Jocko Podcast 295 w/ General Don Bolduc. When Things Change, Don’t Get Caught On Your Heels.

this is jocko podcast number 295 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening on november 14 2001 the troops of general fahim khan rolled into kabul and liberated the city from five years of despotic rule by the taliban to win over the pashtuns in the south and begin operations against the taliban the coalition planned to insert two odas near the city of kandahar major donald bolduck was a member of special operations command and control element 52 which had tactical control of the two odas bolduc explain the mission quote basically from november 2001 until complete we were able to provide c2 and conduct unconventional warfare in order to advise and assist hamid karzai and ghoul sharzai in organizing anti-taliban forces which was what they were called at the time and to conduct combat operations against the taliban and al qaeda forces end quote bolduc further described the key tasks that the oda had to accomplish with their afghan partners quote we were to secure kandahar city develop a plan to stabilize kandahar city and operate from a secure base and then concentrically improve that security from kandahar city which was considered the cultural and religious center of gravity out to other provinces in the south and then on order exfiltrate the operational area coalition leaders also understood that they could not simply leave the area once kandahar was out of the taliban grip but had to set conditions for the next phase of the campaign major bulldog asserted that the end state for the odas was the creation of a quote stable safe and secure kandahar city ready to transition to more formalized humanitarian assistance and nation building operations and that right there is a excerpt from a document that was written by the combat studies institute press out of the us army school at fort leavenworth kansas and the document is called a different kind of war the united states army in operation enduring freedom from october 2001 to september 2005 and when you think about that that segment that i opened up with that’s 14 november that’s just over two months after september 11 2001 60 days and in that minimal amount of time america went from peace and relative tranquility to war and to chaos and men in the military who had been planning another standard day at work or preparing for another training exercise or maybe planning to take a billet where they could go get some more time with their family suddenly these men were at war the opening piece i read mentioned major don bolduc he was obviously one of those men that shipped off to afghanistan to begin trying to sort that place out and that first appointment in 2001 was just the beginning for him over the following years he would deploy to afghanistan over and over and over again and also to iraq and other parts of the world that were under threat and that major would finish out his career as a brigadier general and it’s an honor to have him here tonight to share some of his experiences and lessons learned general balduck thank you for joining us well thank you for having me it’s an honor to be here you know as i was reading that and just saw that date of november 14th 2001 and i was in the military at that time but to think of the radical transformation that was about to take place and how quickly we went from this sort of peacetime military to a wartime military and all that that entailed that’s that’s a that’s a heavy situation let’s do this let’s rewind a little bit and learn a little bit about you where you came from how you grew up and uh sort of how you ended up in the situation that you’re in right now sure so we’re so let’s start at the beginning so the beginning i was born in laconia new hampshire i’ve been a resident of the state of new hampshire for 59 years and i’m 59 years old i learned my work ethic on our family farm in guilford new hampshire we had a dairy farm we had a vegetable farm maple syrup the farm has been in existence since 1779 our family is the second owner of that farm my grandfather bought it in 18 my great-grandfather bought it in 1899 coming down from canada and uh my uh my grandfather had 13 children and my dad was seven of the 13 um and uh what us baldicks did was uh we worked farm that’s how we learned right we we planted gardens chopped wood um uh you know back in the day we’d uh in the in the deep snow my brother and i like we had our harnesses and we would pull the sleds and we would dump the maple syrup into the uh into the container now it’s all done by by gravity through through plastic pipes right into the sap house before it was done by good old-fashioned grandchildren right you know and so i wouldn’t trade that for anything it got me tough in the winter tough in the summer tough in the fall i built more stone walls than i needed to do so moving rocks from point a to point b was never a problem i went to catholic school and got my butt kicked by by nuns on a regular basis and so when i went to basic training in 1981 after high school what are they going to do to me wake me up early yell at me i don’t know how many times my dad told me i was about as useful as a snowball in hell you know what i mean but he you know he loved me right he was just trying to prepare me for the world you know it’s not going to be easy out there you got to use your head right what made you enlist in the army my grandfather on the baldic side had a policy that all baltic males will serve their country and he didn’t care if it was the national guard reserve’s active duty or what service it was but you will serve and if you don’t serve you’re not welcome and he never served because when he got here he was too old um he was too old for world war one um but he uh nonetheless my i had uncles that served world war ii korea vietnam every conflict the baltics have been in since uh since world war ii right and we didn’t get here until 1899 and so my grandfather had to establish some some children and some grandchildren before he could start populating the the u s military but when i when i went into the um i went into my recruiter in the 11th grade because i knew i had to do it so i went in in 11th grade and at that time they had the delayed entry program where if you joined early you got credit for that service plus you went in as a mosquito wing private you know instead of just a slick sleeve private right which was like you know five dollars more a month right and then back then it was double your basic price that’s right back then it was 200 a month so i was pretty happy right so it was good uh and and you know before that though in high school i joined the uh police cadet program in um laconia new hampshire and it’s a funny story how that started right i i was um in 10th grade and we were walking over from high school it was aft after school but before we had to leave for a football game and it was an away game and i was walking over with a group of guys over to the to the little store to pick up some some chow for the bus right and and i uh there’s this coke can set up perfectly right on the curb of the road and i thought man i’m going to go kick that so i started talking about you know five seconds left in the game blah blah you know and i kicked that ball i kicked that can and it hit the side of a police cruiser parked at the light and so i know him now sergeant biennaz jumps out of that car and he is pissed off and everybody get on the ground so we’re all laying on the ground and he’s like who did it so i raised my hand i go i did it sir he puts me in the back of the cruiser and he’s yelling at the other kids and you know my friends and they ran off and i’m sitting in the cruiser and he goes so what’d you do that for and i explained to him that what i was doing and he said all right sounds like an accident to me he goes have you ever heard of the police cadet program i go no sir he goes well i think you’d be a good kid for that program right because you had enough balls to own up to it you know and i said all right so i did it and i got selected and i and i started out and i really loved it so in 1980 a year before i graduated from high school i i had the opportunity to go through the the part-time police academy program and so i did it and i ended up getting qualified as a police officer so when i went into my senior year at 18 years old i was a qualified police officer working for laconia police department and i did that for a year before i went into um into the army and went into the army from 81 to 84 and um and were you active duty i was active duty yeah okay it’s basically a little bit like a break for you because you’re not out on the dairy farm that’s right it’s a huge break well it’s a huge break because it’s not um you know you can imagine being a police officer while you’re in your senior year high school mr popular that’s right mr popular every every party that got busted up was my fault you know i i obviously had inside information that i passed on to the police and it doesn’t work that way right i mean we don’t care about parties but your neighbors do particularly when it gets too loud right so they call and i just couldn’t get that point across but nonetheless um you know after serving as a police officer and you know i mean you know my my dad was a task master right i mean he was a a strong good man who is no longer with us but nonetheless served 35 years as a as a city councilman and mayor for our city school board just a great pillar of the community in addition to being a um you know a guy that would uh would do anything for anybody and so anyways i i learned all that stuff but working on the dairy farm you know haying hangs the worst thing you can do in the world right i mean i hated haying season when july rolled around i prayed for rain because we could we didn’t you couldn’t he can’t hang in the rain but it didn’t happen right i had a guy who was a new guy came to work for me when i was at seal team seven and he was a hard-working kid up ready to move sandbags fill sandbags move steal around dump ammo pick up ammo whatever i need to do finally after a couple weeks and i’m not too impressed you have to be a really hard worker to impress me and after a few weeks i said to him i said hey man you’re because i he had kind of just shown up in my platoon he didn’t go through our work up or anything he was a new guy just showed up in iraq showed up in iraq and he’s working his ass off and i look at him one day and i said hey you’re you’re a hard worker where are you from and he said i grew up in a dairy farm in minnesota and i said well i appreciate your hard work he said sir i’ll do whatever you want me to do as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with cows and he told me his schedule he was up at four o’clock in the morning every day to milk cows get get home in the afternoon after wrestling practice milk cows and it was i don’t know what he had with 300 or 400 cows he had to milk so the dairy farm seems to breed some hard work yeah well you know after uh practice whether it was baseball or football or whatever it happened to be my dad said i’ll see you at the farm and so i would jog from the high school uh up up moral street to the farm you know and uh and did whatever he asked me to do up on the farm right and so when i got to basic training and met sergeant mules my uh my basic training um drill instructor um oh you want me to make my bed you want me to do this you want me to do that yeah you know i was up before he threw the trash can down the aisle right uh because that’s just the way it was and um and he you know he would say to me baldic you don’t sleep i go and i’d say well uh drill sergeant i i do sleep but i don’t require much right and you know so yeah that kind of hard work did it and then the discipline that the nuns instilled in me i mean come on right it’s just sister lucille right i mean she sounds scary she is scary she was a flaming redheaded uh nun that just scared the hell out of me and um and she got her pound of flesh out of me uh but were you an athlete in high school i was yeah what sports did you yeah i played uh football baseball and basketball and i was told uh you’re too small to play football but by my sophomore year i was i was starting on the varsity team too short to play basketball but i was a starting guard on the basketball team i was they told me i couldn’t pitch but i ended up being a pitcher because my arms were too short and i wasn’t tall enough and i couldn’t get a good stretch off the mound but you know so uh i think the farmer and me uh you know don’t tell me i can’t do something kind of thing right because um i’m going to try and prove you wrong so anyways you know when you enlisted in the army did you do it did you plan on was it a career was it reserves or was it active no it actually uh it was active duty okay but my plan was to um you know pursue law enforcement so when i was coming out of the army in 1984 i was a sergeant and i was going to rotc green the gold program not to go on active duty but it was through the national guard and they were going to pay for my education and i was going to get my commission through rotc the beauty part about prior services you don’t have to do the first two years of rotc because you’ve got basic training in ait under your belt so you started your junior and senior years right and i didn’t uh i didn’t anticipate making it a career at all i wanted to be be in law enforcement but i got called down to my company commander’s office and my first sergeant was there first sergeant kingston and and uh captain jeffrey l ames was there and he i reported to him position of attention and he said sergeant baldick i know you’re getting out but i want to talk to you about that because i think you should stay in i think you should re-enlist and i you just came down on drill sergeant orders and you should go be a drill sergeant because what are your plans and i s and so i just explained to him what i explained to you and he said yeah i i just don’t see you being successful as an officer he said you’re enlisted material you’re you’re a sergeant major in the making you know he said i think you should stay in and you should follow that track because you’re gonna have the most success with that and again this little light in the back of my head did you just tell me i can’t do something right kind of thing and uh and my you know i took his advice and i said thank you sir very much but i followed a different path well sergeant uh first sergeant kingston calls me out into his office he puts me in the front lane and rest position and he says you count loud to 50 and he gets down real close to my ear and he goes hey listen he goes you take and you go to rotc and then when you get commissioned you find wherever this captain is in the united states army and you take those bars and you put it somewhere the sun doesn’t shine that’s what he says to me and i go yes for a sergeant as i’m you know 22 first time 23 and you know he’s so he’s like he’s like get up so i get up and he dismisses me i am a first lieutenant in special forces training at fort bragg north carolina and who’s the command sergeant major of the 16th military police brigade sergeant commander major kingston so here i am a first lieutenant in sf training and i called his office and i told him who i was and i asked if i could come over and have a meeting with him so they they did that and i went over and i met with him and he was so happy to see me right he goes have you found captain ames and i go no and he goes you know he’s a lieutenant colonel now and i go no i didn’t know it i didn’t i haven’t tracked his career but anyways he um he goes ah i remember that day that was hilarious and he goes i’m glad you’re doing well you’re in special forces training goes that’s really great right and so we you know um it’s just uh i didn’t plan on going back on active duty but i did well in rotc and i qualified for an active you know regular army commission and i said you know what this is 1988 and it is not looking good for jobs out there right so i said ah i’ll just go in the army and we’ll see how that goes and i really didn’t anticipate staying too long as an officer you know fulfill my requirement you know and you know perhaps get out but as time went on and i went in special forces were were you uh so what was your job as an officer were you an infantry officer i was i got commissioned into the chemical corps which was another thing i was like what the heck you know i graduated number one from northeastern university liberty battalion i was number one and the the explanation i got is well you know the quality has got to be spread out across the army and it’s based on needs of the army so i was like okay sounds like a good so what was it chemical officer chemical officer nuclear biological and chemical officer but you know what when i was looking to get out after my requirement wow that’s a good opportunity big bucks great opportunities i was like wow the good lord was smiling on me because you know i and i went to ranger school and i did all those things that you’re supposed to do so when i showed up at the combat arms units right i had you know i wasn’t just a support guy right you know okay this guy prior enlisted ranger school graduate you know airborne school you know the whole nine yards and so it just gave you more credibility um and as an enlisted guy served in the fourth id in the 82nd airborne so i had that in my background and so it was all good but um but you know yeah chemical core you get put on the battalion staff and you have to do the you know you get you get all the you know nobody’s really interested in doing nuclear biological and chemical training yeah so you get you know you get all the um you know the interesting uh assignments and i did those with a smile on my face and the best of my ability and then you know i was the first chemical officer to make it through special forces selection and training so did you at what point did you learn about special forces well i learned about special forces in 1968 when i watched the green beret movie with my grandfather and um and so i was like oh wow john wayne the green berets you know so it was always something in the back of my mind and then i was in korea on my first lieutenant assignment and um the green beret recruiters showed up and i went and i said i’m gonna do that right and so that’s what i did where were you in the first gulf war happened uh i was in 10th special forces group okay um and um so we did that there and then we rotated over to provide comfort the humanitarian assistance thing up in northern iraq which was great experience with the kurds um and um yeah so i mean god just kept opening up these little doors for me to like you know scoot through and um but before i knew it it was um you know i was a major on my way to commander general staff college and halfway to retirement you know 20 years and i had a few extra years because of enlisted time so i was like you know hey if i make it to lieutenant colonel i’m going to be doing pretty damn good so i was pretty happy about that so the so you went through special forces in what year through through this election uh i went through selection in 1992 february of 1992 was how was that was it challenging for you did you enjoy it was it what you expected it to be yeah i expected a smoke show and that’s what i got right and i really liked the the special forces selection process because nobody said anything to you right all your instructions were written up on a board and you had to be conscientious enough to check that board frequently because they would do things like change it right and then try and catch you right not paying attention um and it was athletic events you know um that you had to do it was like right up my alley right so it was like uh yeah good quality smoke show nobody yelled at you they sleep deprived you and they gave you really good i called it um i called it building barney rubble machines right because it was like oh here’s a trailer with only one tire and here’s some straps and here’s some poles and you know you got to move it 10 kilometers and you know they would set up these tabs and you had to build like so it was like on the farm like our farm was like a osha nightmare um you know we really didn’t believe it yeah it was a huge safety hazard right and so you know uh you know coming up with a fix for for the tractor or for the for the uh the hay baler when it went down or something like that was you know it was always right there right and you know my dad’s like hey we don’t have we don’t have time and we don’t have the money to go pay for this machine so let’s you know use some nylons and some straps and figure this out right and so that’s what sf training was about you know it was like hey you know here’s a bunch of pieces of equipment figure out how to get it 10 kilometers and good luck right and work as a team and support each other so you know that’s what farming is all about and not one person makes that farm run it’s a collective team that’s my grandfather had 13 kids that’s why he has over you know 500 grandchildren to make it work you bring everybody together and you just make it work so um that’s what i liked about you know special forces uh training uh and i like the idea that not everybody could make it right that there was this huge attrition rate and so i thought that was cool too because it was this it was a special thing right that not everybody can get through and only only a certain type of person can get through it doesn’t make you any better than anybody else it just makes you different right and that’s what america is about was there anything that was hard for you or especially hard for you yeah anything that required height because i’m short at five foot seven so you know these things that required height and then keeping up with guys with long legs on the ruck march i would it was a ruck jog for me uh to keep up because these guys had just this incredibly long uh stride and it was like god bless america you know come on cut that stride in half you know but you know they they move at their pace and they can’t they can’t be slacking because you know then the instructor sees they’re slacking for me yeah i’ll pick up a job right so that’s the way we did it and you’re married when you were going through special forces training right yes yeah yeah i got married uh as a second lieutenant i met i met my wife sharon in college we were both in the rotc program together she was studying nursing and she was she joined the army at 17 years old had to get her mom’s permission she went into the medical field right and down to fort sam houston did her training and uh she’s a she’s she’s as hard as woodpecker lips i always like i always like to say um you know source of pride for me is that uh you know i married a woman that wore combat boots so that was always that was always a cool thing but yeah she she was great and um you know she and she understood the army and understood what you were going through and i always asked her right i said hey i want to do this right you know can i get your support uh you know i mean it’s not going to be easy for the family um and that’s why you know leading up to 2001 when we had 911 we were gone a lot because during the clinton years where he downsized the conventional forces a lot of the engagement and stuff fell to special ops right we had to go deploy on all kinds of different things out there so we were gone a lot and so when we were gone a lot after 2001 my wife just took it in stride right and so when she started hearing people say well you know they’re never home anymore and she would she would be able to use her experience to explain hey you know this is this is what it’s all about right and so she was very very good inside the inside the family readiness groups and you know very very supportive particularly during deployments and you know when we had casualties and she she had that frame of reference you know and uh she was always there we’ve been married for over 32 years now and i have never she’s never ever faltered even when i even you know even when i wasn’t a very good version of myself because of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury and and you know um pain management issues and you know i mean that negatively affected my personal and professional life too right you know when when before we get into that when you are talking about the 90s so now you’re what’s what special forces unit did you check into when you got done with special forces school fifth special forces group fort campbell kentucky and then you were doing lots of jsets heading overseas building these relationships filling some of the gaps that were left by the downsizing conventional forces what was your what was your did you do a platoon command did you do a team did you do a company command like what was your billets there so i was a detachment commander oda 582 and third battalion uh fifth group um and were you guys doing like regular deployments would you go on deployment so yeah when i in the 90s when i was in the seal teams we would go on a six-month deployment maybe we’d go to asia maybe go to southwest asia maybe we’d go on a ship but you were doing a work up and you were going on a long deployment were you guys on a schedule like that exactly like that exactly like that but with fifth group i went to one of two places it was either eastern africa normally kenya or it was in the middle east you know uh and we had um you know kuwait uae oman saudi arabia jordan you know those places yeah yeah we must have crossed paths at some point along the way we had to we had to log the dragon eggs i did a bunch of shipboard deployments in the 90s yeah and and one where i wasn’t on board [ __ ] but yeah we were constantly pulling into all those places and doing whatever kind of exercises um just always always over there one of the uh one of the interesting deployments that we went on that i thought was was really really good to work on your trade craft was um jtf bravo the drug interdiction missions that we did on the southern border and we would we would deploy for 120 days to the southern border and we worked from the texas border to the new mexico border arizona and california and we culminated in california in the cleveland national forest searching for marijuana fields and and getting scared to death by booby traps right because they they were everywhere uh and and we would track somebody and then we’d find out they’re actually tracking us you know so it was like holy crap right in america you know what i mean uh and so but we would get into our spider holes and we would you know we would you know i mean we would practice um i remember giving my battalion commander a briefing and i was saying hey we’re gonna we’re gonna be in these holes guys are gonna be in the holes for uh 72 hours and then we’re gonna under the cover of darkness rotate them out get them back to the um to our you know mission support site get a debrief and then we’re gonna send them back to phoenix to recover in a hotel right clean all their kit and we we had this whole process and we’re gonna be we we made our spider holes and all our camouflage out of uh pvc pipes and all that and stuff right and we break it all down you put it in your pack and then you set it all up and you dig your hole and that’s what you’re going to be in right and we we even came up with you know different exercises in the spike because they couldn’t get out of spider holes right and so he goes so what are you going to do with the with the uh human waste well we’re gonna carry it out with us and he goes oh you’re gonna carry it out with you and i said yeah we’re gonna carry it out with us sir and he goes i’d like to see that so i delivered to him a hefty bag full of extra mint and pee and i put it right on his desk and i said there it is sir and i’ll never forget the look on his face the sergeant major command sergeant major pulled me aside and he said that was either the most brilliant thing that you ever did as a detachment commander or the dumbest thing time will tell yeah that’s well that’s good as soon as you said i’d like to see that i said oh he didn’t oh yes he did he did see it yeah so uh yeah those are interesting i never did those missions but i remember platoons getting sent out to do them and it’s basically doing reconnaissance of drug transport routes coming across the border all across the southern border we would wait we would radio it into the police and they would do the interdiction uh and it was just uh it was just a it was just a great mission because we knew we were doing something for our country and then we knew we were also training the hell out of ourselves with these these you know special reconnaissance techniques that um hey if they see you they compromise you you’re done so i mean it was it was good it wasn’t real good so where were you when september 11th happened oh i was the operations officer for 3rd battalion or 2nd battalion 5th special forces group and we were getting ready to go to jordan for what was the largest socks and you know special operations command centcom um uh joint chiefs of staff missions they basically took about five joint chiefs of staff missions and combined them all we’re going to be headquartered in jordan and include uh egypt oman uae kuwait um and it was all over that geographical area we’re going to be doing all kinds of decentralized missions and stuff in in these countries and airborne operations and we had a we had a ranger company with us and it was it was awesome right we put this all together first time they were ever going to do something like that and i really liked it because it was a regional approach to solving problems right instead of a country by country focus so it was really great and i’m a big big believer in this you know regional thing i think it works out better when people get together and try and help each other solve each other’s problems as opposed to just focusing on one country at a time but anyways i don’t want to digress so we were getting ready to go over for that mission i’m sitting in my office the day before we’re getting ready to deploy in 9 11 hits right and i go down the hallway to my boss’s office and i put on the television i go sir check this out by the time i turn it on the second plane hit hit you know and i said sir i think we’re under attack and i said it looks like they’re going to hit every single one of our national elements of power and you know then pentagon gets hit and then the plane goes down in pennsylvania obviously headed probably towards the capitol or wherever that was heading so they you know they hit the economic uh they just hit the military they’re on their way to the political you know i mean holy crap president of the united states canceled every single exercise except for the jordan exercise because it was so important to the king of jordan to have this thing to have this exercise because it was he was the hub country right and so we deployed and we did it and uh it was shortened from 45 days to 30 days and that’s you know we went directly from jordan to uzbekistan for mission planning and then uh and then into uh into terran county afghanistan so you complete this training operation in jordan yeah which must have been strange doing this freaking training operation when you know that the world is like a ticking time bomb right it was it was we’re watching the news all the time and you know we’re we’re i’m i’m actually getting messages from higher headquarters get ready you’re gonna go you’re gonna leave so we’re we got the log guys and ops guys and everybody planning to move us from jordan to uzbekistan but at the same time we have 560 000 moving parts for this five country uh operation and people doing airborne operations live fires you know cqb you know i mean just all kinds of high adventure training right and you know we’re doing uh joint and combined airborne operations so you got picture this you got americans jordanians and egyptians on the same plane getting ready to jump out yeehaw right because you know as far as i’m concerned that’s a you know i mean we trained them but they not necessarily following our training you know and the way some of them exited the aircraft it was like holy crap are you kidding me so it was like uh you know i know a lot of the sergeants are looking at me going you’re killing me sir you know i’m like okay i hope not yeah we’re not that’s not the intent right but uh i’m like hey we got to do this right i mean that’s what it is and they would they would make sure it was great and it went off without a hitch but so then from there you go to uzbekistan uzbekistan and and now are you guys getting you guys got the tasking okay you’re going to afghanistan go to as go to uzbekistan to start planning right because how many guys uh it was it was let me see 15 of us and and colonel fox had to pick them so he picked them and 15 of us went off and then he turned over the battalion to the xo and the exo stayed in place and in jordan and then slow but surely he would rotate the teams into uzbekistan as space opened up so what you get to uzbekistan i mean what’s the damn what’s the atmosphere with the team how much do you guys know about afghanistan prior to this nothing nothing absolutely did you did you did you learn a language as a special forces officer i did i learned egyptian arabic okay now i passed the language test school egyptian quiz show with the lowest score of um that you could get on the defense language aptitude battery test apparently god didn’t give me the ability to learn foreign languages and i did i struggled through what spanish in high school and college but i struggled through it i got through it anyways but nonetheless um so the lowest score qualifies me for a romantic language like french and spanish and italian and what do they send me to fifth special forces group where the language is egyptian arabic category four language and i’m like really you want me to fail is that it but you know like anything else test scores you know they mean something but they don’t test um they don’t test your will to do your best right so i i ended up graduating with a two plus two plus and and got language pay at 75 dollars a month and um and i was just you know i called two plus two plus just being dangerous enough to uh you know use a foreign language you know it’s like it’s like being a first level black belt in martial arts right you’re just dangerous enough to get yourself hurt but it looks cool right uh but nonetheless it is what it is and i i yeah i i did that but egyptian arabic does you absolutely no good in afghanistan with pashtu and urdu and you know tajik and uzbek and you know so uranus about uzbekistan you’re coming up with a plan and and who’s giving you direction at this point what are you guys getting for a mission tasking are you getting clear directives or is it more hey go go start to put something together so to the credit of our seniors everything was moving so fast and everything was coming out of the pentagon and the national command authority so quickly so rapidly uh that you know we weren’t getting anything right and so basically we had two teams and then a command and control element that had to be led by a lieutenant colonel and that came directly from the secretary of defense so my so it’s not even the standard way that we would deploy into a theater of operations so you got two teams with a battalion commander and a very small staff that were c-tuing now third battalion had the north second battalion had the um south and first battalion had you know the um the kabul bagram area um and so when we got there it was like all right you got the south you got to go link up with harmon karzai you got these two teams one’s going to come from the south one’s going to come from the north can’t figure it out so we did and i was happy to figure it out because it was good how did you guys get in so we went uh mh1 excuse me mc-130s to jacobabad pakistan and this this is really it’s really funny because we were told okay you’re going to get there and you’re going to go find the special ops air force unit and they’re the ones that are going to fly you in to karen cow um afghanistan where you’ll link up with a group of afghans and then they’ll take you to harmon karzai so that so that was the plan that was the plan that was the plan and where did i find the air force guys in the mess hall because i looked all around jacoba bad form right and my boss is like i go sir let’s go to the mess hall good call and so there they were they were in the mess hall and so uh you know and will they bring you up in like pavlos or something yes yeah that’s exactly at mh-53s we went right in we took fire going in uh one of them was hit they still brought us in we did a what i like to call a controlled crash landing i mean it was a hard landing we all fell all over the place inside the damn thing we jump out the one advantage we had was nice night vision goggles we didn’t know where they were or who they were but i had worked on i had worked on one pashtun sentence please take us to harmon karzai i worked on that over and over and over again and we land we hit the ground dust everywhere takes a few minutes for the dust to settle we get into a v formation and the plan that we had was i go colonel fox i go sir uh we’ll move forward once we see him we’ll set in security i’ll walk forward with my rehearse sentence and you know we’ll go from there you guys point your weapons i’m not going to point my weapon at them but i’m going to have it at the ready just in case i need it and i can see them they’re all all these ad there’s about 10 afghans there and they’re all pointing their weapons out at me and i’m walking up and i look at them and i got these ak-47s right in my face and all i could come out with was harmon karzai that’s the only thing i could say that well-rehearsed sentence gone gone and uh they um you know gave me the you know good good to go and you know i called up the guys we came up they put us in trucks and 20 minutes later we were meeting army karzai in a mud hut and then we just started doing mud hut diplomacy so what’s mud hut diplomacy look like it looks like a bunch of afghans sitting on the ground with us in front of a map uh and uh we’re telling them you know what we’re seeing uh from our aircraft in the sky and uh are they bad guys are they good guys and then we’re coming up with intermediate places on the ground to go to and our first convoy that we did this uh was a disaster little did we know that that they would all huddle around karzai’s vehicle because they didn’t want anything to happen to them and we had karzai in the wrong spot so we had motorcycles and toyota corollas and pickup trucks we lost complete control of this convoy and then we stopped to pray right in the middle of the operation right is this really a safe place to stop and pray but it didn’t matter it’s time to pray we’re going to pray so we did that so what we did was we figured out on the next one that we would put our guys up front for security and we put karzai back there and nobody would pass karzai’s vehicle so we maintain control now if you turned around and looked at that gaggle back there it was like oh yeah mad max yeah really that’s a great way to uh to explain it and uh but it worked and so that’s what we did uh and as we move forward we got more and more village elders and tribal elders into the meetings and then of course you know people were talking about security concern you know what if someone comes in and just opens up and sprays the place and i said well it’s a chance we have to take i mean it’s just part of the part of the part of the operational environment yeah you can’t mitigate all risk you can’t you do your best but there’s going to be some risks that you’re going to have to take to achieve your mission and they weren’t in the mood for us to disarm them they weren’t in the mood for us to search them they weren’t in the mood for any of that right we had to prove ourselves to them and then they had to get comfortable with us and we just had to trust you know karzai and trust me the cia guys that were there with karzai were just as nervous as we were just as concerned as we were because the last thing we wanted was was karzai to uh to get hurt because he’s on the phone with all of the news outlets right in the middle of a briefing we get a call hey you know you know whatever his name is dan rather or whomever wanted to talk to him right and so he would take an interview right there and then you had the bond committee um that was meeting to figure out you know the government and who’s going to be the interim prime minister and of course karzai’s at the top of the list they want to talk to him so in the middle of that they call up and they want to talk to him about stuff and you know he just and just sit there and listen to it he was really good he was really good in those days he did a really really good job and i had a lot of hope right but yeah things get politicized and things happen and you know the longer things you know go on uh he he just he just you know i really thought he did a great job um particularly at the beginning there and you know the way he managed risk and the way he made decisions and the way he handled and the respect that he got um he was the right guy at the time right and um and so uh it was it was just uh very very interesting to see that and of course in subsequent deployments i had a personal relationship with karzai so i could leverage that pretty easily as a result of that very first rotation to explain something that had looked like in kabul had gone wrong but there was a lot of things in between where it happened and what was being told and what was being put out by the taliban that weren’t true and i was able to get communications to him to be able to say hey that’s not the way it went down sir please please understand that my heart’s in in the right place and he would now now speaking of things going wrong um weren’t you involved in a um in a fratricide incident where a bomb was dropped on your on your location can you brief us on that one yeah i i blame myself for that what a day um so we were at um shao walikat 20 kilometers north of kandahar which was our our operational objective we had to take kandahar from the taliban the religious center of gravity it was more important to take kandahar than it really was to own kabul or herat or mes you know major sharif because of the significance of it and we had one presidential mission and that was to determine whether the cloak of muhammad in the mosque in kandahar was still there because it was a huge concern in the in the muslim community all you know all the way back to mecca right with saudi arabia i mean this was a big deal and so uh you know uh we we were doing combat operations for three days north of here i mean we had to go through a pass and this pass that high ground was a bridge it was a it was a orchard in front and it was very well defended by the taliban and al qaeda and they weren’t given this ground up very easily and we were doing combat operations leading patrols trying to disrupt them we were we were engaging them with you know you know f-15s and so on so forth and um it was going pretty you know it was going real well and we were getting people that were switching sides you know afghans would come and switch sides and they were giving us great intel and stuff which is always shocking for americans to hear about people switching sides and it’s very common especially in the arab culture and i know that there’s a i want to say this is an osama bin laden quote that you know the the people are going to bet on the winning horse so basically if you’re strong and you’re winning people like okay that’s who we’re putting our money on and so this is what you were seeing on the ground was as the coalition grew and as karzai got more people people are looking around going he’s got more people and they it’s almost like a mob mentality of joining joining that team oh absolutely absolutely and and it you know required flexibility and adaptability on our part and i know i know colonel fox was just never real comfortable with it all right don where did all these people come from and i said well sir they came they came from overnight and they came from over there and he goes these guys were fighting us and i go oh yeah they were fighting us and now they’re with us and we got the um we you know they’re all vouched for because you know oh this is my cousin this is my brother this is my you know and so hey all right and you know we got the sergeant major telling us you know it’s okay and then we got you know elvis going thank you very much thank you very much you know so he you know and he goes in we’re going to harm him and give him bullets and everything and i said well yes sir we are uh and and he goes ah jesus so he was never really quite comfortable with it and he goes he goes you you’re good with this and i said hey sir i don’t know if we have a choice number one but yeah i’m good with it you know i grew up in a small town in new hampshire and i can see the same thing happening there you know um people sitting on the fence you know historically we’ve seen that you know where the passive people start joining the people that are winning and you know before that they’re passive now they’re active and you know vice versa so yeah i think i think we’ll be okay right and uh it’s all right i’m coming for you though if you’re wrong and i said all right now that’s fair that’s fair so anyways we um we’re doing this and it’s about 8 30 in the morning and we get some good intel and you know we get with karzai and we get a good decision from him and we start we start our operations up well we had a very very good process for clearing our fires we had a great sts guy on the ground and we have absolutely no errors and we we needed to build up our force structure going into f going into kandahar so we took this point we took this point in time to bring in some additional augmentees right and it was about 24 hours before this had happened so what we did was we um we did a good transition with everybody we had attack p come in and he did good transition with the sts and learned all the sops and everything like that and rsds guy and the tacp had uh changed over so just so everyone knows these these are the guys that call for fire from the air that’s what we’re talking about the tacp and the sts these are individuals that are trained that’s what they do it’s i mean obviously it’s a really hard job one mistake can be deadly and that’s what they’re focused on and it’s great to have those guys because that’s what they do for a living right and so you had a transition taking place where you’re going from one guy that had been with you now your your force is growing you got some extra guys that are going to be able to help out but they’re just showing up so they’re not quite up to up to speed yet that’s correct that’s correct and um and so they did their transition we had got a mail in for the first time so guys were you know guys that weren’t directly involved in doing anything were opening up their mail and you know i had done a walk around our our defensive area which was an old soviet uh mortar pit right up in the high ground and i’d walked around and i had gone down the hill just got to the bottom of the hill and this big explosion right out of nowhere and um i don’t know how much time it passed to be honest with you but i picked myself up off the ground i had pieces of body parts stuff all over me blood all over me i’m doing a quick assessment of myself i got a real bad injury with my leg and you know dazed looking around and it is utter mayhem we got afghans down we got americans down we got rounds cooking off we got rpgs cooking off it’s going all over the place i start walking around i start grabbing our guys we go down to where karzai was and we made sure he was okay and he was with his cia guys and they had secured him and the guys that were with him securing him i asked them if they would go out and recon a safe place to bring in helicopters because i knew we were going to have to cast a vac here and out 200 meters we had casualties right um it was it was a mess all 20 of the u s guys on the ground were injured some way or another some more than others and we had um i designated a casualty control point and i got with my comms guys and we had to find some uh we had to kind of like um take com’s equipment from you know cannibalize it from other stuff to make to reestablish communications with higher headquarters i found colonel fox and he was he was dazed and confused uh just to the point where he was just not coherent about what was going on so made sure that he was taken care of and went up on the hill and we started pulling bodies off right with all these rounds cooking off and everything like getting getting guys off the top of the hill getting them down and we knew we had to get um complete accountability of everybody and we did that and i was missing one right and went back up on the hill to where his position was and that was ground zero of the impact of the two thousand pound bomb from a b-52 up 35 000 feet and i searched everywhere and i found his hat and i took his hat and i started picking up bits and pieces and i put it inside the hat and i put the hat inside a bag and i parked it and that’s how he was identified but there was nothing to send home absolutely nothing to send him and another one of our guys that was killed was completely torn in half i found him under a vehicle his chest was still heaving his legs were over here his chest his body was separated from it and i start doing cpr on him and someone finally grabs me on the shoulder and goes sir no it’s not gonna work he’s torn in half so anyways we get him in a in a body bag and we get him off there and then we had one guy that was not going to make it but was still alive and we kept him alive and we got him evact when the when we had coordinated the evac we got a b team special forces company and an oda to come in to backfill that came in from higher headquarters we got all the guys out and then we started doing the the after action and regrouping because we still had this was 5 december we still had to go and take kandahar so me my assistant s3 the battalion commander and a como guy despite our injuries we stayed on the ground in order to be able to coordinate the push to canar so we did that we regrouped we got as many afghans out as we possibly could that were injured that wasn’t something that haier wanted to do but we talked him into doing it because it was the right thing to do so we got our afghan partners evac out we helped with the casualties for them as well in the village and everybody came out and and helped from the different areas around the village and we just said screw it we’re gonna we’re gonna hit that we’re gonna hit that bridge we’re gonna hit that pass and we’re going to knock him out of there and we went through nobody was there right this was 8 december and we went right into kandahar and we took kandahar and the after action on that though and i’d blame myself to this day the transition between the sts and the tacp was really good but the tacp had to change batteries and and those old soft lamps that we use to target designate when you do that the grid resets to your position so before you send anything or confirm anything with the aircraft you’ve got to make sure that that you have your grid system squared away and that was the mistake that was made and as i go over this in my mind over and over and over again even to this day i think to myself i should have been there to make sure that that i should have gotten an in person briefing from the tacp that he knew all those procedures i should have got that and i didn’t get that and because i didn’t get it because of we’re in combat and because of all the things that you talked about earlier you know a mistake was made and hey i was in charge of those operations on behalf of colonel fox that was my job and i didn’t do my job in my opinion to the best of my ability and we had that event occur and you know well i learned a big lesson and i’m sure a lot of people learned a big lesson but at the end of the day um it um you know there’s a and i think you talk about it and you know in your in your book there extreme ownership the fog of war right and klauswitz and his explanation of the fog of war and i mean it’s all there right and you do what you can do in some cases you can only do so much there’s a lot of things going on but in retrospect it becomes clearer and as you say you got to take extreme ownership right not only on those things that go well but most importantly on those things that don’t go well at what point did you realize it was a friendly bomb well it wasn’t until i was talking to the tacp who was seriously injured and he was apologizing and he said i sir i made a mistake i don’t think that i i cleared that grid like i was supposed to do and i said hey listen mistakes happen these things happen please you need you need to focus on keeping yourself i mean he was seriously in you need to focus on keeping yourself alive so you can get home to your family these things happen don’t blame yourself now i know to this day because i’ve spoken to him quite a bit you know the burden that he carries but um at the end of the day you know fog of war mistakes happen it’s a leadership responsibility but it wasn’t until then that i realized oh crap we gotta we got a friendly fire and sit in here and so when the investigation team came down to investigate we were already in kandahar and we were already set up but we had already written our statements and you know i had a pretty good packet form knowing you know anticipating what was going on and i think you talked about that in your book as well you know when the friendly fire incident said okay let’s we know a whole bunch of shit’s going to come raining down on us so let’s get ahead of the power curve and let’s make sure that we find out what went on and we tell the truth and we get the accurate assessment of what went on and when we came down and and it was uh brigadier general burford he was the deputy commander for u s special operations command he’s one that came down and led the investigation and sat down with his team we said this is what we got we got him out to the spot so he could see it and you know we gave him we gave him a you know a good briefing on on that and what we were doing and how we were doing it and we had taken that soft lamb and we had isolated it um it had been damaged uh but nonetheless wasn’t being used anymore and so we had everything for him in a nice package and and i go hey listen this is a combat environment you know we don’t want them we don’t want to have them come down here and have to expose themselves to danger here while they’re doing their investigation but at the same time we want to make sure they get to where they need to go to do a thorough investigation and and the most important thing is lessons learned so this never ever happens again right and i tell you what nine more rotations never happened to me again never happened in the unit that i served in again because we made sure that that you know those kind of lessons were applied and over and over and over again right yeah when i took over the training for the west coast seal teams like the tactical pre-deployment training i would put those guys in positions all the time and they would every single group every single platoon every single troop every single task unit they’d get a blue on blue and i’d sit down and say i want this to happen here so you realize how it happened so it doesn’t happen overseas like it did to me so that’s the best thing you can do is take those lessons learned and and spread the word so it doesn’t happen again and i i can tell you that there’s still there’s still guys on that oda there’s there’s all three of the guys that we lost still blame us still blame the chain of command for that right and that’s okay i take that responsibility fully i accept it and um i understand where they’re coming from and that’s just that’s uh hopefully it has made me a better leader right as a result i mean what else am i going to do right except acknowledge it and you know move forward because my responsibilities in leading didn’t end as a result of that yeah yeah and i mean even to those those guys that were lost and god rest their souls but at least their the lessons that were learned from that horrible as they may be at least there’s you know as you said no operation that you oversaw after that ever had another incident so their sacrifice saved lives and i know that’s horrible in one way but it’s the truth it’s also the truth it’s also the truth and um yeah i didn’t never had another blue on blue incident uh and the as battalion commander as the siege soda faith commander and as a general officer level commander in afghanistan in combat never ever had another one and you know we attribute that to of course the experience of the guys as we go through uh but most importantly you know leadership and learning they’re indispensable right and so you gotta you gotta move forward and that’s what we did so so you guys roll into kandahar and it’s pretty much no factor like what was the resistance level rolling into kandahar the resistance level was minimal we got ambushed going in and you know we took care of that uh and we kept going we get to uh the mullah omar’s compound and it is uh there are vehicles everywhere covered with mud because that’s what they did to try and hide from our aerial observations right they covered their vehicles with mud they saw a predator right so we we said and that was a way for us to identify if they were if they were bad guys or good guys because the bad guys were covering their cars but here it is again i looked at you i looked at colonel fox and i said hey sir look a parking lot full of bad guys and now they’re on our side right and he goes i don’t get this and then we went to the jail and we brought john muhammad now john muhammad was a very very close friend to karzai and he had been imprisoned by the taliban and tortured for a very very long time and he became the governor of uruzgan and he got up there and he met with karzai and this is a guy that i developed a very good friendship with over the years no matter what job i had going back into afghanistan in his mind i was the commander of all special forces right i just was not and i would tell him i go hey listen i’m just the battalion commander here i just got these guys he goes oh no no you are the commander of all special forces and he would tell people that and it would get in the news right and and i’d get a phone call and i go i didn’t tell him that right and so he probably knew he was getting in trouble he’s like ah commander of all special well he was he was a wild man always had been a wild man and if there’s one guy that you wanted in because orson province was you know i mean it was full of taliban it was full al qaeda and we needed a guy like that to go up there and you know a clean house but the way he was cleaning house and the way that you know it was acceptable in the international community was two different things and so we had to keep a very close eye on that but nonetheless um he gets there and he goes all right i’m going to need some furniture so he starts going in the rooms and he starts going i want that i want that i want that and he goes into moolah omar’s office and i wasn’t with him but one of the guys was in there and he comes running over to me he goes sir you got to get over here he goes the guy that we just let out of jail he’s going to the bathroom on top of mula omar’s desk and i go what and i go in there and he left a mess on top of that desk and that was his just what he felt he needed to do and then he told karzai i’m on my way to orozcon province when i get the taren cut i’ll let you go i’ll let you know and we’ll start clearing that place out and uh you know karzai put governors in oregon province it’s a bull province for our province nimrou’s province hellman province hellman was the one that we got the largest number of taliban al qaeda and operational russian equipment out of um and we had to negotiate that right we had to negotiate that with the taliban leader there that you know he wouldn’t you know he’d be free to go off and do whatever he wanted to do and you know karzai said yeah i don’t care and uh sharzai was the um governor of kandahar now the governor of kandahar is the senior governor in the south that’s just how it works wields a lot of power even though you have governors in all the other provinces so he pretty much laid down the law and you know organized things and slow but surely you know we started seeing security in southern afghanistan just you know shape up and then and how long did you stay in afghanistan for uh for that first rotation from november to march and then uh the so you left in march of 2002 right had the governor’s been put in position yet oh yeah they were all political positions so that’s december yeah so at that point there’s a pretty good it looks that’s looking pretty good at this point it looks real good it looks real good they’re doing it the afghan way and and the airfield in kandahar was something that we wanted to secure uh so that we could you know use it to bring in and bring out you know supplies and stuff like that so general mattis one star general at the time the marines got that mission and so um their operational area was was really confined to kandahar airfield and then we had the siege sodas north up in uzbekistan and then then commodore harwood came in to do senior sort of south kandahar and he worked side by side with with general mattis and we were in kandahar and our sole advise and assist responsibilities um centered around cher’s eye at this time because karzai had gone up to take to be the interim prime minister up in kabul and so everything that we did we did through with and by um karzai or shirzai in coordination with siege sort of north who were ctoing us and then commodore harwood who was ctoing um a separate direct action unit out of kandahar out of the kandahar airfield and we got this task list from from syphilic right the combined forces anyways it was a three-star headquarters right and so uh it was about 180 different places they wanted to go to and that was our tasking to to go do that we had to get that done so would you say go to what do you mean go to like like they thought they thought it was places that had intel or had bad guys in it and all under 180 of them were dry holes like towns or villages or like actual target packages targets right without the target packages it was just a location and we think there’s something there uh but the places that all 180 of them were dry holes but the places that we got all the computers and all the stuff that uh that osama bin laden was working on and omar was working on were given to us by the afghans that were on the ground hey they worked out of that one they worked out of that one they worked out of this one and and we would get a call saying hey we got al qaeda there see that’s where it became tricky because taliban were afghans so you get them and they either switched sides or they didn’t switch sides right if they didn’t switch sides well um you know the the you know afghans you know would would deal with them through afghan law right and custom whatever al qaeda different story they were arabs and we had to be very very careful because there was only one fate for them if they got in the hands of the afghans who had been families had been killed and tortured and so on and so forth and they didn’t have any real love for them right so that was a whenever we got a report in saying uh as al qaeda suspected al qaeda guy we would go boom and we would take we would take them into what i would call protective custard right and then we would move them by our own means to be interrogated and by you know coalition side of the house right and so i mean that’s that’s uh the kind of difference between the taliban and al qaeda at the time there on the ground and how they were just you know dealt with differently and we didn’t really worry about the afghans because they always switched sides but it was the it was the elk it was the al-qaeda because they were from oman they were from saudi arabia they were from pakistan they were from some other place right and not welcome no they were not welcome and you know one of the worst places to go when we first got there was the soccer field because that’s where all the hangings the beheadings and the stoning of women took place i mean stoning women for and killing a children for flying a kite we handed out thousands of kites when we got down there because they’re huge kite flying folks they have competitions you know where they attack each other with the kites you know it’s just like this huge thing anyways um they loved it right we got them their music we got them things to play with their music we established businesses one of the one of the first businesses that we established was a woman’s um laundry and then we used it to clean our own stuff because by the time we strategic thinking right there by the time we got to kandahar we stumped right i mean it was pretty bad so anyways we we did that but i’ll never forget i was on it was four four o’clock in the morning i was up on the kandahar um governor’s mansion and i was doing my had my uh night vision goggles and i got my afghan partner with me and to keep them awake all you had to do was give them the goggles because it was like this was amazing to them right it was amazing to see that technology and they could see because they’d go and then he’d go back down right and i know you can’t see me on the radio but i mean it it you know it’s just is what it is but i’m up there and i see the bakery that we had established them you know and the guy goes in for work and he gets in there and he starts opening up and that’s where we got our bread every morning and that nan bread that football shaped bread it was warm it was delicious by that time we were getting peanut butter and jelly sent to us and my wife sent me a tub of marshmallow because i’m from new hampshire fluff and nutters are really good right peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches so i was looking forward to it but i’m watching this guy and i go there he is you know doing his thing we he starts you know he gets the dough all done and he gets in the bowl with his feet and starts needing it and i’m like no i did not just see that right you can’t unsee no and i’m like and i know what his feet look like right and i’m thinking to myself it’s done i i can’t eat bread again right and we go get the bread and i’m sitting down and battalion commander’s sitting there and watching the guys and i go all right guys i gotta tell you i got to tell you this is what i saw today i gotta share this with you i hope i don’t ruin it for anybody morally obligated to share this i gotta share it with them and i did and they looked at me and they go i don’t give a [ __ ] i’m eating this bread and he goes the brick oven burned it all off and i go i can’t get there i can’t get there right so it kind of ruined it for me but anyways that’s good so by by the time you leave for the first time in march you know it looked like things are going pretty as good as you could want them to go 2002 when do you get back there again so you know it was interesting i get selected to be the fifth special forces group s3 so i get bumped up from the battalion go up to the group level and we’re now of course sustaining operations uh well it had gone to a different group so we didn’t have to worry about afghanistan anymore at fifth group because we’re not really there so because it was third group but then we got the warning order for iraq so we start planning iraq and then i get called in to my group commander’s office he says hey you just got by name requested to go do an interview to be the secretary of the army’s aide oh joy i go sir i just got the job that i’ve always wanted group s3 i mean it doesn’t get any better than that in a sp in a special forces group right and in my mind anyways and i was like sir i don’t i don’t want to do that he goes well you don’t have a choice and he goes and you better not blow it because we need an sf guy at that level it’s never happened before so we need you there right we need you there so you go there and you do the best you can if you don’t get picked don’t worry about it but don’t sabotage it so i go there and tom white is the secretary and i do my interview and um i’m sitting at home and i get a call it’s tom white don you’re gonna be my aide you got two weeks to get here and i go holy crap so i call my boss and i tell him and he goes yeah congratulations it’s great it’s going to be great for the sf community blah blah it’s funny because the entire time i was an aide there i never got a call from the sf community not once but i did what i was told to do and i went there and i was the aide for tom white and what a great experience that was right how long did you do it for what a great one year that’s all you get right uh and then you move on and then uh so that’s what what year was that that you were the eight 2000 june of 2002 to june of 2003 got it right and then i went what did you before you jump into where you went next what did you you know you said it was a great experience i was fortunate enough you know as fortunate as you can get when you become an aide i was fortunate enough to be the aide for for the seal admiral admiral mcguire and definitely i loved him he’s a great guy great guy but i was very lucky that i was able to do that job because i got to see a lot and got to understand what was happening and understand how these high level decisions were made and see a little bit into the future what was it from from your experience what did you see that what did you learn that was important well all of what you just learned but more importantly i learned um how all the just you know how these decisions are made inside the the political level right um from the top and all these things that are done so when i got back to the tactical level i could explain to the guys what’s going on at the strategic level and although although they may not like it at least i had a familiarity and an understanding and be able to explain to them what’s going on in the whole process and why we’re sitting here you know waiting to be ordered to go do something or what what have you uh but i learned how the army worked they didn’t know how the army worked right and a lot of us go through hell there’s a lot of guys that get promoted to general officer and they don’t even know how the army works right because they’ve never been in a job that taught them how the army works it’s just a matter of so you know there i am you know i’m you know i’m the you know battle buddy of the secretary of the army you know and he depends on me for everything right and um and it was just a phenomenal opportunity to learn how the army works and how the army fits into the larger service and how the joint chiefs of staff works and you know how all these things go and and uh so um you know i did not want to leave the the group s3 job at all i just you know i didn’t want to and when i got asked the question by secretary white you know do you want to be do you want this job and my answer was sir i’ll be honored to serve as as an aide but i’d rather be this fifth special forces group s3 jack and i was told later that’s why i got the job because everybody else they interviewed wanted to be they and i didn’t so they gave it to the guy that didn’t want it yeah yeah and um and i went there and i gave him 110 like i would do any job if they made me the floor sweeper it’d be the best damn swept for foreign army right that’s just the way it goes right you just go do whatever job they give you and do it best of your ability and then you know you know good things will happen and so i did that and then i went over to i got picked up for lieutenant colonel and i got picked up for battalion command first battalion third group and i had to do some joint time so i went over and i worked for i was the executive officer for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations low intensity conflict so then i got to see how the osd worked right and how all of that went and i always like to say how it works and doesn’t work right because there’s both sides of the coin right but it is good excellent experience and i met some really great people there that i have relationships with to this day but um that was three june of 2003 uh and then i went and took command of fifth special forces group um first battalion third special forces group the desert eagles and we did two back-to-back tours to afghanistan there and [Music] that was that was awesome one of the only battalions that ever did back-to-back tours it’s just the way it worked out so we went there for nine months came back for six went back for another nine months um and then i went up to use the sock headquarters the the amount of continuity that’s one thing that when you compare let’s say world war ii with either the end of korean war or the vietnam war where you have guys coming on tour they’re gonna do a year and then they’re gonna leave and that’s that’s that um that’s almost a continuity when you do nine months there six months home and then nine months back there you start to get some real continuity what what did you see in that deployment uh or those two deployments you get to see like a bigger arc of the story yes with with a better thread through it so we really saw the um the uh reemergence and the resurgence of the taliban and al qaeda in 2005 when we got there may of 2005 is when we got there now now obviously 2003 i think i might have cut you off when you were about to say this before but 2003 things are looking about as good as we could hope in afghanistan the war kicks off in iraq that means people are you know american soldiers resources are now pouring into iraq that sort of becomes the focus and and that allows over in afghanistan where we had a big presence now all of a sudden that’s drawn down now all of a sudden the you know al qaeda and the taliban start to see opportunities yes and so when you roll back in it’s now 2005 and now they’ve taken advantage of some of these opportunities they have taken advantage of the opportunities yeah and i’ll never forget september 11 2005 i was on a hilltop with charlie company commander and in the um kandahar province and there were 1500 wave after wave of taliban fighters coming at us it was unbelievable september 11th 2005 that was that was i had been you know i mean 2011 uh i mean uh september 11th 2001 wasn’t that long ago right and you’re right i mean we had it looked good in 2002 2003 and four we didn’t have the resources that we needed but we were still doing nation building we were still building an army we’re still building the police we were putting together their justice system we were putting together their constitution so on so forth all that was working but there wasn’t anybody to keep the pressure on them right and so they researched and so we saw the brunt of that in kandahar province in in 2000 2005 september 11 operation medusa um and uh you know it was a big operation um and uh it was just it was just unbelievable what was going on during that time frame in terms of you know enemy capability capacity strength numbers and it wasn’t just southern afghanistan which is where my battalion was it was in the north it was in the east you know predominantly at that time in the east we were on the border right wow that was just incredible right so what’s going on all over the place right you know when you when you talked earlier you mentioned that you know we were helping them we were writing their constitution we were setting up their government we and there’s a you know when i when i talk about leadership a lot um which i do i talk about what happens when you try and impose your plan on to your subordinates onto your team you impose your plan onto them look you can kind of get away with it sometimes depending on the authority that you have depending on the amount of leadership capital that you have depending on how much oversight you’re allowed to kind of sit there and if you’re going to impose their plan a plan on them and then you have the tenacity and the and the ability to sort of continue to put the pressure on them then maybe maybe you can pull it off but it’s much better from a leadership perspective to say hey don you know here’s this mission how do you want to do it and kind of let you come up with a plan it seems like america has a tendency to want to impose you know our way onto countries whether it’s vietnamese there’s the the the vietnam thing the way that unfolded and the way we tried to sort of impose what we wanted it to look like and the vietnamese don’t like that they they’ve fought against that forever and they’ve never been beaten and so they weren’t going to be beaten and and it wasn’t that they didn’t like what we were saying it’s just that they wanted to say what they wanted to say so so you know here we are with the afghans so doing a little bit doing some imposition on them and and the way that turns out it’s sort of like from a leadership perspective if you don’t have the the constant pressure to say no no this is exactly what i want you to do and i have the the tenacity and the leadership capital the resources to kind of make you do it which again this isn’t ideal how do you think we find ourselves in a situation where we we seem to make that that seems to be our tendency to want to impose our our way our plan on to other on to other people well to your point i mean it just it doesn’t work out well right and and the way we had set it up there was the us was doing the military the germans were doing the police the italians were doing the justice system and then there was this collective body that was writing the constitution and we factored out one of the most important things that goes in a constitution or a or a document whatever they choose to call it that establishes their their government and how their government is going to govern in a muslim country and that is they don’t separate church and state right and that was one of the big mistakes of that document right and then we named the government um for them as well which you know they didn’t like either so one once they got it turned over to them they made you know karzai went in they made they made the changes right and we were building a top-down western government uh police and military force which isn’t culturally the way they do things right it’s very decentralized very decentralized and we’re trying to centralize it and we’re trying to centralize it from kabul down and they don’t do that either you know their political system is very democratic to begin with it’s it’s shures and jergers and it’s local and it’s consent among the tribal elders and the village elders which are which are different right because you have the tribal elders and they may not be the elected village elders right but they still work together and they understand and then they have a pecking order of the tribes and so when stuff goes when stuff is available the tribes get their fair share based off of where they sit in the pecking order and they’re okay with this but we don’t like that a lot of times right because we want the the minority one to get the stuff but they’re okay with the stuff they get because it’s good enough right so we went in and we mucked all that up right because we we’re just not familiar with the tribes idealistic about the way we think things are going to be i remember a very similar example we had these young iraqi soldiers and the the officers were skimming their paychecks and you know my guys come to me they’re you gotta they’re skimming the paychecks of these young enlisted guys so i started talking to my interpreters and i go hey wait what’s going on can you help us you know i want to understand what’s happening he’s like well of course they are the soldiers know that that’s that’s that’s their boss and he’s going to take a little piece that’s the way it works that’s that’s fine so us going and trying to impose what we have this ideal of the way things should be doesn’t always match up culturally and it turns into a problem yes and that’s exactly what you know i mean the same thing happened in afghanistan right and we were obligated to fix it which puts us in a position we don’t have any real authority to fix right not going to listen to us they’re still going to skim it they’re still going to do their thing they’ll just figure out a different way to do it and although we see that that is bad i’m not saying it’s good i’m saying it’s just the way it is right and over time these things will change like we saw in afghanistan right now the ambassador to the united states and afghanistan is a woman never would have been that way in 2001 or five or ten but in 20 it’s a woman that’s great that’s progress they’ll figure it out right they have a great university system that they figured out you know it’s one of the things we really didn’t get involved in and it works right and i don’t mean that that everything we did was terrible because obviously it wasn’t but when you start getting involved in a country’s institutions and you start getting involved in their culture and their society and you’re an outsider it’s never going to be received well and you’re probably going to you know trample over something that you should just you know just stay away from but the good things will happen as they you know continue to move forward and another thing that a lot of people in the villages they didn’t want to go from the 7th century to the 21st century right they didn’t want to they were very happy being in the 7th century you know one of the things that i would always tell folks that would come to you know to do humanitarian work in afghanistan i say don’t give them coats don’t give them shoes they don’t want that all they’re going to do they’re going to smile at you they’re going to say thank you so much they’ll even have kids running around with this stuff on but as soon as you leave the kids are taking it off putting on their sandals they wear sandals you know even in the wintertime right they’re not going to put on winter boots they’re just not going to do it but they’re going to take those winter boots and they’re going to put them on trucks and they’re going to go to pakistan and they’re going to sell them and then they’re going to come back home because they don’t have any use for them what they have used for is paper and pencils and school products and things along those lines that they that they will use and they won’t go sell because they want their kids to be able to draw they want their kids to be able to write they want them to be able to you know so stop giving them converse sneakers you know it’s they’re not going know you know they’re not gonna wear them you’re not gonna see basketball courts break out you know they want soccer balls and they’ll play soccer barefoot and they’ll outrun us right in their bare feet so let’s just you know i think it’s you know to your point right i mean it you know it kind of is it’s kind of is what it is and and uh our guys would see it because our guys would stay there and you know all the boots and the shoes and the jackets and you know they don’t wear hooded sweatshirts you know give them blankets right they’re not going to sport a hooded jacket with a hood on it in the middle of the afghan villages they stick out like a sore thumb it’s not what they wear right so you know they like cooking equipment you give them cooking equipment they make a great stew you know you might pay for it for a few days if if you eat it on our stomach right and the other thing that we were doing was we were introducing medical supplies that were causing more harm than good because we needed the medical supplies because the way we grow up and live in america our immune system is much different than what they look and i used to tell stories i used to tell a doctor we’d get an afghan in with a head injury right and a bullet wound through the head right and the guy he’s expectant and i go oh no i wouldn’t be so sure please don’t call them expectant this is an afghan they have incredible healing um just the way it is i get a call from the doctor the next day hey don you’re never going to believe this the guy’s sitting up spouting all kinds of things and and you know posh too and i go of course he is he’s an afghan yeah you know that might have put down an american soldier but not an afghan that’s just the way they are so please you know i used to go over when our when our afghan partners would come in and i would make sure and say please and i’d have my medics there and i’d say just watch this guy because they’re going to say expectant and we know that he might not be sometimes yes most of the time no and you know they just have a different constitution because of the way they have to um you know operate and if we bring in all of our amenities we weaken them and we make them more susceptible to getting sick and and dying yeah and it’s not their their way of life it’s not their way of life and and they don’t want it right you know they do have their idea of of uh medical care so don’t exceed it right just come up to it bring it back bring the doctor back back bring the nurse back bring those skills back that the taliban had attributed down to nothing and that’s what they need so those so those two deployments back to back that’s 2000 was was it 2006 2007 so it was 2005 to 6 and six to seven yeah and those so what what type of operations were your guys doing because because now you were the first battalion commander of third special ford what what operations were you guys were your guys doing so we were doing uh we were assisting the afghan national army at the time with uh you know um shaping uh and clearing operations right and then we’d want to put we’d want to hold that area in a way that we hadn’t been holding it before so we introduced kind of the hold because it used to be shape it go clear it and then leave and then they’d come back in so let’s hold it let’s figure out a way to hold it and that’s where the first ideas about bottom up security came into play in 2005 six and seven so you’re so you’re setting up uh what was it afghan police was it local police the idea of afghan local police right came in there um and at that time we were just calling them the arbi right and we had the support of the and arbikai means like security local security yeah it means their local security so like back in the day when they were fighting alexander the great and genghis khan and the brits and the russians the kabul the king of afghanistan wouldn’t send down national troops to deal with the problem he would organize local arbites and the village elders and the tribal elders they’d go and they’d get their weapons out of their you know out of their huts and they mud huts and they would come and they would report and they would defend afghanistan yeah and that’s how they would do it yeah there’s so many similarities you know from from my experience in iraq and and in 2006 and in the city of ramadi the when the the army came in look the army worked hard they when the iraqi army came in they worked hard they they sacrificed greatly they fought hard they were a bunch of shia going into a sunni city and that right there you’re already starting off on the wrong foot i mean and that’s not even pretty that’s putting it extremely mildly just say you’re starting off on the wrong foot you you deal with people that have a history of killing each other and so you got the strong shia army coming into the sunni city and look the sunnis inside ramadi realized look the they’re after al qaeda they’re after these insurgents they’re after these foreign fighters so we were able to to get through it but it wasn’t until the the the sons of iraq and the iraqi police the local the local sunni tribesmen tribal leaders the sheikh said you know what we want to defend our own city let us put our tribe let us put our tribesmen in the police force that’s what we did and then it was a game changer because now you had the local tribal leader had his tribesmen with police uniforms on authorized by him saying yep we’re we don’t want bad guys here and the local population is going up that’s that’s our tribe and there’s several tribes there multiple tribes but they all agreed that that’s what needed to happen so this idea of you know decentralized command but also this idea of hey the people that are on the ground that are from there they know who’s good and who’s bad and the local populace is going to support the neighborhood kids that are now neighborhood police and that’s just it’s it we were lucky enough to kind of watch that unfold i was lucky enough to watch that unfold and and see those the what they called the sons of iraq and it was interesting too because in iraq there had been there had been out in al qaeda the marine corps had pushed through al-qaeda and when they did it there was a bunch of locals going hey there’s bad guys in that building over there just bad and so the marines said hey you know what let’s organize these guys and they made this this thing called desert protector which was hey if you’re a local and you want to help us out cool you can join this program called desert protector and they started this and it was working pretty well well when maliki got elected all of a sudden he looks out at al-anbar province and they got all these desert protectors out there and he goes wait a second now i got a bunch of random rogue uh security forces running around i can’t have that i can’t i can’t have that so he shut it down which which was not a great move but you can see from his perspective he doesn’t want a bunch of rogue paramilitary units running around but we were able to convince the the shakes in ramadi because they were asking we wanted you as a protector we want to do that we were able to say look we can’t do desert protector it’s not around anymore but you can be iraqi policemen you can be local and we’ll help you train and that’s what we did so what you’re talking about it’s very similar very similar yes yeah well you know i mean as you pointed out the the cultures are you know very similar uh in the way they approach things and there’s the principles that really work and apply from one place to the other the techniques and the tactics and the approach might require adjustment but nonetheless the standard principles remain the same and that and that’s what you’re talking about and i think that one of the biggest things that we saw in 2005 to 2007 was that this broad bottom-up approach has merit over a top-down approach right although there are aspects of the top-down approach that you still need to apply but really if you’re talking about security and safeguarding a population and making that area an area that the enemy can’t operate in uh that’s going to be the way that you need to go and from 2007 five to seven we learned that but the other thing that we learned was during this time frame you know the us you know transitioned the mission to nato and that’s when it became a full-fledged nato operation and a very good friend of mine dave frazier who’s written a book about afghanistan and about his time there during this time took over that’s when they went from o sixes colonels and in some cases navy captains commanding the regional commands you know north south east and west uh in afghanistan to general officer level headquarters and dave came in he was a canadian special ops guy who i had had a relationship with a really really good guy and when we got into afghanistan he said hey i need you to come over here i need to talk to you about you know what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do this because we got a problem and uh warren we came in here to do peacekeeping operations and although it’s not popular thing to say my assessment is is that we’re fighting an insurgency and a deadly one and he knew that that was our assessment as well our intel guys and everybody had the same assessment uh going in there from first battalion third group and our group headquarters uh up north so anyways um he called me in and we said well i think we can come up with an operation using the afghan national security forces to come up into this district panned away and take over this stronghold of insurgents right and so we went back we did some planning we came back and briefed him and so what charlie company first battalion got the mission and it was a instead of coming at them from you know uh kandahar province you know directly or hellman province where they expected you to come we went all the way down south into the red desert which is the red desert now when you fly in southern afghanistan and you’re flying uh you know east to west or west to east there’s the red desert that heads all the way down into pakistan and it’s nothing but desert and then there’s a distinct line that goes into the built up areas and the green areas and so on and so forth and it’s just so blatant nobody goes down there only better ones go down there so we did our infiltration in the pandu weight district that way it took three days we did vehicle recovery operation i mean it was ugly right but we got there and completely surprised the taliban in panjoy and it was a huge victory so we routed them up and then um my guys were up for over 96 hours straight me and my command sergeant major went in once we took panjoy district and this is where i told you earlier we got up on top of the hill and saw saw all the taliban coming it was unbelievable well anyways once we got control of that situation our guys mike those guys hadn’t slept for 96 hours and i called my headquarters and i said hey i’m going to stay sergeant major and i’m going to stay here overnight so cancel the ch-47 coming to get us and so we did that and i knew if i had told my guys that the sergeant major and i were going to pull the entire night shift so they could sleep i would have got a bunch of pushback right now sir you’re not going to be pulling guard yeah i would so i just kept my mouth shut and i said hey i’ll take first watch and they go oh you don’t have to do that and i go no i’ll take first watch well these guys went down hard and the sergeant major and i just stayed up all night well about two o’clock in the morning my company commander jared hill comes out he goes sir what the heck’s going on it’s two o’clock in the morning i was supposed to have shift you know i slept through it i’m sorry i go no no no we got this go back to bed we’re good he didn’t argue with me he went back to bed uh and um uh none of them had to pull shift it was just me and the serge major uh and we did radio watch and did the whole thing and we called in all the all the times right and and that was that and these guys got up not only did i have that but i also had the helicopter come in with hot chow right hot breakfast right and so i said you guys get your hot breakfast and now sergeant major and i will hand it back over to you and you know you got it right and um you know it was just amazing what these guys had done general fraser in his book writes today about our guys and he says they saved the nato mission because if we didn’t have these special ops guys to do this we would have been routed by the taliban and it would have been a huge political nightmare for nato first battalion third group my guys got awarded for the first time the equivalent of the canadian presidential unit citation the only foreign military in the history of the canadian military to get that award and they got that award and it sits in the battalion headquarters at fort bragg proudly and you know they sent down their their equivalent to their chairman of the joint chiefs of staff to fort bragg and all the guys got got it pinned on him it took him uh four years to get it approved but he didn’t quit and he finally got it proven and i was i was just getting out of the war college at that time was 2009 when the when they when they did the award and i was just so proud to see these guys get the award and do their thing but um yeah it was i mean and that that’s really what what kind of got us thinking and you know who got thinking general mcchrystal and when he came in in 2010 to take over he was all about bottom-up all about it and then when general petraeus came in to take over for him oh he loved village stability operations and afghan local police and so when when you before we get into that so you get done with your battalion commander tour mm-hmm 2007 something like that yeah yeah july of 2007 then you change command and then you go to war college uh yep i go up to use of sock headquarters for from from basically august to may of 2008 and i get selected for the war college and i go off to the war college but another great opportunity when i went to our three-star headquarters which is a place nobody wants to go but you know you go there i got put in the to be the deputy g8 and the deputy what the g8 does in that headquarters is they do they do all the combat developments and the resources and the budget and you know all that stuff and so i learned that and then i learned how usesoc not only fits into socom and how we compete for resources there but also how we compete for resources in the army and how our tier one guys how they get all their resources and how the rangers get all their resources and everybody and so that was huge right and so i was right in the middle of that process because we were right in the middle of of doing all of that uh for the next five years and i got put in charge of um of the uh movement of seventh group from fort bragg to destin florida for their new headquarters in setting that up and what that would look like and although not perfect we really really did create an optimal special forces group headquarters with all the ranges and all the things associated with so they could do all their levels of training right there and what you learn about working with communities and briefing communities because there’s noise things and noise studies and this that and housing issues and you know is there going to be enough housing you know how is this all going to i mean it’s just unbelievable right so that was another part you know like i told you before with the secretary of the army and then working at asd and then the joint staff and all that all coming together really gave me tremendous insight on on how ususak you know united states army special operations command works and again we’ve got a lot of guys that make very senior ranks and don’t have any idea how that works because they don’t get the opportunity to go there and that was because i come out of battalion command i get selected for the war college and it’s like oh now what the hell we’re going to do with them right they had no place for me right and they said report the use of sarc headquarters and they’ll have a job and i originally was going to be in the j in the g3 but then i got stuck i got moved over to the g8 because an old boss of mine was the was the use of sock g8 um jeffrey putz and he goes oh no no i want him right he’s a farm boy you’re gonna work his ass off for me right and uh and he may not like it but he’s gonna do it and so boom so i went there and yeah it was great great really great experience um wondering how that worked and then what’d you study at war college so i went to the war college and i just studied that you know their curriculum and you get a master’s degree in strategic studies so i was like ah this is great right so i i’ve worked at the strategic level right in three different assignments and i’ve worked at the operational level and now i’m going to go and i’m going to get an education uh in the in in strategic studies and so it really it it brought together the job experience and then an education and kind of mesh that together for me i got a business degree when i went to commander general staff college because i i’m like you know what when i take over a unit it it can’t shoot move and communicate like nobody’s business right but god do we suck at admin budget you know all that stuff that nobody likes to do and they’re not comfortable doing it so i ended up you know i got a business degree because i thought that that’s what officers do right and so learning how to run a business i said you know that’s going to help me out and it did right so i had the business thing going for me and then i had the got you know got to the war college uh carlisle and and that was just a great experience there as well and um uh but i learned one thing at the war college it’s not necessarily the war college and what you learn there it’s winning the jim thorpe sports event where all the war colleges come to the army war college and you compete right in a variety of different sporting events and the army has only lost it twice who’d they lose into history of they usually you lose it to the navy war college the what are the events the national war college their teams are so small right because the school is so small they get their butts kicked all the time but the army war college and you know you got the army the air force the navy the coast guard academy you know you got all those guys that come down uh and it’s a it’s three days of feats of strength right i loved it uh and and you you play all these sports right during the war college only so that the coaches of the different teams in the jim thorpe sports competition can draft their athletes and then you start training in january after the first of the year you get put on a team and then you train all the way up to uh uh may when they have the event what what what event did you do i i was in the uh 800 meter relay and the five mile run and we won both those events um we had a ringer we had a uh some guy with a 357 mile or something we had a a guy on our team he was a marine on our relay team who was a you know division one uh relay national champion yeah on a team right yeah and that’s not fair and and our coach was in the 1972 olympics as an 800 meter relay game and so the coach you know so he taught us you know how to run you know and and how to pace yourself and how to do it yeah it was uh a blowout uh it was pretty cool uh but i had the um what leg that i have i had the first leg yeah that’s right i had the first leg he even knew how to set up people for the what legs and yeah you know and he stood right right at the place and he said turn it on so as i ran by he goes turn it on and it was you had so much left in you right even though i was last i picked everybody off right and that was the whole idea of it because people don’t get trained on how to run it they just go you know and two laps yeah around a track yeah you know you’re gonna start feeling it yeah you know no i the 800 which i never did but i was reading an article about it somewhere along the way and the 800 they say is like the most painful event because you know you’re running 100 yards it’s over yeah you you run you run a mile or a 16 or even a marathon it’s at a lower level of intensity he and this this article that i think i read i think it was an article i read but it pointed out the fact that there’s zero recreational 800 meter runners they don’t exist there’s marathon there’s people run marathons there’s people that do little sprint triathlons there’s no one that just guts through 800 meters like for fun it doesn’t happen all right so we wrap with the uh jim thorpe championship that’s right and it’s time for you to go back to work and your next your next thing is you go back do you go back to afghanistan again i do i go back for afghanistan again what proved to be 22 months and this is what 2010 2000 2010 um and i go back to afghanistan as an advisor to the rc south commander and at the time it was a dutch commander by the name of a major general decrees he was a dutch guy and we were having some general mcchrystal was concerned about the problems with soft coordination so he said hey you’re going to take command of siege soda faye so so the siege is a that’s the that’s a combined joint special operations task force afghanistan this is the person that’s going to be in charge of all special operations in afghanistan that’s correct and you get you get tasked with that outside of the the tier one guys right yeah uh tier one guy’s not included so um uh anyways we uh i’m gonna take command of that that’s going to be my brigade level command opportunity and i couldn’t have been more excited i have admiral olson and general kearney to thank for that they’re the ones that picked me so i was um had a great relationship with admiral olsen and general kearney general kearney was then the deputy the deputy of uh socom but before that and during my time as a battalion commander he was the sock special operations command central commander as a two star so that’s how i built that relationship with him and uh general olse or excuse me admirals and i developed ignite a good relationship with him and so they picked me for that command but there was some time there so i went to uh i said hey i’ll just go early right and i’ll you know um do whatever you need me to do i’ll work on a staff i’ll do whatever you know pick staples out of the rugs i don’t care just you know just get in there early and get myself you know ready for uh you know the command and they said hey general mcchrystal wants to go down south and be the special operations liaison to general decruyff who was not uh very happy about the coordination with his headquarters in rc south and the soft guys so i went down there and i got myself established and did that well the interesting thing is general de croix went to the army war college and there’s 20 seminars in the army war college and you get assigned a seminar and there’s a 21st one and that’s for all the guys deploying out of the war college whose families stay right so my wife was in seminar 21 when i left she stayed right there which was great continuity for her and the kids because they were there my kids wrestled so one of them wrestled for the high school so they were that was just good continuity and we thought it was only going to be for a year but it ended up being for 22 months so they ended up staying there almost three years which was really good for them but general de croix went to the war college and he was in seminar eight and i was in seminary and we called ourselves the eight balls and so when i went in to introduce myself and he said where you coming from and i said the war army war college he goes oh i went to the army war college too and i go really that’s great sir i mean i loved it he goes oh i loved it too i was in seminar eight and i go well so was i and he goes no way and and we had the same instructors the same guys there so we were able to share that we were able to share stories about being an eight ball right and it was automatic you know relationship establishment rapport and everything and so all i did was go to his morning meetings be available for him whenever he needed whenever there was operations coming up i made it sure that they were deconflicted and i ended up traveling with him everywhere he went in afghanistan on his plane everywhere he went in the south that’s what he wanted me to do and it was it was like simple and general mcchrystal was happy because he was not getting any more complaints from the rc south commander and you know and uh and they were valid complaints i might say right i mean you know how that goes there’s just so much going on right and everybody’s trying to do the right thing and they’re trying to they’re trying to get it done and you know things slip so they get those six now you know a colonel there to make sure that doesn’t happen and if it does happen he got one guy to blame me nobody else so it was good uh and you know we just tighten that up and you know it wasn’t just soft you know it was conventional side it was all kinds of you know everything’s going the state department and what they’re doing and then the you know other things going on so hey it just worked and how long did you do that for i did that for uh six months [Music] uh let’s see from june to yeah june to december six months and then after that you took over let’s see just yeah i went home for two weeks uh for taking a nice vacation yeah two weeks two weeks went home for two weeks came back took command and stayed in command uh of um of the special operations there uh you know the siege soda fe uh may of 2011 um and this is and this is when you started or at what point did the did the vso the village stability operations start at it was it at this time yes so because i remember i was getting ready to well i retired in 2010 and i was i was running training and as i was running training we were starting to have guys do training missions based on vso based on going out and doing tribal engagement and key personnel engagement and going to meet people in villages and having them how they’re going to set security and all that stuff we started doing that in 2010 so i don’t know exactly when it came came to fruition but from what when did it so it would have been about april of 2010 okay that it all started coming to fruition because i got there in 2009 i did that then i took command yeah june of 2009 and then i didn’t leave until may of 2011 right uh so it was it was about that time frame and you know it was a it was a collection of people that were you know putting this together but i happen to be the commander that did the bulk of operationalizing it which is the hardest thing to do right the first guy in the breach right um you know it’s it’s hard because you got people pushing back against it and you got people that are all for it and you know even though general crystal wants it to happen you know there’s there’s many people there with him that don’t want it to happen and you got the international community and and even my own community right uh they were skeptical of it because they saw it as a special forces mission so bringing in marsoc and bringing in the seals to do this kind of mission they were like hey that’s not their mission and this is a bad precedent and this any other thing and i’m like hey but you know okay so give me more odas right i mean you know i i came up with a term and the joint staff uh because everyone was using the word fungible right and i happened to be giving somebody a brief right and and it was about using special ops and you know we’re better when we work together right because we have just we just are right so anyways um uh i said and you know special ops puts the fun in fungible you know because that was the big strategic word at the time right and so the more you could show you were fungible the better off you were so we’re fungible as hell right and and that’s what that’s what we do uh so anyways we yeah we we just um you know came together and did it and every single whether it was marsoc whether it was uh whether it was um you know their teams or the navy seal teams or the special forces teams these platforms did really really well and just give us a quick brief on the idea of of the vsos of the of the village stability operations what was so if if i was an oda team leader i was a seal platoon leader what was what was my mission what was it going to look like so your mission is to go is to go into say it’s uh you know kandahar province and it’s district x and you’re going to go in there and you’re going to figure out what is the best village to start a village stability platform which consists of your team and additional augmentation of intel guys and other things that you’re going to need in order to be able to operate there you’re going to go in you’re going to talk to the village elders and the tribal elders and you’re going to figure out where you need to be now they’re going to tell you where you need to be and you’re going to go with it and if it’s the wrong place don’t worry about it we can change it so just just go with the flow just go in there they’re in charge they’re the guys that are going to tell us where to go and over time you’ll figure out if it’s the right place or not and then working with them if you got to change the place you don’t want to because what’s going to happen is they’re of this top-down mindset okay the u s is coming in and they’re going to come in with a whole bunch of good stuff and we’re going to be able to take advantage of it well they’re going to realize over time but we’re not coming in there with jack right yeah just go talk to the odas and the seal platoons that are out there in the middle of nowhere that’s right and so some hesco barriers and a freaking sackcall antenna have fun boys right and we’re not coming in with with a big bag of money and a whole bunch of things that they’re going to be able to you know take advantage of and then they’re going to realize wow holy crap right and but what we are going to do is we’re going to come in with the ability to be able to prove to them that they can secure themselves and we’ll develop this afghan local police program and they’re in charge of nominating the people for this program so we we get their fingerprint their thumbprint on that guy and so if that guy does something it discredits the village elder and the tribal elder so you’re not going to really get back at now did we have some problems yes we did but the problems were minute and we started we started clearing these you know clearing and holding these areas and with the afghan local police program and yeah and it’s based more on relationships that you form with the locals more than it’s based on imposing your will on the locals right which you can only do that if you’ve got the strength and the consistency and to do that all the time right which is it’s impossible it’s impossible it’s impossible it’s impossible and so some of the challenges that i was presented with was hey you’re putting these guys in in harm’s way they’re going to all get killed one night the taliban is just going to overrun them and i said well i don’t think so our guys are smarter than that they’re not going to allow themselves to be overrun they’re going to keep their finger on the pulse on the intel we’re going to use the relationships that they have in the pashtun wallet code and people kind of laughed when i said pashtun wallet copy but it is strong you know and it consists of you know supporting strangers it consists of revenge right and that’s what they basically operate off of and they accepted us in and we became their responsibility and um as a result of becoming their responsibility then let anything happen to our guys now did we get guys injured and did guys get killed yeah but that was in combat operations and they died right along with us right it’s just combat operations or combat operations but did we ever get overrun no and this was in the middle of the time where you saw conventional outposts being overrun right uh and you know all over afghanistan and this is conventional units that put themselves in valleys uh and in places that they shouldn’t have put themselves because they were operating independently of the the afghan culture’s protection right and so ended up by 2011 when i left we had 90 locations and none of them ever got run over none of them ever got attacked the afghans were all over it i mean they knew and they never lost the fight against the taliban they they were protecting their families and they took it seriously and when they saw the progress they were making and this big bad taliban guy was defeatable and they saw they were like whoa then they got the will to fight and they had the mission and they realized that that their freedom and their destiny to live life the way they wanted to live was in their hands and that they didn’t need the american military or international forces to secure their freedom for it they could do it themselves but we need your help a little bit right we need your help a little bit but when we got it we got it and that’s where the transition piece came in yeah it’s interesting because you know i was saying that not only can we as americans impose our will on every village in the country guess who else can’t do that the taliban the teleman that’s right so so if you got it you got to make those connections it’s decentralized command it’s building relationships and had a pretty positive i mean a very positive impact on what was happening in afghanistan 2000 what was that 2010 2011 into 2012 and 13 things are moving in the right in the right direction right and you know like i said general mcchrystal put it in place he was replaced by uh general petraeus and general petraeus became a huge huge advocate of this and one of the things that general petraeus did was he said don what do you need to expand this and i said well we’re kind of limited sir with just our special operation forces but if we could get augmentation from the conventional forces then we could expand right and we could we could use the conventional forces to augment and not as guards for our bases because we don’t need those we got the afghans to do that but just as additional people and we can train them on on how to do it but and then we can expand ourselves because we have we have a little bit more people but not too big because we can’t get too big because then that that gets out of right so he went to the army and got us a battalion right and we used that battalion to um to augment not every team but certain teams in certain areas and it allowed us to expand faster and one of the one of the areas that we needed to do this was konar right and we brought in a guy by the name of jim gant who had relationships with the tribal elders out there both in pakistan and in and in afghanistan and we gave him the village stability operation mission now gant worked for me when i was a battalion commander he wrote a paper that general olsen or admirals and really loved and so did petraeus and so did others and they asked scott miller who was my boss one star then two star major general miller um who was my boss during this whole time and who i worked through in order to get you know village stability operations and afghan local police started and he was pretty brilliant and and you know how he got that approved through karzai and so on and so forth because everybody was in the international community was very concerned about oh you’re going to arm all these guys and then they’re going to create all kinds of humanitarian violations they’re going to kill people and you know karzai was worried that they would get too strong and take over the government but you know when you go down there at that level they didn’t have those they didn’t have those aspirations they just wanted to control their village that’s it they just wanted to live control their village have their family get their family educated uh bring their crops to market and live right and not have anybody bother them they they had they had no design to take over afghanistan because they saw kabul as a as as big a problem as anything else right so um yeah people but there’s people that live in montana and wyoming that don’t really care what’s going on in washington dc and they certainly don’t want to move there they don’t want to move to new york they don’t want to move to l a they they just want to live exactly exactly and so same principle applies and so you know they you know we uh you know we we took advantage of that and it cost us 1 8 the amount of money that it costs to make an afghan police officer or military officer or afghan police officer or army and you didn’t need big garrisons right and they walked to work so there’s no infrastructure right and it’s the ultimate decentralized command right it it really is it and and and it it you know it was working and they could sustain it you see it wasn’t anything they couldn’t sustain in the long run so um and every place was different you know if you saw one village stability operation and one afghan local police uh in a village well you only saw one right because they’re all different right and they’re different because you know different people are are making it work right uh and the tribes are different and the ideas are different you go up north yeah the terrain is different yeah the way they’re making a living is different yes everything’s different so you’ve seen one you’ve seen one so there there’s there there isn’t this there isn’t this like uh you know magic formula where you you know you got one and you take that one and you impose it over here no all different right and what i really liked was we carved this up into marshall territory into naval special warfare territory into special forces territory and i i would get the same guys back all the time right they would they would come in for their six months they would out rotate out in their six months and we got that kind of continuity right and we weren’t reinventing the wheel where you know special forces are coming in it happened every once in a while and i remember when i took command to see desoto a um we were coming up let’s see this was april i said hey listen i walk into this headquarters and i see all these lickeys and chewies and all this all these condiments and ice cream and all this other stuff and i go hey if our guys on the ground can’t have this we’re not having it and that’s just the way it is right and let’s talk about thanksgiving and let’s talk about thanksgiving right now it’s april if they don’t get turkey we don’t get turkey right and we had the technology we had refrigeration units we could put out there not not tax anything we had stuff that would run off of off of one of those panels why am i having solar panels and we had all kinds of stuff and we could you know there was all kinds of innovative ways that we could get turkey out to them now some guys got the frozen butter balls and they put them in the freezers and they were good to go but what about those that we couldn’t get that stuff out to well i had this i looked at ron reagan my my law guy and i said hey you got to make this happen and he goes all right well we’re going to happen so julia fuhrman a at the time a young lieutenant log officer comes up with this plan and she goes sir we got it i think we’re going to be able to meet your intent for thanksgiving and i go all right well let’s let’s get it operation turkey drop and our um our guys figured out how to drop live turkeys in and i said okay is this going to be cost prohibitive or what and they go oh no it’s it’s great we do it with the normal runs but we just you know we have got our own shoots we pack our own stuff we’ve done uh several rehearsals we haven’t had any misfires so i’m not gonna get in trouble with peta by dropping in a turkey and the turkey you know the parachute doesn’t you know i was just kidding of course uh and and uh so we did it we did operation turkey drop we got them out there in september all the turkeys because we had to drop grain and feed and you know we had to tell them how to take care of the turkeys and so they did it and on thanksgiving day i got all kinds of storyboards right of these guys eating their turkeys everyone’s happy our guys are happy because they get turkey and all the fixings went out there with it right i mean boxes of um stove top stuffing and then you know all that good stuff right and so these guys are eating that stuff well come january i happen to roll out to our uh one of the marine detachments out there and at the time the young captain there was the son of the commandant of the marine corps and i was going out to see him and i land on the ground and dust settles and the next thing i know i got these two humongous turkeys on each side of us and i go what the heck are these guys doing out here and he goes because oh those are those are our turkeys you know i go these the same turkeys that we’ve dropped to you and he goes yeah yeah yeah and he wants to get off the subject as fast as he possibly can but these turkeys are snuggling up right next to me and he told me what their names were and i we continue to walk and we closer we get to the range the turkeys break off and they go into this tent that’s got and i walk over and they go no no sir it’s this way and i go no i’m going to see what the turkeys are doing the farmer in me is now very interested so i go over to see these turkeys and they got this like they got they’re hooked up they got hay and you know place to eat and drink and tables that they jump up on and all these things and i go what’s going on he goes he goes oh yes sir and he’s looking down at his feet he goes the guys they got the turkeys out here they named him the guys just fell in love with them and they couldn’t kill him and i go you steely-eyed marine special operators couldn’t take take two turkeys down for thanksgiving we couldn’t do it and i go all right this is great and i said hey i don’t blame you you know i get it uh and uh but he goes you know the afghans are waiting for the day [Music] they’re waiting for the day yeah cooks right and so a special forces oda which i was getting my point is we didn’t always have the flexibility of replacing marines with marines and so on and so forth but sf oda gets out there and that next sunday i got a storyboard and they’re eating the two turkeys they didn’t have the same connection with those turkeys and the afghans the cooks they’re all smiling you know they got there you know they’re all happy but anyways then uh so you were in that tour um for 22 months you’re over there in afghanistan and then what what happens when you get done with that so i get done with that uh and they say hey you’re gonna go to the joint staff and you’re gonna be the deputy uh deputy special operations uh guy in the joint staff and i’ll be working for uh general negada now the the the vso idea seemed to have faded and and lost some of its uh steam not so much from what was happening in the field but it seemed like we went in a different direction yeah what caused that well when i got back so i went to the joint staff uh reported there in june of 2011 worked on the staff and there was emphasis taken off of village stability operations and afghan local police from 2011 to 12 but i got told hey you know general or admiral mcraven was now the socom commander and general allen was the commander in afghanistan and they wanted more emphasis placed on vso so i got told that i would be going back in june of 2012 to june of uh 2003 it was going to be a year anyways and they said hey and and tony thomas was going to be the commander there the two star commander and i was going to be the one star sif sock a commander with the portfolio for vso alp and i’ll think of his name as we go but air force one star i was still a colonel i hadn’t i hadn’t come out on the 07 list yet but the one star was going to work as a deputy for general thomas and he was going to do all the direct action stuff right so two portfolios one commander bringing soft under one command and you know tony thomas got that and so we went in there under that construct and and i was told get this back online get it expanded so we did that and by the by june of 2013 90 percent of the um 90 of the rural area was in the control of the um afghan government and it was due to village stability operations afghan local police and we started doing transitions so we were transitioning to the afghans they had put a general ahmadzai became my battle buddy and he was in charge of the afghan local police for the minister of interior and and so he was my battle buddy and i worked with him to ensure that he could he understood and could implement this mission everything from you know making sure they got the training make sure they get the weapons make sure they get the oversight make sure they got you know they’re doing everything they possibly can and it was integrated into the afghan government fully and 100 and were out and we had this on a timeline it took us out about you know 2015 maybe 2016 and we would had completely transitioned it and by that time nearly 100 percent of afghanistan would have been fully under the control of the uh of the afghan government the taliban at the time were saying we’re done al qaeda out you know they were completely ineffective again same thing i was talking about earlier they don’t have the they don’t have the resources to be in every single village and get down to some local village with 280 people in it and and put the resources against it to get control of it and impose their will on it and meanwhile the locals obviously they live there they’re not going anywhere and there’s more of them than there are the taliban capability bill to do it so it was you know it was just it was heading into in a good direction it was heading in a very very very good direction and so um you know by by the middle of by the middle of 2013 um and and everything was you know falling into place to where the afghans and and none of the things that they said you know it wasn’t a perfect perfect program but what program is perfect it was good enough right and it was working and a lot of the things that people really had a problem with just didn’t happen right um the humanitarian you know incidents didn’t occur to the extent that people said they were going to occur and and the you know karzai was not concerned that the afghan local police were going to form you know a huge militia and assault kabul right it just wasn’t going to happen right all these things that they at the political level they were really nervous about just didn’t happen and so i mean i mean it was good right uh and and then you know it’s it’s it’s 2013 and people are wondering hey when you know when are we going to get out of there and so you know the political stuff started you know filtering into afghanistan and you know the ideas of pulling out and so on so forth by 2014 and transitioning to non-combat operations coming out of the villages and stuff like that and so we tried to influence that the best we could with you know rand studies and showing them that hey if we just keep this for a couple more years you know it’s going to be solid and the chance for resurgence will be way low and i mean i mean look what we’ve done in terms of the dropping of casualties you know lowering of casualties record lows record highs and security the taliban are pretty much slapping the table on defeat al qaeda is like hey we can’t operate here anymore and that had a lot to do with the top down stuff going on too because you needed that right so you know the tier one guys weren’t involved in in the village stability operations afghan local police but what they were doing to take out the senior guys was obviously complementary complimentary right so this was good this was a good balance and it was soft was in a good place where we were all working together and we were doing a variety of different missions along our very broad mission continuum and it was way less expensive than sending over a division or a brigade to do it right you know did it keep soft busy yeah it kept soft busy but uh you know i mean in a productive way and the guys saw it right i mean not everybody even our guys weren’t in love with the mission at first you know i mean you talk about it in your book you know about having to explain to guys that it’s going to have to be an iraqi solution to this right and we’re going to have you know and it was the same challenge as i had right no guys we’re not going to be kicking in doors um the afghans are going to kick indoors probably but you’re not going to kick in any doors and if you do well that’s an extreme right but you got to work through with and by these guys they’re the ones that have to own it at the end of the day and so we went through the same thought process but the guys realized that this was still a combat mission that this was not a mamby pamby kind of hand ringing humanitarian thing it was a combat mission and uh and so you know they got it i mean they they they really they really made it work without them no way wouldn’t have happened and so yeah so you start hearing this and we’re getting concerned and the concern is about a drawdown coming drawdown coming right changing from a combat operations to non-combat operations coming out of the village villages too early handing this program lock stock and barrel over the afghans at the senior level too early and you know we gave him the warnings we said hey likely the security situation will reverse likely the uh there’ll be a resurgence and al qaeda will come back right well nobody thought that isis would come back but by 2016 we had a complete reversal because we did we they made the decision they slapped the table we came out of the villages we went strictly top down we put all our emphasis on the afghan national army and police to fight and gain security we didn’t support the afghan local police program anymore it fell you know it fell apart and i think it could have been avoidable i think a lot of other people who have done assessments on it not it could have been avoidable but nonetheless you know our guys on the ground regardless of what mission you give them still do it with honor integrity and they get done what you want them to get done but at the end of the day we saw isis come back we saw al-qaeda emerge we saw emerge we saw the taliban come back in full force the security situation was reversed and we had an all-time high in casualties in 2019 so here we are in 2021 um and uh you know president trump i think had the right idea let’s figure out how we can come out of afghanistan well nobody gave him a plan right when he asked for two years in new administration just didn’t have plan to come out so um you know hey the political situation you know overcomes everything right uh going into a presidential election year a big year for the congress you know um and that starts driving decision making starts driving decision making and really um instead of the guys on the ground right exactly and so here we go and you know the president was responsible the current president who’s got to make a decision right i mean it it is what it is but he was also in charge of when he was vice president you know coming out of iraq in 2011 and going to zero and you know he he just used i think what he learned there in the experience he had there and applied it to afghanistan and boom you know we’re out lock stock and barrel and we although i am an advocate of you know figuring out how to come out of there i’m more of an advocate of coming out of there the right way and there’s a lot to lose there particularly i mean i’m signing a lot of letters today from 20 years of working with people there in afghanistan interpreters and workers barbers you know guys you know gardeners guys that really put their life on the line to um to support us and to help us them and their families and now they’re left there and and so i think i got 45 letters signed right now um and i send everything i do to congressman crenshaw and tom cotton because they’re you know they’re putting together some sort of process to expedite getting these guys out of there but you know um it uh yeah it’s a everything’s political right and and you know we just we’re you know we’re at a point in time now where um you know strategy and policy and security inside our country and outside our country is is uh you know i mean i think it’s an issue i think a lot of americans see it as an issue right um yeah well especially when we see other you know nation states that are making moves big moves and playing long playing the long strategic game and we’re looking to the next election that’s our long strategic game sometimes yeah right now 2022 is our long strategic game right i mean how are we going to change the house and how we’re going to change the senate and how we’re going to get the majority there not so much and how we’re going to deal with china and and how we’re going to deal with a potential invasion of taiwan and how we’re going to deal with russia and their encroachment on the crimea and europe and and their pipeline issues and and iran and and and you know their proxy war and what they’re going to do against israel and north korea is going to follow china everywhere it goes and now it’s working more on its nuclear program than it ever has been and we got you know no visibility on that and and those are some ex those are some existential threats that we really got to pay attention to and they’re real and they’re happening and we got africa right 28 countries in africa that are just getting eaten alive by china and russia they’re getting eaten alive by terrorist organizations that are taking advantage of the ungoverned spaces and that’s dangerous for europe you know the french and the british and the and the dutch and the germans and the italians the front line for the for the war against violent extremist organizations is in africa for them you know it’s mali it’s libya it’s tunisia uh and uh it’s uh it’s kenya and it’s somalia and it’s nigeria and it’s senegal and mauritania and morocco you know it’s all these different places right and you know i mean i spent four years in in us africom and uh two years 26 months of that was commanding special operations command in africa and we had 28 countries over 2 000 special ops troops on the ground advising assisting training and conducting operations through with and by our partners to get after al-shabab right sama isis somalia right out in the east there central africa the lord’s resistance army and now isis is there in nigeria with boko haram and isis west africa and and in chat and cameroon and bikini faso and mauritania and senegal and and all of the uh affiliates of al qaeda that are out there wreaking havoc right the french have over 4 000 troops on the ground in you know from mali to nigeria because it’s their war on it’s their front line right and you have a huge coalition of you know of european partners there i mean i dealt more with our european partners than special operations command europe did because they’re fighting in africa right and so i was always you know coordinating with mark schwartz hey mark i’m going to i’m going to denmark i’m going here i’m going there you know i i went to france five times right to talk to the highest levels of their government about you know what was going on there um and you know uh so what was going on in africa is is something that america has taken its eye off of and 1 4 billion people by 2050 it’ll be 2 4 billion people and incredible amount of resources there incredible amount of resources huge and what goes through south america into the united states you know south america is not very far from the african west coast and you’ve got all those traditional lines of illicit trafficking that go through europe iranians have multiple have have been able to establish multiple places where they have infiltrated africa all over africa to move men weapons and resources at a drop of a hat if they need to so i mean we got other problems out there you know we have to keep our eye on it in afghanistan we shouldn’t be tied to one country uh but we got tied to that country there was a good way to go out but moving to a regional perspective with everything going on in that region is a whole heck of a lot smarter and you know we just need to start considering that but we i still think we have some responsibilities to afghanistan that we kind of overlooked in our in in in our in our um exit there you know you know you we looking at the global perspective and the global issues clearly um that’s that’s all stuff we have to think about but i know that there’s one more issue that you’ve dealt with personally and you’ve tried to help out our troops with it and that’s what’s going on and what happens to our troops and what’s happened to our troops well i guess as long as we’ve been around but we’ve definitely noticed it for sure since these wars kicked off the war on terror kicked off and that’s uh post-traumatic stress and and then the the traumatic brain injuries what was your how did you address that how did you experience that what was that like for you and i know we’ve been talking for a while but i wanted to cover this because i mean this is something that a lot of people are are dealing with yes uh well i think it’s the number one health issue that we have in the united states military today and i believe it’s the same when you look at our veterans and it’s leading to the significant amount of suicides in both on active duty in the reserves national guard and and again in a veteran community right um and i think it’s all has to do with this mental injury uh issue and physical injury and spiritual injury and it’s that triad that i think is hugely important that we have to work on strengthening all the time in the military because you know as well as i do if you’re physically hurting you need that taken care of and mental injuries right uh you need that taken care of and we know by studying uh all the way back to um to sparta right that traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress was something that they looked at they didn’t call it that right but they knew that a conch on the head created problems right and they and they manifested themselves in the inside their their uh their their units their military units and they they realized that they had a an obligation right in an ancient spotter there’s only two people that get their name on a headstone a mother who get who dies in childbirth and a warrior that dies on a battlefield everybody else is buried and spotted with no name no nothing but the birth of a child and the sacrifice on the battlefield the ultimate sacrifice on the battlefield are recognized in that warrior culture so when we look back and we see everything that we’ve done and what we’ve called it throughout the years and and i was one that didn’t have an appreciation for it either right i thought it was a sign of weakness right there’s no way right i mean you know you think about patent and you think about you know the way our society has shaped us and i thought it was weakness as well until it happened to me until i saw it happen in others until i realized was a problem and you know who educated me on this my wife she’s a nurse she started studying it she started seeing it she started seeing how i changed every time i came back and when you get more comfortable being away from your family and deployed in a combat zone than you do at home with your family you got a problem and that was me and it was affecting my relationships with you know my family it was affecting relationships in the military i was i was always you know wired for sound and go high and right really quick and lose my temper not want to listen to people and it just negatively affected everything right and she started noticing around 2008 and she was talking to me about getting help while there was no getting going for help in 2008 in the military i can tell you that right now in 2010 you started seeing programs and they were starting to deal with traumatic brain injury but i’m telling you we have all these programs but what i learned was our approach is wrong right uh it’s our our approach is punitive and we’re going to take you off your team and take you away from the people that you love the people that you want to be with every single day and we’re going to put you over here and we’re going to say okay you’re not going to do your duty you’re not going to do your job and and oh by the way uh we’re going to take your clearance away or suspend it whatever and if you don’t get better in a year we’re going to process you out of the army i mean that’s dod policy right and i thought that was insane well by 2013 um i just been promoted to brigadier general i just got to us africa u s africom just started my job as the operations officer there and guess what my wife came to me and she said we can’t handle it anymore i can’t handle it kids can’t handle it your dog can’t handle it you know klondike are husky at the time um she goes you gotta do something i gotta draw a line here she goes uh and i said you’re right you’re right and she’s talking about losing your temper not being around socially isolating myself staying at work till ungodly hours just avoiding avoiding social events you know the my biggest fear was having to go to a social event right and i would look for every single excuse under the sun yep i’m going i’m going i’m going until i call her i’m saying hey something came up at work i could stay away right check and i would go home right after the event was done so and she’s not dumb she knows exactly what i was doing right and um but she knew it was delicate right and and you know i wasn’t a screamer at home i would just not involve myself in anything right just come home and mind my own damn business not get involved and that was that and you know if something came up i would exit stage right and avoid dealing with it you know and then i would look for every opportunity i could to go deploy somewhere right well when i went to us africom that ability to deploy went away because as the operations officer u s africom the only place i was deployed to was my office right that was it yeah so in 2013 she got me to go but i had heard about this nurse sarah mcnary who had was up at lawn stool and she was really innovative and so i went up and i had a meeting with her and i said listen you know i got to do this under the radar right i mean this is not something that would be accepted by the chain of command if i’m going for pts help so she understood and she put me on a program i went up and it was easy for me to get away right we had africom units up at launch duel uh and you know ramstein near launch tool and i could i could always find a way to get up there if i needed to go for an appointment or what have you so it wasn’t a big it wasn’t a big stretch and it didn’t put a lot of light on what i was doing but i went up there and three days got evaluated post traumatic stress tbi sleep disorder pain management issues neurotoxicity um and uh it was all positive right i mean all the malaria medications and the vaccines and all these things we’ve done all our career all life it was my kidneys my you know uh other organs uh the way your brain thinks so on so forth uh all that positive pts positive more importantly i got put on therapy programs right and so i took advantage of this and i did it religiously from 2013 through 2015 i managed to go through this and then i looked at myself in the mirror what do the therapy programs consist of so is this like sitting down talking with someone is this yeah so they give you a bunch of tests for pts right and they figure out exactly what’s you know what’s wrong with your um you know with your brain and and you know with your thinking and and how uh social isolation is impacting you and you know and they put you with a therapist and they work on those those things you talk about it you come up with strategies to overcome it you you my wife came with me that was hugely important because you know she’s got there’s a quote above my doctors on my doctor’s um office there in launchdual because my wife was with me and he asked me a question and i told him my answer and she goes that’s a bunch of [ __ ] because she knows so he goes oh yeah what’s the real deal right and so i realized the utility in that because sometimes we’re embarrassed by our actions right and we don’t want to fully disclose them well if you don’t fully disclose then people aren’t going to really understand how to help you and and when i had to travel and i had an appointment i did it by skype and so i the tbi i had serious balance issues i my eyes were out of focus and there’s a machine that they test that on and a machine that they fix it on so my eyes got back into balance and my balance got they put you on a balance machine and you know you feel like an idiot and and i did all my balance uh exercises my balance got good you know there was i’d go for a walk with my wife we’d hold hands and i would you know veer off to the right and she’s like hey you’re killing me right and she pushed me back over and so on so forth and so they just have all these strategies to fix your now think about it you’ve got traumatic brain injury as a special operator and your balance is off and your eye focus is off and you’ve got to do a you know high risk ch mh-47 infiltration into a village and and then and then you know fast rope onto a building and then use a ladder to cross from one building to the other and your balance sucks right these are things we need to fix but we’re not going to be able to fix them if we’re not aware of them and so i started thinking about what a freaking coward i am doing this under the radar and not leading the way and so on and so forth so i went back and i talked to my boss about it as the operations officer in africa and i said hey this is what i’ve been doing and i am a different man my wife sees it my kids see it my dog sees it i am different i’m not perfect but i’m a better version of myself and he goes yeah i’ve noticed you’ve been showing up to our uh to our social events on fridays here in africa when i go oh yeah he goes before he wouldn’t come narrow i don’t know i wouldn’t come near him no no no and he goes he goes that’s good all right because i get it and i said i’m going to open it up to guys in the in the in the j3 and i did and i got them all together and i talked to them and i laid it all out and i told them what i was doing and i said i’m a freaking coward but i tell you what i’ll do right now is you want to get taken out of your job you won’t get taken you won’t lose your clearance i will back you up 100 i don’t care if it is dod policy they i don’t care it’s not the right approach so i got your back we did it and i’m telling you a lot of guys that helped i carried that over when i took command of special operations command africa on 24 april and i got with them unbelievable 26 months of data what i thought were uh in discipline issues with alcohol and drugs was self-medication those guys trying to figure out how they’re going to be able to alleviate their pain deal with their issues and still be able to do their mission the best of their ability right and in in south africa we put even the deploying troops that came over we put them through the program and it was huge navy seals marine special operators sf air force guys we got testimonies from wives and marriages that were saved we decentralized the uh the program like i remember i was in niger which we’re up in arlit which is in the middle of nowhere it’s not the end of the world but you can see it from there you know what i mean and and i did my skype you know meeting with my therapist right i mean i still see a therapist right it’s just something that i decided to continue but i’m very high functioning person and that was my point these guys are still high functioning and they’re even more high functioning if we give them the treatment they need it’s just a mental injury 52 people we we diagnosed with pts 471 with with traumatic brain injury 471 and there’s only one guy and you wouldn’t believe how many people with pain management issues right i mean and sleep issues we’re the definition of a sleep you know sleep problems yes we are and and so we got them the machines or the mouth thing whatever they wanted and it was unbelievable you know if you if you get less than five hours of sleep your brain operates like it’s got point one zero percent alcohol in it you know legal limit of uh driving under the influence so for i don’t know 25 years or so i was shit-faced at work without without taking a drop of alcohol you know and think about your decision-making and stuff like that and so the new york times came into the unit said hey uh we’re going to do an article on africa and then she started talking to people he said that’s not the story the story is how we’re dealing with post-traumatic stress and tbi and getting resilience and readiness back in the unit that’s a story you should ask them about that so she asked me about it i told her and that became the story i wasn’t a popular story with the chain of command not a popular story at all and i was told to stop talking about it um the more you talk about it the more problems we have and i said well i don’t agree with that i think the more we talk about it the more we understand it and the least problems we have uh and we get guys in the therapy and we can do it without degrading the mission i didn’t i had 96 96 missions in special operations command and 846 associated tasks and i had zero zero detriment in mission uh and guys got better i mean drug and alcohol abuse you know incidents went way down i went to zero in misappro uh you know uh misbehavior in the uh in the workplace zero right they sent a team from dod to investigate what we were doing right and i said hey it’s just a matter of taking care of mental physical injuries and spiritual you know socom had a great program that they brought in with that integrated families and we had that and we located it in our headquarters and that was something that i had nothing to do with because the rules are that nothing gets reported the chain of command and i’m okay with that right i don’t need to know right guys there with their families working out problems it was really unbelievable after 26 months of you know of this and um uh yeah uh you know it was for me it was a whole process of of leadership and learning and understanding and then being able to say you’re strong not weak if you ask for help right and i had three suicides in my units i i’ll never forget sergeant first class in kenya six month rotation to kenya combat operations with the kenyan special ops rangers uh against el against al-shabab and isis somalia just great work packed up all his gear cleaned his quarters that he was staying in put a note day before he was redeployed went out to the range sat in a chair and shot himself in the head it was more painful him for him to go home at that point in time in his life in his decision-making process then um so he took his life i tell you what man i took a knee on that one you know what i mean i mean a big knee right and um so i said we can’t we can’t allow that to happen you know it’s bad enough to lose somebody in your unit combat but suicide and of course we missed all kinds of warning signals everybody missed warning signals you know who knew the family knew but the family was afraid to talk because they were afraid that if they say anything then it’s going to hurt their their husband’s career and so we need to be better at making sure it doesn’t hurt their career make sure they get the help because we can do it we get a lot of white space on the calendar when guys come back we can make it work and taking these health assessments isn’t going to work right you’ve got to have take these programs and you at the top i’m telling you rich paglisi who was my senior enlisted advisor navy seal great guy love rich i know rich rich and i had the same issues and we would get in front of the unit and we would talk and we would share our personal experiences and we had everyone’s back the only person that didn’t that got taken off was the sergeant major of our our sift team you know our direct action teams and that’s because he took after we talked to him he took all 45 of his guys the next day over the launch tool ran him through the program and when he was getting his mri to see if he had any traumatic brain injury they found a tumor about the size of an eraser on his brain he got medevac to um to walter reed they took the tumor off they said hey you know if you if this had gone another year you would have been figuring out an end-to-life plan and they replaced his left hip that he had been uh you know dealing with for years um and he was a new man right and an advocate of this whole program and you know after he left the team he went off to our training and has been an advocate for this and you know promoting it ever since and this is what you get you get guys with a better understanding from the bottom up but they got to have that top down cover and i’m afraid it’s still not there it needs to be there we got to put it there and and you know i went through the you know what everyone else goes through oh i’m weak something wrong with me uh i’m less of a man and that’s none of that’s true right so that’s that was your last tour was was at sac africom right that was it um you know it was funny i joined the army 29 june 1981 and i gave up command and had my retirement ceremony on 29 june 2017 i didn’t retire officially until 2 august 2017 but you know i came home and went on terminal leave and started helping veterans put together a business called truth to power um which um which i was doing really well with um i’d have about four speaking events a month which was good just bringing in the money that i needed then i got hired to be an associate professor at new england college and i just got laid off and i was trying to find a job i got laid off in may trying to find a job so i ended up applying to hampton police department and i am now a at 59 years old a police recruit in the new hampshire police academy i’m the platoon leader and uh my the youngest guy in the class is 19 years old and i’m like holy crap right and so uh i’ll graduate in november uh november 19th um and uh it was funny because in 1980 i was in class number four because remember i told you about being a police officer and i am now in class 281 and so uh yeah i’ll start working uh working at hampton police department which is the town right next to stratham where i live now in new hampshire it’s uh it’s on the seacoast so it’s right there on the beach and a majority of the the work there is patrolling the the hampton beach area right which is which is going to be cool and uh you know it’s going to be uh high adventure new hampshire baywatch that’s right that’s right and uh you know i mean i’ve always looked at where i can contribute uh and i gotta tell you at 59 years old when i and it’s quite a process too because i i applied and i got my test date of 3 may and i went in took my test with 27 other young guys right and that was the standardized test right so i hadn’t taken a standardized test in over 40 years so i was nervous about that right and i took the test that i passed much to my dismay and surprise and i got set up for my oral interview and i had the lieutenant the sergeant and the patrolman and they go all right we know who you are uh we all voted for you right uh in the last election we know who you are and we know what you’ve done for our country why in the hell do you want to do this and i said hey just looking for a way to contribute and you know there’s no more to it than that and he goes okay and the sergeant starts asking me questions and he gets to the patrolman he goes i don’t have any experience to ask you any questions and i said yeah you do you’re a police officer so bring it on but nonetheless uh you know you do the polygraph and you do the physical fitness test and you do the you do the uh the psychological test and it was like going through special ops again right uh you know all those things that lead up to you getting in you got to qualify physically mentally you know you got to pass the uh the full physical test and i have two prosthetic hips and three prosthetic discs because of combat injuries and that was the thing they were worried about the most right and i said listen i’ve jumped out airplanes with these things i can certainly handle patrol they go okay that’s okay i guess you can right and uh and so um my wife thought i was nuts so that might seem like nuts and then what seems like even more nuts to me is you entering the political arena yes what that what brought that about i was asked i was asked by i got a lot of emails and texts and letters phone calls from people in all 10 counties in new hampshire all 50 states to include across the military asking me to run for office and i thought well if people think i can help them i don’t have all the answers certainly uh not a politician um and i think that many people in the military would attest to the my my lack of political acumen because it’s just not there too straightforward blah blah blah but nonetheless um if you think i can help you i’m going to try and so that’s my why for running and and so um you know i i just want to help our country our economy help us become more fiscally responsible and help us be able to improve the safety and security of americans so that we can all live the american dream that’s all i want to do right the oath i took in the military is still valid i still believe in and and the american dream and and the greatness of this country and and i have a tremendous amount of of exposure to what other people in other places across the world think and feel about america and the promise of america and i think that regardless of your political beliefs or spectrum that you fall on you know god family community and country it’s got to appeal to everybody and that’s my platform and that’s what i’m doing and that’s what you’re doing right now so what is it you’re running for right now just so everybody knows united states senate in new hampshire where you’ve lived for 59 out of 59 or where you’ve been a resident of 59 out of 59 years that’s right um and i’ve been a republican in that state for 42 years my 18 years old first president i voted for was ronald reagan [Music] so what’s the when’s that election timeline so the primary in new hampshire so if i get another republican that is going to run against me which there isn’t one yet the primary election is in september of 2022 and the the general election if i win the primary against senator maggie hassan a democrat who’s been our senator for one term now will be for november 2022 i don’t have a political machine behind me i got to get my name recognition up fundraising is huge so i’ve got to start earlier than those that have already established politicians right and so i’m out now campaigning we’re raising money we’re getting our message out there it’s being very well received i’ve in the last poll you know four months ago when they did a poll i was at 30 percent i’m now up at 45 right so uh we’re moving in the right direction so if people want to help out where do they where do they find you where do they go to help you out so my website is dot www dawnbaldic com and you know uh you can go there and you can either you know if you if you want to help the campaign out uh if you’re in new hampshire that’s easy to do um you just sign up you know everything is right there on the website my positions are there on the website so if you’re interested in how i feel on the second amendment or whatever it’s there and uh if you want to donate it’s there um you know i start pretty low i ask folks to donate 20 and 22 cents 2022 to my campaign and if i get a lot of people to do that i get a lot of money and it’s you know anything helps five dollars ten dollars twenty dollars and twenty two cents two thousand two hundred twenty two dollars yeah that helps too uh but everything helps uh and um and i’m just gonna go there to serve there’s 1 3 million people in new hampshire and i’m going there to serve every single one of them not just the republican party but you’ve got to serve everybody once you get in that office right you got to declare an office and you know my my political beliefs line up as a republican but that doesn’t mean that i don’t i won’t work for and work hard for everybody in new hampshire regardless of whether they’re an independent democrat or libertarian right and i think that’s what we’ve lost in this country with the political divisiveness we can’t come together on three very important things our economy fiscal responsibility and the safety and security of americans we used to be able to do that you know i’m a big fan of jfk you know i mean big fan of him you know and he would not even be recognizable today right as a matter of fact he’d be more of a republican than a democrat today so we got to come together and we need people that i think have had the experiences in life that realize that we’re stronger if we work together than we and we are a part and are we going to have our differences yes but today our differences are just too much too much around what’s really important god family and community also you got social media too right dude yeah we’re yes sir we’re we’re on social media uh everything um i would be remiss though if i didn’t didn’t um didn’t mention the fact that everybody that found out i was coming here to talk on your show was like out of their minds and it was across the political spectrum by the way which is which is uh which is really neat and no no one more excited than my son zachary who serves in the new hampshire national guard uh he was speechless i mean he was like jocko oh yeah he just couldn’t speak right and he goes why didn’t you tell me and i go i mean i don’t know i mean i just you know uh but um well we have i i worked with the with the national guard extensively my uh deployment to ramadi they were there when we first showed up and they were just complete warriors and professionals and uh it was an honor to serve with those guys so i nothi nothing but love for the national guard that’s for sure yeah he’s coming up on his six years and he’s going to become a veteran he’s already made that decision but nonetheless i am proud that he served his country and my youngest boy matt is a senior at purdue and he just finished his uh his lieutenant training uh so so they’re upholding the tradition he’ll be a second lieutenant on active duty uh look out another baldic is coming fellas so awesome that’s probably probably a good place to stop echo you got anything oh yeah real quick going back to the marijuana fields oh and this is going deep yeah yeah yeah and you mentioned booby traps yes like what kind of booby traps are in them the no the the the marijuana growers back in the day would put booby traps around their marijuana field so people who wouldn’t sneak in and steal their everything like what kind of booby trap so you would get the booby trap where you came across it and it would be just uh it would it would kick off like um like a uh a ditch of uh like napalm fire would come up also like violent booby traps bombs the old ones with um like you like the you know uh you know vietnam era stuff where punji sticks and and they they would they were spring-loaded kind of things and they would come and they would just hit you in the thigh or the leg or what have you upper body those those kind of things yeah dang that yeah they were they were serious they were scary well because i’m quiet and this is bad back in the day too when when it was illegal but uh they’d have booby traps but it would be they wouldn’t be violent booby traps they’d just be like alarm type like you know like i heard one where they had just like cases and cases of mouse traps so like if you sp if you stepped on it you nudged it and it was like like you know like a bunch of birds taking off or whatever but louder it’d be something like that like that kind of stuff they had those two violence early early warning devices yeah yeah they’d have that and but they also had the closer you got the worse off it was for you and that’s why the the um the the forest rangers were always you know they were very appreciative of us going in there because we’d take it very slow and you know our guys were trained very trained very well and we had you know we had some technology to help us out as well so uh but yeah it was there it was ugly and we’re lucky that we didn’t set any of them off that we were able to either go around them or you know um neutralize them different way with you know old-fashioned way with uh with the um the rope and the grappling hook grappling hook pull them out and watch what happens wow that was a good show glad we weren’t around that right on yeah general any closing thoughts well i think the only closing thought that i would have and since this is you know you focus on leadership a lot is um i’d just like to let everybody know that um throughout all this i realized that i was uh imperfect leader and that as long as i remembered really three things and that is to remain humble thankful and grateful and that i never let my ego get in the way and i was always self-aware of my weaknesses and worked on those and let my strengths be what they are um it was better off for me and everybody else around me and these type of shows and the things that you do and what this show does for anyone who listens to it uh is is uh is hugely important for america because right now what we need more than anything else is effective leadership it is it is a huge huge issue and and something that i think my experiences teaching in college and being around my own kids and being around others is they’re thriving for for you know leadership in these examples that we have seen in the past and and you represent that here with this show and i just want to thank you for this opportunity i’m i’m humbled and grateful for it and and so thank you for what you do and thanks for letting me tell my story well thanks for coming on thanks for joining us uh more important thank you for your leadership your service to our great nation your sacrifices overseas it’s been a long war for america you were there for most of it and that’s saying a lot and you are still continuing to fight for america we appreciate it thank you god bless you thank you very much and with that general don bullduck has left the building definitely uh seen a lot always looking to improve i think that’s something we can definitely take away maybe we can all look to improve maybe that’s a good idea echo charles yes sir any suggestions on where we can start to improve ourselves yes what do you got well he did mention how he’s he didn’t say he was the oldest one cadet in the police uh i think it’s safe to assume he’s the only one i assume yeah um but he did imply that he you know but the fact that the point is he’s out there staying capable talking about jumping out of planes with hips a certain way to the extent where they’re like oh yeah you pass just you can do you can still do this kind of stuff you were this capable you’re in meaning the hips past mustard yeah exactly right they’re good to go remember they they’re like um oh you would you know they’re concerned about his hips or whatever and he’s like hey i jump out of planes with these hips and they’re like oh and then you can patrol that’s right point is very capable high levels of capability 59 29 19 years old whatever we’re maintaining it the clock is ticking the clock is ticking i heard so we want to keep ourselves capable mentally physically of course right through this path of capab capability chasing we’re chasing capability of course through this path we’re going to take some beatings 100 take it from me yeah you do some jiu-jitsu you take beating sometimes sometimes that neck gets sometimes yes and they’re gonna get squeezed on that one so you know how like i said hey after i rolled with you that one day and i was like man i like i feel like i got hit by a truck and you’re like oh yeah full body doms right oh yeah it’s way more than full body doms psychological got some emotional doms as well man and that’s that’s real you know these are that’s just one of the many examples of the beatings you’re going to take on this path no problem though sometimes you need some supplementation to help you through those beatings in fact you get through these beatings that’s when the capability starts to emerge see i’m saying additional levels of capability anyway got some supplements for you gonna help you help us so first supplement i wanna talk about is a new era of energy drinks straight up like the the old new category new category real category new paradigm paradigm shift one two three oh mia discipline go yeah so no sugar it’s a healthy energy drink straight up that actually tastes good yeah i saw someone someone wrote hey i thought jocko didn’t drink energy drinks i heard him say he didn’t drink them unless he really needed them well why is that that’s true that’s a fact it’s a fact before this came out because you weren’t going to want to drink one of the other the energy you weren’t going to you didn’t want to drink those unless you had to yeah i’ve got a 19 hour drive i’m 14 hours into it i’m fading i need something to boost me up for the next three hours okay cool overdose with caffeine get your jitters on but you get there yeah so that’s what i used to do for sure now all of a sudden it’s like oh i’ve got something that i can drink it’s actually healthy for me and it gives me the benefits of energy right it’s a no-brainer yeah it’s true so do do i drink traditional old school poisonous energy drinks the answer is no i don’t yeah i used to occasionally if i needed to now don’t never need to do that again because we have an alternative that’s functional yeah and works so there you go and tastes good do you drink kombucha no have you ever ever tasted it i’ve probably it might have almost touched my lips but like i can just smell stuff and i don’t like it but that’s wonderful oh kim kombucha is no exception in that regard but it tastes junk it tastes bad i know people including people that i’m related to that are so down with kombucha okay i get i do more females like kombucha than males i i don’t have those numbers in my family that’s what i’m going on my family females are drinking kombucha yeah kombucha what is it kombucha kombucha they’re drinkin it females males not drinkin my father-in-law straight up makes it straight up it’s like a process it’s a thing and then i assume he drinks it yes sir he does but in my experience yeah more females are into kombucha than males but that’s not the point the point is if you ever tasted it you’re like cool kombucha is so healthy you know it’s detox and whatever they say about kombucha i don’t know i don’t know that ain’t worth it it’s healthy we’ll just say bro tasty you’re like all right i’ll endure that taste for the health benefits you see insane but there’s no reason to do that no no there’s not that’s the thing so this one especially the mango flavor oh you drink that one you’re like wait a second tastes good and healthy and gives me energy no no lose situation right there okay just so everybody knows the the the mango flavor there’s no difference other than the flavor yes you can’t put it over here on a pedestal of whatever it tastes the best so you know in your opinion yes yeah i think and you know the consensus is still kind of being formulated because new which is another kind of novel thing new new flavor so you know you want to look at that one i always go back to old faithful jocko palmer yeah i can’t i can’t argue with that right yep it’s legitimate yes sir jp danielle pointed out that jaco palmer tastes good whether it’s like room temperature or whether it’s cold yeah you’re good to go orange is like that too for sure so yeah get your oh yeah it’s called jocko discipline go if you didn’t know already which you know most of us do know but we i do want to kind of reiterate these things about it yeah by the way it’s available in wawa right now and we’re working on a bunch of other convenience stores you’ll be seeing it but everyone that’s been going out to wawa and just clearing shelves thank you yeah because that makes the other you’re actually helping everyone in the in the nation you’re helping everyone in the nation because other convenience stores look at wawa and think oh how’s it go they go oh how’s it doing there whoa yeah you’re selling a lot of that stuff so that means other convenience stores go all right we want it to and they’re saying that so we appreciate east coast troopers out there clearing shelves in wawa yeah it does make sense right if you’re uh let’s say a convenience store owner yeah right a guy who makes the decisions whatever and he’s gonna be like wait a healthy energy drink he’s gonna be thinking kombucha or something like this where it’s like cool it’s new might not taste that good whatever but wawa’s over here demonstrating that hey brother it’s gonna taste good too you know so they’re like oh i get it now you know they’re kind of connecting the dots a little bit yeah there’s all this data and it’s been great so again sincere appreciation everyone that’s been rolling out to wawa and just getting it appreciate it that’s awesome and you’re helping america because now the rest of other convenience stores are getting on board and then other people will have access to this wonderful nutritious as as travis mills said nutritious and delicious nutritious and delicious fully also other items that can that do help us on the path is we got some joint stuff joint warfare super krill oil another good thing for your joints um and the thing is it’s a big deal and this is like we always say this is one of those things where this really pays for itself in a way that’s like invisible because you’re not worried about your joints you’ll feel the difference when you don’t have it here’s here’s what’s interesting we have a massive amount of subscriptions to those two so people yes send it to me every month because they want to not miss out on that goodness yeah and then we’re just worried they don’t want to worry about that and if you want to subscribe to it you get free shipping by the way which is cool we don’t have to pay for shipping you can also not pay for shipping if you go to a vitamin shop you can get all the stuff at vitamin shop they’ve also been supportive and everyone has been supportive rolling in the vitamin shopping buying stuff so very cool we appreciate it we’ll keep making milk we’ll keep making things that taste good and are good for you yeah that’s what we’re doing jackalful com you know also originusa com this is where you can get american-made denim shoe or boots some other all the cool new stuff that pete thinks up working pants got some jiu-jitsu stuff on there as well so if you’re joining jiu-jitsu you don’t have a ghee yet or maybe if you do have a ghee origin and they’re always coming out with some new keys yeah yeah i said that in kind of a but let’s face it the geez at origin like i put a i have the first like one of the first rift geese i have i was wearing it yesterday where were you yesterday i was at you know somewhere okay while i was training on the mats of justice sure i was wearing the first a dish yeah white rift key those things are freaking unbelievable it’s like a whole new thing era yeah a paradigm shift since you said that earlier yeah yeah they’re yeah they’re they’re the best the the only downside is that you will potentially be spoiled and that will throw away your other geese yeah or at least marginalize them i had i put on one to see oh yeah does this still fit and you know feel it and you feel it you’re like bro i would never wear this i mean cool respect oh you put on one of the old ones the old ones yeah and it’s it just simply went out of the rotation yeah and plus you know it has bad karma why because it was made by a slave lady yeah yeah china yeah yeah what’s cool too is and we can you can see this on the origin youtube channel it’s like it’s the opposite of slave labor it’s like it’s one thing to be like okay you have slave labor okay they don’t want to be there they’re kind of in a way like obligated or forced in one some way to be there and they got to make this stuff okay that’s terrible obviously but then you have like maybe the quote unquote standard where it’s like hey that’s the job they’re going to go and they’re going to do it then you get origin you go there bro those their way every single one you see them all man they care they care about that stitch you see them saying they care about like the whole deal then they make that ghee then you get to wear it that’s gay that’s the then you get positive karma good karma with that ghee all around good karma with those jeans the working pants supporting american economy as well that’s a big part of the whole gig amazing yeah so win-win wins across the board origin usa com cool stuff on there very cool also speaking of cool stuff jaco has a store it’s called choco store so yes discipline equals freedom shirts hats some uh rash guards on there uh hoodies on there schwartz on there you want a shirt that says good with or without jocko’s face you got the option though anyway some good stuff on there check that if you look at that stuff you like something get something we do have a subscription situation on there as well called the shirt locker cool designs depending on your opinion sure but we think they’re called general consensus they’re cool design they’re fun you know a little bit different so we’ll say creative i don’t know i’ve heard the word creative thrown around okay nonetheless uh you can check those that out as well it’s all at jackal store subscribe subscribe to this podcast wherever you subscribe to podcast you can also subscribe to unraveling jocko unraveling with daryl cooper we’ve been making some of those lately we have the grounded podcast which we haven’t made lately does it need to be revived from the ashes yeah it’s possible uh warrior kid podcast it’s another one i got a i got a letter from a little kid they had one question for uncle jake yeah when’s the next warrior pawn kit kid podcast coming out because i’ve only made i think 37 of them or something like that yeah but they’re there you’ve got a kid warrior kid podcast we also have jocko underground com we have a that’s a little um little sovereign area of the interwebs that we built to make sure that we can remain free out here and because look these people doing are all kind of weird stuff with these platforms that we’re on so far everything’s been cool it’s cool we appreciate it but contingency wise you can’t just you can’t build your house on someone else’s land because they might come around and and kick you off right so we made our own land it’s called jockowunderground com if you want to help us support that land if you want to if you want maybe a little room on that land maybe you want a little plot yeah we can get you one it costs 8 18 cents a month hey if look and if you if you need to come on to the land the sovereign land of the jocko underground and you can’t afford it it’s okay we want you there as long as you’re in the game you can just email assistance jacounderground com that’s we appreciate it again for real if something goes sideways on these platforms we’re going to be there and and as a as a appreciation we do another little podcast it’s usually about an hour we talk about some other subjects we answer q a questions that have been sent directly to the underground that’s true then we cannot tell you what’s up so that’s that we also have a youtube channel and a lot of people correctly identified on the latest release of the mayhem movie sure that echo charles made sure a lot of people recognized that there was a some powerful assistant directing going on in there i’m serious i saw i’m the assistant director yeah and uh and also you know kind of i had a supporting role in that yeah one would you say i think so actually you might have been the lead on that one i don’t know zero lines yeah which is they they were powerful though that’s the thing your zero lines because your whole performance is powerful because big shocker echo made a movie and he’s the star of it that’s kind of the feeling that most people got like it was a clip of us talking about it or whatever and um how like you know that the time you’re you’re clicking on the can or whatever in the in that video or whatever it gets me i guess at the end of the day i was giving you props for that uh-huh or whatever yeah and i feel like everyone including maine thai is kind of just sort of recognizing you straight up you’re the ad assistant director so i still feel like i’m in the shadow of the star yes the person with all the lines yes and the most camera time yes yes you are you are no that’s you dude yes our youtube channel we do have uh uh on top of jacqueline the assistant director we do have the video version of all this stuff if you want to see what general don bullduck looks like you can come on here yeah and check out the youtube channel youtube is you know one of those things now it’s not just a video thing anymore it’s like some people it’s their preferred method to like watch tv listen to podcasts or whatever so i dig it and we got you that’s where we got this whole thing i think i’m one of those people yeah i mean does anyone watch tv like actual tv like a show yeah is that happening yeah okay some dvr action okay i don’t know if people still watch it live like live no i don’t think so like that might be connected very low numbers objected to commercials and stuff so commercials are kind of a non-starter for me at this juncture of my life yeah you know what’s weird in my kids kind of the same way is like i like i like commercial not all of them but well fast forward to them but if i see one then i’m like oh wait let me see that commercial like it’s kind of there’s no commercial there’s like a because some commercials there’s a little story within the commercial it’s kind of good i feel that way a little less so yeah anyway yeah the point is we have a youtube channel boom subscribe to it subscribe to it if you want it’s a good one so yeah there you go also psychological warfare if you don’t know what that is an album a jocko album with jocko tracks on there telling us how to get past our moments of weakness when we have them and i have them from time to time but you don’t got to worry about that kind of stuff because doc will tell you why you should get over them 100 uh success on that one 100 if you want to hang something cool on your wall why not make it something from flipsidecanvas com that my brother dakota meyer made owns he is the i want to make fun of how do we make fun of him he’s the creative artistic director of that thing there you go dakota creative artistic director i think that’s the title he’s always wanted yeah i don’t doubt it it’s a good title that’s dakota one of my heroes and if you want to get some stuff to hang on your wall flipsidecanvas com got a bunch of books i’ve written a bunch of books the one that’s coming out next is called final spin we don’t know if it’s a novel we don’t know if it’s a poem we don’t know if it’s a manuscript we don’t know what it is but it tells a story a story with some lessons i let my oldest daughter read the book final spin and she got done reading it and she came out the kitchen and like i could see that she just got done reading it and i go oh well you know what’d you think and she started explaining to me what she liked and what she didn’t like and she started crying while she was explaining it that’s when i said to myself okay looks like i found it it’s like we got it we got what we wanted yeah that’s funny which is to have some kind of an impact right that’s what we want yeah i want that thing to leave a mark a little bit you ever think about that like why do we ever cry during the movie no come on bro zero when you’re young you never cried there in the morning oh no we’re not you didn’t say when i was young ever yeah when you were young whenever yeah yeah one movie uh i’m pretty sure e t you know what sucks is i watched et with my daughter who’s when she was 11 when i watched it with her this was just like this year have you seen e t lately no not lately uh steven spielberg no offense that movie did not stand the test of time hey i went to the theater when i was a kid and i saw that movie and i was with a friend of mine and we were kind of you know little tough guys we were probably 10 something like that little tough guys you know and we were bawling and i watched this movie what part is the end of it or something i don’t know he goes home i mean eventually right that’s like well it’s supposed to be the so i watch it with my daughter and i’m sort of bracing for her and i’m thinking all this is gonna be she she just it was bad it didn’t stand the test of time now look jaws as you know i mean jaws one of my favorite movies steven spielberg good job credit that stands a test of time and then some now could we go back maybe cgi some shark activity we probably could i guess i don’t really want him to do you want him to no no you like it old school so keep it the way it is bruh but you’re not going to beat quinn and chief brody right it’s not happening um i mean who ca who’s going to do better quinn let’s face it so steven spielberg jaws stood the test of time good to go credit however e t bro wait why because the story or just because especially the whole thing the whole thing the whole thing it was like an okay movie but i don’t like okay movies yeah you know that doesn’t do it for me they got to blow you away yeah i want to get i want to get something it takes an hour and a half to watch a movie maybe two hours sometimes i’m not and at this juncture in my life if something’s not good to go i’m done no time we’re not watching it yeah i will leave a theater i will leave i’m not watching this stupid or you know what i’ll actually do sleep dang straight like get some rest oh yeah if i’m with my wife or my kids and there’s a bad movie we once saw okay have you ever heard of a horror movie that’s called it yeah it yeah yeah yeah so the first one came out my kids really liked that horror movie my wife doesn’t even watch one millisecond of a horror movie the first the first the first of the new ones because it is old school the first of the new ones dude with the clown face and uh yeah that’s all the print and penny wise yeah that’s always the story okay so i watched the one of them okay and it was okay but then my kids were all amped yeah and so we actually went to the theater to go see it the second version or whatever chapter two whatever we roll in there it is so bad i just was like i i watched maybe seven to 12 minutes of it maybe maybe and i was out sleeping caught up with something caught up on some sleep they woke me up i saw the last the last seven minutes of it yeah it was so bad and we all walked out of there my kids thought it was bad too oh for real thing okay that makes sense you ever okay this is okay now we’re kind of deviating but i don’t care you talk about it it’s cool i’ve never seen the new ones i saw the old ones like they’re super long too and cool i get what they’re doing and they’re good but it the new not chapter two like the first one of the new ones so the thing i didn’t see any of them but they have a trailer for that oh man it’s a really good trailer there you have a few of them but it’s the one where it’s like hey um there’s georgie and then the older brother i forget the older people i was sleeping and he’s like hey you’ll float too like hey if you come down here or everything floats down here that’s what the ghost kid says right everything floats down there i think that’s what the clown said first i guess anyway so he’s like if you come down here you’ll float too and then like this beat this horror kind of beat and like starts speaking up and he goes you’ll float too yo float it’s really really well done trailer on that one yep well it must have been better than the movie i think so and remember a long time when we were talking you’re like oh why did you start video or whatever and the whole phenomenon that some some movies actually a lot of movies i mean i could name a lot of movies that the trailer is better than the movies like watching the trailer provides a better like experience than watching the movie yeah that’s totally true so that phenomenon is kind of what made me like want to do videos or whatever yeah it that’s one of them you have to say the t distinctly yes so final spin we don’t really know what it is but it will withdraw some emotions some lessons learned some thought-provoking material yeah final spin cool you can pre-order it now that way you can get the first to dish it’s going to be kind of rad to have the first dish of that i think it’s gonna be extra cool so check that out leadership strategy and tactics field manual the answer to all your questions is actually in that book leadership questions the answers are there the code the evaluation the protocols discipline equals freedom field manual way of the warrior kid one two three and four mikey and the dragons about faced by hackworth which i wrote the forward to extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership i got echelon front which is a leadership consultancy and what we do is solve problems through leadership go to ashlandfront com for details this is where you can find details for our live events we have the muster we have field training exercises we have ef battlefield the next muster is in las vegas october 28th and 29th the next ftx is in september it’s september 20th and 21st it’s actually sold out so yeah we sell things out if you want to come then go to echelonfront com and click on events and you can find all this stuff we also have online training the extreme ownership academy leadership is a skill that you need to practice it’s a perishable skill you don’t you don’t take one jiu-jitsu class now you can kick people’s asses yeah you don’t take one leadership book read it and now you’re good to go no you actually have to train that’s why we made extreme ownership academy online leadership courses it’s a leadership gym for you to go through we have live sessions i’m on out there all the time answering questions go to extremeownership com for that also if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star families check out mark lee’s mom mama lee she’s got a charity organization go to america’s mightywarriors org if you want to donate or you want to get involved and if you want more of my anti-climactic anecdotes or you need more of ekko’s yattering yarns you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on the gram and on that facebook echo’s adequate charles i’m at jockowink and again general don bolduck can be found on facebook twitter and instagram at gen gen don d-o-n baldur b-o-l so if you want to check out what he’s up to or you want to support his campaign you can also go to don bullduck com d-o-n-b-o-l-d-u-c dot com and thanks once again to general bulldog for joining us today and for being out there from the beginning holding the line to protect our way of life and the same goes to the rest of our service men and women out there right now also holding the line to protect our way of life and the same goes to the police law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thank you for holding the line here at home to keep us safe and everyone else out there on september 10 2001 we were at peace the next day september 11 2001 we were at war in one day everything changed and that’s the way life can be too things change things happen people get sick people get hurt we lose our jobs we lose our loved ones anything and everything can change in one day and when it does don’t get caught back on your heels instead go forward go on the attack and continue to fight until there’s peace again and until next time zekko and jocko