i had an opportunity to work and serve on selection boards so you’re a junior officer and you’re supporting the senior of the captains and the admirals as they make their selections and you see the selection board process and then you see who gets selected and who doesn’t get selected and you could just sit back there after a while ago don’t sweat the load man just do your job it’s as simple as that you know because everybody’s record you know when they’re up for flag just about every one of those captains uh their records are like manicured lawns but not everybody’s going to get it and he says it doesn’t matter if you’re going to get it you’re going to get it but if not just relax and just do your job and really took an awful lot of pressure off there but um yeah that was a time uh uh that then we went up with um uh uh first gulf war so wound up leaving there and going down to uh dev grew as the deputy commander and then how many how many years did you spend down there i spent two years down there and then um uh left to take over commanding officer seal team now during this time would you say that this is a time where you know you had uh the first gulf war happened our seals start to kind of kind of become popular yet i mean i came in in 1991 as we mentioned as i mentioned earlier i mean there was the the navy seals movie which i’m sure echo charles likes the navy seals movie i think came out in 1991 yeah mike said chuck forrest movie yeah yeah but there was still not a lot of not a lot of popularity wasn’t a big deal yet no so you know um um you don’t want to have a history lesson for everybody out there but uh because of the failure of the iranian hostage rescue mission uh in april of 1980 and then compounded by what happened in grenada that the civilian side of the house and made the decision that especially because of the failure of the iranian hostage rescue mission that if we as a nation want to have an organization that be able to conduct no fail missions that we need to be serious about this and there has to be one command that’s organized trained and equipped to be able to do that that started shaping the the community but we were still in the navy the army was still in the army and through the department of defense appropriation act of 1987 senators none and cohen tacked on the end of that appropriations bill the establishment of united states special operations command and bringing in the navy seals army special forces rangers and as uh 160th and air force commandos under united states special operations command so then we had our own line of money for free for unique but be honest with you um at that time um my friend tom coulter who mentioned that you know okay once once the seals came into united states special operations command tommy goes well congratulations we’re now in the bottom of two food chains [Laughter] pretty much we were you know but um uh we still in spite of that uh the resources didn’t flow and um the active duty military did not necessarily want to have this and if they did they wanted to have it three-star command you know it’s close to washington and it was our civilians uh that said no we know the military it’s got to be a four-star and um well actually probably had an awful lot to do with a powerful florida delegation more than anything else that we wound up in mcdill but um it took quite a while and we would just be calming and but the leaders of the community made very very good decisions on with the limited resources we had uh and we had other opportunities to do away with certain types of things that we as a community did and one of them was you know unconventional warfare that the special the green berets were going to do away with that and luckily they decided not to so when 9 11 happened and they were able to send the fifth special forces in you know with john mulholland as the group commander and the other young folks that wound up being the horse soldiers but that war was the defining thing for the community unfortunately we paid a heavy toll to be where we are today but when the opportunity presented itself for both afghanistan and iraq special operations mentality and capability was at a premium and we were ready at that time to do that and luckily the active duty military had come around as well as the senior civilians and completely changed the resourcing for united states special operations command and i have to say really gave us all the tools necessary and bent over backwards to make us as successful as we possibly could be and we were carrying all the water and um so um she said back then nobody knew who we were now everybody knows who we are but that also has got to do with the tax that we paid and the brave people that you mentioned a little bit earlier
My WordPress Blog