knowing what you know about war and the teams if you could go back in time what would you have done differently man I wish I could go back in time Dave Burke and I were doing an event earlier this week and he was he said you know I’m glad I’m not Ramadi I know Lafe probably wish he wasn’t rowdy 100% i’ma go there right now let’s go and look it’s what I would do differently is the recognition that we were super aggressive we took a lot of risk what I would do differently is I would actually be even more aggressive I would be a hundred times more aggressive I would be putting up you know a concept of operations brief for your for your approval to send up the chain to swim across the river and hit targets and and and you know put in some cyber over watches and just completely ruin the bad guys program going on in South Central my when they had complete freedom movement before they had any expectation that we could be there before he might get to us and I think they would never see it coming which means that we would have more impact and it would actually be safer for us because they wouldn’t be expecting it so they were probably hammers but we recognized that we could get away with a lot more you know that then we could and looking back on it I just when you when you come into an area in there like hey don’t go in there you’re all gonna get killed you you want to be cautious you don’t know you don’t want to just jump into things you want to mitigate risk and control certainly but we recognize we could get away with a lot more than we thought we could and more often than not bring bring guys home and of course that’s the one thing I would change obvious if I could change if I would trade places with Mark Lee and ride Joe in my platoon in a second I’d trade places with Mike Monsour indelible to it in a second and I don’t wish I could do that and I can’t but that is the that is what I would change but I certainly would if we could go back there again we would be even more aggressive and we’d have even more impact there’s a term that that they used to say and the teams I don’t know if you ever heard it you probably did when we be doing special reconnaissance training and guys would say trust your camouflage did you ever hear that expression you may not have I don’t want to listen so what it was was when you got good at putting your camouflage together you could really get aggressive in getting up and observing a target because if you trust your camel if you’ve done a good job with your kami paint your ghillie suit and and putting yourself together well the enemy is not gonna be able to see you but it’s really weird to be you know 40 meters from a target that you’re looking at then there’s a guy walking around and you feel completely naked like they can see but they can’t see you at all they can’t see you at all and so it takes some it takes some time to learn to trust your camouflage and I think you know obviously hindsight is 20/20 and when you look back at your mati like you look back and you think yourself what we could have done this we could have done that we could have gotten closer to that target we could have done more things because our hindsight’s 20/20 and also we learned over time to trust our camouflage and the longer we were there the the more aggressive you know operations took place but yeah let’s hindsight’s 20/20 isn’t it that it is
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