker 2 Turns out they were bad and they got busted for what they were doing. But we didn't know any better.
We're just like, hey, let's go get rid of these people. We already held them at gunpoint earlier.

Speaker 2 My buddy's dad came out with a shotgun and says, hey, y'all, get the hell out of here right now. I'm calling the cops.

Speaker 2 They lied their ass off and then they went around and then dad went back to sleep. So we decided to take it in our own hands.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 who's we? Me and three other buddies that were camping out and running around and partying that night and shooting guns everywhere. It was a total redneck Florida story, man.

Speaker 2 And so we ran across the street and two guys went left and we went right and basically L-shaped ambushed them before we knew what an L-shaped was and dumped one.

Speaker 2 They dragged, it turned out to be a female.

Speaker 2 Just scraped her head.

Speaker 2 Didn't kill her. But about a year later, they found out and came to school, hooked me up, threw me in jail for about eight days.
And

Speaker 4 they found out that you shot her over a day.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 they arrested his dad because he was the only one witnessed with a with a gun that night. And I was like, dude.
What happens if they find out? He's like, he goes, screw my dad. He goes,

Speaker 2 he abuses me and and molests me him he can rot in jail and i was like uh

Speaker 2 okay

Speaker 2 a year later he breaks and they come in and say hey you're under arrest

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 so that was an attempt to murder charge at first and of course it dropped down as a juvenile so they dropped that down to some assault charges battery all aggravated battery assault with a deadly weapon

Speaker 2 they i ended up taking a plea and the judge used to be a former jag

Speaker 2 colonel And my recruiter, I'm in the delayed entry program at this point in time. And because now I'm like 16 and a half by the time this all comes around.
And I'm thinking my entire life is ruined.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to be able to join the Marines. I'm not going to be able to go play ball now.
Can't do anything.

Speaker 2 And the judge, he reviews it. And my staff sergeant's like, look, I can speak for this kid.

Speaker 2 You know, he's helped us immensely in the delayed entry program.

Speaker 2 My dad worked for Florida Power Corporation. So I had access to numerous resources on the family farm.

Speaker 2 So I built an obstacle course on my family farm that was bigger than Paris Island, South Carolina's confidence course. Towers,

Speaker 2 almost a thousand-foot zipline coming out of a 62-foot platform, fast ropes. Like I was a nerd.
Wow. I was a nerd

Speaker 2 because the guy that built the original fast ropes had a hanger right next to my dad's hanger and we'd fly. Colonel John Matthews, he introduced me to him.

Speaker 2 And because I used to pull up old wells and the old plastic pipe and I'd hang it in trees like 40 feet up and I'd drill holes through it and hang it. I'd slide down it until one night I

Speaker 2 sprained my ankle because it was wet and hit the ground and my dad was like, you're not doing that anymore. Cut that out of the tree.
And then he introduced me to John. He said, go ahead and pick one.

Speaker 2 It was a fat, you know, back as a kid when fast ropes were brand new, like you never heard of this concept. It was always repelling.
I see this rope. I'm like, holy shit.

Speaker 2 And so I hung it in the tree and I just fast roped every single day of my life.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you know, so we'd have delayed entry program meetings at my farm. We'd have like 60, 70 kids running through the whole course and the recruiter's like, who the folk does this?

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Speaker 1 Do it.

Speaker 2 So that's how I grew up. I was just a military nerd.
Grew up on my grandfather and my father's, you know, blood-soaked horror stories from war.

Speaker 2 What I I would say, maybe blood-soaked horror stories for some, but for me, I was like, that's my destiny. I feel like I need to do that.
I need to serve in some way.

Speaker 4 Do you feel like, was it pushed on you at all?

Speaker 2 No, not one bit.

Speaker 4 It was 100% your decision.

Speaker 2 Never. My dad never really talked about it a whole lot.
My grandfather did, but there was never any, you should think about this, son. Never.

Speaker 2 Ultimate support. I think they expected it from me.
And as soon as I joined up, and of course, when the judge goes, that's exactly exactly what you need is some discipline.

Speaker 2 So upon completion of your community service and all this other stuff you got to do, you will join the United States Marine Corps. Do you understand me? And I'm like,

Speaker 2 yes, sir.

Speaker 2 And he goes, and staff sergeant, he goes, if this kid doesn't do these things, then you will come back to me and we're going to have another meeting and we'll readdress your future.

Speaker 2 And so I did everything I was supposed to do and still had that shot to join the Marine Corps.

Speaker 2 So I, you know, I equate that back to a lot of guys do bad things, but it doesn't mean they're bad people.

Speaker 2 And I realized that later because I really questioned myself, like, am I a bad person for trying to help people? You know, I didn't know the law. I didn't know what I could and couldn't do.

Speaker 2 And then I still had the shot to go and do what I did in my life. I, you know, I'm extremely grateful for that and blessed that I was afforded that opportunity.

Speaker 4 You're an eighth generation.

Speaker 2 My dad, my grandfather,

Speaker 4 all the way back to

Speaker 2 the American Revolution. Yeah.
My grandfather's got probably the most unique story.

Speaker 2 Omaha Beach first wave, first boots, first ramp to drop. He survives four out of 40 in his boat team,

Speaker 2 makes it to the beachhead,

Speaker 2 tries to jump overboard when everybody's getting shot inside the boat, realizes he can't swim, sees

Speaker 2 one of the other soldiers drowning,

Speaker 2 and jumps back in. And the staff sort of just like, let's go.

Speaker 2 And he grabs a Thompson off of one of the dead guys, an M1, and goes in, gets injured, goes back to London, does the whole rehabilitation camp stuff.

Speaker 2 Then he goes back to New York, meets grandma, gets his orders to go back to Europe Command for a second tour,

Speaker 2 gets on the train. And about three hours in the train ride, he's like,

Speaker 2 Are we going to New York? And these guys are next to him, like, no, man, we're going to Camp Pendleton, California. We're Marines.
And he's like, what? And he couldn't stop.

Speaker 2 So by the time, you know, trying to wire to people back then, you ain't getting off the train and going back to Europe or back to New York. So he ends up going to California.
They retask him.

Speaker 2 And then he was in

Speaker 2 first wave invasion, Irojima, first ramp to drop, got hit by a kamikaze, came in and ripped off the back of his boat,

Speaker 2 and then packed their shit up a few months later, went to Okinawa, Japan, and was in Okinawa. So he's the only known warrior that was in both theaters in all three major campaigns.

Speaker 2 Both of his flags are down in New Orleans World War II Museum, the stories that he has. So I got to grow up on that and I'm like, that's cool.

Speaker 2 I didn't even know until about 10 years ago the lineage of my family. I didn't know this growing up.

Speaker 2 I didn't know anybody beyond my grandfather in World War II because my dad's like, yeah, I think we're from Germany. I think great-grandpa Gershbach is from Germany on your mom's side.

Speaker 2 And then Grandpa Haley, you know, we got family. I'm like, Haley's not German, dad, it's Irish English.
And he's like, well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 And then I find out in 10 years ago, I got this whole family tree and I found all the military documentation all the way back to

Speaker 2 James Haley was my seventh generation grandfather who was a sergeant in the 11th Virginia Infantry in 1776.

Speaker 2 And then he ran home to his dad, William Haley, who was 52 years old, retired on the farm and said, dad, the revolution's starting. You got to come out of retirement and fight.

Speaker 2 So he served as a private under his son, who was a sergeant in the 11th Virginia military and infantry. And they fought in the revolution.

Speaker 2 And I just found last month another name popped up, John Haley, before. him.
So now I just found my ninth, but I don't know where he comes from.

Speaker 2 It doesn't, there's not a whole lot of information on it yet. So I'm still digging into that.

Speaker 2 And then I go back to my dad, I'm like, dad, we're not from Germany at all, man. We're freaking been in America.
He's like, well, how long? I said, I don't know.

Speaker 2 We've been here since at least the 1600s. So we're early settlers in this, in this country.
And, you know,

Speaker 2 every male has stepped up.

Speaker 4 You know, I'm curious. Do you think your dad and your grandfather wanted you to join the Marine Corps?

Speaker 4 Having both have been to war?

Speaker 2 I wish I could ask them that question because I don't know the answer. I know they were super proud when I did.

Speaker 2 And I think, you know, how that generation, both those generations were a little quieter, especially Korea and World War II.

Speaker 2 Now, my grandfather didn't hesitate to talk about slaying Japs and freaking, you know, and World War II or, you know, killing the Nazis. But my dad was quiet about it.

Speaker 2 Not from a trauma standpoint, I don't think. I think he was just a quiet man.
And

Speaker 2 it's probably why I run my mouth too much sometimes. And because I always wanted him to speak out more, I always wanted him to tell more stories.

Speaker 2 So I think that he was extremely proud of me joining because he never gave me any sense of,

Speaker 2 you know, or like any weird frequency or feeling I never got from him.

Speaker 2 So, no, I don't, I'd love to. One day, one day I'll ask him that.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 You know, the reason I'm asking is

Speaker 4 we had a conversation downstairs about your son

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 you know I ask a I ask a lot of

Speaker 4 gents that come through here if they that have been to war you know in our time frame if they want their kids to go to war I think about it all the time you know about my son and he's only three

Speaker 4 but and I think about

Speaker 4 how I'm gonna project my past to him and all that kind of stuff. And so

Speaker 4 do you want your son to serve? Did you want your son to serve?

Speaker 2 I think that was the most bittersweet moment when,

Speaker 2 and maybe in that feeling, I may now know what my dad and grandfather might have felt.

Speaker 2 You know, like I told you, I found out from the recruiter, not my son. And so a lot of, cause, of course, my ex calls, like, did you fall, you made him join the Marines?

Speaker 2 Like, I, I said, no, I had nothing to do with this. This is all on him.
And so I was confused at first because I was worried that they weren't picking anything, no job.

Speaker 2 You know, they had talked about a couple of things, but military was never on the table.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, this recruiter is telling me, hey, I'd like to meet with you. He's 18.

Speaker 2 I know he can do what he wants, but since he still lives under your house, I want to give you that respect and talk to you about his desires. And I'm like, okay, find out.
Get down there.

Speaker 2 Hayden, what's going on, man? I'm joining the Marines, Dad. Okay.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to recon. I'm like,

Speaker 2 what? Like, you didn't think to talk to me about this? We talk about this all the time. You come out to my classes, you hang out with these guys, you talk to these dudes a lot.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, why not tell me?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it just wasn't my time for him to tell me that. So maybe he was thinking I would talk him out of it.
I think.

Speaker 2 I think he would say that. Maybe.

Speaker 2 And maybe I should open that transparency up with him and make sure that that's clear. But I did tell him, I said, look, if you do this, you have to promise me one thing.

Speaker 2 You are not allowed to walk in my footsteps.

Speaker 2 You will make your own.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 because I don't want you, because he's going to get compared to me, of course, you know,

Speaker 2 you know, I was honoregraduate, high shooter, all that stuff in boot camp. He's living under that.
And guess what he does?

Speaker 2 He gets Ironman and high shooter and undergraduate, gets E3 promotion, meritorious Lance Corporal out of boot camp. I've never heard of that in my life.

Speaker 2 So he's already kicking my ass and my brother's ass, who was also Iron Man and a high shooter and undergraduate, and then became a colonel, just retired.

Speaker 2 And now he's heading to the same path and the same footsteps that I stepped into. And you know, like those fins, man, when he puts those feet down in that pool deck here coming up soon,

Speaker 2 he's going to kill it. And he's doing more now than I was doing.
And I was pretty prepared going in.

Speaker 2 So I think my feelings at first was like

Speaker 2 pride.

Speaker 2 Man, he's doing something that most people on the face of the planet would never do.

Speaker 2 Second emotion,

Speaker 2 fear,

Speaker 2 suffering.

Speaker 2 Just like the old saying, ignorance is bliss.

Speaker 2 He's ignorant right now. Wisdom is suffering.

Speaker 2 The pains that we have,

Speaker 2 the visions, the memories,

Speaker 2 sounds, the smells, whatever it is from our past and our combat experience

Speaker 2 is the suffering from how much we now know about it, how much we know about the world.

Speaker 2 I mean, look at the things we're talking about with the state of America, the border, the drugs, you name it, the sex trafficking, the wars,

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 corruption. Like, we didn't have that.
At least I didn't remember that when I went in.

Speaker 2 I was like, gonna go serve my country, put foot to ask for my country, you know, against evil people in the world. And that was all I had to worry about.

Speaker 2 Now our kids are joining the military with all of those things that we're talking about. And they hear podcasts.
They hear guys talking about it. He has access to all this information.

Speaker 2 And he's still choosing to join. That's where I go.
Why? Why are you joining? Because I want to make the world a better place.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 2 That's a really good start.

Speaker 2 And so, of course, a lot of people would say, are you sure you want your son joining the military in a time like this? You sure you want him working for this administration? Of course not.

Speaker 2 But I worked for some shitty administrations too, just like you did, and just like a lot of us did, just like my grandfather did.

Speaker 2 There were people that were running the country back then that weren't the best. And you're always going to have bad leaders.
And so you're always going to have bad people.

Speaker 2 And I think people forget in all the chaos and the bullshit in the world that we talk about all the time. It's like music, man.
There's so much beautiful music in the world.

Speaker 2 Just like the world is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful place. The problem is the bad is louder.
That's it. So my opinion is

Speaker 2 the only way to fix a problem, like the problems we're having in a woke-ass military, in a government that's not prioritizing Americans first, et cetera, et cetera, is to put good people into that system and stop quitting.

Speaker 2 Now, I get it. I'm a victim of

Speaker 2 quitting law enforcement because I was forced out because I was making too good of decisions. I was increasing people's hit probabilities and survivability rates, like astronomically and world record

Speaker 2 national highs and percentages around the country. Well, that puts out the improper psychological mindset to our communities that we're training killers, not police officers.
So shut it down.

Speaker 2 Like, what do you mean? We only do four calls a year. Shut it down.
You only need to do one a year. Why?

Speaker 2 You can't justify that to me. Then goodbye.
And I had to throw my badge across the table because I won't be a part of that when I know I can fight harder outside on that system.

Speaker 2 So I've not told him any of these things. I've not said, hey, here's all the corruption and stuff you're going to be up against.
Here's the things that you need to worry about. No,

Speaker 2 you need to worry about swimming, running, breath work, meditation. And I'm teaching him old cultural warrior ways,

Speaker 2 not the new stuff. Like I'll see him get really stressed out and all of a sudden I start going,

Speaker 2 and he goes. And I'm like, damn, I wish I had the senses to do that when I was younger.

Speaker 2 So it's not my job to tell him about all my horrors and my suffering and the wisdom that I have. I want him to be a little ignorant.

Speaker 2 I want him to go in with a good foundation and good parenting strategies, which we can pride ourselves on for, I think, doing a decent job and a hard life that we've all had, you know, broken foam, divorces, and trauma.

Speaker 2 Me, I was not the best guy, man. I wasn't, I wasn't around much.
That's why I stopped. That's why I left the Marine Corps 15 years and tried to find something else because I was confused.

Speaker 2 And I want him to find those lessons on his own.

Speaker 4 What is your, what is your,

Speaker 4 what bothers you the most? What's your biggest fear about him

Speaker 4 potentially going to war?

Speaker 2 It's a selfish thing I've realized.

Speaker 2 I don't want him to have the same darkness that maybe we have afterwards.

Speaker 2 But he's going to. And that's the choice he's making.
That's the life he's manifesting.

Speaker 2 And I realize that if you're going to step up and take on that hardship of a life,

Speaker 2 I mean, just think about a pipeline alone. Who does that to themselves? Why would you want to,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 be deprived of food and sleep and be wet and cold all the time and be beat down and mentally and physically exhausted at the end of every day for two solid years? Who does that to themselves?

Speaker 2 Very special people.

Speaker 2 And I know a lot of operators don't consider themselves special, and that's the problem. They are.
They are special.

Speaker 2 When you get out, you look back at your brothers and you look back at what you did, you're like, there's not a lot of dudes in the world that would do those types of things to themselves and with each other.

Speaker 2 And that's what creates the bond that we have.

Speaker 2 I'm excited for him to feel that. Really excited.
All the great things that we've encountered in our lives and in the operational community, I want him to feel all of that.

Speaker 2 I'm scared that he'll feel all the bad. I'm not sure how he'll react to it, but

Speaker 2 that's the selfishness. That's why I have no business trying to

Speaker 2 change his physics because that's nonsensical. You can't have that conversation.
That's like trying to change the position of the sun. You can't change somebody else's physics, man.

Speaker 2 And so I want him to be on this journey. I know he's going to be a savage, a compassionate savage.
He cares. He's vulnerable.

Speaker 2 And I want him to find all the hard things and deal with them in his own way.

Speaker 2 And I hope that I have given him the best that I can with what I have, a structure of how to manage the stressors where I didn't have one.

Speaker 2 He's gone through the passages, not medicine stuff, the meditation work, the cold stuff. He's a fighter.

Speaker 2 He knows what pain is. And that's the biggest lesson that I want him to understand is the difference between those two words, pain and suffering.

Speaker 4 Do you worry that he is trying to live up to the life that you've manifested?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's another piece of it that I think when I heard Maureen first, I'm like, whoa, what? And then all of a sudden he goes, and I want to be a recon, Maureen. I'm like, okay,

Speaker 2 I hope I didn't do something to make you think that you have to take that same path that I did. And after exploring that deeply with him,

Speaker 2 I don't think it is. I really don't.
Because I had some buddies of mine

Speaker 2 talk to him.

Speaker 2 I had him talk to a couple of my buddies that were former Force guys went to PJs down in Tucson, had him talk to a couple of buddies in CAG that came in.

Speaker 2 And a buddy in CAG, he's like, he's like, look, man, your son's not joining because he wants to be like you. Because he went deep on him.

Speaker 2 And because i told him the same exact thing i said man i'm worried that he's doing this because i'm doing it

Speaker 2 and he goes nah man he he wants to get it out of a system he wants to choose the hardest branch of service he wants to get the badass uniform wants to get the ass and he wants to go out and and be hard but he goes i understand and and after talking to your son he is extremely intellectual um i said yeah he scored perfect on all his his tests 100 on the ASVAB or 99, whatever that is.

Speaker 2 I was like, he could add any job he wanted, chooses recon. And he's like, he wants to take the hardest thing.
And then he started asking me about our world. And I was like, oh, really?

Speaker 2 He's like, yeah. He goes, a kid like him in four or five years from now,

Speaker 2 we're going to look for him.

Speaker 2 That made me feel good, right? Because especially the hardships that Marines go through and the forced reconnaissance or reconnaissance community, the raiders are getting their,

Speaker 2 they're always constantly messed with by the Marine Corps.

Speaker 2 And that's why a lot of guys go contract. That's why a lot of guys go over to the dark side.
They start their own companies. They get out and they do something different because they're at this point.

Speaker 2 We're like, I think I've, I think I've maxed out what the Marine Corps can give me at this point. And it's getting better.

Speaker 2 I hope the Marine Corps starts learning their lesson and starts taking care of their people

Speaker 2 because you have the greatest organization of, again, brotherhood and camaraderie and this crazy ass.

Speaker 2 psychopathic, compassionate fraternity of men that come together to go destroy evil that came together in a bar one night in Pennsylvania and said, we need to kill people.

Speaker 2 And they started a branch of service in a bar. Okay.
That tells you a lot about the Marine Corps.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I'm honored that he's a part of that. And I'm also, you know, I was grateful to hear.
And when I started talking to him about, hey, what do you think about some special mission stuff?

Speaker 2 Later on down the road, he's like, oh, yeah. He goes, I would absolutely love to do that.
He goes, I just, I love the water. I love the amphib side.
I tried him.

Speaker 2 I said, dude, I need you to come down to Cordado, work with some of the teams that I work with. Some of my buddies down there.
I want you to check out the Naval Special Warfare side of the house.

Speaker 2 We go down there, hang out, talks to a bunch of my buddies. And he's like, I'm just not, I don't, I don't feel it.
I don't feel it. I was like, okay, what about pararescue?

Speaker 2 What about helping saving lives, man? You know, so others may live concept. Introduced him, had him work with a team of guys that came in from Tucson.
And he's like, these dudes are badass.

Speaker 2 He goes, they're, he goes incredibly talented. He goes, I just don't like the medical side too much.
I'm like, all right, okay. What about ASOS? What about this? What about that?

Speaker 2 No, I was like, well, what do you want to do then, bud? I don't know. Recruiter calls me.
Like,

Speaker 2 I tried. So I tried to introduce him to as many people as I could.
And I think what he'll do is he'll take that path.

Speaker 2 He'll go up and then he'll cross deck and go to the CAG program. I think.

Speaker 4 Have you thought about

Speaker 4 how you would handle it as a father if he doesn't make it?

Speaker 2 Of course, I've had that worry.

Speaker 2 And so with that worry, I've just said to him, like, look, this is a hard life and not everybody makes this through on the first one. It's okay.
It's okay if you don't make it through.

Speaker 2 Some of the selections or vettings or

Speaker 2 basic reconnaissance course.

Speaker 2 You know, so what I want you to do is think about, you know, the, the, the, the trusting side of the house, all the things that I ever taught you about the braving system, you know, the boundaries, the reliability, the accountability, the vault, the integrity, the non-judgment, the, the generosity that you need to have as a leader before you go and outperform everybody else over here.

Speaker 2 I think Simon Sinek talked about that a little bit with the SEAL teams. Like, he always looks for the trusted and performer guy.
You know, he's got his cool graph that he talks about with that.

Speaker 2 But I'm like, no, that's, you need to understand what the anatomy of trust is first. And that is setting healthy boundaries.
That is reliability.

Speaker 2 That is vulnerability and accountability of your actions.

Speaker 2 That is, you know, being a quiet professional because there's no such thing as a silent professional. That's something the military is messing us up with bad.

Speaker 2 That's the problem with a lot of these guys that get into. going back to the stress and the PTSD not to bounce around here, but like they're taught to be a silent professional.
And that's a problem.

Speaker 2 There's a look again define the word silent means what

Speaker 2 nothing quiet though means hey you guys keep your voices down um you know and i know you know the the teams get their balls busted for writing books and making movies i wish we did that i wish we had 5 000 forced recon marines in the world but we don't we have maybe 400 actually that's up to 800 now it's the highest it's ever been when i was in 300 dudes 100 on the east coast 100 on the west coast 100 in okinawa japan that's it and then your reserve guys you guys have like 5 000 navy seals in the world right now or something like that.

Speaker 2 Why? Because you guys are good at marketing and storytelling. And, you know, regardless of people busting balls, the Marine Corps won't do that.

Speaker 2 You look on their Instagram channels, you'll have a recon Marine doing something, jumping out of an airplane. It'll say, U.S.
Marines doing this, conducting this exercise here and there.

Speaker 2 I'm like, why don't you talk about it? That's the quiet side I'm trying to get people to do more of.

Speaker 2 And so I'm shocked that he came to me and wanted to do that because I've never really talked about it much of what I did in Force Recon.

Speaker 4 You know, I think about this all the the time. And, you know, I

Speaker 4 really hope my kid doesn't want to join the military.

Speaker 4 I'd rather him go another path, but I, you know, I think about it all the time and

Speaker 4 as a dad, and he's, he's three, but he's starting to get into,

Speaker 4 he's starting to show a lot more interest in dad. Took him fishing for the first time not long ago, took him camping for the first time not long ago.

Speaker 4 Do a lot of family hikes, ATV rides, shit like that.

Speaker 4 And, you know, one of the things that I just always think about is,

Speaker 4 is what if he does

Speaker 4 try to walk in my footsteps, especially, you know, the career.

Speaker 4 It sounds weird, but because I'm talking about my own career, but I could see how a kid would be impressed with the military career that I've experienced.

Speaker 4 And then to expound on that,

Speaker 4 the podcast that I'm doing now, you know, we're bringing on guys like you and

Speaker 4 lots of

Speaker 4 soft, SOCOM, tier one types.

Speaker 4 I wouldn't necessarily say that we glorify it, but

Speaker 4 it's everywhere.

Speaker 2 You're telling history and history is is important.

Speaker 4 And, you know, so something that I think often about is even that if he does want to, if he does go that route, which I hope he doesn't, but if he does,

Speaker 4 how do you let your son know that you're

Speaker 4 proud of him

Speaker 4 if he fails in what you've succeeded in?

Speaker 4 i think that would be one of the toughest

Speaker 2 i i've shared this with him and i think being transparent is important to your kids about those types of things um and saying look it was not easy for me there's things that i failed at there's things that um

Speaker 2 i i never thought i would be able to get through and some of them i didn't and i said you're gonna find those times i said you know just like you jumped into wrestling in the last two years of your life and you skyrocketed to the the top, man.

Speaker 2 You took top state championships and in a short amount of time.

Speaker 2 But how many fights did you lose? He's like, oh, a lot, yeah. I said, exactly.
So you're going to continue to lose a lot of fights, especially on this journey.

Speaker 2 You're not going to be the star athlete in this game. You're going to be with 60 other dudes that are also almost on the same level as you at certain points in time.

Speaker 2 Now, of course, you got your tool bags and you got your high performers, but the mid-range of everybody is going to be pushing everybody.

Speaker 2 And that's what's going to be addicting to be around those types of guys that want to push themselves that hard and be that miserable in order to put foot to ask for their country.

Speaker 2 That says a lot about them. And that's what makes it a special organization.

Speaker 2 So I've shared those times, like you will fail. You understand that, right? And I said, just because I failed

Speaker 2 doesn't mean I didn't go back and try again. I said, so if you fail it, that doesn't mean you don't.

Speaker 2 you don't you go back to the marine corps needs you you go back to another unit like you can take that in dock again later it's going to happen.

Speaker 2 There's times I had to spend two and a half years as an infantryman before I was even allowed to take an indoc. I said, son, you're on a contract.

Speaker 2 You get to go out of boot camp and walk right into the reconnaissance training center. Like, that's awesome.
Right. And I said, but

Speaker 2 I had to live through failure for two years before I even got my chance. And I just so happened to be lucky to pass the vetting and indoc to get into that.
But then I failed miserably down the road.

Speaker 2 I failed at a lot of stuff. And so I said, when that happens, don't hang your head low and walk away.
So,

Speaker 2 you know, and I, of course, I've taught him don't ever, don't ever ring the bell concept. You know, that's not, that's not in your, in your life.
It's a love story. So I, I have shared that with him.

Speaker 2 I've shared the love story of what it's like to, to want to do that. You know, like when you were kids, you had a poster on your wall and it had the cool guy stuff.

Speaker 2 You know, I kids watch the commercials nowadays of the of the special operations guys jumping and diving and doing cool coming out of the water. And I was like, damn, I wish I had that one as a kid.

Speaker 2 I had that stupid marine corps poster with the guy with the cabbage and the cabar on his lc one it's like that was it that's all i had um

Speaker 2 and i i just happened to find reconnaissance and and and never studied any other branch of service never studied seals never studied air force any of that stuff even my dad was in the air force i just just gravitated towards this path and um

Speaker 2 um so i think you know

Speaker 2 he is extremely lucky to be in this opportunity to where I think he's set up for success because I know there's a big, they've changed the programs quite a bit, which makes me feel better about his success because right now, basic recon course has like a 98% pass rate.

Speaker 2 And people be like, wait, that's a basic school, man.

Speaker 2 It should be more like Buds because that, but that's a problem with Buds now, too, because I know you've been talking to a lot of people about that.

Speaker 2 But I heard last year that they had like a 71% attrition rate. Well, that's a lot of money and a lot of time they're spending.

Speaker 2 So where's the preparation courses for these guys before they even go into it? That's what Recon's doing now.

Speaker 2 So they're doing a like, he's starting five weeks weeks of MART, which is this Marines are waiting reconnaissance training.

Speaker 2 Then he goes into a five-week reconnaissance training assessment program where they really start squeezing them and try to figure out who's going to be candidates to go to BRC.

Speaker 2 And then they'll have 13 weeks basically on top of their infantry training they just got out of on top of 13 weeks of boot camp, which there's more infantry training in.

Speaker 2 So they already have a good infantry skill set with land navigation and basic patrols and formations and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 Where I know if you're a Navy side, it's hard to get that if you're not in an infantry-based job. So So you're, you're trying to get into that school and then you're learning all the combat tactics.

Speaker 2 So I think the Marine Corps and the Army has that side a little bit better.

Speaker 2 And so they've realized that that's the last place we need to have a high attrition rate.

Speaker 2 Let's burn them out before they even get there because then we can send them back to infantry or the Marine Corps' needs before we waste a ton of money or a million bucks sending them to BRC.

Speaker 2 And so now they've, they've, they've pretty much capped that 98%, which is awesome. So I have a good feeling.
And he goes, I said, well, what's the 2%

Speaker 2 to the staff staff at 2IC out there? And he goes, it's DORs. It's guys that's still at that point.
They get all the way through that and they get to BRC. I'm like, I just, I changed my mind.

Speaker 2 I don't want to do this. And that 2%, that's pretty damn good.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I think those preparation programs are very important nowadays. I didn't have that.
I just, I took leave. to take an induct to sneak out of my unit because my unit's like, you ain't going to recon.

Speaker 2 You're a light armored reconnaissance marine. I'm like, that's not recon.
It's a tank. I'm driving around and I hate my life.
It's hot. It's fucking steamy and there's sand on my body all the time.

Speaker 2 And I want to go in the water. And they're like, too bad.
So I took leave and I prepped for the indoc. And I found a guy at the pool one day.

Speaker 2 I had a recon jack on his arm where we typically tattoo it. And

Speaker 2 I said, hey, how do I get the recon? He said, just come to Camp Henleton, take an indoc. I said, just come take it.
And I said, but how do I do that? My unit won't let me.

Speaker 2 And he's like, bro, if you pass the indoc, recon owns you. Your unit can't do shit about it.
I was like, so I had to find out the hard way.

Speaker 2 And me and a best friend of mine took the indoc and took a week off, went to Camp Pendleton, did surf drills and did everything we thought we needed to do and passed the indoc.

Speaker 2 And we were three out of 53 people to pass. That's it.
Oh, shit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so I, they said, all right, good job, guys. We'll do your psyche valves.
And they sent us back to our unit. And they said, in a few months, we'll call you and get your orders out here.

Speaker 2 And then six months goes by. And then finally, all of a sudden, orders show up.
And dude, I got hammered. Sergeant Major screaming at me like, what the fuck is this?

Speaker 2 And I'm just sitting there smiling with big shit right on my face.

Speaker 2 And he's like, you're gonna fail and you're gonna come back here and you're gonna make your life miserable and that motivated me i was like well i'm damn sure not feelings i don't want to come back to your ass um so i i tell him those kind of stories as well it that's a that's you know the potential of failure is is greater uh then than i think he has now and plus the kid like i said he's a savage man he's he's swimming 15 000 meters a week before he goes he's deep into the deep end fitness program uh that i run uh with a friend of mine in in scottsdale uh under prime hall and the guys that you've had on your show before,

Speaker 2 and uh, and that's I'm just seeing these kids, man. We got about 10 kids on contract right now in our defense fitness program.

Speaker 2 I mean, I would have died to have had an eighth of the training that these kids are getting now.

Speaker 2 So, the resilience and the water survivability stuff and the things they're doing is tenfold more so than what they'll even get in Buds or

Speaker 2 Special Warfare and Air Force or reconnaissance training.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 2 So, I'm not as worried.

Speaker 4 What is the

Speaker 4 I'm sure you've had a lot of talks? What is one piece? And I'm sure he's going to watch this.

Speaker 4 What is a piece of advice that you haven't given him yet

Speaker 4 that you want him to know?

Speaker 2 To soul search what compassion truly means to the warrior,

Speaker 2 I believe compassion

Speaker 2 is the number one trait of a warrior.

Speaker 2 Why I say that is because

Speaker 2 you know, a lot of people would say, Well, what do you mean that? What does that have to do with warfare or gunfighting?

Speaker 2 I'm like, Well, it kind of has everything to do with it because if you think about it, the more I care about something,

Speaker 2 the harder I'm going to fight for it.

Speaker 2 It's like if somebody broke into my house and tried to hurt me or my family and I'm sitting on the curb afterwards and the cops are like, hey, what happened?

Speaker 2 Why did you shoot that guy 15 times?

Speaker 2 I'm not going to say the typical answer that most people might say, well, because his evil motive or intention or his capabilities and all the stuff that we would

Speaker 2 have a legal justification of why I did it.

Speaker 2 That would be reasons, considerations, and potentially excuses of why I did it. The deeper meaning is

Speaker 2 I did it because I care about something so much more precious than that piece of shit, my family. That's why I did it.
I didn't want to do it.

Speaker 2 The last thing a man that wants has seen violence, as you know very well, is more violence.

Speaker 2 But I will

Speaker 2 take his ass out of the street and skin him alive and light his ass on fire to make a spectacle for everybody to see what not to mess with. It's like that American flag on the wall.
Same thing.

Speaker 2 I care about that. I care about what it means.
And so that compassion is what drives us to go out and put foot to ask for our country. And

Speaker 2 we forget that at times. And I want him to remember that.
That no matter what

Speaker 2 you're going through,

Speaker 2 no matter how much pain or suffering you're in,

Speaker 2 remember how much you give a shit.

Speaker 4 It's a great piece of advice.

Speaker 2 And the world will be a better place if we all just cared a little bit more.

Speaker 4 Thank you. Let's take a break.

Speaker 4 I know everybody out there has to be

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call signed super bad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan Show.
And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The only other thing that's going going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 All right, Travis, we're back from the break. Let's get back to you.
You're going to, you went in the Marine Corps, you got into reconnaissance.

Speaker 2 How to go? Yeah. So I, um,

Speaker 2 I, uh, like I took that leave, got my orders back about six months later, pissed off my command, uh, got what I wanted, went out there, and, uh,

Speaker 2 I loved it. Now, again, I, I'm, I've never seen

Speaker 2 in my life as a Florida boy, never been in the snow ever, never saw snow, ever, uh, never saw mountains, you know, came from a small, you know, farm type family, didn't have a whole lot of means.

Speaker 2 Mom and dad worked their ass off for everything we had.

Speaker 2 Um, and so we didn't take a lot of family vacations unless it was like Disneyland or something like that, which was huge for us, you know.

Speaker 2 And so I get out there, and all of a sudden I fall in love with the mountains and the rock and California and mountain warfare schools. And I just hit every school I could possibly go to

Speaker 2 and spent some time out there.

Speaker 2 I did my first enlistment,

Speaker 2 got

Speaker 2 in a relationship, very young and dumb relationship, typical marine 21-year-old story, Vegas. I'll just throw that in there.
Nice.

Speaker 4 Vegas.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 4 the old shotgun wedding.

Speaker 2 The old shotgun wedding. Literally at the Chapel of the Bells, which was the same that Chevy Chase and the Vegas.

Speaker 2 Same church. Hold on.

Speaker 4 We got to go into this.

Speaker 4 How did this happen?

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 So I check into First Recon Company.

Speaker 2 back before it was a battalion. So if somebody's like, what's a recon company? Like, it was First Recon Company at the time.
The battalion had disbanded and came back later.

Speaker 2 And when I check in, I check into the headquarters battalion where these

Speaker 2 girls were working, the secretaries, S1 Abbin.

Speaker 2 And they check us in, and you know,

Speaker 2 my buddy's like, Hey, they're pretty cute. Let's ask them out.
So, we both ask them out, start dating both of them. And in two weeks, we're both in Vegas getting married.

Speaker 4 Nice.

Speaker 2 I don't think I've ever told this story before out loud.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 he comes home home first and goes, dude, now we're surfing, man. We're like living California life.
We're just trying to be the bachelors that, you know, we're finally recon.

Speaker 2 And I mean, we're still ropes. We're still in the recon indoctrination program at this point.
And he comes home and says, dude, check it out. I got married this weekend.
I'm like, what?

Speaker 2 What are you talking about? Who are you? What do you mean you got married this weekend? He's like, no, check it out. They both work in admin, right? This is an old school thing.

Speaker 2 I don't suggest anybody do this. That's watching this.
Oh, I think I know where this is going.

Speaker 2 And they can go into accounting and because both being active duty, you get dual comrades and BAH housing allowance.

Speaker 2 And so you can then move out in town when you get this and get an apartment and live the bachelor life. And then we get it annulled and go our separate ways.
And that didn't work out

Speaker 2 because she ended up getting pregnant

Speaker 2 about four months later.

Speaker 2 And I'm in jump school at this point. Or no, I was still in, I was still in the indoctrination program.
And

Speaker 2 I think BRC started coming around and then jump school and all that stuff. There was the pipeline wasn't the way it was back today.

Speaker 2 So I'm like, when are we going to get this in all? When are we going to get this in all? And she's like, I was like, we haven't told our parents anything. Nobody knows about this.

Speaker 2 And she's like, I'm pregnant. And I'm like,

Speaker 2 what the hell do we do? So we tried to make that work the best we could for about a year and a half. I even got out of the Marine Corps, moved back to Florida with her and Travis Jr., my oldest.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I was an electrician growing up. My dad was a big electrician.
So I went to job, went to work for a buddy

Speaker 2 and went to the police academy every night for 26 weeks. I'll just be a cop, man.
I'm no longer a Marine. So I do that for about 10 months.

Speaker 2 I start working on my post-certification for Orange County Sheriff's Office out of Florida to become a deputy.

Speaker 2 And the guys I'm working with, the field training officers, my recruiter that I'd hang out with and drink beer every night. And I'm just miserable.
He's like, dude, sign the papers. go back in.

Speaker 2 What are you doing? You're miserable. And I'm like, I just, no, I got to be a family man now.
I'm just going to become a cop and I'll be fine. No, dude, sign up.
I'm not signing the papers.

Speaker 2 Stop, Dave. And then,

Speaker 2 and then everybody was just busting my boss. You're not ready to be a cop yet, man.
And so I go home. We didn't get along too well.
We were just totally different personalities.

Speaker 2 And I said, look, I'm sorry. I need to go back and do what I set out in my life to do.
And so after that 10-month break, I contact the recruiter. I walk in.

Speaker 2 I said, hey, man, give me those papers right now. And he's like, well, I can't get you to recon.
I'm like, what do you mean you can't? I'm a recon Reed. What do you mean you can't get me to recon?

Speaker 2 And he says, I've got, I look, he goes, I got a buddy up at 2-2 Scout Sniper Platoon, the stay platoon. He goes, they need a chief scout right now.

Speaker 2 I'm going to send you up there, go over to recon, tell them that

Speaker 2 you're stuck in the infantry, and they'll suck you back over. And I'm like, okay, that's crazy.
Why the hell would I go to a sniper platoon? I'm not, I'm not a stay guy. I'm a recon guy.

Speaker 2 That's That's not going to work. And he's like, you'll be fine.
Don't worry. So I did it.

Speaker 2 And it was actually a great opportunity to run, you know, sniper command centers and understand that world because I never understood it before being in the reconnaissance side of the house.

Speaker 2 And so I, on the job, trained with those guys for about nine months. Whenever the sergeant major said, hey, I'm a recon Marine at an infantry unit.
He's like, what the hell are you doing over there?

Speaker 2 I said, they told me that they're not taking sergeants at the time.

Speaker 2 back into recon and he's like what are you talking about we need sergeants like crazy so again recruiting commands are all screwed up so i had to go through this whole process when i could have just went right back to recon

Speaker 4 and then so they they found a seat and second force recon one of the platoons needed a guy so i stepped into that and jumped right back into force recon and holy shit so hold on let me replay this for you just so i'm tracking here so you you've wanted to be a force recon marine since you were nine years old yeah you joined the marine corps at 18 You become a reconnaissance marine two years later.

Speaker 4 You have a fling.

Speaker 4 You guys get married so that you get the BAH money and you can move out in town only to get out of the military and become a fucking cop.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 4 Holy shit, Travis. What the fuck?

Speaker 2 Totally gets everything that I wanted to do in my life, right? But that was what was happening. And I've learned very,

Speaker 2 well, I've learned the hard way that,

Speaker 2 hey, man, what happened happened? And it happened exactly the way it happened. And it didn't happen any other way.
You know why? Because it didn't. And so I get back on my journey.
And

Speaker 2 so I just had, I had like, I don't know, I wouldn't call it a pause.

Speaker 2 It was, I was, that was deviation. That was meant to happen for some reason.
And of course, I have an amazing, incredible son.

Speaker 2 You know, Travis Jury's a freaking, he's, he's, he's my, my first love, man. My first kid.
And

Speaker 2 he's working on becoming a professional fisherman, electrician.

Speaker 2 And just all around, just awesome. And

Speaker 2 what month is it? I don't even know what month it is.

Speaker 4 It's November.

Speaker 2 In two months, I've become a granddaddy.

Speaker 4 Congratulations.

Speaker 2 So I'm excited about that.

Speaker 4 That's awesome.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's giving me

Speaker 2 and everybody a wonderful gift. So, um, and of course, Dallas, that was a struggle, though.

Speaker 4 The one question I have is:

Speaker 4 wait, how long after you got married did you get out of the military?

Speaker 2 That stint with that marriage? Yeah. It was pretty tight towards the end of that.
It was about a year and a half. So

Speaker 2 we dated, did the thing, got to recon about two and a half years.

Speaker 2 And then at the end of that enlistment, I had to make a decision to

Speaker 2 stay in and continue to deploy and stuff, which she was not having that. And she's like, we need to just get out, get away from the military.
And so on my first, I was on a small extension.

Speaker 2 And I said, I'm done. I'm leaving.

Speaker 4 So was it St. Apple? So what was it? A year and a half of marriage before you got out?

Speaker 2 About a year and a half, I think, if I remember back.

Speaker 4 That's not very much money in BAH for 207.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So now, so then I get out and I'm working as an electrician from five in the morning till six at night, going from the law enforcement account six at night to about 10 at night every day for 26 weeks.

Speaker 2 And I was like, this is, I want to go back and just malinger in the Marine Corps.

Speaker 2 Damn.

Speaker 4 For those that are wondering what BAH is, BAH is a housing allowance that you get in the military. It was

Speaker 2 that back then, I remember $79 a month more to live in an apartment in California. Nowadays, it's a little different, but yeah, you're right.
It wasn't a lot of money.

Speaker 2 But no, I deployed.

Speaker 2 You know, I went home as many deployments as I can do when I got to Second Force Recon.

Speaker 4 Did you deploy with reconnaissance before you left the first time?

Speaker 2 No, not on the West Coast. No.

Speaker 2 Or was your first deployment? It was all schools, all workups. And that's what pissed me off so bad is that I felt like I was leaving my guys down because now I got to get out.

Speaker 2 And I'm just now fully getting schooled up. I didn't go to dive school yet because dive school was a hard seat to get back then.

Speaker 2 And then I'm like, I got to go, guys. And I remember Gunny Smith, Ed Smith, I'm sure a lot of the Recondo dudes out there listening know that man's name.

Speaker 2 He tried to keep me. He's like, you're an idiot.
Don't do this. Come on, man.
And he screamed and yelled at me. And I was like, I just got to take care of my son now.
He's like, we all got kids.

Speaker 2 We all got to take care of, but the Marine Corps needs you. And I was like, I wasn't listening at that point.
And I wish I would have. But again, everything happens for a a reason.

Speaker 2 And maybe I wouldn't be sitting here if those things wouldn't have happened to me. What year is this? This would have been 98-ish.

Speaker 4 98. So not a lot going on in the world, anyways.

Speaker 2 No, not at all.

Speaker 2 And so maybe that was something else, too. I'm like, okay, I've spent an entire listment here.
Nothing's happened. And maybe I can just become a cop and take care of my kid now.

Speaker 2 I fucked up. I'm ashamed of myself.
You know, now I got to figure out how to be a dad and live a life. And then I realized how hard it was.
and so um

Speaker 2 i went back in and just fell in love with that love story again you know of of of being the image that i wanted to become when i was nine ten years old and

Speaker 2 started schooling out heavily what year did you come back in 98.

Speaker 2 you came 99 it would have been 99 that i came back in yeah so you were out for like a year maybe less it was less than a year like 10 almost 10 10 and a half months maybe if i had to guess um

Speaker 2 yeah because it took me a little bit to get in the academy get my job scored away and then by the time i graduated the le academy it was 26 weeks later and i'm like nope i'm going i'm getting in

Speaker 2 so then i get back to segment force i deploy a couple combat tours on that uh

Speaker 2 that was first wave invasion mosul uh we were the first troops into northern iraq

Speaker 2 And we went off the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. So we're already floating and cutting circles.

Speaker 4 so you went in and then did what, you went back in 99, four years, and then finally deployed into a combat room. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, but yeah, what, 2000?

Speaker 2 Oh, 99, I went into Kosovo, which all we did was fill gaps with the SAS there. And you saw some interesting stuff.

Speaker 2 You know, we got some mortars fired on us and navigated around a bunch of landmines for a long time working with the SAS.

Speaker 2 So a lot of guys wouldn't consider that a combat diploma as an active, like,

Speaker 2 we're going going in and working against the Serbs because they were the ones we were watching at the time.

Speaker 2 So, and then I did a golf deployment in Somalia.

Speaker 2 I was telling you about when I first came in, just hit the fleet at 3rd Light Armored Concept Battalion, 20 on Palms, boom, balloon goes up, going over.

Speaker 2 And I spent four months over there on boats and working around,

Speaker 2 watching people fight over bags of rices on the docks, securing the pier facilities.

Speaker 2 So that was cool because that was first thing, man. First step on the parade deck in Toronto Palms, just getting out of boot camp in School of Infantry.
I'm on a plane heading over to Kuwait.

Speaker 2 So I was like, I'm doing it. And then it'd get this stagnant, like nothingness happens.
And then I get out, come back in, 99, Kosovo. I'm like, all right, things are starting to happen now.

Speaker 2 And then 2003 kicks off.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I was, 2003 is when debt one, if you remember, the first Marine Special Operations team was hand selected with Gunny Oates and those guys.

Speaker 2 Out of 500 candidates that were selected, I was one of them with two other guys in my platoon to go to debt one.

Speaker 2 But me and

Speaker 2 I think it was Brian Moss and Ricochet and Sean Mickel,

Speaker 2 we got selected. And

Speaker 2 I remember us having a kind of come to Jesus meeting like, dude, we're already done with the shooting package. We're ready to deploy.
And I was like, I don't think I can leave my guys.

Speaker 2 And because you've got a 25-man tight team that's been working together for six months, you're ready to hit stuff. And so we decided to stay back.
And then Sean gets injured and he goes.

Speaker 2 So he couldn't go on deployment anyway. So he healed up and actually, I think he went and did part of the debt one stuff.

Speaker 2 So then Marine Special Operations is founded and I'm overseas on deployment. We get the call to go into Mosul.
So we stopped in the Cyprus, flew in, and it was...

Speaker 2 The battalion landing team from the Mew was supposed to come in through Turkey. And we land in the Mosul in the middle of the night.

Speaker 2 Triple-A fire, everything's on fire flying in. And we're supposed to be going up against the Iraqi 10th Corps Army, which is 10,000 troops.
And from what our intel reports were,

Speaker 2 birds take off. We're sitting there in the grass all night long, kind of waiting, find out on comms, hey, VLT is not being authorized to break through the Turkish border.
You're on your own.

Speaker 2 And we're like, okay.

Speaker 2 So we ended up sending out sniper teams and figuring out the situation before we could finally get other people in there.

Speaker 2 There was an ODA working in town that we finally linked up with and a couple of agency dudes running around.

Speaker 2 Got in some firefights.

Speaker 4 Let's talk about the first one. Firefights.
Your first firefight.

Speaker 2 It's fucking hilarious.

Speaker 2 So there's a learning lesson from this one, too, that

Speaker 2 it really started making me think about. the science, you know, because everybody kind of calls me the science guy in the shooting world a little bit.

Speaker 2 We were rolling

Speaker 2 through the ASPs and to describe Mosul, it's a, you know, when you're out in the fields, it's a beautiful rolling, for those that haven't seen it, like grassy plains. You can see for 10,000

Speaker 2 for like 10 clicks, man, you can just see forever.

Speaker 2 Now, the AMOS, the ASP, which is an AMO supply point south of the airfield, is one of the biggest ASPs in the world. EOD guy said it would take like 10 years to systematically clear this thing out.

Speaker 2 So our job was to go in and secure the ASPs so nobody could get access to all that ordnance. And it was a lot of ordinance, 300-foot-deep tunnels and

Speaker 2 these structures in the ground that they kept all their artillery missiles and stuff in and scuds.

Speaker 2 Also looking for chem labs was one of our missions.

Speaker 2 And so we go out and roll. It's like day four, I think, in country.
And the BLT is starting to finally come in. And we're like, all right, we're going to go push out and get out into our AO.

Speaker 2 And there was

Speaker 2 four IFAB commando jeeps,

Speaker 2 six-man team in each jeep. So you got a whole platoon of Force Recon guys.
And our last platoon was probably one of the most stacked platoons in history. I'd have to imagine.

Speaker 2 I think by the end of deployment, everybody got promoted. It was,

Speaker 2 I want to say there was like.

Speaker 2 five or six gunnies in the platoon, which is unheard of. And, you know,

Speaker 2 E7s in the platoon.

Speaker 2 Everybody else is staff sergeants, which is more like an ODA team, how that would be structured, not necessarily a force recon team where you have a gunny, you know, maybe a staff sergeant, all sergeants as team leaders, and then everybody else is kind of sergeants most of the time.

Speaker 2 So everybody, I mean, I think we had like 17 school-trained snipers in our platoon, which most scout sniper platoons don't even have that. I think we have like five free fall jump masters.

Speaker 2 Most of us are tandem masters and just dive supervised. I mean, it was stacked, man.
So, and I'm staging that because of the amount of experience that was in this platoon.

Speaker 2 You know, looking back, laughing now, we're rolling down this hill and we come around, we see this little building in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing else for miles and miles and miles.

Speaker 2 And the building was probably about 5,000, 6,000 square feet, one story,

Speaker 2 a couple windows and a door on the front.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, I hear one of the guys in the front, Ed, he goes, light it up. And we're like, what the hell? And I remember hearing something that didn't sound right, but i didn't hear like

Speaker 2 it wasn't that good the traditional snaps but i heard something i was like what the is that noise and then all of a sudden i hear

Speaker 2 and i'm like oh we're getting shot at now we're tailing charlie and uh brian moss uh i believe who was driving at the time he just retired um congratulations brian by the way if uh uh if he sees this and uh

Speaker 2 he pulls off through the rocks and I'm on the 50 trying to get on this window and it was a left side window that was shooting at us.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I'm like, Brian, stop, stop, stop. And he's like, I can't, let me yell shape because he's trying to pull away so we can pound the building.
And I was like, fuck it.

Speaker 2 So I throw the 50 down, I bring up my M4. And I, I pulled that trigger so fast, man, it was probably three seconds.
That gun was out of ammo. And I remember coming down.
Now he stops the vehicle.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, nope. I had a ready mag system on.
So I dropped a mag, put another mag in. And I remember going, damn it, use your 40 mic mic.
So I'm like, so I grabbed the 203. And

Speaker 2 one of the policies that I've always had for my teams,

Speaker 2 and even that team, a lot of us carried M203s, because if we were in a contact, you know, as a six or four-man recon team, put their heads down, man, put some heat on them first, you know, to make them think that you're bigger than what you are.

Speaker 2 And so my brain just clicked into that mode.

Speaker 2 It's like, hey, pump a 40-mic mic into the building because I don't know where this is really necessarily coming from, except for that window, which everybody was identifying.

Speaker 4 A 40-mic mic is a grenade launcher for you civilians.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the 40-millimeter grenade, a little tube underneath your rifle. And

Speaker 2 it's already locked and loaded. So I take the safety off, come up.
And I remember the first time in my life going,

Speaker 2 where the hell do I put the red dot on my aimpoint? Because you don't typically shoot a 40 millimeter. This is exactly 50 meters on the road.
I mapped it out afterwards.

Speaker 2 And so I was thinking, like, on top of the window, maybe a couple feet above the window. So it's like, dunk, you know, fired, it went in and detonated and blew up the window.
And

Speaker 2 then

Speaker 2 I remember, I think Ed sees mine go in the window, so he decides to fire his and it goes like 150 meters over the building because, you know, your brain goes to what it knows. It's like, dunk.

Speaker 2 And it's like, god damn it. So I busted his balls for that for a while.
We spent,

Speaker 2 I think, I think three of the 50 cals were almost empty. Okay.

Speaker 2 Everybody shot at least a mag.

Speaker 4 On one window.

Speaker 2 240 mic mics were fired. And I think some of the Pentalmana 240s were run down pretty good to at least 100 rounds or needed to swap a belt

Speaker 2 and I'm just like this building looks like Swiss cheese I've got to say that sounds very Marine Corps yeah but not I mean that again going back to the experience of us right you think we'd like oh there he is

Speaker 2 done hey high five let's move on this building was falling apart man we were done with it And I remember us kind of having a, especially our team having to come to Jesus meeting afterwards being like, hey, man, if you're going to pop that puppy's can, don't grease him so hard next time, man, because the world's out of ammo.

Speaker 2 We've got to go back and refit and regroup now.

Speaker 2 we can continue our patrol that we just started um and that was kind of the first funny thing so that that really triggered me and i looked back on a lot of the stories that that we have and whether it's buddies or personal situations that i was in like that bothered me that i didn't know where to hold that that red dot because i'm like well they don't let us shoot high explosive grenades out of a 203 and 50 meters in training um i've heard they've done some programs like that now because i know the guys are trying to breach doors with them and stuff um And I started realizing why, wait a minute, hold on.

Speaker 2 I don't even remember seeing my red dot for the 30 rounds that I fired before that. Why not? And then I started studying ocular science.

Speaker 2 And I ended up hiring three ocular scientists at Haley Strategic to try to help me understand why we see things a certain way. How can we understand how our eyes can be better? How can I be faster?

Speaker 2 How can I increase my visual acuity?

Speaker 2 How can I calm myself down under critical stress? So every time you get under critical stress, gunfight,

Speaker 2 or if you remember back to high school fighting, you're just like going crazy, it's like, that's the amygdala hijack. That's the chimp paradox.
Great book.

Speaker 2 If nobody's ever read that, by the way, if they want to know more about that. It's like, once a chimp comes out of the cage, you can't control him.

Speaker 2 Because if we had a chimpanzee here right now, we started pissing him off and got in a fight with him, who's going to win? He will tear your ass limb from limb. So like, that's your emotions.

Speaker 2 That's your affect. And you need to keep him in the trunk.
And that's my biggest thing. And going back to the medicine and stuff we talked about earlier, I finally met my snake.

Speaker 2 It's a snake in my world. And I was able to keep him at bay.
I'm like, say, hey, I don't need you. I don't need you anymore.
You keep fucking up my life.

Speaker 2 You keep making me talk to my wife the wrong way. You make me treat my children in a way that I don't want to treat them.

Speaker 2 You come out when you're not needed, man. Stay asleep.
I'll come get you when I need you. And you've done a lot of help for me in my life.
You've been there when I needed to destroy things,

Speaker 2 but not anymore. I'm in control now.
So that's what it kind of helped me with.

Speaker 2 And so anyways, when you go into this critical stress, this body alarm response that we call it, this blood flow increases to the center field of your vision, which eliminates the possibility for a near sight focus, which what have we been taught all our life with handguns?

Speaker 2 Clear front sight, clear front sight, clear front sight. Well, guess what you can't, you cannot get in critical stress? is a clear front sight.
So it's like, well, what do you mean?

Speaker 2 We've been taught that all our life. What do I do?

Speaker 2 Well, that's where I broke it it up into you have a clear front sight, which I would categorize as precision sight picture, hostage situation, long target,

Speaker 2 and then stress sight picture. Well, stressed sight picture is when I walk up to a vehicle and go, hey, good evening, ma'am.
I'm Deputy Haley with America. Woo!

Speaker 2 And I start doing the matrix and drawing a gun and coming back, and I'm getting shot at.

Speaker 2 Your eyes are going to immediately change in geometry. That's the thing.
That's the key. And

Speaker 2 wishing I knew this information back then, so I may have have had better solutions or better, more files in my file box to pull from.

Speaker 2 When the geometry of the lens, the gushy white ball, changes shape and flattens out, this is looking this way, there are ciliary muscles that go all right around the eye.

Speaker 2 And those ciliary muscles will contract and then flattens the geometry of the lens, which eliminates your possibility to see near focus. It does what?

Speaker 2 It's a natural defense mechanism for humans to go, hey, the bear's attacking me. Throw the spear, throw the rock, punch, do whatever.

Speaker 2 so it's like, well, why do we teach that in firearms when nobody else teaches that?

Speaker 2 Baseball players don't have to go clear red threads, clear red threads, and throw all the way from a mound to a pitcher and be perfect.

Speaker 2 A sword fighter never said clear, sword, tip, clear, sword, tip, and stab.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? So like, nobody's ever had to do that. And now it's suddenly introduced modern firearms and screw up the way our eyes naturally defend ourselves.

Speaker 2 So it's like, well, what's the answer? And that's what I started working back and forth with a lot of doctors to figure out like, hey, I couldn't see this then. Why? Okay, here we go.

Speaker 2 We start diving into it. I understand the eyes.
Then we start doing tests back and forth and going, whoa, okay.

Speaker 2 So we need to have some other type of sighting system, which would be stress sight picture. What does that mean? Learn to shoot with my iron sights by focusing down range on the target.

Speaker 2 It's a simple plane adjustment is all it is. And then some people are like, well, that's all you had to say.

Speaker 2 Like, no, but it took me so long to figure out and dive into, you know, ocular experts to understand how my eye actually works to come up with a simple solution to go precision say pitcher, I've got time working for me, hostage situation.

Speaker 2 Some guys would say time's not working for you, but you're not coming into a room and going, Hey, that's my briefcase, bro, and Tom cruising them in the street.

Speaker 2 You're going to be very precise with that shot, even if it is at speed. Your brain will switch in those situations.

Speaker 2 And what I say is that when the threat is bigger than the threat itself, that might be confusing.

Speaker 2 If I'm in a hostage situation, I go home and I find a man or threat holding my wife or kids.

Speaker 4 When the threat is bigger than the threat itself.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 And so to give you this example, if you walked in and saw a horrible case scenario, your wife or child or somebody that you love or care about being held at gunpoint or knife point, what's the biggest threat?

Speaker 4 Your wife dying.

Speaker 2 Not the guy with the gun or the knife. So the biggest threat now is, oh my God, the most precious thing in my life might die if I screw up.

Speaker 2 So you might want to take some time and then make sure you see your sights. I've talked to a lot of guys that have taken shots on hostage or SVS guys.
I had a buddy in CAG that took a shot like this.

Speaker 2 And he said he remembered calculating the brain box math as he's coming around the corner, hitting a guy on the bed with his wife and kid, about to go high order, like movie type shit.

Speaker 2 And I was like, whoa, wait, that's, you saw that? Okay, describe that to me. I'm nerding out on what he's seeing because the situation's like, okay, it happens.

Speaker 2 But, and then you ask cops the same thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I remember seeing my sights just like I was trained. Really?

Speaker 2 It was 9 p.m. You're sprinting down an alley, shooting at a guy at 27 meters, and you hit him once in the back of the head with a single shot fired, single-handedly, mind you.

Speaker 2 Just like you're training. I want to hire, I want to go work for that department.
That's how you guys train.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what I had to write down in my report. Oh, okay.
You didn't see shit, did you? No, I was just shooting at the guy. Okay.
Just like that, that building we started shooting at.

Speaker 2 I didn't see clear at all until my eyes went, hey, you're about to fire a high explosive device.

Speaker 2 You might want to remember where you're, so now the threat's becoming bigger, me potentially lobbing a grenade and having frag back or something.

Speaker 2 And I think that's what triggered my brain, just like it will trigger a hostage shooter or a S-Vest type situation. So in his case, what's the biggest threat?

Speaker 2 Him and his entire team about to vaporize. Not the guy with the bomb.
It's like, no, we might all die if I don't take this shot and calculate it right now.

Speaker 2 So I thought those stories were extremely interesting and why I took a really deep dive into the ocular stuff. So yeah, something as simple as a stupid little gunfight in Iraq, blowing up a building,

Speaker 2 which turned out to be an ammo supply point, issue point. That's where all the ordinance would come and they would issue that out.
So that blew up for days.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 2 Because, and that's how we started clearing. We'd have, we worked with the ODA.
It was the next kind of fight we were in. And we pulled up on them and like, hey, what are you guys up to?

Speaker 2 And they're like, some assholes shooting at us from one of those ASP towers up there about 500 meters away. And we're like, well, let's go roll them up.
It's like one dude.

Speaker 2 So it's us, us and a whole ODA. Let's go get this guy.
And they're like, nah, we got a Viper on station. It's coming in here.
He's IP inbound about probably two minutes. And we're like,

Speaker 2 what you got to, you're going to drop a fucking J-DAM on that building over there? And they're like, yeah.

Speaker 2 They were like, okay.

Speaker 2 And you said IP inbound two minutes? Like, yeah, okay. See you later.
So we jumped at our shit and started hauling ass up the road.

Speaker 2 And they're dropping a, I think it was a 2,000 pounder on this thing

Speaker 2 and in an ASP that's 300 feet deep in the ground, full of ordnance. So we're like, yeah, we're out of here.
And we hauled ass.

Speaker 2 And then we could kind of see in our mirror the guys looking back, like, and then you can see him calculate the distance. They jump at their humbies and start hauling ass with us.
And the thing's just

Speaker 2 that fucker blew up for three days, man, non-stop. Like, I got it on video.
We sleep at night at the airfields.

Speaker 2 You see already rounds landing in town.

Speaker 2 And the good thing was like, well, we don't have to patrol for three days. We're good.
So, cause nobody can go in there at that point. And that's how some of the ASPs got cleared because it was bad.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 Wow. So you were on the initial invasion.

Speaker 2 First troops in. Yeah.

Speaker 4 That is pretty fucking historic.

Speaker 2 And it was kind of cool that, you know, we took Mosul and we did a good job.

Speaker 2 Big Army came in, Hunter First took over for us, and that's when the IED war started kicking off.

Speaker 2 And I believe, and a lot of other guys talked about how much ordinance there was coming out of that ASP. We believe that may have fed the IED war in the country.
And when we lost control of Mosul,

Speaker 2 we didn't gain it back until

Speaker 2 Marsoc and I think it was ST, I think SEAL Team 7.

Speaker 2 I think it was 7, went into Mosul together and took it back in 2017.

Speaker 2 And they gave us a piece of one of the mosques there and it's got the trident on it and the flag that they flew over the city when we won.

Speaker 2 So, we've got that in our in our little museum at Haley Strategics Headquarters.

Speaker 4 That is cool.

Speaker 2 To try to try to say, like, man, we've lost this for almost 15 years. And we fought and fought and fought with the Iraqis and finally got it back.
So, but still a shithole, still a loss.

Speaker 4 What was your guys' op tempo on that deployment?

Speaker 2 It was short and fast. Um,

Speaker 2 uh, a lot of movement, and then um,

Speaker 2 we left,

Speaker 2 flew back to the ship.

Speaker 2 Now we're out of full deployment at this point. And we're ready to go home.
And so we're heading through almost to the Straits of Gibraltar.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the Mew, the Marine Expeditionary Units, for people that don't understand how that works.

Speaker 2 Like right now, there's a Mew in the Mediterranean, probably cutting gator circles, as we call them, around Israel and just hanging out waiting for something to happen.

Speaker 2 And then there's always one in the Pacific. And you always have, but back then then it's changed a little bit, but you always have a force recon team and a SEAL team attached to that MU.

Speaker 2 And we work hand in hand as a special operations nucleus of that entire

Speaker 2 system. And you're on a carrier, the Gator, the LHDs, which have all the Ospreys and Cobras and

Speaker 2 F-35s.

Speaker 2 So we can deploy an entire Marine Airground task force, hovercrafts, tanks, you name it, infantry guys. So we can mobilize anywhere in the world in 24 hours or less.

Speaker 2 So they call us the 911 of the world. So when a country has a problem, an embassy goes bad, or Afghanistan with the Abbey Gate, that was the 26th Marine Expedition, or they call in to go and help.

Speaker 2 Like, I think Tyler Vargas, you had Tyler on your show. He, he was on the Mew that went into Afghanistan and got in that shit with Abby Gate.

Speaker 2 Do you know Tyler? Oh, yeah, yeah. Had him on the podcast and everything.

Speaker 4 What a fucking awesome.

Speaker 2 I think that might have been the first podcast he did was with me.

Speaker 4 Damn.

Speaker 4 I love that dude.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's incredible. Resilient, man.
Yeah. I mean, that's learned a lot from him.
So we got the 911 to go into Liberia after that.

Speaker 2 And Liberia was,

Speaker 2 of course, we were disappointed at first. Like, come on, man, we just want to go home.
And so it's like, nope, your asses are going in. Figure out what's going on.
This was a 14-year civil war.

Speaker 2 Charles Taylor, the president of the country, very highly educated, U.S. educated guy.

Speaker 2 He was on a just a murderous, he was a genocidal freak all of a sudden and started killing his own people. So he killed about 180,000 of his own people that year

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 his corrupt government forces. So now you have Sierra Leone and a couple of other countries that created rebel groups like the Lord rebels.

Speaker 2 They would come down from Sierra Leone and fight against the government. So now you have these.

Speaker 2 corrupt government guys fighting against rebels trying to overthrow the corrupt government and guess who's in the middle getting getting killed all the innocent people in the country um

Speaker 2 that was probably one of my most eye eye-opening experiences culturally you know like again being being worldly traveled

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 seeing true death and true just just heads heads on tables everywhere in the markets um human heads oh yeah piles of bodies why were there human heads on tables cannibalism it was it's voodoo man cannibalism it's west africa it is like hardcore.

Speaker 4 Do you see that happening?

Speaker 2 Every day. You see that? Like all the data.

Speaker 2 If you type in rebels of Liberia, West Africa, you will see crazy people with wigs and weird glasses and wearing women's dresses and life preservers.

Speaker 2 And they're out there shooting with AKs and RPGs, kind of Lord of War. Remember the movie Lord of War with Nicholas Cage? That is Liberia.
And so

Speaker 2 the ground, the pavement is all 762 by 39 brass. There's no pavement.
It's brass everywhere you go in the the streets. Just constant gunfights.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 eventually we gotta.

Speaker 2 This is a silver war that nobody never heard about. I've never heard about it.

Speaker 4 What is it?

Speaker 4 I mean, you saw fucking cannibalism.

Speaker 2 Yeah. What?

Speaker 4 I mean, just describe that in detail the first time you saw it. Or anything.

Speaker 2 So this is the weird part about this country.

Speaker 2 You have people that are just trying to survive and live like almost normal people, like just normal, great people.

Speaker 2 I love, love is a word that might even describe how I feel

Speaker 2 towards the Liberian people. Like there was kids I wanted to adopt and bring home with me.
Man, it was crazy experience. I don't know if that was the same for other guys in my team,

Speaker 2 but I really immerse myself in places that I go

Speaker 2 and sometimes too much.

Speaker 2 If you've ever seen, what's a good movie, Tears of the Sun with Bruce Willis, the Navy SEAL team that goes into Cameroon,

Speaker 2 and there's piles of bodies and stench and everything, very, very similar.

Speaker 2 The Nigerians are there whacking and killing people, even though there's supposed to be a friendly peacekeeping force for the African Eco-Wasps or Eco-Mill forces, which are their kind of small NATO.

Speaker 2 So in the continent of Africa, if something

Speaker 2 goes

Speaker 2 high order, like something blows up, they will not call NATO in right away.

Speaker 2 They'll call ECO WAS, which I forget what ECO WAS is, but African nations come together and they then determine: does military action need to happen here?

Speaker 2 And then, if it does, they'll say, okay, Eco Mill, military side, let's get Ghana, Senegalese, Ivory Coast,

Speaker 2 Cameroon, Nigeria. You guys can bring in a contingent of armed forces and help secure this country and stop the civil war before we need to get bigger people involved.
So that's the level this was at.

Speaker 2 So United Nations, everybody's watching this.

Speaker 2 Our job was to go in and do a uh uh hydrographic survey of the port facility and White's Beach down by the by the um by the embassy so we could determine if we could land hover crafts, Amtraks, you name it, and send the BLT in to stop.

Speaker 2 Um, Romsfeld and Bush at the time needed to get more SA, so they sent us and SEAL Team 4 in.

Speaker 2 Do you know Rourke,

Speaker 2 Lieutenant Rourke, uh, Denver Rourke?

Speaker 2 He was the platoon leader for Steel Team 4 at the time

Speaker 2 and now is in the acting world, I think. He played himself an act of valor, the movie.
So

Speaker 2 he was Lieutenant Rourke in Act of Valor.

Speaker 2 And so I know he's done a couple other films. Well, he was the platoon leader.

Speaker 2 And Rob O'Neill was in that team as well.

Speaker 2 They hit the beach. We hit the port facility.

Speaker 2 I know they were a little upset about that because we won the mission planning on the port facility, which was a 2,000-meter surface swim.

Speaker 2 We were trying to go subsurface, but we couldn't because of the amount of intel. Because I was one of the intel guys on the team pulling all the information from S2.

Speaker 2 There was like three ships laying on their sides in the port, bodies floating in the water,

Speaker 2 active gunfights going on on the port facility while we're doing a hydrographic survey. And so what happens is we're back done.
Recon's done. We're back on the beach.
I'm sorry, back on the boat.

Speaker 2 And about

Speaker 2 5 a.m.,

Speaker 2 if I remember right, we hear launch QRF, launch QRF over the 1MC on the boat, the intercom. It's called 1MC.
And so Cobras and 46s took off because something happened. One of the team guys got,

Speaker 2 I heard, and I'm sure there's a whole, I'd love to hear the story if anybody knows it.

Speaker 2 I know it's probably embarrassing for those guys, but somebody said that one of the guys got cramped so bad from drinking the night before on the boat. They couldn't get through the surf zone.

Speaker 2 And they brought boats in. They brought the ribs up to grab them and throw them in.
And Liberian fishermen were coming out that morning and identified, we're over the horizon, man.

Speaker 2 We're not supposed to be there. It's a clandestine operation.

Speaker 2 And if you look up Navy SEALs in Liberia, you'll see Rob O'Neill and all his guys and Rourke on the beach holding like a thousand Liberians back on, stay back, stay back.

Speaker 2 And they're like, Americans, you're here, you're here, you're here. So there was a compromise.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 they get back to the boat and General Turner's like, you guys can go back to Sigonella. We don't need you here anymore.
Thank you. Now we have to change the entire mission.

Speaker 2 So they send us back in as a liaison team to work with the EcoMill forces to try to stop this civil war by running checkpoints and telling the Nigerian NIBAC commanders, hey, this is what you're going to do.

Speaker 2 This is what you're not going to do. Then we go sit and grab the Lord Rebels and we'd say, hey, sit your ass down.

Speaker 2 You are not a general, even though you call yourself that, because these little skinny crackheads, like when I say crackheads, like crack was extremely bad, heroin was bad, they're constantly chewing cot.

Speaker 2 And you're telling them like, hey, stop shooting at civilians. If I catch you shooting at civilians, you're going to die.
Do you understand that?

Speaker 2 Do you see that loud, that thumping noise that flies over every once in a while?

Speaker 2 We will have no problem, no hesitation blowing your ass up if you're firing a rocket on a bridge across the street into the market.

Speaker 2 You will stop beating people and stealing their cars. You will stop treating people like shit.
And so every night we'd have these meetings at their bars. We'd walk in and be like, hey, hey, sit down.

Speaker 2 All right, what can we do? And we single-handedly, and I say this not out of,

Speaker 2 you know, being

Speaker 2 egotistical or narcissist or anything, but we stopped a 14-year civil war in just a couple of months by moving as fast as we did as three recon teams throughout that country. Damn.

Speaker 2 Keeping the fucking South Africans back because they would come in and just say, oh, you just killed these people. I'm like, yeah, okay.
Fuck out of here. You don't care.

Speaker 2 And the Nigerians, that's a whole other story.

Speaker 2 They only get paid about, I think the average infantry Nigerian soldier gets paid back then $600

Speaker 2 a year and equivalent to American money.

Speaker 2 And they don't get paid while they're there, but they're on a year-long deployment and they have to go in this eco-mill deployment for a year and work in Liberia.

Speaker 2 And then when they get home, they finally get paid. So what do you think those guys are going to do?

Speaker 2 Imagine if you took freaking a thousand Marines that are all privates, put them in a foreign country and said, we'll pay in a year from now.

Speaker 2 They're going to rape, pillage, and kill everybody they can. So now they're a problem that we had to work as a liaison force to stop.

Speaker 2 So it turned into a nightmare. Made,

Speaker 2 I'll be honest, it made Iraq look like Disneyland. It really did.
Sounds like it.

Speaker 2 Especially with the stench and the bodies, and people will come up to you in the market with a head, like, hey, this is a government head from a commander. Look, what do we got? Look, what do we got?

Speaker 2 I'm like, dude, get the fucking head out of my face, man. Like, that's what Liberia was like.
And it's, and it's, it was a beautiful country before this all happened.

Speaker 2 Subtropic, beautiful hotels on the beach. When we got there, looked like some, some horrible tropic, um,

Speaker 2 uh, like a bomb went off. No windows, holes, Swiss cheese everywhere, casings all over the ground, constant rocket firing back and forth.
Um,

Speaker 2 and then we forced Charles Taylor out. He went in exile,

Speaker 2 but then paid his special operations team, which he called the Wild Geese. They would name everything after like weird American movies and stuff.

Speaker 2 Like the commanders would drive by and it'd say Rambo on the side of their car, and then it'd be John Wayne. And it'd be like funny, funny, you know, Josie Wales.

Speaker 2 And the commanders, they got 20 people in the back of the truck with AKs and PKMs and stuff. And you're like, hey, what's up, Rambo?

Speaker 2 Like, if you see all the pictures on the internet, if you look up Liberian Rebels, like, I guarantee I know every one of those dudes by name.

Speaker 2 And the voodoo magic was really interesting because they would wear women's dresses, wigs,

Speaker 2 life preservers, which is life preservers? Yeah, there's a funny little funny story on that.

Speaker 2 They would wear these things because

Speaker 2 the voodoo magician would bless that article that they're wearing and it would make them bulletproof. And one day one of the guys comes up in a blue dress and a and a wig and these old weird glasses.

Speaker 2 And I said, why do you guys wear that shit? And they all speak English. They all speak this their first language, which I, this was the coolest part of the whole country.

Speaker 2 was back during the, you know, they kept calling us brother American, brother American. I'm like, why do you you guys call us brother Americans? Like, you're not, what do you mean?

Speaker 2 They're like, we are Americans. And I'm like, last I checked, you're Liberian.
Well, I'm an American. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 We are grateful and honored for you to be here because we are all brother Americans. We come from America.
And I'm like, what are you talking about? You Liberians come from America.

Speaker 2 And then they started educating me and my guys on the history of our own damn country that we forgot. The emancipation.

Speaker 2 When the slaves were freed, they had an opportunity to go back to their homeland.

Speaker 2 And Liberia, Monrovia, Liberia was the first colony of American slaves that established a new order and a new government in the continent of Africa.

Speaker 2 And they are extremely grateful for that, right?

Speaker 2 Interesting. Interesting, you know, misunderstanding, potentially.
And I was like, really? And so we just dove into the culture and the information.

Speaker 2 And they were teaching us some of these kids, man, that are.

Speaker 2 They don't even know how old they are, but like 12 to 15 years old, they'll recite parts of our Constitution. And you're like,

Speaker 4 you live in a tin shack, dude it was incredible that's why i just really have a deep love for for those people i mean it's interesting you know the the piece of advice that you gave your son is fine compassion and you're talking about it right now in one of the worst places imaginable at least at that time yeah it made me realize how

Speaker 2 How good the world really is, even though it's bad all around you.

Speaker 2 Even the kids, the kids were amazing. One time we pulled up on this village, just checking in, doing a security assessment.
They got hit the night before, lost a couple people.

Speaker 2 And because every night, you know, when you're out, you're trying to patrol as much as you can. You hear about, hey, we got a village over on the east side just got hit, man.

Speaker 2 The government came in and he paid his government $44 million in cash. He goes, look, I'm going to prove that I'm still in power, even though I'm in exile.

Speaker 2 You guys keep raping, pillaging, and killing as many people as you can. And that's what his special operations teams were doing.

Speaker 2 So at night, they go out and tear people up and then the eco-mill forces and us liaison and we'd have to try to figure out who's what and try to help out all these people and then go in and do an assessment the day after to figure out hey what happened um you know raping gee pillaging cutting nipples off of women so they can't breastfeed their babies are you

Speaker 2 child war yeah of child soldiers constantly being taken this is 2003 man this was still happening and it still happens in africa um liberia is a better place now from what i understand but that's what it was And it was life-changing for me because I think a lot of guys don't think about what that was.

Speaker 2 Just because you weren't in a shit ton of gunfights doesn't mean that you can't learn valuable lessons about cultural, you know, differences or,

Speaker 2 you know, like just the kids, man. I grew such an appreciation.
And I'm sure a lot of people will when they hear this.

Speaker 2 We hear all this laughing and screaming and we pull around the corner and there's like 15 kids running up and down the street, up this little hill.

Speaker 2 And we're like, what the hell are they all happy about?

Speaker 2 Every time we'd pull into into a village, all the women would come out and start dancing and chanting and like thanking God for us to be there because now they get to walk free because they're scared of getting raped, killed, their children being stolen

Speaker 2 and put into child warfare,

Speaker 2 whatever. Like they're just, and they, it was the greatest feeling to have these people chanting and screaming and laughing and smiling all of a sudden.
And it made you choked you up for a second.

Speaker 2 And we realized these kids are chasing a toy. And I look at it and I walk up to them.
I'm like, what are you guys doing?

Speaker 2 And they hold up a wheel, which was a piece of wire, it's like a piece of hard wire that they found, like a hanger, and they twisted it together and made a wheel.

Speaker 2 And then they made a stick about three feet long, and it had a little L shape on the end, like a snake stick.

Speaker 2 And they would sit there and roll that wheel with that snake stick down the hill and get it going really fast. And they would chase it up and down and up and down.

Speaker 2 And they did that shit the entire time we were there. And not one time did anybody quit, or like they were constantly having fun.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, there's like death and destruction and piles of bodies everywhere. And they just got hit the night before.
So that, to me, I'm still trying to understand that.

Speaker 4 They became accustomed.

Speaker 2 Because every time I walk into my kids' rooms and I see all the shit they have,

Speaker 2 it makes me want to go outside and grab a piece of wire.

Speaker 2 And I think we need to remember that, you know, we have a ton of resources as an American.

Speaker 2 We have everything in the world. You have every single opportunity to make something of yourself in this world, in this country, especially as an American.

Speaker 2 And so I think, you know, after my world experiences and traveling, seeing that, I go, how dare you have the audacity to say that you don't, you need more?

Speaker 2 And so, again, it comes back to how much resources can you have before you forget how to be resourceful? And that's all those kids are. They're so resourceful.

Speaker 2 And having the best time doing it in the worst situation you could ever possibly fathom.

Speaker 2 And, you know, that scares me now because if something did happen in this country, which every great nation eventually has this problem,

Speaker 2 what are our kids going to do? Are they going to be able to have that resilience and that happiness under that situation, or is it going to be 10 times worse?

Speaker 2 So, those little things that you pull out of the battle spaces are what you really truly remember. The gunfights, that's why we were there, man.
You pull the trigger,

Speaker 2 you do your job. Sometimes it hurts, especially when you fuck it up.

Speaker 2 But the times you do it right feels good.

Speaker 2 But what really feels good is making that kid smile, making that woman chant and

Speaker 2 dance and praise. Thank you for making us free.
Like, Americans don't realize what that means

Speaker 2 until you see some shit like that. And you don't need to be in a gunfight to see that.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 yeah, I think

Speaker 2 that was an interesting one.

Speaker 4 I'm very.

Speaker 4 I agree with everything you said there. And I think that was important that you brought that up.
I want to know about the cannibalism. I've never seen that.

Speaker 4 What was that experience like?

Speaker 2 So it's not like they're eating bones and stuff in front of you in the markets and stuff, but you're hearing the stories constantly of especially the rebels and the corrupt government people that would do that as a...

Speaker 2 a fear tactic.

Speaker 2 And I think it's a part of their culture, man. It really is.
It's a cultural thing. It is.
It's the same thing that comes out. No, I don't think it's a necessity because not everybody does it.

Speaker 2 Your people that were in positions of power were the ones that did most of it that I'd noticed.

Speaker 4 This is like satanic ritualistic shit.

Speaker 2 Well, if it's the high, if the elites are eating other fucking human beings, yeah, but they're also just younger operational types too, they're teaching the kids to do that stuff.

Speaker 2 You know, so all the shit you see in movies about, you know, the cannibalism and those countries is not on this, like

Speaker 2 you would think like the deepest, darkest little tribes in Africa or in South America only do that no normal people that are wearing blue jeans and gold necklaces and running around with AKs and wigs and stuff on are also doing it

Speaker 2 It's a part of the culture. It's holy shit

Speaker 2 Was it the biggest how do they do it? No do they've do they cook it? I think they just cook it and eat it. Yeah, or eat it raw Wow

Speaker 2 Not a big expert in that regard in the cannibalism

Speaker 2 Even just asking that question makes me want to look back and go wait a minute. Let me let me dive into that a little bit more.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 it was definitely very apparent, and people would tell you about it. And the excuse where we go, wait, is that satanic? They don't know what that is.
I don't think.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I think there's one line, like in that movie, Tears of the Sun, when they walk in and they see the mother with the nipples cut off, which is a thing. They pour cornmeal.

Speaker 2 We'd find women with cornmeal in their mouths as they're getting raped and trying to be suffocated as they're being raped by these kids that were rebel soldiers, um,

Speaker 2 and they would steal the boys, they would shoot the men, leave the elder alive to tell the story, they'd rape all the women and impregnate them and then cut their nipples off. Like, and

Speaker 2 gee,

Speaker 2 that's just the rest of the world. That's why

Speaker 2 it'd be nice if Americans realized what percentage they are of the world. It's very small, and and and and I'll maybe close with that later, but I call it the whole concept.

Speaker 2 But yeah, that's just what they do. That's the best answer

Speaker 2 when you say,

Speaker 2 who in the fuck would do something like this? And then the only response is, it's just what they do. You know, and what drives that? I don't know.

Speaker 2 But I would be happy to kill every one of those people that do that. Man.
To these beautiful souls. as all these people, these kids were.
People in the villages that we encountered, amazing.

Speaker 2 Absolutely amazing. I go back in a heartbeat.
Matter of fact, I did. I went back on my own.

Speaker 4 You went back there on your own?

Speaker 2 Did some contracting work by myself with a client. Yeah.

Speaker 4 How are you handling the home life with

Speaker 4 that?

Speaker 2 As far as

Speaker 4 you have a son now?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, how are you? Is this shit coming home?

Speaker 2 So this is where things started getting weird in the transition of my life. How did I transition out of the military? Why did I even transition?

Speaker 2 It was so many years of active duty service at this point.

Speaker 2 After a few deployments,

Speaker 2 I love,

Speaker 2 I loved

Speaker 2 being a way sick instead of home. You know how guys get homesick, like, I just want to go home, man.

Speaker 2 Like you got the army guy with his helmet cocked back and he's dragging ass going, I just hate this. I've been here 13 months.
I want to go home to my family. I get it.

Speaker 2 But that's not why you're here. You're here to do the job.
And if you really love the job, you shouldn't have to go home because you start to realize home is where you are.

Speaker 2 And I think that's what a lot of us tend to

Speaker 2 let happen

Speaker 2 because war is a home to us. And I just had this conversation with the Marine Raiders the other day because they keep getting messed with by the big Marine Corps and I hope it changes.

Speaker 2 And I said, you know why you guys are miserable right now? I said, because you're not at war. Because when you're at war, you don't have to worry about being disruptive.
You are naturally.

Speaker 2 But when you come back and you're in garrison, guess what? Everybody's messing with you. You can't have an elite unit inside of an elite unit.
What's the elite unit?

Speaker 2 The United States Marine Corps itself is an elite unit.

Speaker 2 So that's where the silent professional problem comes into play.

Speaker 2 And I think is destroying us because these guys are afraid to speak out

Speaker 2 and they're afraid to play the game. And they need to just learn to play the game while in garrison so they can go back to war before they get disbanded again.
And that can happen very quickly.

Speaker 2 And SOCOM's pissed off about it.

Speaker 2 So after I came home from my deployment there in Africa, my son, Travis Jr., at the time was about eight years old. And I remember walking into the house

Speaker 2 and going up to visit him. And she knows I'm coming, right? I tell her.
I walk in and I open the door and he's sitting there playing on the ground in the living room.

Speaker 2 And I remember saying, hey, buddy, I'm home. And he looks at me, sitting there.
He looks back at mom,

Speaker 2 looks at me again, looks back at mom, and goes, mom, who's that? Oh, I was like, shit.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that was like taking that dagger and stabbing it into my heart. And I, I.

Speaker 2 You know, you've heard me mention this love story, the love story of the poster. I want to be that one day.
I love that image. And then I love becoming that image.

Speaker 2 I love sweating and being sugar cookied on a beach with sand in places I never could possibly imagine getting.

Speaker 2 And I love that perseverance aspect where I'm still here and I'm not ringing that fucking bell. I'm not quitting.
I'm not DORing.

Speaker 2 I can look next to me and say, okay, you may not be here, but I'm still here because perseverance is my only mission. And I love that.

Speaker 2 And I loved becoming that image of hunting evil in the world, man, deploying. And I loved every second of it.
I loved.

Speaker 2 being in a tyrannical, war-torn, shitty environment because it made me realize and appreciate what I got to come home to eventually. And that's where the away sickness comes into play.

Speaker 2 But I loved it too much, I think. And I loved it still, still gets me a little bit.

Speaker 2 I loved

Speaker 2 hunting people. I loved

Speaker 2 knowing that I could make the world a better place by one five, five, six round at a time.

Speaker 2 I loved

Speaker 2 being away so much that I loved everything that loved me and I loved to leave everything that loved me. And then I started to deal with darkness, and death, and friends passing.

Speaker 2 And then I started to realize: well, I guess this is just the darkness I need to learn to love because it's never going to go away in my life. And I just sit there and go, I just got to fake this.

Speaker 2 And imposter syndrome kicks in.

Speaker 2 And then you start to realize you better find something else that you love, otherwise, it's going to kill you. Going back to maybe the suicide, if that helps people.

Speaker 2 And when I walked in and he said that,

Speaker 2 I realized that I loved,

Speaker 2 I loved war more than I should have loved my own family.

Speaker 2 That's not okay. That's not okay for any man.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so I'd go back to my unit.

Speaker 2 And I'm at, I think, fuck 12 years at this point, maybe, maybe,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 2 Most of that time now in force reconnaissance, reconnaissance community.

Speaker 2 And I tell my platoon commander, who's the greatest platoon commander on the face of the planet, still is, in my opinion,

Speaker 2 Andy Christian.

Speaker 2 I said, hey,

Speaker 2 I'm going to check out. And he's like, what?

Speaker 2 You know, the guy that loves it so much? What the fuck are you talking about? You're checking. What do you mean you're checking out? What do you mean you're leaving?

Speaker 2 What do you mean you're going to, what? That doesn't make any sense. Like, it shocked everybody.

Speaker 2 And I was up for a B-billet at this point in time. A B-billet is a staff position for people that don't know where I'm going to be some type of instructor free fall school, which was my first choice.

Speaker 2 Scott having has been a big thing for me. Love it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 VSW, very shallow water programs for working on some. top secret programs of the Navy.

Speaker 2 Love that stuff. I know they play with dolphins in the dolphin program the Navy has.
And my mom was on,

Speaker 2 she was a trainer and on the set of Flipper when I was a kid growing up. So she, she did a little bit of stuff with Bush Gardens in Florida.

Speaker 2 And I was like, mom, I might be able to get into a dolphin program and train a bunch of flippers in the Navy. And she's like, really? That's so cool.
What are you going to be doing?

Speaker 2 I was like, you don't want to know. But that never happened because this happened with my son and I ended up getting out.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I don't want to go to a B-billet. I still want to fight, but I need to make my own schedule.
And so I was confused in a dark, dark environment now.

Speaker 2 And that's when we lost our first,

Speaker 2 it was this transition time right before I started contracting. I lost one of our teammates, killed an IED.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we had just moved to Washington, D.C., because I was working out of D.C.

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 We were all well met at Arlington National Cemetery to send him off.

Speaker 2 And I

Speaker 2 was done at this point. I'm like, I'm moving on.
I'm going to not contract. I'm not going to do shit.
None of that's on the table.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to start a business and I'm going to figure it out again.

Speaker 2 Um, because I got to be there for my son, because I haven't been at all. It's been a horrible divorce, horrible relationship with mom, which is great now.
Thank God. Um, but it just wasn't our time.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 sat there at Arlington, you know, and everybody's in their blues, looking sharp, Valhalla, right? It's the Warriors, noble end.

Speaker 2 And this is another, I guess, PTSD story that I learned a lot from, a ton,

Speaker 2 where I'm standing there and I'm like,

Speaker 2 this is why we do this, you know.

Speaker 2 And then I start looking around and I start seeing the faces of people. I start seeing the pain, the suffering.
the tears,

Speaker 2 the disappointment,

Speaker 2 the anger. And then I start to see the color guard moving in and

Speaker 2 the gun team. And something I noticed when I was a kid, every time a movie was on, a war movie,

Speaker 2 and taps would play.

Speaker 2 Taps is the song, the trumpet song you'll typically hear at a funeral or at nighttime, they play taps to go to bed, 2200.

Speaker 2 to remind of us of that there's no victory without sacrifice in a nutshell. And every time that song were played, my dad would get up and walk out of the room every time.

Speaker 2 And I was like, well, I must be going to get another beer or something. And I just kind of made this excuse for him.

Speaker 2 And then I started to realize, and it wasn't until that moment when that tap started playing,

Speaker 2 that killed me. And I started losing my shit.
And I realized like, the fuck, man, where's the nobility in this? Where's the nobility? Look at, she just had a baby while he's on deployment.

Speaker 2 Her two-year-old daughter doesn't even know dad's dead, laying there in front of him.

Speaker 2 There's no nobility in this. Why are we doing this?

Speaker 2 Now I'm struggling with this inner fight. Like, was it all worth it? Was this worth it? You know?

Speaker 2 And at the end of the funeral, standing there, losing my shit again.

Speaker 2 You know, but I'm a Marine, so you're not allowed to cry.

Speaker 2 You're not allowed to show emotion. So I'm trying my best to hold it inside, which eventually just turns into trapped resistance, and then you suffer.

Speaker 2 Well, one of my buddies comes over, and I'll ever forget this. He comes up next to me, and standing over Javier's grave, and

Speaker 2 he goes,

Speaker 2 He goes, Isn't it awesome, man? He kind of hits me, and I'm like,

Speaker 2 Dude, what's so fucking awesome about this?

Speaker 2 And he's like, What do you mean? To know a dude that just went all the way,

Speaker 2 and I'm like,

Speaker 2 Okay, what are you talking about, brother? And he goes,

Speaker 2 To know a dude that just went all the way, like a guy that's willing to do that is incredible. He's like, how do you not get that? And I'm like,

Speaker 2 I'm trying to process all this right now, dude. Like, what are you talking about? And he goes,

Speaker 2 dude, our fallen brother represents everything that we do, everything that we stand for, everyone that we stand with here and everything that we now stand against.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it started to click a little bit.

Speaker 2 And he said, don't forget, there's no difference between you and him.

Speaker 2 He did that just like you would do that, just like I would do that. So, don't forget

Speaker 2 who we are and what we do. All right.

Speaker 2 And I just like

Speaker 2 try to keep my shit together, and he gives me a hug, walks away.

Speaker 2 And then that's when the nobility kicked in.

Speaker 2 That's when the tears of sadness and sorrow that you'll still see in me that are tears, but they turn from sadness to sorrow to pride and honor.

Speaker 2 And that's when the nobility kicked back in and said, without sacrifice, there is no victory. As hard as that is for people to understand in our world,

Speaker 2 everybody sacrifices something. You've sacrificed a ton, man.
You're sacrificing something right now, being here with me when you could be doing something different.

Speaker 2 You could be with your wife or your kid. You know,

Speaker 2 we've all had sacrifices and sometimes they're little, sometimes they're massive.

Speaker 2 and i think they're all necessary especially in the face of evil um this there's only one way to get through that and that's to realize that we need men and women that are willing to go all the way because if we don't um

Speaker 2 you're not gonna have anything you'll have nothing and that's what everybody's scared about right now is having nothing so maybe we should all step up and start thinking about this a little bit differently and that's all i ask people to do just think differently how you think i'm not trying to change you i'm just sharing we're sharing our experiences and our stories of people that are horrible, that are

Speaker 2 horrid. Nobody likes telling the war stories.
And if they do, they're probably not true.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, we should listen to those experiences and listen to what other people around the world tell us. Listen to the concept of the whole, the 8 billion people in the world.
Who are we?

Speaker 2 And what are we here to do? That's an important story.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, man, it's like these little tiny things I have, you know, where it could be just a simple story of an experience in combat or with my kid walking home that turned into the greatest lessons in my life because it allowed me to look into a place, you know.

Speaker 2 So that was like, I need to look into that. I need to, I need to figure out, okay, he's the most important thing right now.
And I still fucked it up after that.

Speaker 2 You know, I still wasn't the best dad, wasn't there all the time.

Speaker 2 And then I transitioned. All right, I'll start my own company.
I'll start training. And I do.

Speaker 2 I move out to California to be with my wife because we were separated for three and a half years with two deployments between that time.

Speaker 2 She was a doctor at Balboa Naval Hospital as a lieutenant commander and I was in Camp Lejeune

Speaker 2 in Force Recon. And we did it well, man.
We made it, made it work. We travel every month and see each other.
I'd go out and do free fall school or, you know, jump packages and go meet her.

Speaker 2 She'd come to me and, and we made it work. And then we have two beautiful kids out of it, Hayden and Hudson.
And,

Speaker 2 but once I got out there to California, she's like, are we finally having a family now? I was like, I think so. I think we can actually be together for for, for once.

Speaker 4 How did you meet her?

Speaker 2 I was in Free Fall Jump Master School and we were, I was

Speaker 2 gas lamp district, Buffalo Joe's, disco night. Everybody wearing afros and Ray Bands.
She was in there dancing, walks by and goes, hey, hey, what's up?

Speaker 2 Pulls me on the dance floor. We start dancing.

Speaker 2 Loud as hell, can't hear a damn thing. It's kind of funny story, actually.

Speaker 2 And she's like, so what?

Speaker 2 I was like, what do you do? I'm a doctor. I'm like, okay, whatever.
Nice try.

Speaker 2 Sweating her ass off, dancing on the floor. And she's like, what do you do? I said, I'm a cook.
And I pulled the Steven Seagal thing, which that guy's another fucking story.

Speaker 2 And she's like, oh, you're a cook that likes to jump out of airplanes. And I'm like, what are you talking about? She rolls back my tattoo, my jack.
And I was like, well, I also, I also cook.

Speaker 2 And so then we started talking on the phone. And she's like, why don't you come out next weekend? I got a good feeling about you.
And so we went diving and did some, she was working up on a marathon.

Speaker 2 So, I ran 19 miles with her. And I was like, Yeah, I can do that.
Um,

Speaker 2 and next thing you know, I, I, she's like, Hey, you want to come back again next weekend and you can stay with me?

Speaker 2 And I've got four roommates, one of them's in the Navy as a lieutenant, and the other one's you know, a barkeeper or something else.

Speaker 2 Um, so I go there and I open up her closet to put my clothes to hang them up, and I see Navy uniforms. And I'm like,

Speaker 2 I said, Why is your

Speaker 2 and I thought it was her roommates' uniforms, and then I saw the female rank, lieutenant commander, or lieutenant at the time. I'm sorry.
I was like, Jen,

Speaker 2 please tell me these aren't uniforms. And please tell me for the last two weeks, you haven't told me that you were in the United States Navy.
And she's like, what does it matter?

Speaker 2 She goes, I'm a doctor. You know how naval docs are, right? Don't even know how to put the ribbons in a rank on their uniforms.
They're wearing scrubs all day. I was like, Jen, this can't happen.

Speaker 2 This isn't, this isn't a thing that we can do. She goes, I don't care.
She goes, and we're on different coasts. We'll figure it out.
So we dated long distance for years.

Speaker 2 then eventually we ended up getting married and had two kids and just worked out.

Speaker 2 And then she got out of the Navy as a commander at 16 years and started her own practice in dermatology, became very successful. And

Speaker 2 then I was working and started contracting. And that's what happened when I went to San Diego finally.
I'm sitting there. I got my toes dug into the beach, man.

Speaker 2 I'm like, am I finally going to have a break in my life, which is going to be weird for me?

Speaker 2 Damn phone rings. And it's one of the project managers of Blackwater.
This is two weeks I'm out in California, and I'm like transitioning my entire life to be with her. My son's in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 I'm trying to figure out how to see him more.

Speaker 2 And I get this call, hey, Trav, what's up, man? My name is so-and-so from Blackwater. I was like, Blackwater, the contracting company? It was brand new at the time.
It's 2004.

Speaker 2 And I was like, yeah, hey, man, we heard you're out. I'm like, the hell do you guys know I'm out? Like, hey, word travels fast when the operators get out.
We got an opportunity for you.

Speaker 2 How would you like to be back at Moyak and be here in a week from now? I'd like to get you back into Baghdad in two weeks. And I'm like, what? Now I'm Jonesing.

Speaker 2 I'm hurting and I don't know what to do in my life, but I want to fight. I want to go back.

Speaker 2 But family's messing with me at this point. And he's like, look, we'd like to ask you to be on Ambassador Bremer's personal detail.
He's the most high threat PSD principal in all PSD history and

Speaker 2 out of even every U.S. president combined.
And

Speaker 2 he needs good hitters to be on his team. And we'd like you to come out and try out.
I was like,

Speaker 2 yeah, man, I'm honored. Thanks for the call.
What do you want me to do? Hey, we'll have tickets for you in a week or two. Just be on a standby.
Roger that. I hang up and she walks up.

Speaker 2 She's like, hey, who was that? And I'm like, oh, fuck. And I just couldn't stop making those decisions.
And I know it hurt.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 went right back to Iraq two weeks later. And so I was on the Bremer detail with Blackwater.

Speaker 2 Started doing a lot of surveillance work for the Blackwater teams on the the advance side, even though it was on his detail as a gunfighter.

Speaker 4 How many people were on his detail?

Speaker 2 Oh, shit, man. It was.

Speaker 2 I want to say, I could probably be corrected here by 10 or 20. I know there was 52 people at the time when I was there approximately for his advance team, just the advance.

Speaker 2 Now, that didn't include the entire company of military police and strikers and Humvees. That didn't include these specific Iraqi forces that we, oh, it was a full-on mission profile.

Speaker 4 Holy shit, I didn't realize it was that big.

Speaker 2 Three little bird helicopters that were directly attached to him and him only, unless they could be tasked out, which we got tasked out to a lot of things, but that was primary.

Speaker 2 He had priority all the time.

Speaker 2 Not including the advanced team. The advanced team would be about 20 dudes at a time.
And then we had another 20, and we were rotating constantly because this dude was like the energizer bunny, man.

Speaker 2 He would plug himself in at night. He swore.
He'd come home at four,

Speaker 2 like, well, I'd say like midnight, and he would wake up at four in the morning. He'd walk in reading into his villa.
He'd come out reading out of his villa.

Speaker 2 He'd plug himself in, keep going all day and all night. And we're just like, man, we can't keep up with this dude.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 what else? And then QRF teams on top of that. And then that grew even bigger after I left.

Speaker 2 So air support, round support, you name it, we had it all.

Speaker 2 Probably one of the coolest PSD details I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 2 Everybody was a hitter. Everybody was former special operations until standards started dropping.
And then, as you know, you know, clown show started to happen.

Speaker 2 At that time,

Speaker 2 I was on the detail and then they asked me to come over to the airside and say, hey, who's a surveillance guy here? I said, well, I'm Ricondo. And they're like, you know how to run a camera?

Speaker 2 I'm like, yeah, dude, come on.

Speaker 2 So I went up in the birds, started doing a lot of intel work.

Speaker 2 And they said, hey, would you mind, you know, because you're working all day and then you're going up on the birds at night whenever you got a chance, why don't you just transition to the bird team if you don't mind i know you like being on the details like you mean i'll have to ride around and get smashed by ads all day i can look down instead of look up yeah absolutely i love i love aerial platform stuff and so i ended up kind of working and developing the program of instruction for blackwater i did all the the videos uh that went back to eric and and said hey we got a guy in country that can video film and edit so that way when a new gun gun guy comes on board the team, I can say, watch this video.

Speaker 2 Here's how this works. Here's how we pick up the package.
Here's how we drop the package. Here's Here's how we work venues.
Here's how we do inner and outer concentric rings of security.

Speaker 2 And blah, blah, blah. And I filmed this whole thing

Speaker 2 and then started working on innovations. Now I'm working on saw mounts for the helicopters.
And it was a perfect match. So I loved being on the little birds.
And that's when Najaf happened. And

Speaker 2 April,

Speaker 2 April 3rd.

Speaker 4 It is a very historic event.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 this year's the 20th anniversary, correct? It is.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 I really want to document this piece of history. So if you could be as descriptive as possible.

Speaker 4 I'll do my best. I would appreciate it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And we're still trying to pick up the pieces.
I know me and the team leader for the Najaf team just got together, did a podcast on

Speaker 2 our channel on the bridge. And

Speaker 2 him and I were comparing information back and forth of what happened up north in Baghdad versus what happened down in Najaf.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I'm on detail.

Speaker 2 I'm on office watch at the time. So when he's working at his desk, somebody's standing in that room at all times, just like Secret Service.

Speaker 2 And you're hearing every conversation that he has with Rumpsville, the president, you know, Colin Powell, Connolly's rights.

Speaker 2 Everybody's walking out of the office every day if they're there in country, which was pretty frequent. And

Speaker 2 I'm hearing all the red phone conversations. And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 we started getting word of shit happening down at Najov. And so I start hearing the traffic going back and forth on the radio.

Speaker 2 And then I start hearing Bremer talking on the phone, a Sanchez, General Sanchez, the time, the coalition commander.

Speaker 2 Not well liked at the time by a lot of the staff and everybody from what I was hearing. So he comes in.
Sanchez, what's going on down in Najov? It's not a big deal, sir.

Speaker 2 We're starting to evacuate people. We're good.

Speaker 2 Everybody's moving from Camp Golf back to Camp Echo. Might have that mixed back and forth, but that was in the Jaff teams.
And then the camps are about 20 clicks away from each other.

Speaker 2 So when they started taking the heat from Tatar al-Sadar's Mahdi army, they started pushing forces back.

Speaker 2 Now, at the time, we knew there was a Spanish company of troops that were on the ground. They had LAV-25s, not necessarily like our LAVs, but they had 25-millimeter Bushmaster chain guns on them.

Speaker 2 They had, I think there was about 100 Spaniards there. It was a small contingent, platoon size of El Salvadorians

Speaker 2 who were savage.

Speaker 2 And then a small Blackwater team protecting Phil Kosnet, who was the CPA official.

Speaker 2 That was their principal. And that's what White Boy, call sign white boy and his team were protecting.

Speaker 2 We think Phil was on the agency side of the house as well with some stuff that was going on out in town.

Speaker 2 There was some,

Speaker 2 I heard of a failed failed agency hit.

Speaker 2 I don't know any details about that. I'd love to hear more about that.
If anybody knows, I'm sure nobody's going to talk about it, but it was just like, it's like, what's going on?

Speaker 2 And then they had local police chiefs out in town that were trying to be, you know,

Speaker 2 trying to be loyal to the U.S. coalition, but at the same time, McCutter Al-Sedar said, hey, you'll be loyal to us.
Or other guys, we're going to kill your police officers.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 few nights before, I remember, I think White Boy says it in my podcast, but they have this big giant meeting with Phil Cos and everybody in this town hall and the police chiefs and everybody are there, the Iraqi police.

Speaker 2 And they say, hey, you have to show loyalty to the coalition. If you do, we'll help you.
We'll support you. We'll

Speaker 2 push these people out. And so apparently that chief stands up and goes, you have my loyalty.
I will be faithful to the coalition. And they all drive out.

Speaker 2 Chief gets in his car, drives out, assassinated as soon as he drops out and goes outside.

Speaker 2 And I think that was kind of the big, from what I understand, Muqtadar al-Sadar, kind of the icing on the cake for him. And he says, you know what?

Speaker 2 Fuck this coalition provisional authority, take it down. I want it.
And at this time,

Speaker 2 it was, I forget that thing where everybody's kind of migrating into Najaf because it's the golden, the golden mosque is in Najaf.

Speaker 2 It's the most holy city in the entire world, besides Mecca, for the, for the Islam, for the Muslims. And so there's just people walking all over the place, all over the country, man.

Speaker 2 As we're flying down, there's like thousands of people on the roads just walking towards Najaf to pray. And so now you, you, just like our border, right?

Speaker 2 You invite all the assholes along with the people going to pray to fight the infidel. And so McTotter built an army of 10,000 Mahdi army in the city of Najov.

Speaker 2 So a lot of people don't realize Najov, the battle where the Marines go in, is bigger than Fallujah.

Speaker 2 And we just had the recent anniversary for Fallujah, but Nazhov was a bigger offensive than Fallujah was.

Speaker 4 I did not realize that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a lot of people don't know that. And because it was nasty, it was rough.

Speaker 2 I think Fallujah was more systemized and organized. You got General Mattis pushing through and his big speeches that kind of make it kind of prominent in history.

Speaker 2 And we lost a lot of people in both, but I think we lost more in Fallujah, but Najaf was a very complicated situation.

Speaker 2 And we weren't a part of the big phase. We were the initial.
So I think the reason why they also then pushed into Najaf afterwards is because, and Fallujah, because

Speaker 2 Jerry and the guys that were just hung on the bridge a few days before all of this. And that stimulated a bunch of people, especially us.

Speaker 2 And because I actually took Jerry Zokov down that morning and the Little Birds and transported him down to his new position,

Speaker 2 dropped him off the next day. They were ambushed and killed and hung from the bridge.
So all of us were like, man, we were just hanging out with this guy.

Speaker 2 You know, that's fucked up what happened. Let's get some revenge.
And that could be a problem. So I think everybody went after,

Speaker 2 as soon as the Namahi army kicked it off and started attacking the CPA that day on, I believe that started April 3rd, all of us are like, let's get it on. Let's go down there and mess these dudes up.

Speaker 2 And of course, contractors have to be reminded from time to time, like, look,

Speaker 2 you fall under the Geneva Convention. You're not allowed to offensively engage in combat operations.
If you do, it's against the Geneva Convention. So pump the brakes, Haas.

Speaker 2 And that was the big conflict with us in the U.S. military.

Speaker 2 Everybody wants to shoot everybody until it's time to read your EROEs and your rules of engagement, the Geneva Convention. So

Speaker 2 this stuff all starts popping off.

Speaker 2 And now they're trying to, I think that they were trying to kill Phil specifically and take that compound down. The Spanish start

Speaker 2 pumping 25 millimeter, the chain guns, when the initiation starts. I think it was Daisy chain.

Speaker 2 I think they drove an IED in, popped it off, drove another one, popped the next one off, which is what an IED Daisy chain is,

Speaker 2 killed some people. And then that's when the Spaniards started going to work to push the first phase back.

Speaker 2 The El Salvadorians started running around clearing houses and buildings and pushing people back.

Speaker 2 Blackwater dudes went into defense mode.

Speaker 2 And then the Spanish prime minister of Spain then said,

Speaker 2 shut it down, cease fire. Not one Spanish troop will fire a shot in Iraq.
And if you do, you'll be court-martialed. We are pulling out of Iraq.

Speaker 2 We're negotiating with terrorists because the Madrid bombing had just happened. And instead of them saying, you, they said, no, we're going to pull out.

Speaker 2 So we even had a Spanish sniper with a 50 Cal Barrett on the rooftop that day. And we had him smash a dude at 800 meters with an RPG.

Speaker 2 Takes him out. The colonel, Colonel Cole, the Spanish coalition commander, personally goes up to the rooftop, grabs his ass, and pulls him off the roof and takes his 50.

Speaker 2 And we heard he was court-martialed for that. Yeah.
And I'm trying to grab the 50.

Speaker 2 And they're like, yeah, no, that didn't happen. And so they took all the weapon systems.
We couldn't shoot.

Speaker 2 These guys are sitting in their tanks buttoned up while all this shit's happening and nobody's firing around. Now, in the beginning, they did, but they were shut down.

Speaker 2 So now, and I'm not there at this point in time, right? We're still up in Baghdad, getting all this information back.

Speaker 2 Bremer gets pissed off. Here's another phone call, kind of scratchy comms coming in from white boy Chris down in Najov.

Speaker 2 And he's very broken, unreadable, but you could hear him say, hey, we're not going to make it through the night. And those are the words that we all heard on the radio.

Speaker 2 And so we're like holy shit we got to get down there man

Speaker 2 bremer calls sanchez back in sir they're a bunch of contractors they don't know what they're talking about stop listening to them they're mercs now you don't tell a bunch i'm still a freaking staff and ceo in the marine corps i'm in i'm in force so i stayed in the reserves through this process as well so i was out uh had a platoon in in hawaii for force recon

Speaker 2 and because that's where she moved to we would move to hawaii after dc

Speaker 2 and uh um

Speaker 2 so i'm like like, I'm not a merc, man. I'm just making my own schedule right now.
I'm still wearing an American flag just like you are there, Sanchez.

Speaker 2 And so that was pretty disappointing because, you know, White Boy is a former freaking retired Navy SEAL.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 most all the dudes on his team were hitters. And so we're all, I'm standing around Delty guys all day long, SF dudes, SEALs, forced recon Marines and Rangers.

Speaker 2 And it's like, you're calling us a bunch of mercs? Like, no, we wear, we have the same heart that you do right now. We're in this for the the same exact reason.

Speaker 2 You know, mercenary definition, because people still get this wrong.

Speaker 2 It's a derogatory term to call us mercs, because a mercenary is somebody that only does it for their own monetary gain, their own, their own ego, their own gains out of it, where the contractor is still in it for the same reasons that we would all be in it as Americans in the coalition.

Speaker 2 So he's like, and he screams back at Sanchez. They get in this fight.
And I saw Bremer even ball up his fist a couple of times.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, this is going to be the best office watch I've ever been on in my life um

Speaker 2 so he leaves after this fight and he says hey call your boss in here i said roger that sir i said frank you need to come up to the office frank comes up um hey have you heard from white boy we're getting broken commser he goes last year we heard is they're not going to make it through the night he goes they're starting to get wired in uh or dialed in with mortars and spaniards are shut down nobody's firing a shot and he's like why are why are the span and he's like oh yeah they they think about the Spanish situation and like they need help.

Speaker 2 They need help now. And Big Army has denied all medevacs and they have one army captain that's now shot.
And because there was a small contingent of U.S. military there on that post as well.

Speaker 2 The Marines that were there, there's a handful of Marines. They were, I think,

Speaker 2 mostly

Speaker 2 they call it defense systems messaging analysts or something. So they're doing like, you know, server stuff and sending out comms and making sure all that.

Speaker 2 They were just checking in on the servers and the antennas to make sure, I guess, everything was working that day. So they weren't even basing Naja.

Speaker 2 They were just popping into the, and then popping back out. A couple Army people,

Speaker 2 not sure what they were doing there.

Speaker 2 One female army that was scared to death.

Speaker 2 Even made a derogatory comment about her in a video that I did in the 10-year anniversary video 10 years ago.

Speaker 2 Because she was screaming, what are you shooting at? You're shooting women and children.

Speaker 2 And I remember turning around saying, look, if you're not going to be part of the solution, you're part of the fucking problem if you want to go downstairs and be in and being raped and freaking killed by insurgents that are about to come in and take us all out you can go do that or you can sit there and shut your mouth and i i don't have time for that and i was a different man back then um wasn't as compassionate as i am now or didn't know how to find it maybe and she killed herself that day on the 10-year anniversary and that

Speaker 2 That bugged me. And that's the only situation she was ever in in her life.

Speaker 2 She just happened to be there in this worst case scenario, this Alamo situation, and it devastated her to the point where she left her own child behind and committed suicide on the 10-year anniversary.

Speaker 2 And man, that was made me want to. And I was about to go back and delete that whole video.
I said, No, I'm going to leave that up as a reminder for me of that.

Speaker 2 You never know what people are going through in their lives.

Speaker 2 And you don't have to have some resume that you're some badass with 14 combat deployments or 20 combat deployments or three, whatever it is, that you

Speaker 2 have more value over somebody else that's hurting. Like, that's not okay.

Speaker 2 So, I left it up and still to this day.

Speaker 2 So, that's the kind of people that were there. And then you had us up in Baghdad.

Speaker 4 Would it bother you if I overlay that video on this?

Speaker 2 Oh, even the chick on the roof that was running around yelling, what are you shooting at? What are you shooting at?

Speaker 2 Like I told you on the roof that day, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, it's out, right? I mean, I'm vulnerably speaking about it because I fucked up. I feel, you know, most people are like, hey, she didn't know any better.
You didn't know any better.

Speaker 2 It's just, it was that time. Yeah, we were young and dumb.

Speaker 2 And it hurts that

Speaker 2 I felt like it added to her pain, maybe.

Speaker 2 When maybe I shouldn't have done that. Maybe I should have went up to her and said, hey, it's going to be okay.

Speaker 2 We're here. Okay.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we'll tell you what to do if you have any issues. Like I would now.

Speaker 2 Like if I went into a hostage situation and there was somebody crying and women were tied up, I wouldn't go, hey, fucking suck it up, buttercup. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Like, that's what the military put into me. And I don't like that.
And so I would obviously be more calm and compassionate and say, hey, you're going to be okay. All right.

Speaker 2 If you need anything, just let us know. Keep quiet.
Let us know if you see anything. And we're going to take care of this.
And we're not hurting anybody. That's good.
Okay.

Speaker 2 We're only hurting bad people. And then go back.
I wish I could have had that conversation. And so, yeah, I think that's history, man.
And

Speaker 2 even though sometimes it hurts to think about it, our past is only something that we now simply know. That's all it is.
And so, yeah, I wouldn't have any problem with that because

Speaker 2 it's another reminder for me to continue to be living off of my first trait, the warrior trait, which I believe is compassion, like I said earlier.

Speaker 2 And the second trait of a warrior is being vulnerable, having the courage to be imperfect. And so, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's why I left it up because I realized that that wasn't the right thing to say in the moment.

Speaker 2 So, like, if my son or anybody else is in that situation again and somebody's hurting and somebody's screaming and somebody's suffering and they feel like they're going to die, you might not want to tell them to shut the fuck up.

Speaker 2 You might want to be there for them in any capacity that you think is appropriate based on the situation, of course.

Speaker 4 Could you have been there for her? I don't know.

Speaker 2 Considering the circumstances, I think I could have spoken differently to her.

Speaker 2 I could have.

Speaker 4 I mean, how many combatants are you guys engaging at any particular moment in time on that day?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 it would be between onesie, twosies with RPGs, up to about 50 people running down the street at one time. It was probably some of the bigger groups.
And then mortar teams setting in on buildings.

Speaker 2 But there was about a, so I met a speaking this question, I met a guy in D.C. one night.
I was up there working. I was at a hotel.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I walk outside. This guy's smoking a cigar.
And I'm making a phone call. And I said, hey, man, how's it going? He's like, good.
He's like, hey, who'd you serve with? And I'm like, what?

Speaker 2 And he's like, who'd you serve with? I said, I was a Marine. He's like, oh, yeah, I was Air Force.
I was like, oh, okay. Where'd you serve? I said, well,

Speaker 2 Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, you know, Balkans. And he's like, he's like, where in Iraq? I said, well, all over the place, man, from Baghdad to Bosul to everywhere between Ramadi, Jakrit, Najaf.

Speaker 2 He's like, where in Najaf? I was like, we just went. I was like, April 4th, 2004.
You may have heard about the big. He's like, dude, I was flying sorties that day.
I'm a Viper pilot.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, whoa, what? Wow. And he's like, yeah, he goes, that shit was insane.
And I'm like, what did you see?

Speaker 2 Because now I'm like really interested what he saw because we see what we see and you can't see from a 20,000-foot perspective.

Speaker 2 He's like, bro, he goes, I remember getting on comm saying, you have at least a thousand insurgents running on you at any given time. And I'm like, was it that many?

Speaker 2 He's like, oh, man, I could see it all. He goes, I don't know how you guys made it out of that.
He goes, that was the, and this has been told, that was the biggest insurgent assault in U.S.

Speaker 2 and in the history of the war, war in the iraq war um

Speaker 2 because they were just massively being pushed at us pushed at us pushed at us for fallujah they were hiding like cockroaches inside the buildings we had to go and hunt them uh this was an actual assault where that didn't happen a whole lot on the insurgency side of the house the reason i'm asking that question is i just i want to

Speaker 4 i want to paint a whole picture of what that scenario looked like.

Speaker 2 The next day,

Speaker 2 the next day, the U.S. Army said there there was 374 dead insurgents in the street.

Speaker 4 374 dead insurgents. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 and I don't mind that. I wish it was more.
I really do.

Speaker 2 I shot almost 800 rounds of Mark 262, 77 grain out of a sniper rifle in two days.

Speaker 2 And I was the only guy who had a sniper rifle out of just chance. I remember

Speaker 2 going to the ready room because I remember 800 rounds. It was two, it was almost four total loadouts, man.
I was grabbing mags.

Speaker 2 Guys were throwing me mags, non-stop, because I was a guy that could see more than anybody else because everybody had Mark 18s or shorty, 10 and a half inch guns and aim points on them.

Speaker 2 So they couldn't peek in windows. Nobody had Ubinos.
Nobody had shit. And I was weird.

Speaker 2 I'm in office watch. Again, Bremer calls Frank in.
Hey, what's going on? Hey, look,

Speaker 2 I'm making a big risk here, Frank. From what I remember, the conversation, he's like, I am authorizing you by any means necessary to go down and get my man out of there and get your team out of there.

Speaker 2 And he's like,

Speaker 2 sir, what do you mean by any means necessary? He's like, you know what I mean. He goes, I will cover you guys under the Geneva Convention.

Speaker 2 I will write some type of order or whatever it was that will temporarily authorize you to offensively engage if you have to to get our people out. And we're like, whoa, what?

Speaker 2 And I'm never found that order or anything, but we're like, and Frank looks over, he's like,

Speaker 2 you ready? I said, you ain't got to ask me twice, boss. Hauled ass back, went to the airfield, sprinted across the airfield, like, get it up, get ready, and ran back across over to the, across

Speaker 2 the palace, went through our ready room, grabbed the weapons, started kitting out and grabbing as much shit as we could.

Speaker 2 Grab my M4.

Speaker 2 Grab an MP5 that I bought in a fucking gas station for 70 bucks because we had to buy a lot of our own weapons weapons in the first phase.

Speaker 2 A lot of people don't realize that the contract because state wasn't able to get guns over to us yet. So some of the early contracts, like if you were on a off-site, you had to buy shit.
So

Speaker 2 I like guns. Saw an HK.
I'm like, 70 bucks? All right. I talked him down from 150.

Speaker 2 And got a case of beer from a gas station guy that, you know, they had the beer hidden behind because they weren't allowed to have alcohol.

Speaker 2 And so anyways, I take that thing

Speaker 2 because I always carry the bird with me as a secondary weapon to my M4 and a saw. So I have the saw on the bird all the time.
That was my primary weapon system.

Speaker 2 And I remember looking down at the sniper rifle and going,

Speaker 2 and I remember talking to my partner who was a counter sniper on the team that I would share in and out when I wasn't on the birds. And I was like, you think I should take that? He's like, maybe.

Speaker 2 I said, I'm taking it. And I grab it and he's like, hey, hey, here's the dope, man.
Here's the dope. Cause I never shot this gun, right?

Speaker 2 I would sit on it as a counter sniper in the stadiums and stuff and rooftops, but I never shot it. So he would zero the gun before I got there.

Speaker 2 And he said, yeah, it's got 100 yards, zero, and here's your dope. I'm like, well, how do you know what your dope is at 800 yards?

Speaker 2 And when you can't shoot 800 yards in the green zone because there's no range that can support that, we're guessing with ballistics and what we do back then.

Speaker 2 So that's why in the video, you can even see me, if you look up the Blackwater Stiper video, you can see me turning the dials on that Luipole. Like, what the fuck? And you see me turn it back.

Speaker 2 And eventually, I'm like, fuck it. Just zero it out and go mill dots only.
And I'm like, why am I trying to dial right now? Because he gave me dial numbers, not mill dot numbers.

Speaker 2 So I'm sitting there trying to figure that out in combat, which is a whole other story that I shared on my classes now and why I push precision so hard with our carbines or like I just got done teaching our first sniper class or precision rifle class, not sniper class.

Speaker 2 That will be next.

Speaker 2 And fuel craft, urban stuff. And it's like, no, we dope these guns because I've learned the hard way.

Speaker 2 I grabbed a rifle that was a shared counter sniper rifle, 556, 20-inch barrel, level mark four scope on it dmr trigger and took it into a battle space and had to zero the gun in combat

Speaker 2 i don't know where the hell my rounds are hitting um

Speaker 2 and so i get there we we we actually back up a little bit we get final mission hacksaw who is my pilot uh who actually just called me recently and i just finally got a voice i haven't talked to him in 20 years since i left the roof with him and i was like holy shit

Speaker 2 Like all these guys are coming back out now and calling. So I can't wait to get, as soon as I get done with this, I'm going to call him up and give him some love, man.

Speaker 2 Greatest pilot in the world, 160th guy was one of the lead Blackhawk or Black

Speaker 2 Blackhawk down Mogadishu Littlebird drivers.

Speaker 2 Greatest pilot in the fucking world. Anybody would say that about this guy.

Speaker 2 We go over, he does the full mission briefing. Everybody's trying to figure out what to do.
And we go. We haul ass 100 knots, 100 feet as fast as we could get in.
So we land in Babylon first.

Speaker 2 So there's a fuel air supply,

Speaker 2 resupply there. We land, we shut down the birds for a minute.
We're all kind of stoic and quiet because we kind of know what we're getting ourselves.

Speaker 2 We think we know what we're getting ourselves into, but nobody knows what to really say. And all of a sudden, two gunships come in.

Speaker 2 Steve goes, oh shit, these guys look like they're coming from the west, from Najaf. So the Apaches land, he goes over, the Apache pilots get out.
They're like, dude, Steve, what's up, man?

Speaker 2 He knew one of the guys.

Speaker 2 and uh he's like hey man we're going in najov he's like whoa he goes we just got called out of najov and he's like what do you mean you got called off he's like yeah it's too hot they called us out i was like someone says when the do apaches get called out when it's hot like we need you in there right now our guys aren't going to make it to the night he's like yeah it's something weird uh we got vipers on station right now uh dropping ordinance but we don't know what's happening we just got called off mission and like well why were you called nobody could answer the question so now i'm thinking okay is big army doing something here this is why they've called this the Benghazi of Iraq, because there's some weird shit behind it that nobody really knows still to this day.

Speaker 2 And I'm not trying to open a can of worms. I'm just trying to talk about the history of these.

Speaker 2 It's just interesting, right? It's just interesting.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 he's like, give me those freaks to the vipers. He's like, Steve, you know, I can't do that, man.
You guys are contractors. So he brings back what

Speaker 2 supposed freaks. And they never worked.
And Steve goes, hey, everybody, come here. He goes, I need y'all to understand that this is a volunteer mission.
And

Speaker 2 if something happens,

Speaker 2 it's a volunteer mission. Okay, there's no guarantees on this one.
Anyone want to step back right now and stay here? Nobody's going to hold it against you.

Speaker 2 And dude, everybody was just kind of looking. I think we'd looked around at each other to like, I fucking dare somebody to say that.
I dare somebody to step back, you know. And of course, nobody did.

Speaker 2 We spun up,

Speaker 2 got off deck

Speaker 2 18 miles, ripping as far, hard as fast as we could.

Speaker 2 We come in,

Speaker 2 trying to get air, comms with the vipers, nothing.

Speaker 2 We're on final coming into the buildings. We kind of do a loop around,

Speaker 2 checking everything out. We're like, wow, this shit's on fire.
There's stuff, you know, I could see what I thought was bodies laying down on the road.

Speaker 2 I see the guys on the roof waving at us like crazy. And then all of a sudden, I hear the whole freaking aircraft just goes

Speaker 2 and it shakes like it was getting like I thought we were going out of the sky. Worst turbulence ever felt.

Speaker 2 And I'm hanging out the side of this thing and

Speaker 2 I'm like, what the fuck? Steve's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what was that? And the bird's like pitching and rolling. And I was like, I don't know, I don't know.
So I check tail rotor.

Speaker 2 I checked everything. I'm looking up.
I'm like, we look fine, Steve. I don't know.
I can't see anything. And I look out and this building's just going.

Speaker 2 mushroom cloud coming up about 500 meters from us.

Speaker 2 And it was a viper drop of a a fucking J-Dam on a mortar position and uh from an Anglico Marine Anglico team apparently that was calling for calling fires missions while we were trying to come in

Speaker 2 and we thought we got hit by an RPG or something,

Speaker 2 so we gained stability, we're okay. We come in, we're like, we got to shut down now, man.
We got air dropping out of the sky.

Speaker 2 We don't be flying around this place and doing because we were going to come in and just do some gun runs, drop some supplies,

Speaker 2 and see what's going on and then fly back out. Well, Steve's like, making making it audible, guys.
We're going in, we're landing and see what's going on.

Speaker 2 So we all land in this courtyard that was, you know, I mean, like, if you could fit scale-down helicopters and put them in this room, two feet off of each wall, two feet up off of each rotor blade.

Speaker 2 It was super tight. We were sitting there.
These guys are phenomenal pilots.

Speaker 2 So we get out, and then guys come up to us: Holy shit, man. Thanks for you guys coming and supporting us, man.
Holy shit, we need to get on, get on the roof, get fighting.

Speaker 2 We're going to tell you what's going on here. And we're like, well, what are we doing? They're like, you ain't flying.
It's too hot.

Speaker 2 So then Ben Thomas, who ends up being kind of my quasi spotter that day, former SEAL,

Speaker 2 he says, dude, is that a sniper rifle? I'm like, yeah, he's like, thank God you brought that, bro. Bring it to the roof.
We don't have any of that here. So I haul ass.

Speaker 2 I take my crew helmet off, put my hat on backwards, grab my loadout, and haul ass up to the roof. Went to work and just started.
identifying things.

Speaker 2 And the biggest thing I identified when I started shooting at people

Speaker 2 was this fucking gun's not doped. And this is not a good thing.
So, I started to say, Hey, Ben, hey, see the T barrier, the T wall?

Speaker 2 I said, Hey, I'm gonna shoot it. How far is it? It's about 100, 105 meters.
I'm like, I shoot, hit. He's like, Okay, you're about an inch high.

Speaker 2 I was like, All right, well, that's an inch high at 100, so the gun's not zeroed for me now.

Speaker 2 And then I start working out and we start building a range card, and then all of a sudden, like, hey, contact left.

Speaker 2 We'd start shooting, and I'd come back, and then I'd start doping the gun again.

Speaker 2 And I had to literally build a dope card and a range in a fucking gunfight in the biggest insurgentist attack of the war one of my biggest lessons there is zero your damn gun

Speaker 2 more importantly zero yourself first in order to be able to zero your gun that's kind of a saying we say in our training classes because you can have a zero gun but if you're not zeroed you're not gonna be thinking right so now i'm trying to figure things out i finally start figuring it out um start taking dudes out um

Speaker 2 One guy on my podcast, there's a footage of a guy with an RPG getting into position, which is real footage. It's the first time I saw this.

Speaker 2 there was a french reporter embedded with the mahdi army the insurgents and he was documenting what they were doing against us and yeah you know lots of freelance reporters was running around battlefield doing that and

Speaker 2 it was about 10 years ago you you had that reporter on your podcast no his footage from that day that he was filming the insurgents shooting back at us we found that footage 10 years later and i wonder if you could find that guy this so it's it's been taken off the internet, but I have the piece of footage.

Speaker 2 I'll show it to you.

Speaker 2 And it's a document about a 21-year-old guy that travels from Europe to fight the infidel. Goes all the way to Iraq, travels, gets to the holy city, is recruited by Muqtadar al-Sadar's Mahdi Army.

Speaker 2 And the first thing he does is they give him an RPG and they say, go shoot at the American sniper. That was me.
And you can see that on the subtitles and everything.

Speaker 2 And I remember the shot like it was yesterday. It was about 320 meters and yards, actually, back then.

Speaker 2 He crosses a street. I see a glimpse and I start scanning over that way.
And I say, hey, man, I think somebody's got RPG walking out.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 he pops his head up for a second. behind this tin shed thing.
And as soon as he pops his head up, I dumped him right there, right on. And so,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 10 years later I find this documentary about this kid that traveled all the way from Europe to try to kill us or the American sniper which was me um

Speaker 2 wow dude had no idea what he was fighting for you know imagine his family his parents who knows I mean he's an insurgent so I'm sure people have to go fuck that guy like no it's still somebody's son it's it's still somebody that was corrupted somebody that was coerced into evil somebody that made a decision to go and fight somebody else because of common enemy intimacy.

Speaker 2 And that bothered me for a little while. When you see that footage, it's like, I don't have any hesitations.

Speaker 2 And I wouldn't have not, if that happened again with, and if I knew that, I'd still shoot his ass. It wouldn't have stopped me from shooting him, but it's like, that's war.

Speaker 2 That's how fucked up it is, man. Got to know how to fire at RPG.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so that's the kind of scenarios that were happening.

Speaker 2 Farthest shot that day was 720 meters

Speaker 2 with a 5.56. That's my next lesson.
It's like, I never shot a 5.56 past 500. Marine Corps boot camp, man.
That's it. That's the limitations of that weapon system.

Speaker 2 Just like if you're a sniper in the Marines or Army, they'll tell you back then a thousand yards, that's the limitation in the sniper systems. And I'll shoot past that.

Speaker 2 Like, dude, if we knew an eighth of what we know now back then, we'd have killed so many more people. So now I'm trying to dope a 5.56 out to 800 yards and hit guys with rockets and stuff.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, they were coming down pretty hard and fast.

Speaker 2 One of the coolest stories from

Speaker 2 that day was,

Speaker 2 you know, a couple people got shot.

Speaker 2 But there was one, I have this knife story. It's a resilient story about sharpening your knife.
You know, a lot of people watch my videos and hear me say, hey, stay sharp.

Speaker 2 Because I always say, hey, stay sharp, be safe, and die free.

Speaker 2 And they mean something, you know.

Speaker 2 You know, be safe. Well, that means.
Don't be risk adverse. It means do dangerous shit carefully, like JP says.

Speaker 2 It's being sharp means that knife, it's not useful unless it's sharp. And so if you gave a knife emotions and put it in a grinder, it would hurt.

Speaker 2 I think that's the problem with Americans with people in general in the world is that they're afraid to sharpen themselves because it hurts. And

Speaker 2 this one guy, this Spanish airborne dude that was a part of the Spanish contingency there,

Speaker 2 I can't remember his name, Tabata or something like that. I forget.

Speaker 2 He's getting attacked with his squad by the insurgency that broke through the gate. They're down down below in these outbuildings, and they're going at it.
These dudes, all of them run out of ammo.

Speaker 2 His best friend's shot and killed right in front of him. He's got a bunch of his buddies that are on the ground hurting.
And all of a sudden, like eight insurgents come down the wall.

Speaker 2 He's out of ammo. He pulls out.
If you look up Najaf Buck Knife Spanish soldier, you'll see him standing there with this bloody knife in his hand.

Speaker 2 And I use it as a big, a big presentation when I'm doing my leadership and resilience presentations and uh and

Speaker 2 he's sitting there with a big shitty grin on his face with this bloody old-timer buck knife kind of like not like I think it was a buck and like the wooden handle with the gold oh I know you know yeah we all we all grew up with them and uh the insurgents come in dude just starts stabbing these guys man stabs them as many as he can to where they all run away and they didn't fire a shot and saved his buddies lives um so he got I think the medal of valor or something when he got back to

Speaker 2 Spain.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry. Jeez.
I'm sorry. I think he was an El Salvadorian, not the Spaniard.
He was El Sal.

Speaker 2 Those guys were phenomenal. They were clearing out.
We had a sniper in the hospital that was shooting at us who hit Corporal Young, one of the Marines, who turned into an infantry Marine really quick.

Speaker 2 We gave him a saw and said, hey, go to town.

Speaker 2 Then he was running up and downstairs and delivering water and food and getting more ammo. And I even had him go get some oil from a Hum V.
I said, Hey, man, my gun's drying up, dude.

Speaker 2 Like, nobody had oil. That's another funny thing.

Speaker 2 I'm like, looking back on these after actions, I go, you see all the dudes in Vietnam with a little oil thing in their band and their helmet, and you laugh at it. I was like, does anybody got any oil?

Speaker 2 Like, nobody had any oil. I'm like, guns are seasoning up, guys.
So that's where I come in as always been the resourceful guy on a team when you're out of resources.

Speaker 2 Hey, go drain one of the differentials on a Hum V or on a tank and give me some oil and bring us a fucking pan of oil up here. So I was downstairs.
I ran down to wash my

Speaker 2 and got some oil, dipped it, dipped bolts in it, and freaking went back up to the roof. So, like, those are lessons that you should know.
You should know those things.

Speaker 2 So, in the event that you're in a shitty situation like that, you ain't going to go, well, my gun's dry. I guess I'm down.
No, you fix it. You fix the problem as fast as you can.
It's a risk formula.

Speaker 2 What do I need to do right now? What's the risk I'm going to take? What's the resources I have available that'll equal my decision in action?

Speaker 2 And if I can keep that going in my life, I can make a decision for my kids, my business, my family in combat. And it's a simple formula.
It's a condensed OODA loop formula. formula.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we had one guy get shot in the eye, concrete splash from the sniper, if I remember right. Army captain got hit through the arm.

Speaker 2 One of the one of the El Sals got hit through the mouth with an AK and blew his mouth out. And there's blood.
You'll see pictures of blood all over the roof. That's from him.

Speaker 2 They're dragging him out and blood squirting everywhere.

Speaker 2 And then Corporal Young gets hit while he's shooting on the saw. And this guy was a Kentucky boy.
I'm still trying to reach out to you, man. So if you see this, reach out to me.

Speaker 2 I always want to make sure he's okay. Because what happened next was, you know, I got a Marine next to me now, Brotherhood, right?

Speaker 2 Losing consciousness, not doing well, but then still fighting. He'd get back on the gun.
He'd still keep fighting. This guy was a savage,

Speaker 2 a defense systems messenger, by the way, not a combat ranking or a combat MOS guy, from what I understood. And he fought like a dog that day, man.
He did well.

Speaker 2 And more importantly, supported everybody else to the point where he started losing consciousness. Mede-Vacs, all denied.
All denied. What do you mean denied? Why? We have fucking U.S.

Speaker 2 military personnel that are shot and need to be medevaced immediately. Negative denied.
Like, what the fuck's going on, man?

Speaker 2 That's the weird thing. Like, there was times where it wasn't that hot at all.
They could have easily came in when he had lulz in battle.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so I go to Steve and I'm like, hey, man, how can we get this dude out of here?

Speaker 2 We're running low on ammo, running low on food, chow, which doesn't really matter at this point, but we need more ordinance. We need some shit and we need to get these guys out of here.

Speaker 2 And he's like, well, he goes, I don't know what's going on, Trav, but this is weird. He goes, I've never seen Medevacs denied like this.

Speaker 2 I said, what if we fly his ass back and go get more supplies and come right back? And he's like,

Speaker 2 what do you mean? I said, me and you jump in our bird.

Speaker 2 put his ass, strap him down in the front seat, fly his ass back to the cast, drop him off, hop over over the pad, which is right next door, reload, refit, and me and you fly right back down.

Speaker 2 He said, Travis, if I get shot, we're dead. I said, I understand that.
I'll take left side and support you and protect you best I can. And he goes,

Speaker 2 we're doing it. So me and Steve single-handedly

Speaker 2 loaded Young up the front seat, strapped him down. We booked out of there as fast as we could, went back.

Speaker 2 dropped him off. I threw his ass on the stretcher with all the medics that came out.
And Pat and Montchess said, you're going to be good, brother.

Speaker 2 And he had a round that went through his shoulder and into his, I think his upper, I think his upper quad is long because he was starting to get really drainy sounding.

Speaker 2 And we didn't know what kind of internal damage he had or anything. His shoulder swole up this big.
So

Speaker 2 he gave me a thumbs up. They pushed him away to the casp, went over to the pad.
All the Blackwater guys were ready, feeding us with shit.

Speaker 2 Right back down at Najaff, went right back to work.

Speaker 2 And Corporal Young, from what I heard, got the Silver Star for that, for his actions in Nashville.

Speaker 2 I don't know if that was downgraded to a Broad Star, but he was up for the Silver Star that day.

Speaker 2 I think the Anglico commanders put him in for that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 went back, started pushing people back. SFODAs started coming in and started controlling the area.
And then all of a sudden, we find out General Sanchez is on his way down and we can now leave.

Speaker 2 And so he came in and did a big dog and pony show on the rooftop and made it sound like he stopped the war in Najah. They had air coming in and like this big dog and pony thing.
Who is this?

Speaker 2 General Sanchez, the coalition commander at the time in 2004, and stood on that rooftop in a big, like

Speaker 2 kind of

Speaker 2 apoplix now stance on the rooftop saying, we did this.

Speaker 4 Are you fucking kidding me?

Speaker 2 Yeah, fucking pissed a lot of us off.

Speaker 2 And again,

Speaker 2 I don't want to be be judgmental because I don't know what he was going through. I don't know what Bremer was going through because both of them are talked badly about.

Speaker 2 A lot of people talk shit about Bremer. And I didn't see nothing but him trying to do the best job he could.
I saw him constantly frustrated on Office Watch talking to Bush or Rumpsville.

Speaker 2 I'd be screaming at him through the phone. He's like, fuck.

Speaker 2 And I always wanted to go like, you're all right, sir, but obviously I can't do that.

Speaker 2 But you could tell he was dealing with a lot of shit, a lot of moral decisions he had to make that I think he didn't like the decisions that he had to make. Um, and then, of course, Sanchez coming in.

Speaker 2 I mean, all you got to do is say, Hey, they're fucking contractors, sir. Don't listen to them.
I'm like, you realize who the team leader of that team is, right?

Speaker 2 That dude ain't a fucking mercenary, he's a savage former Navy SEAL.

Speaker 2 Um, and look at all of us on this team that have been protecting Bremer's ass and taking care of your army guys when they're out needing help. They'll come to us because they're afraid to go to you.

Speaker 2 Because every time they'd ask for air support from the Apaches, the Apaches weren't authorized with their ROEs to engage.

Speaker 2 So they'd come over to our pad and say, hey, can can you guys fly for support for us?

Speaker 2 We'd have military police guys going out trying to find bomb builders and stuff that were like, they were making arrests in town with special operations.

Speaker 2 They'd have us fly concentric ring security for them because the Apaches weren't authorized to engage on certain people. So we were doing barter trades with operational, you know,

Speaker 2 resources to help the Army. And then they could help us because we wouldn't get ammo and stuff sometimes.

Speaker 2 So I would go, hey, we'll do a mission for you as long as you guys can find us some link to 556. We can't get any link tracer 556.

Speaker 2 So I would be bargaining and making equipment and using their machines and stuff to do it. And I was just always the tinkerer.

Speaker 2 So we made the program work. It was, but that guy was always a thorn at everybody's side.
So again, I don't know who was bad in that situation because somebody was.

Speaker 2 Somebody was making bad decisions that day.

Speaker 2 Luckily, more people didn't die because they should have. If you think about how big that insurgency was,

Speaker 2 pretty fortunate, you know, to keep those people back. So I took targets 300 and beyond.
Everybody else took targets inside of that.

Speaker 2 And I think we started pushing those guys back to where McTotter finally decided, I guess we can't take the CPA today because we're losing too many people.

Speaker 2 And then we pulled out, Big Army comes in and goes, we got it now. And then never talks about it.
And then redacts all the stories in people's books and everything else.

Speaker 2 You know, I didn't think that was really cool.

Speaker 2 Even some of my friends, like, you know, we've talked about, you know, friends of mine that I was on a mission with will tell me, hey, shut your mouth about this. None of that happened.
I'm like,

Speaker 2 well, it did. It was just another mission in our lives, another gunfight, because I mean, I've got almost 14 trips and combat tours.

Speaker 2 So it was just another fight for me. But there's some weird shit about this one that I can't answer a lot of questions to.
So maybe we should ask questions.

Speaker 2 Do we just stop talking about Benghazi? Do we just stop talking about the shit that happened there? Do we just stop talking about all these other conspiracies?

Speaker 2 No, we should probably open a can of worms on them.

Speaker 2 Now, if it

Speaker 2 divulges national security information, of course, that's where I'll shut my mouth. But nobody said, Travis, hey, look, we had some bigger issues.
There's a national security thing there.

Speaker 2 Can you keep this down?

Speaker 2 Sure, man. Thanks for telling me that.
Wow. Roger that.
I know what a TSSCI clearance is. I can keep my mouth shut.
But when you don't tell me that, you just say, hey, dude, shut the fuck up, bro.

Speaker 2 So, who got to you? Who got, did the agency get to you? Did somebody get to you and tell you to shut the fuck up? Did, did your book not do very well? And that's why you're all pissed off at me? Okay.

Speaker 2 Like you got, we got to put that aside. And

Speaker 2 again, I'm just doing it from a historical archiving standpoint because I think it's good to talk about, you know, guys like Corporal Lonnie Young, who's a freaking savage that got medals for that day that helped us help everybody else keep the insurgency back so we can keep that CPA alive, prevent the loss of life.

Speaker 2 And ultimately finish our mission, which was go in and get those people out and save the Coalition Provisional Authority, Phil Cosnett, from getting killed by the insurgency.

Speaker 4 What do you think was going on?

Speaker 2 A rumor that I heard, it's just a rumor. I have nothing more than that, was somebody tried to do a failed hit on McTotter's family.
And he was like, okay.

Speaker 2 Fuck you. I'm taking that CPA now.

Speaker 2 That's what I heard. Now, that could be just a wazoo story, rumor.

Speaker 2 But I think, you know, kind of

Speaker 2 you want to start a war, don't kill a king, kidnap a prince concept. And I think that could have been potentially one of the angles.

Speaker 2 Plus, I know that the guys in Najov were doing a really good job trying to get the support of the people in Najov to fight against Muktotter's army that was growing rapidly.

Speaker 2 And they were like Muktotter's goons would go in at night and kill police officers that were loyal to the coalition.

Speaker 2 And then our job was to go in and really help them understand why you need to be loyal to us because we're going to help you. These assholes ain't going to help you.
He's going to take over one day.

Speaker 2 He's an Iranian Shia.

Speaker 2 He's a cleric. He's going to take over this country.

Speaker 2 And what did Buktatr al-Sadar do after we pulled out of Iraq?

Speaker 2 Comes out of Tehran from Iran, takes over the country, and turns it into the cesspool that it is, which I believe is another American issue.

Speaker 2 I don't think we should have been in Iraq in the first place. I think that

Speaker 2 it's all to make money, just like Liberia. Oh, sure.
Why do we need to secure the Firestone tire plants? Who gives a fuck? We're going after this guy that's a scumbag special operations terrorist.

Speaker 2 Well, just do what you're told.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 2 Later to find out we at that time got like 27% of our rubber from Liberia. Nobody went into Rwanda when they killed a million people with machetes.
Why not?

Speaker 2 Because there's no economic assets to protect there. So I get it.
There are certain economic assets we want to protect. It's a part of our job as well.

Speaker 2 It's why State Department, I guess, exists to some degree. But

Speaker 2 Israel, it's all about money, man. Nobody gives a fuck about the Palestinians.
They care about capitalizing on the largest economy in the Middle East. And who is that? You got the Shia.

Speaker 2 Nobody gives a fuck about the Shia.

Speaker 2 Magically, the president of Iran disappears in a helicopter crash and his entire chain of command is wiped out in the next six months after that.

Speaker 2 Then all of a sudden, Russia, Xi Jinping, and China and Putin start talking about Middle Eastern reform. All of a sudden, we jump in because Israeli gets attacked.

Speaker 2 And then you have to look back 100 years to the 1922 white papers from Winston Churchill and see why.

Speaker 2 Why are we going into the Middle East? Why are we trying to get rid of the Shia? Because they don't make up any of the economy. And the Middle East was a thorn in the Sunni side.

Speaker 2 You got the Turks, which is a semi-Semitic Sunni population. Okay, they're cool, right?

Speaker 2 You got Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, all the big countries, Egypt, and the list goes on of the Sunni population.

Speaker 2 So I believe, personally, after studying the promised land a little bit in my life, that this has been contrived ever since the 22 white papers to allow the Zionists to live there, to allow the Arab revolt to happen when they're like, hey, you lied to us.

Speaker 2 Oh, you want to fight? Now your asses are going to live in open-air prisons, Golian Heights, Gaza, and the West Banks.

Speaker 2 And now your asses are in open-air prisons the rest of your life and you're painting our asses. And so now you have this whole problem of them going back and forth, abrogation of law, everything else.

Speaker 2 And they're always arguing about who's right, whose land it is.

Speaker 2 And next thing you know, America and the Western world sitting back going, God damn, we're going to capitalize on this as soon as this stabilizes because we're going to make agreements, which we've already done with Saudi Arabia and Egypt and everybody else that doesn't give a shit about helping the Palestinians

Speaker 2 to capitalize on once we turn that machine on, we make all the money. It's a monopoly.

Speaker 2 That's why Xi Ji Ping and Putin said six months prior they need to do Middle Eastern reform because they're tired of us.

Speaker 2 And that's when we're like, nope, we can't let them get in because they already own Africa. They already own Central, South, and Latin America

Speaker 2 and a lot of the rest of the world. And so we got to make a call.
We got to make a move because look at how Bricks Nations is building quickly. And so, you know, that's

Speaker 2 all. I think it's all connected.
And I think something with Muqtadar al-Sadar all the way back to Najaf is a part of all of this shit, a part of everything. I don't know what it is.
Interesting.

Speaker 2 But it's, it's weird. So that's why I think a lot of guys will Benghazi factor that a little bit to go, it's a part of the bigger picture of making money in the world.

Speaker 2 And that's, you know,

Speaker 4 I mean, it's, you know, the connection between Dick Cheney and

Speaker 2 Halliburton is,

Speaker 2 that's all you need to know. He made $64 billion in the first year of the war, from what I understood.

Speaker 2 You remember how fast Cabe Yard and Halliburton everybody built up? I mean, just took over that country and it was like

Speaker 2 this is impressive.

Speaker 4 And Afghanistan. It's all money.

Speaker 4 When you see that, you know what it was all about. There's nothing else.
You got the fucking vice president connected with the biggest logistics company

Speaker 4 who's running all logistics for two separate wars. That's it.
That's what it was.

Speaker 2 Now, and I don't think, and you and I certainly probably agree to this. We don't want to come off sounding anti-war because there's people that need to be killed.

Speaker 4 I'm not saying we did anything bad.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 4 we did do bad. I'm not saying we shouldn't have been there at all.
I'm not saying we didn't do any good because we did rid the fucking world of a lot of bad guys. We did.

Speaker 4 But we did not have to fucking be there, especially in Iraq and the way Afghanistan went.

Speaker 4 Should we have been there? Yes.

Speaker 2 Have you ever had any... any experts on like central banking and all that stuff come in yet? Not yet.
I'm really interested to see how that all feeds in too, because

Speaker 2 like a lot of people would say, you know what hitler and qaddafi and

Speaker 2 hussein and some other big prominent features or people leaders in the world had in common they're against the central banking that the western world wants to do so they have to get rid of those people in order to

Speaker 2 destabilize a region to go back in and fix it and save it. Look what we did.
And now we can capitalize on the economy of it.

Speaker 2 I believe that could be a potential possibility with Saddam because, as everybody's agreed, he's the only dude that stabilized the Middle East for as long as it was stable.

Speaker 2 He had Iran to fight with back and forth for a while. Big deal.

Speaker 2 Now we destabilize the whole thing. And then Gaddafi starts squawking and making noise.
And we go, oh, let's get rid of his ass too, destabilize Libya and all that stuff. And Benghazi happens.

Speaker 2 And it's like, well, who's next? Oh, the Iranians. Let's go ahead and wipe those dudes now.
So we're starting to wire down to the Sunnis that we want to be able to help. So

Speaker 2 a hundred-year plan, in my opinion, because it's been consistent since the 20s of our movement into that region.

Speaker 2 But again, I'm not educated to that, but it smells like that, you know, because we've seen the money, we've seen the,

Speaker 2 you know, and then, of course, all the sex trafficking and drug trafficking that comes on top of that. You know, that's another problem.

Speaker 4 How many any enemy combatants do you think you might have killed that day?

Speaker 2 People have asked me that a lot.

Speaker 2 I can't count, but I know I shot a lot of people.

Speaker 2 I didn't sit there and start ticking my stock and things like that. You don't really do that in that type of situation.

Speaker 2 And then there's people that I know I hit that ran off or, you know, can't confirm.

Speaker 2 But when you're sitting there in a prone position on a sniper rifle with groups of 50 people coming at you, or like in the video that i i put up there's a bus a tour bus that they use to try to dump all the insurgents right behind the the hesco wall or the t-ball

Speaker 2 um and we that's 104 yards man and it was full of insurgents and uh you can't see it on the grainy video but through a 10-power scope i'm sitting there looking at dudes inside of this thing waiting to get off and i'm just like

Speaker 2 Got 100 meters in the prone on a freaking sniper rifle. And everybody else was shooting too because it's like, hey, it's a bus full of bad guys.
Blow them up.

Speaker 2 Somehow that bus was able to get out of there. It turned around and backed up.
It was like, fuck this. You see the guy driving away, but you could see the windows and everything popping out of it.

Speaker 2 And I would guess there had to been at least 25 insurgents on that bus alone.

Speaker 4 Did that much killing affect your

Speaker 4 psyche at all?

Speaker 2 Not one bit.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 4 Never questioned it.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 Because it was right.

Speaker 2 Meaning, it was righteous, right? Like, we look back and go, well, the war may not have been righteous, but you know what? When we're on the ground, we're on the battlefield and we're fighting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's that thing that's like, oh, I'm fighting for my brother next to me. Eh, no, that's not what you signed up for.
You signed up to kill bad people, you know, and I want my scalps. So

Speaker 2 I'm okay. taking out evil people.
I think there's a level of

Speaker 2 psychopath in everybody that is involved in that job. And I know people would look at the word psychopath as a very bad, bad derogatory type word.
If you study ancient warriors, you study history,

Speaker 2 you know, you study the last 3,000-ish years of hunter-gatherer separation and agriculture and things growing, we don't need hunters as much anymore.

Speaker 2 We don't need the fighters and the protectors as much anymore. So we get outcasted.

Speaker 2 And some of us in our blood still have that

Speaker 2 super sense of justice, that super sense of duty. And I will go out and fight and make sure that our village, our country, whatever we call ours will be safe because it's just in our blood.

Speaker 2 And that's the thing, like with my son, when he asks, should he go and fight in the military?

Speaker 2 If he doesn't, where is he going to go fight? Because he's going to fight. And I think this is where a lot of guys like myself as a kid, I was already fighting before I was going in.

Speaker 2 I was looking for the fight. I was looking for something bad.

Speaker 2 I was looking for something to blow up because it was cool to understand the experiment that happens in the event that one day in the military I need to know explosives.

Speaker 2 I should start learning now by going to Home Depot. You're like, well, I didn't know any better, but

Speaker 2 so imagine if I wouldn't have had the chance that I had. I'm already coming out of jail, man.
What do you think would have happened to me? I would have fought for somebody else, maybe bad.

Speaker 2 Maybe, maybe that's the difference.

Speaker 2 Another phenomenal book is The Wisdom of Psychopaths, what we can learn from spies, serial killers, military, and CEOs. Donald Trump is a psychopath.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Hillary Clinton is also a psychopath. Two difference.
One's righteous, one's evil. You can tell by their intentions.

Speaker 2 And I don't care.

Speaker 2 There's even studies that they've done looking back to all former U.S. presidents to find this element of the psychoticness inside them.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 JFK was the highest ranking one.

Speaker 4 No shift. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's like, wait, what? And then you start to realize he cared. He was compassionate.
And sometimes that will, that's an element.

Speaker 2 That's why I think compassion is the number one attribute to a warrior, because if you care about something, you're going to fight for it.

Speaker 2 And then if you have that tendency inside of you that you will fight for it no matter what, and you will go all the way for your beliefs and your morals and your ethics and who you stand for,

Speaker 2 that's a pretty fucking good killer, man.

Speaker 2 And there's nothing bad about that because we need those people in the world. And I'm not labeling myself as that.

Speaker 2 I've been studying it and trying to figure out why I do the things that I do, why my heart rate drops drops under stress versus increases.

Speaker 2 I'll see that I'll monitor myself in planes. I do heart rate variability testing in our labs in Scottsdale.
And I sit there sometimes,

Speaker 2 why is it when I'm at six to 9,000 feet, I'm kind of amped up. Heart rate's like 120 in the plane, checking people, having a good time.
And then after

Speaker 2 that 10,000 foot mark hits,

Speaker 2 starts going into this flow state.

Speaker 2 And then when I'm in free fall, I still measure in the 70s and 80s. And I'm like, interesting, whether I'm free flying, whether I'm doing tandems, whether it's just like my flow state, man.

Speaker 2 It's my, my, it's where I want to be.

Speaker 2 So they contribute that to sometimes those tendencies that allow you to go into that mode.

Speaker 2 So I think

Speaker 2 the difference, though, between the evil sociopath or psychopath and the righteous one is the suffering that occurs. The evil ones don't suffer.
They love it. They love the hurt.

Speaker 2 They love the pain on other people.

Speaker 2 They're the malignant narcissists of the world.

Speaker 2 They're the ones that really, truly need to be destroyed. And

Speaker 2 the righteous one will feel the same way about killing until they fuck it up. And this is where I tell my students.

Speaker 2 99.999% of your life is everything.

Speaker 2 Sitting here right now, it's taking your kids to school, going fishing and hunting and camping and taking

Speaker 2 your queen to the movies or going on a date or paperwork, taxes, work, everything in between.

Speaker 2 Even, let's say, you know,

Speaker 2 riding on a helicopter into combat and you are doing the fast rope and doing the thousand yard dash across the field.

Speaker 2 You kick the door, you go inside and you touch that trigger, you almost touch it, but

Speaker 2 the situation in front of you changes immediately. Maybe they drop their gun.
Maybe they have a come to Jesus meeting or something or Rohammed or Mohammed meeting or whatever. And you're like,

Speaker 2 to me, that's 99.9% of your life.

Speaker 2 So why is it that, you know, why do we teach firearms training? Why do we teach tactics training,

Speaker 2 the mind tactics? Because there's no such thing as physical tactics.

Speaker 2 Why do we spend so much time in our life on those skill sets when it's a micro percentage that point

Speaker 2 zero zero zero something? And even after all the shots that I've taken in combat, and I know there's guys out there taken way more me,

Speaker 2 it's still a micro percentage of our career.

Speaker 2 The rest of it's humanitarian efforts and laughing and playing with kids in Africa and you know, or wherever the Philippines, or you know, it's like just schools and training.

Speaker 2 And I think we can screw up and fix a lot of this. I can zag when I should have zagged over here.
I could spend money or not spend money, you know, when I should have.

Speaker 2 I can make a good family or business decision. I can make a bad one, but like, hey, we'll fix it.
It's okay. But when you cross that line, because if you think about a 1911, for example,

Speaker 2 that trigger is only a 0.070 of an inch. An M4 is only 0.089 of an inch.
That's like that, man.

Speaker 2 That's the difference between your life changing or not.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 if you go over that line and you do it right,

Speaker 2 you won't lose any sleep over it. You'll feel good about it.
You'll high-five your brother and be like, damn, that was awesome. See that guy's head come apart? Like, you know, some shitty movie scene.

Speaker 2 But when you mess it up,

Speaker 2 you know, when I ask people, why do you take that little tiny percentage so seriously and come out here and train and spend all this time and money with us and our classes? Why do you do that?

Speaker 2 It's because it's the micro percentage of your life you can't fuck up.

Speaker 2 When you cross that line and you do it wrong, you will never, ever be able to come back from that mistake. And that's when you realize the pain.

Speaker 2 When you take something away

Speaker 2 that you can't, it's like, dude, it's like a,

Speaker 2 you know, law enforcement had this joke at crackheads. When they drop pieces of the crack, they're so addicted.

Speaker 2 They'll crawl on the carpets for hours trying to find the pieces they missed to put it back together to get that fixed. Right.
And so I think of this, this

Speaker 2 shooting scenario that I could be in that if I fuck that up, which I have in my life, and break that glass,

Speaker 2 you will sit there with a pair of tweezers and glue and try to put it back together.

Speaker 2 And if you could imagine trying to take a mirror that shattered on the ground and try to make make it perfect again, you can't.

Speaker 2 And that's why that training is so important because you can't mess it up.

Speaker 4 Um, where did you that up

Speaker 2 in Africa?

Speaker 4 Do you want to talk about it?

Speaker 2 I, I,

Speaker 2 it's a tough one for me, man.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 I might be able to abbreviate it.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 I've been working on this one for a long time to try to be able to come out and tell the story.

Speaker 2 This kid, man, this kid who was

Speaker 2 everything to me.

Speaker 2 Probably about 16 years old. He stayed out of the war efforts.
He really wanted to

Speaker 2 help educate us.

Speaker 2 Earlier, when I said that when we went to in country, everybody's calling us brother American, he would be the first to say, here's why. And he, his kid, knew everything about America.

Speaker 2 And that's all he wanted to do was go to America one day. And he told me that his mom and dad were killed two weeks before we got there in the Civil War.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of kids running around with no parents. And so, you know, when we see him, they're like, hey, kids, you got to go away.
You can't stay here anymore. We have no place to go.

Speaker 2 We have no place to go. I'm like, okay, well, why don't you go back to your village? Your parents are dead.
Okay. So we had these five kids that would always hang out with us on a daily basis.

Speaker 2 They'd always be looking for work. So we'd give them MREs and food and medicine and stuff.

Speaker 2 And they'd tell us where to get like eggs in town and little blocks of cheese because like you're eating MREs every day.

Speaker 2 And, you know, there's not a whole lot of food running around in that, that country during that war.

Speaker 2 So he was extremely resourceful.

Speaker 2 Like one day he ran into town eight miles to get an egg and a block of cheese for me and a little bowl of bread and ran eight miles back and came back at the end of the day.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, where the fuck have you been, man? He goes, I went and got the egg and cheese. I'm like, what took you so long? He's like, I went to town.
I'm like,

Speaker 2 you mean you went, you went to town? You mean you, did you, did you get a ride? No, I ran. Flip-flops, man.
And I'm like, you ran 18 miles to get me an egg and cheese.

Speaker 2 Yes, I guess. He doesn't know what 18 miles is.

Speaker 2 Because it's all they do all day is run and walk everywhere. And I'm like, do you see that vehicle right there? You tell me next time and we'll drive in and grab it.
Okay.

Speaker 2 So then we started doing that. I was like, that's how cool these kids were.
Anyways,

Speaker 2 he would start telling us where weapons cachets cachets were and say hey i know a guy that's building guns he's not bad he's trying to put food on his family's table they can't sell weapons to the militia um you know legally so they're getting busted these are part of the weapons cache issues that was happening in the city because it's just lord of war man there's guns everywhere so we would go and do these hits and eventually realize when we turn over the the

Speaker 2 um you know anybody that was a potential threat or issue the nigerians would take and cut their hands off on the side of the road typical our african stuff um they didn't take prisoners because they don't get paid like I talked about earlier.

Speaker 2 And so they

Speaker 2 would interrogate and beat the shit out of these people to a point where one day I ran down and put a 1911 in a NIBAT major's face and almost killed him and told him that's not what we do here.

Speaker 2 We're a peacekeeping force. And he gets in my face and he's like, but we don't get paid.
My men don't get paid. He goes, what do you want us to do? We can't take prisoners.
We can't feed these men.

Speaker 2 We can't. So we teach them a lesson.
by cutting a finger or hand off or beating the living shit out of them and sending them back out of town as a message.

Speaker 2 So we're like, guys, we got to do something different. This ain't working.

Speaker 2 We got to start going more clan on this.

Speaker 2 So we take our shit off at night. We go out and hang out with the rebels and we start listening and working on an agreement of how we're going to stop these things.

Speaker 2 And then this little kid would be like, hey, man, I know this guy is selling weapons down the street, blah, blah, blah. So anyways, this is working, man.

Speaker 2 Like this is really starting to make people, because when you go up and knock on a door and say, hey, U.S. Marines,

Speaker 2 they'd be like,

Speaker 2 yes, come in, come in. And they would fucking, here it is.
And you're like, okay, that was easy. Why has this been so hard?

Speaker 2 Because they don't want you to hurt us. They don't want us to turn you over to the Nigerians or anybody else.

Speaker 2 And so we're like, okay, well, what if we just start offering food and supplies and medical, being compassionate to these people?

Speaker 2 And so at night, I would go around sometimes by myself and start talking to these people in villages. And we'd go out to their Guinness factory.

Speaker 2 It's funny, it was an import Guinness factory that

Speaker 2 the rebels took over, and that's where they'd run all their operations out of.

Speaker 2 And so we'd go down at night and they'd be dancing and partying with their people and drinking and smoking dope and stuff. And we'd sit down and just bullshit with them and talk.
And then we'd leave.

Speaker 2 And then one night we're down there. This kid comes in, and I'm not going to say his name,

Speaker 2 but he

Speaker 2 says, Travis, I know where a place is. And I'm like, get the fuck out of here, man.
You're not supposed to be here. I don't want these people knowing that you associate with us.
He was so adamant.

Speaker 2 I said, all right, fuck it, let's go. So we, we jump in the vehicle, we did a five-point contingency plan.
We jump in the vehicle, we drive down the road, which is right around the back.

Speaker 2 And I said, hey, if we're not back in 45 minutes, this is the approximate location we're going to be. And we walk up, same thing.
I knock on the door. And

Speaker 2 there's a guy sitting

Speaker 2 on a box in a little tiny room about the size of a large closet.

Speaker 2 A couple candles lit in the room. And he had a mattress on the floor right around the corner, which the kid told me that there was a couple RPGs and AKs in there.

Speaker 2 And so I knock on the door and he's got a, I could see her an AK beside him, which they could have a rifle in their house. We didn't give a fuck.

Speaker 2 They were trying to protect themselves, but they just couldn't have cachets and be selling guns.

Speaker 2 So I said, hey, you know why I'm here? And he goes,

Speaker 2 he goes,

Speaker 2 he goes,

Speaker 2 He goes, yes, I know who you are. I said, okay, can we talk? And he goes, no, you get out of my house.
How dare you insult me? And I'm like, okay, this is different. This never had this conversation.

Speaker 2 Normally like, yes, come in, come in. You're the Marines that are helping us.
Yes, here, give me my food. Give me my medicine.
Where's the Red Cross? Can I have security? No Nigerians.

Speaker 2 I want Ghana, Senegalese only. And we'd do a quick negotiation and we'd get out of there and we would secure that village with security and food and they would love us.

Speaker 2 Well, he's pissed off. And I'm like, why? Dude, what the fuck, man? Hey, I'm going to talk to you and you're going to listen to me.
I know you're selling weapons and you need to stop.

Speaker 2 And I know you have them. And I'm here to offer you a deal.
I'm here to offer you help. You've probably heard what we're doing for you.
I know, how dare you insult me? Get out of my house.

Speaker 2 I don't sell weapons to the government. I'm like, I didn't say you did yet.
Okay.

Speaker 2 But,

Speaker 2 and he starts getting really belligerent. All of a sudden, kid runs in

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 starts yelling at him saying, you listen to him. You listen to him.
He'll help you. He'll help you.
And I'm like, shut the fuck up. What the fuck? What is going on here?

Speaker 2 And I'm like, dude, why are you, you know, like, I'm trying to say, like, I don't know this kid.

Speaker 2 I'm acting fucking weird and i was like look dude i don't shut your mouth listen i'm gonna give you 20 american dollars to save your life because you know at the end of the road there's a nigerian checkpoint the nigerians like yeah exactly and you know what's gonna happen if you don't obey me right now i'm gonna arrest your ass and take you down to nigerians you and i said hey dude 20 20 american dollars at that time um the liberians told us that would be a year's salary for a liberian so i'm like we're carrying cash all the time right

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 can't drop a role Rolex in Liberia. They don't give a shit.
They wanted American money. And

Speaker 2 so they

Speaker 2 he takes it and he, or he actually, I'm sorry, I'd go to give it to him and he slaps my hand away and I'm like, and he goes, $100.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, dude, what? This is, and he goes, per AK-47. I'm like, you motherfucker.
And now he just admits it, right? And now he's trying to.

Speaker 2 trying to

Speaker 2 swindle me out of this thing now. And I said, fuck you, get up, up, you're under arrest.
And I reached over and I was sitting on this little stool and he was about right here.

Speaker 2 And I reached over and I grabbed the mattress and I point and I go, see you motherfucker. And that's when he grabs it AK and puts it in my face.
And I was like, I didn't even think about that.

Speaker 2 I totally was like, stupid idiot. You let your emotions get to you.
This is me looking back on the situation.

Speaker 2 The kids like screaming. I'm like, shut the fuck up.
I was like, hey, calm down, dude. Calm down.
I'm here to help you again. I'm not here to hurt you.
And at that point, I saw two things.

Speaker 2 i saw his eyes extremely bloodshot i think he was high up on something

Speaker 2 and i remember seeing of course the muscle on my face and i remember seeing the safety on on the ak now i'm a big ak

Speaker 2 was the first gun i ever owned as a kid 13 years old i begged my dad to own an ak because in 1986 clinic woods said it makes a very distinct sound when fired at you so remember it in that movie heartbreak ridge about recon marines and i went out and studied that gun inside and out

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 that is the thing that popped in my mind. And at the time, I didn't realize it, didn't process it, but I remember getting so angry, so mad in this moment.

Speaker 2 And even me trying to explain this whole process, this whole process probably was about two and a half seconds.

Speaker 2 I remember going,

Speaker 2 you lose in my mind. I had my 1911 on under concealment

Speaker 2 and in a Safari Land 071 paddle holster on my side,

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 remember

Speaker 2 realizing in a nutshell, again, looking back a little bit, but processing the micro thoughts that I had was he's going to try to kill me. The gun's not going to work.

Speaker 2 He's going to relinquish control with his hand to take the safety off, like an untrained person does on an AK. By the time he gets his hand back on the gun, that's going to be about two seconds.

Speaker 2 I know I can draw my 1911 in less than one second from concealment, smash this motherfucker right now, pin his AK up against the wall, step into his chest, and pull the trigger.

Speaker 2 And step 10 happens and it goes into it. I grab the muzzle, I step up, put my foot into his chest, pin him into the corner, fire two shots, and step back.

Speaker 2 I fall back. I

Speaker 2 hear this. I'm holding the barrel, holding the 1911.
I hear this fucking scream that was like a...

Speaker 2 If you could murder a cow and the cow could scream, I don't know why that pops in my head. That's what I heard.
And I almost shoot

Speaker 2 my boy in the face. And I called him my boy, like he was almost my son.

Speaker 2 Because I felt so sorry for him. That would happen to his family.
I grab him and he's just balling, man.

Speaker 2 And I pin him up against the door jam. And I'm like, don't you ever fucking do this again.
Get the fuck out of here. And I throw him outside.

Speaker 2 He tumbles on the ground and gets up and hauls ass down the alley. And I'm standing there.
And I, anyways, I run back. We get in the vehicle, we haul ass.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I'm sitting there staring at that fucking AK. And I pull the chamber back or the bolt back on it.
There's a round of chamber like, fuck, man.

Speaker 2 What the fuck? Why, why did that just happen? Like, why did this kid come in that fucking room? Why did he, why was he so adamant about this tonight when he never does that?

Speaker 2 Like, what the fuck is going on? Why did he mudsuck me into that situation? And I thought about it. I sat there all night staring at that AK.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the next morning, didn't sleep one second. Sun comes up, just barely.

Speaker 2 Kids aren't there. Kids are always there every morning.
They're out there sitting on the railing, ready to bust rust on our vehicles, ready to get food, ready to, they weren't there.

Speaker 2 So I jog down the hill, get into town.

Speaker 2 I see one of the kids walking around in town, one of the older kids, about 19 years old, I think. They don't know how old they are.
I go up to him and I say, hey,

Speaker 2 I forget his name.

Speaker 2 I yell his name and I go up to him and I grab him and he jerks away from me scared to death. And I'm like, hey, what, dude, what the fuck, guys? Where are you at this morning?

Speaker 2 And he starts shaking his head and getting nervous like I'm about to cry. And he's backing up away from me.
I'm like, dude, what's going on?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I said, I need to see

Speaker 2 my boy. Where is he? He fucking, I need to talk to him about something that happened last night.
And he backs away and he goes, no, no, you'll never see him again.

Speaker 2 And I was like, why won't I see him again? What's and I'm trying to really figure out what the hell is going on here. And he goes, Because last night you killed his father.

Speaker 2 And he turns around and runs away. And I'm like,

Speaker 2 The fuck does that mean? What are you talking about? Killed his father.

Speaker 2 His father's his father died. And so

Speaker 2 it fucking hit me, man.

Speaker 2 I dropped to my knees

Speaker 2 right there in the village,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 I realized, and I heard the stories later from the villagers that all that boy wanted me to do was get his dad out of the weapons,

Speaker 2 arms, fucking whatever that was. He was ashamed of his dad.

Speaker 2 And he was a f

Speaker 2 and I was the guy that was supposed to help him,

Speaker 2 and I fucked it up

Speaker 2 because of this fucked up supersets of justice

Speaker 2 incestual curse, maybe

Speaker 2 to go so far above

Speaker 2 and beyond to help other people

Speaker 2 that I hurt them.

Speaker 2 I didn't tell anybody about this except a couple very tight dudes

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 determined that

Speaker 2 it was a good shoot.

Speaker 2 Fuck whatever that means.

Speaker 2 And I wanted to quit like I've never wanted to quit in my life. And

Speaker 2 thank God it was a week out before we were leaving.

Speaker 2 And I just sat back in the recon operations center and just listened to comms traffic the rest of the time and didn't do shit.

Speaker 2 And we helped so many people.

Speaker 2 I believe it contributed to stopping a 14-year civil war.

Speaker 2 But that was the micro percentage

Speaker 2 that I feel, regardless of what people say. And friends have taught me through post-traumatic growth training and breaking down the story and telling me,

Speaker 2 because I lied about this. I even told the story one time on a video that Magpole did.
They forced me to tell the story and I lied. I didn't tell the whole story.
I didn't tell anything about the kid.

Speaker 2 I didn't say anything about the father because I was ashamed of myself. I was fucking ashamed.
I didn't didn't tell my wife for probably 12 years.

Speaker 2 Later, I didn't tell anybody. I was afraid, of course, by my own teammates to be fucking scrutinized by running around in Liberia trying to help goddamn save the world.

Speaker 2 They still don't know. One of them does.

Speaker 2 And I don't know what he thinks of me because I did it. you know, in a way that I thought was helping, but maybe it would have compromised and fucked up the entire team's mission.

Speaker 2 That's always the thing that I was scared of.

Speaker 2 And I've always been scared to tell that story because of the shame that I believe is the worst enemy that we have when we screw up in our life

Speaker 2 when all my intentions were to help people. That's it.
Just to help. And I saw the magic working.
I saw what we were doing.

Speaker 2 And then that just crushed my soul.

Speaker 2 That's the real reason I got off active duty.

Speaker 2 For fucking two weeks later, I'd be sitting on the beach,

Speaker 2 starting to feel it again. I get a phone call.
Hey, I'm going back. And

Speaker 2 I was not communicating well with my wife at the time.

Speaker 2 She was like, hey, you got this thousand yards there, man. And I don't know what's wrong with you.
You're here now. You can leave all that behind you.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm trying

Speaker 2 to get a phone call to say, hey, come back to Baghdad. And

Speaker 2 I go,

Speaker 2 that's what I need. I need to go back.
I need to be a Wasick again.

Speaker 2 Because if I go over there and I get in a shitty situation, I might feel more appreciation and grateful for going through this experience. And

Speaker 2 man, that was dark. That fucked me up for about eight years.
Didn't sleep well.

Speaker 2 I hurt people. I hurt my kids.
I hurt my teammates. That's a reservist.

Speaker 2 I hurt.

Speaker 2 I hurt a lot, man. I lied.

Speaker 2 My integrity was destroyed.

Speaker 2 And integrity meaning, you know, not just doing the right thing when nobody's looking like we say in the military, but also not taking fast, fun, or easy.

Speaker 2 And I started taking the easy way out of things.

Speaker 2 And if it wasn't for a good friend of mine that

Speaker 2 was a

Speaker 2 human lie detector, polygrapher, or something like that.

Speaker 2 He was a law enforcement detective. And he's like, tell me this story, man.
I've heard the story online that you told, and it's bullshit. You're fucking lying to me.
So I dive into the story and

Speaker 2 he was a former golden gloves boxer. And he comes out of his garage and puts a beer down.
After I tell the story, he's like, drink that. I said, I'm not fucking drinking that.

Speaker 2 And he's like, you will drink that. I'm going to beat your ass.
And I'm like, I'm not drinking a Guinness, man, because this happened in a Guinness factory or started.

Speaker 2 And so I've always had this like,

Speaker 2 not doing it.

Speaker 2 So you don't drink that. I'm going to beat your ass.
We're going to go. He throws down boxing gloves.
I'm like, Tommy, I'm not beating you. I'm not doing that.
You're going to hurt me. I know it.

Speaker 2 And I'm not giving in. And so he says, You're going to fill in the gaps of this story and we're going to do it the hard way.

Speaker 2 And so I started coming out and telling him these other pieces that I'm telling you that I've really never openly told ever in the world. And it scares me still.

Speaker 2 Scares that it could compromise the situation. It could, it was a good, good effort in battle.

Speaker 2 We helped thousands and thousands and thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people.

Speaker 2 But when I hurt one that I don't mean to, even though

Speaker 2 dad made a bad decision, man, I got to live with that kid and what he's feeling. Who is he? What does he do now? Is he a fucking terrorist? Did I turn him into something horrible? Is he happy?

Speaker 2 I was told that by a friend of mine who's a monk.

Speaker 2 Just recently, about two years ago, he told me, he's like, hey, I have a feeling from the spirit that

Speaker 2 your boy's happy. He's happy happy for you.
And I was like, How the fuck would he be happy? He's like, Because he sees what you've done for the rest of the world, he sees

Speaker 2 you

Speaker 2 sharing

Speaker 2 sharing powerful.

Speaker 2 and that helped, man, that helped a lot when he told me that because I couldn't let go of that kid and his face, the last face I saw on him was just the most horrible face I

Speaker 2 and I want to believe, my friend who told me that,

Speaker 2 that because you've helped so many people and shared this, you've taken some of your simple situations here, like thinking first that's why i say think before you shoot there's a catchphrase that we always say thinkers before shooters it's just a thing that came out and it that's what it means it means you might want to think about the consequences of your decisions

Speaker 2 instead of just being a fucking gunfighter man um

Speaker 2 And that's what I always call myself, you know, always a gunfighter until that moment. I wanted to, again, like I said, I quit everything.
But I went back and I did multiple tours after that in Iraq,

Speaker 2 four more trips to Iraq, I think.

Speaker 2 Took vetting,

Speaker 2 went in Afghanistan a few, three or four times

Speaker 2 and kept chasing the dragon. You know, I kept trying to find

Speaker 2 myself and it took forever to do that. And I apologize to everybody out there

Speaker 2 that I hurt in those dark times in my life because that's not me anymore. Even though you'll still see the pain.

Speaker 2 And again, even though you might see tears of sadness and sorrow right now, they're not.

Speaker 2 They're proud moments. They really are.
So when I do get emotional, I try to think back to that. You know, my buddy told me, hey, man, we'd all do the same thing.

Speaker 2 He went all the way and you go all the way. Or that my traumas and my past are now something that I simply just know that I can look back to and go, how do I take that?

Speaker 2 And how do I share that powerfully and authentically as much as I can with people to where maybe they don't find themselves in that same situation?

Speaker 2 And that's why I gravitated to start becoming a tactics and weapons and mindset coach because I didn't have the right story in my head. I may still not.

Speaker 2 And a lot of people will, when you ask them, what a mindset is, combat mindset, warrior mindset, it's all bullshit. It's a very simple

Speaker 2 explanation. And that is the story that you tell yourself.
That's it. Nothing else.
So if I'm in a bad situation and I say, I'm going to die,

Speaker 2 which we heard that in Najaff. There was one guy going, man, we're not going to make it through the fucking night, man.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, what's a guy like me say to a guy like that on the rooftop? Most people say, oh, shut up, dude. You know, suck it up, buttercup.
No, that becomes infectious.

Speaker 2 And then everybody starts going,

Speaker 2 Holy shit, what if we don't make it through the night?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're dialing mortars in on us. Holy shit.
This is a real thing. I might never see my family again.

Speaker 2 Um, this is real. Man, maybe I shouldn't have gone on that helicopter.
You start questioning everything,

Speaker 2 and then what happens? This is called a negative thought-performance interaction, psychologically speaking. And we turn down this toilet bowl of death where I don't want to fail.
I hope she says yes.

Speaker 2 Man, I hope I graduate. I hope I get through the course.
I hope I pass vetting. Um, um, you know, that creates frustration, disappointment, fear, anxiety, um, you know,

Speaker 2 high tension, hormone imbalance.

Speaker 2 And then it goes down to ultimately decreased performance. And then you keep going down the circle and you just keep telling yourself, I'm going to fail.

Speaker 2 That's when somebody goes, we're not going to make it through the night. Or I say, I'm never going to get over this darkness.

Speaker 2 And I had to take my own medicine because I've always preached this to people. Say, hey, have a thought.
performance interaction that's positive.

Speaker 2 Today, when I wake up, what am I going to do for the world?

Speaker 2 Like this morning, I did that. I woke up early.
I went right into the pool. I was like, damn it, the hotel pool is like 86 degrees.
So, what do I do? Oh, it's raining outside.

Speaker 2 I go outside and I sit in the rain and cold meditate for about 30 minutes this morning. Why? Because I want to manifest a good day with you.
I want to help people.

Speaker 2 I want to make the world a better place than

Speaker 2 when I came in it. And I think that's easy to do as long as we share authentically.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 then I go through the rest of my process. I had a little bit of pain.
And that's what I realized: is that

Speaker 2 best lesson out of all of this with trauma management for us.

Speaker 2 And not just for us as gunfighters, but anybody, right? Rape victims, people in horrible accidents,

Speaker 2 inner child issues that you just cannot figure out what's going on. There's two voices I've broken it down to.

Speaker 2 There's a voice of pain and the voice of suffering. And the voice of suffering for me

Speaker 2 is that really sympathetic,

Speaker 2 annoying,

Speaker 2 itchy asshole voice that's always on your shoulder telling you, Man, what are you? Why are you here? Why did you do this? Why you're cold, you're wet, you're tired, go home, quit, ring the bell.

Speaker 2 She's not going to say yes, don't ask her, Hey, you're not going to get this job. Why are you even applying? Don't stop working so hard.
Why do you need to go to the gym for so much?

Speaker 2 Why do you need to wake up so early? Why are you going in the cold water? It just hurts. Get out of there.
You're just going to suffer. That's the voice of suffering in a nutshell.
It's annoying.

Speaker 2 And a lot of people listen to that voice. Then, on the other hand, there's the pain of the voice of pain.
And the voice of pain to me is the voice that is very parasympathetic. It's very quiet.

Speaker 2 It's very stoic. It's the voice that will say, hey, man, look,

Speaker 2 you can listen to that other guy.

Speaker 2 And he's right. If you quit right now, today will be easier.

Speaker 2 But tomorrow is going to be harder, and you know that. So if you can simply just accept

Speaker 2 is the key word, the resistance that you have of this thing, this trigger, and accept it, you will realize that resistance is simply the precursor or bedfellow to suffering. That's it.

Speaker 2 The more you resist in your life, the reality that is, I'm not happy with my bills. I can't pay them.
I can't get a job. I'm stressed out.
My wife hates me. My kids hate me.
I'm getting divorced.

Speaker 2 All this stuff. Keep manifesting that.
Keep telling yourself that. Keep telling yourself that today you're not going to build a new product.
You're not going to market well.

Speaker 2 You're not going to tell a story well. You're not going to train well.
I'm not going to shoot well today. I just don't feel like good.
I don't feel good.

Speaker 2 You're creating a negative story of suffering.

Speaker 2 But the pain will tell you that if you can put that knife edge in there and sharpen it and deal with the pain, that pain is absolutely mandatory in your life.

Speaker 2 Suffering is optional. And that's why I have a big quote above my office desk.
It says pain is mandatory. Suffering is optional.
Life.

Speaker 2 And I suffered for so long. I know a lot of guys suffer for so long.

Speaker 2 And we'll always have something that we'll suffer in, but it's the ability to go back and go, hey, suffering, I don't need you right now, but I do have to endure the pain if I want to get through this.

Speaker 2 That is the

Speaker 2 deviation amplification model of post-traumatic growth versus the deviation countering model, which is put under the rug. Don't talk about it.

Speaker 2 You know, hey, we lost a guy today, which I've been a part of this. And all of a sudden, it's like, hey, let's not talk about it.
Let's move on. Let's go to the next target.

Speaker 2 You're like, hey, what the fuck did we do wrong? Hey, nobody did anything wrong. Don't start shifting blame.
Everything's fine. He was a hero.
Like in a nutshell story, right? Generalities.

Speaker 2 And it's like that's not okay we need to talk about this we need to make sure this doesn't happen again

Speaker 2 and that's a problem for me so I think if we can as human beings listen to the voice of pain just a little bit more and realize that yeah today's gonna be harder but tomorrow is gonna be easier and if you can make a routine of that and and wake up and try especially for me it's hard man it's really hard to get an ideal routine for me um to help my mindset but i i do it the best that i can with what i got at the time and if i can start making a habit of that, what'll happen is I think one day somebody will say, who's Travis Haley?

Speaker 2 When I answer that,

Speaker 2 I will answer with an undeniable stack of evidence that I am exactly who the fuck I say I am because I've been able to put in the work to get over this darkness, this story, this bullshit in my life that's haunted me and hurt others because I couldn't be authentic.

Speaker 2 I couldn't tell the true story because I was afraid of what was going to happen.

Speaker 2 That fear and anxiety alone, I think, makes people put

Speaker 2 the bottle in the mouth or the needle in the arm or the gun to the side of their head.

Speaker 2 And I don't want that for people. And that's why I've learned to try to share as powerfully as I can, even if it creates consequences for me.

Speaker 2 So thanks for listening.

Speaker 4 Thanks for sharing.

Speaker 2 That's why that's hard for me to put out. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I do tell it in small circles. I tell it in, like, if I'm teaching an AK class, I'll say, hey, guys, come here, let me tell you a story because I still have the AK.

Speaker 2 It's on my wall in the office.

Speaker 2 I'll show it to you from Scottsdale. So,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 demilled it, made it a museum piece so it can be brought back. My team, my team said, we're bringing this back.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's a reminder. It's a reminder.
Every single day I walk in.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 2 Think.

Speaker 2 Don't get ahead of your headlights. Don't assume.

Speaker 2 Create a healthy boundary for myself before I step over the line.

Speaker 2 You know, try to be as reliable as I can for people. Take accountability for this.
You own it. You lived it.
You did it.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 there's a lot of lessons in the conversation that we just had, and

Speaker 4 that's definitely the biggest one, man

Speaker 4 and uh

Speaker 4 i think that's the perfect way to end this on that lesson and uh

Speaker 4 damn man

Speaker 2 your traumas will always haunt you it's how you manage them um so it's not about letting go I learned this the hard way, as you can still feel and hear, even though I coach and I help people now.

Speaker 2 It's not about letting go. It's about letting it be.

Speaker 2 Because what happened happened exactly the way it happened. It didn't happen any other fucking way.
You know why? Because it didn't.

Speaker 2 And if I can find acceptance in that, if I can find peace in that, which I have, and I can share that,

Speaker 2 somebody else might turn around and share it with somebody else. And next thing you know, we have a better society, a better community, less suicides, you know, more.
vulnerability and openness.

Speaker 2 And I think that's in closing on vulnerability.

Speaker 2 When you that around operators, they go, man, I'm not weak. And it's like, dude, they're two totally different, totally different, different definitions, even though they might sound the same.

Speaker 2 One means the inability, weakness, to defend yourself against criticism or an attack.

Speaker 2 The other one is the ability to defend yourself against or be open to criticism or attack and have the courage to be imperfect.

Speaker 2 I think that's a pretty good judge of a man's character that can be vulnerable and open and tell the truth no matter how bad you fucked up in your life. And things will get better.

Speaker 2 You may not think so, but I promise you'll start being a shapeshifter. You'll start helping other people and you'll start to be a catalyst in other people's lives.

Speaker 2 And that's why I will train, I will teach, and I will share stories as long as I possibly can while my body and mind allow me to.

Speaker 4 You're doing a good thing, man.

Speaker 4 You're doing a real good thing. And

Speaker 4 thank you. Thank you for doing it.
I know that's got to be

Speaker 4 real tough and

Speaker 4 to share and to live with. And,

Speaker 4 man, Travis, you're just

Speaker 4 a fucking genuine, good human being. And

Speaker 4 I'm honored to know you. I'm honored to interview you.
And

Speaker 4 just thank you for being here, man.

Speaker 2 Thanks, Cane. I appreciate you.