The Days Grimm Podcast
The Days Grimm, "arguably Indiana's most comical, thrilling, and controversial podcast", This three-pronged mandate acts as a primary filter for their guest selection. The "comical" aspect is reflected in its official genre of "COMEDY INTERVIEWS" and its history of hosting local stand-up comedians. The "thrilling" component is evident in interviews with individuals who have extraordinary life stories, such as people who survived shootings, rare medical conditions, and combat. Finally, the "controversial" element is demonstrated by Brian & Thomas’ willingness to engage in difficult or unfiltered conversations, touching on topics like homelessness, artificial intelligence, and religious hypotheticals.
A crucial element of the show's tone is its tagline, "Brought to you by Sadness & ADHD (non-medicated)". This self-aware and raw positioning signals a modern comedic sensibility that embraces vulnerability and finds humor in personal struggle. The podcast's brand is not built on polished narratives but on the authentic, often messy, intersection of hardship and humor. The most compelling guests are those who have navigated a "Grimm" reality and emerged with a story to tell, and ideally, a sense of humor about it. This dynamic is the core of the show's appeal and the primary filter for identifying a story worth telling.
The Days Grimm Podcast
Ep.228 Paul Linberg - From the Baseball Field to the Battlefield
Join Brian Michael Day and Thomas Grimm on a new episode of The Day's Grimm as they sit down with a special guest, a Marine veteran and Evansville native named Paul. In this candid interview, Paul shares his incredible life journey, from a promising high school baseball career to serving multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This episode covers:
A Life-Altering Injury: Paul recounts the high school baseball injury that ended his dreams of playing professionally and led him down a new path.
A Shift in Focus: Discover how Paul's eye injury led him to explore his artistic side, playing in a high school band called Phoenix Dawn and making short films with friends.
The Road to the Marines: Paul discusses his fascination with military movies like Forrest Gump, Black Hawk Down, and Rambo, and the family history that influenced his decision to enlist.
Military Life Unfiltered: Hear firsthand what it was like to go through Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island and the unique challenges he faced. Paul also weighs in on popular war films like
Warfare, 1917, and Lone Survivor, offering his veteran perspective on their accuracy and realism.
This episode is a powerful exploration of resilience, service, and the unexpected turns that shape a person's life.
[The Days Grimm Podcast Links]
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDaysGrimm
- Our link tree: linktr.ee/Thedaysgrimm
- GoFundMe account for The Days Grimm: https://gofund.me/02527e7c
[The Days Grimm is brought to you by]
Sadness & ADHD (non-medicated)
Hello, hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome to another thrilling episode of The Day's Grimm. My name is Brian Michael Day. My name is Thomas Grimm. Thomas Grimm, who's joining us in the studio
SPEAKER_02:today?
SPEAKER_01:You know what I mean? Like, do you ever feel like, do you ever think about it that way? Like, you could almost like, it's almost like I could die tomorrow, it doesn't matter. Like, every day after is just a win. You know what I mean? Like
SPEAKER_02:a cat on their fourth life. Yeah. I mean, you definitely get a level of perspective, you know? Yeah. You start seeing how other people live and how a hard life can be, and you're like, this is not bad.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, how insignificant you are as a person. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, dude. So, if I'm here, I'm right inside the grass, baby. That's right. That's a win. That's right. Paul, how are you, sir? You doing okay? I'm doing well, man. It's warm up here, so I apologize in advance.
SPEAKER_01:We're going to sweat together, dude. It feels good to
SPEAKER_02:me. I'm all right.
SPEAKER_01:Nice, cool 79 degrees, I believe.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you got out later than Brian, so you're probably more accustomed to the heat. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:A couple trips to the desert, I believe, right? We were talking Iraq versus Afghanistan. You did a couple to Afghanistan, and you did do a couple to Iraq? That's
SPEAKER_02:right.
SPEAKER_01:Nice, dude. I was
SPEAKER_02:going to say, what about for the conspiracy theorists out there? Were you doing any archaeological digging or anything like that? No. No, no, no, no. What do you think? I think when you see that pop up on your feed, does that pop up on your feed? No, thankfully, and now it probably will. We're in different feeds, yeah. Yeah, now it probably will. I didn't even know that was a thing. Yeah, I think that the tomb of Gilgamesh is in Iran, and then in 2003 when we invaded. That's a character from the Lord of the Rings, right? Yeah. Close enough. I think so.
SPEAKER_01:Well, damn, dude. Welcome to our really hot studio, man. I'm really pumped to have you. I always enjoy a military guest. I'm a big fan uh supporting the veterans as we're gonna learn today so are you you go out of your way above and beyond to help people out and that's great um but before we get into that we should probably go to like
SPEAKER_02:where it all started like where you so are you from evansville were you born here born and raised east side oh yeah which high school memorial memorial shout out to the okay the cake eaters uh nice dude memorial panthers tigers tigers close enough both cats Both
SPEAKER_01:cats. No, they just went to state. Both have rights in the name, right? Yeah, Memorial Rites High
SPEAKER_02:School. They just went to state a few years ago, if I'm not mistaken. They go to state quite a bit. Yeah, they've got a good football program. Soccer team, lacrosse. Hell yeah, brother. Speaking of sports, do you play sports? What's like growing up? Yeah, so I grew up playing all the sports. Like Little League and all that? Oh yeah, I played baseball year round most of my life. Wrestled, played football. Got to Memorial, was playing freshman baseball And then that summer, I was playing for Newberg Junior Legion, and I injured my eye at a practice. Playing baseball? Yeah. I was wearing contacts, and I slid in, and I got dirt in my eyes, and I ripped it out real quick and didn't think anything of it. And next morning, it was hurting really bad, and I could barely see out of it. Ouch. They were like, hey, we went to the ER. And they said, hey, just put this gel on there and put a patch on it. You'll be fine. Did that. Next day, I couldn't see out of it. And it hurt way worse. Oh, shit. And went back to the ER to a different doctor. And he said, basically, keep doing the same thing. And it was what had happened. And you're how old? I was 16. And you're like, fuck, I'm going to be blind forever. Right. I just got my license. Now I can't drive. Yeah. That's a tough break. So what happened? What winds up giving? It got, it got a, um, there was an infection and it developed an ulcer on my eye. So, I mean, imagine the, all the white part of my eye was blood red and all the Brown was white and like, it looked like a snot on top of it. Um, how hard did your recruiter have to work to hide that? Oh yeah. Yeah. He had to work a lot. I mean, I, yeah. People are like, how'd you even get in the military? I mean, my vision now is still probably like, I think it's like 2,200 in my right eye. I don't know if that's good or bad. That's terrible. I don't know numbers. 20-20 is perfect. Yeah. So anything higher is bad. Oh, it's just bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just bad. Usually people who need glasses, it's like 20-40, 20-60, 20-80, and I'm like 20-200. Oh, like 20-200. I'm picturing like 2,200 in my head for whatever reason. Oh, yeah. No. Sorry. I mean, I think that's how it is. I'm real stupid. You had to basically quit playing sports to do this eye injury. So this big kind of jock athlete, and then it was like, well, can't do that. I had no debt perception. I mean, I spent a whole summer sleeping in my parents' basement and I couldn't come into the daylight. Every time I shut my eyes, I would get immediately dizzy and I'd throw up. So I spent months just staring at a TV in a chair until I passed out from exhaustion. That's how I slept. That is brutal. Did it ever get better? No. No. You can't really correct it. I've actually gone back. I went back a couple years ago to say, hey, is there any new advancements?
SPEAKER_01:Right. You guys got LASIK. You're
SPEAKER_02:replacing Have you seen where they replace eyes with teeth?
SPEAKER_01:What? Yeah. Oh, fuck. Then we're going down a dark road.
SPEAKER_02:I've seen the horror movie Teeth. Is that what we're referencing? Yeah, yeah. Same thing. Because that's a nightmare. Yeah, same thing. Just have like two canines sticking out of your skull. Yeah. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:I don't know about that. Tooth in eye surgery. Osteo odonto keratoprothesis. Jesus,
SPEAKER_02:Murphy. But this uses like a last resort for these people that have like no eye and corneal blindness. And what they do is they take a tooth and they drill a hole in it and they put like a fake lens in it, almost like a camera lens or whatever. But since the tooth comes from the body and it's all calcium, the eye won't, yeah, it won't, the socket won't reject it and they can like attach something that allows them to see out of it. Oh, that's wild. What the? Who's the guy who thought of that? You know, I got an idea. Hannibal Lecter. Yeah. I'm only thinking about fucking tesla now all of a sudden the rc boat sorry uh yeah what kind of madman was like guys hear me out i want to put i want to put teeth i want to put teeth in somebody's eye socket uh that's wild um so shout out to that guy hopefully it works or if it doesn't they've
SPEAKER_01:done
SPEAKER_02:it
SPEAKER_01:a
SPEAKER_02:few times
SPEAKER_01:i it went down a rabbit hole i saw it i was like no way
SPEAKER_02:well
SPEAKER_01:how attached to your teeth
SPEAKER_02:are you
SPEAKER_01:you know what
SPEAKER_02:i mean uh
SPEAKER_01:so like uh so then what how's that how long is that recovery process like uh
SPEAKER_02:that that took i mean it It was basically just endure it until your body just kind of gets used to it. You know, it was, it's really the equilibrium. I would get dizzy all the time and I finally kind of figured it out where I could go outside. If I went upstairs, I took a black two sock and I would wrap it around my eyes. Cause even just shutting them, it was too bright. No shit. Yeah. That was a miserable summer. Oh my God. So, and then did you try those like the big thick glasses or any? Oh yeah. They, they tried to give me those in bootcamp. Like, a real thick i mean it was like this thick and like a clear lens basically yeah like horse blinders yeah i was like these are silly i'm
SPEAKER_01:not how do you so like you get your eyesight back and then is that like when it changed for you for like hey like sports isn't gonna be an option i'm gonna
SPEAKER_02:go then i just kind of you know i started playing guitar and listening to music and kind of getting a little bit more artsy yeah your eyes suck but your ears still work
SPEAKER_01:you know what i'm saying dude i still got my fingers
SPEAKER_02:so i did that yeah it was i mean it was cool you know i played I played in a band in high school. Who'd you play with? From around here? Yeah, it was a local band, just a high school band. Well, I might remember. Who was it? Because you're only a few years older than me, I think. Yeah. I'm 41. I'm 35. Who was it that you played with? Phoenix Dawn.
UNKNOWN:Phoenix Dawn.
SPEAKER_02:I love it that we're getting this shout out of Phoenix Dawn. Oh, yeah, dude. We're going to have to look them up on Spotify. They're definitely not on Spotify. Oh, fuck, dude. But that's sick, though, dude. So how long did you do that for? I did that for like two, three years. While you were in high school. Yeah, in high school. And first year of college, we did it. Oh, yeah, dude. What else did you do? So, okay, you're 16. You get through that summer. You're going into, what, your
SPEAKER_01:junior year. You finally can see again normally. You can be outside. I mean, how fucked up is your eye at this point? I got to ask. I
SPEAKER_02:mean, it's still the same as it was. Could you see anything out of it, or is it just completely blurred? No, it's a complete blur. Even now? I can see you. You're just as blurry as something. than you know 200 yards away no shit that is super blurry to me and you're right-handed aren't you yeah
SPEAKER_01:so how'd you get in like oh
SPEAKER_02:yeah well let's get hold on let's get through high school because i'm curious so what did you do junior senior year like what well i know so like for me like when i had my tumors or whatever but like when you recover from that it's almost like a like a awakening experience of like a like like a near-death experience but not really but like it makes you realize that like certain aspects of life are futile yeah fickle well i I mean, my dream when I was little was to be a professional baseball player. That's what every little kid plays. That was it. Yeah, I was like, I'm going to do that. MLB. I want to at least play in college, right? Yeah. And that was just like, nope, you're done with that forever. Yeah, at 16. What a heartbreaker. Yeah, so I really just started listening to a lot of music, playing music, going to a lot of shows. I love... hardcore shows. Oh, yeah, dude. Which was, like, huge around Evansville at the time. It was a huge scene, yeah. At the time, too. Did you ever go to, like, The Rev? I did at my uncle and cousin were in Metalhead, and they went to, like,
SPEAKER_01:all the
SPEAKER_02:local shows. Yeah, we used to play in all the local shows with a guy, my buddy Jake. He had a band called Morning by Morning, and we used to play with those guys all the time. They were a big metal band or hardcore band around here.
SPEAKER_01:Hell, yeah. Like, I used to go to, because I was too young when it was real, real big in Evansville, but I would go to, like, the Wired and the Boney June shows,
SPEAKER_02:but I couldn't go to like bars and stuff because I'm like in high school when the scene was like popping. You know what I mean? Yeah. But yeah, there were some
SPEAKER_01:good bands like Emma Rosa that came through and stuff like that that came out to Boney June's. There were some good folks that came through, but that's cool, man. So you do that all the way basically
SPEAKER_02:through high school. Did they have recruiters come like your junior year like in the lunch or was that like a thing of a later generation? Yeah, I had an army recruiter come and I was like, yeah. your interest or did you have family in the previous military? I knew I was going to be in the military. I knew it. Just not the Army. You were like, I'm not going to lower my standards that low. I can finally get some shout outs back to the Marine Corps. Get some punches back for the Marine Corps. All the shit we've been talking about. My grandfather on my mom's side, he was in the Army. He was in World War II. Awesome dude. Always loved him. looked up to him. Um, and my dad's dad, he was in the air force during world war two. He went to Germany. He didn't really do much as far as like anything, you know, cool. I would say. Yeah. But still honorably served in a dangerous time to be a pilot. You know what I mean? Oh, he wasn't a pilot or well, yeah, but there's no way he was a pilot. He's like, nah, Pappy wasn't smart enough for that. But you know, I had both my grandfathers were in the military and, you know, he'd grow up watching, you know, Oh, bro, don't even get me started. Rambo, Schwarzenegger, Commando, you know, like all the, you know, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, all those movies. I was obsessed with them. It gets you teed up. Oh, yeah. And you're like, let's go kill some Viet Cong. And you're like, what? This is 1985. What are we talking about Vietnam for? Fucking relax, dude. I just, I always had a fascination for it. And I was like, man, that's something I could do. What is that? I don't know. What is that? Tom, were you fascinated with war movies as a young
SPEAKER_01:man I think all guys are and we still are that's why Call of Duty is such a big game but like you know what's
SPEAKER_02:funny though is like a few years ago they were like oh a guy thinks about the Roman Empire every week and I was like I kind of got off of that like I was thinking about other empires and like other things not maybe the Roman Empire every week I think about it but I think it's like the history of like power and wars and I mean it's probably deep in DNA you know
SPEAKER_01:absolutely are you a big history guy
SPEAKER_02:I
SPEAKER_01:find a lot
SPEAKER_02:of military dudes are big history dudes. If I was probably good at any subject, it
SPEAKER_01:would probably be history. Which is funny because I was decent at math but
SPEAKER_02:sucked at literature
SPEAKER_01:but
SPEAKER_02:good at history. History is just, I feel like, a guy's subject. Can't read, but I can learn. Tell me once and
SPEAKER_01:I'll remember. Can't memorize dates, but I can tell you what happened. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:yeah, yeah. Dude, that's so wild. But no, I think that's a funny... For me, it was... You watched Forrest Gump and you were like, oh, I can do this.
SPEAKER_01:Bro, it's funny you say that. Forrest Gump was one of the films I was fascinated with. It was the Vietnam portion of the film where I was just like, oh, that's so fucking cool. Some dirty dirt is out here just saving people out of gunfire. And then another big one for me was Black Hawk Down. Got me hard, dude. I
SPEAKER_02:remember being in high school when that came out. That came out in like 97?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, about small. Maybe not high school. Maybe I
SPEAKER_02:watched it in high school. No, maybe I'm off. It was like 2002. It was like 2001, 2002. I was... I was an adult then, so I liked it, but it wasn't an influence. You were already in. I went in in 02. Okay, you were right there. No, I went in in 04. I graduated in 02. So for me, I'm in junior high, and I'm watching Blackhawk down, and I'm like, look at these Delta dudes just smacking dudes in flip-flops.
SPEAKER_01:I'm like, that's
SPEAKER_02:what I want to do, dude. I want to be the good guy. And that was the moment I knew. I was like, I think I'm born to kill people. It was Rambo First Blood Part 2, man. Such a good one, dude. I was just like, dude, I want exploding arrowheads, and I want to shoot at these people. I want to be in a boat on a river that no one's ever
SPEAKER_01:heard of before. You're like watching James Bond, and they got all that crazy tech, too. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I was really into James Bond growing up, too. Dude, I'll tell you what. While we're on this topic,
SPEAKER_01:real quick, before we continue through the timeline, what are some... I'm a big film head. Love film. Same. What are some...
SPEAKER_02:Have you seen Warfare? I have. Fuck. I was... Eight out of ten? Seven out of ten? Man. I'm conflicted. You are? Because I couldn't stop bragging about it. And I've never even been to Iraq. But just the anxiety that that film dreads up, that anxiety is real. Yeah. I watched it with my wife. Yeah. And, you know, right when it opens up, you see the shadows, right? Yeah. And they're moving along a wall. And I was like, oh, that's a Terp right there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Because I could tell by his helmet and just his silhouette. Like, that's an interpreter.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And, you know, there it was. And then it was the long quiet and, like, that buildup. The anticipation. The anxiety. I felt that. I was like, oh, man, this is pretty good. You can fucking taste it. I love that about it. You think that's also maybe bad for some people, though? No. I want to relive those moments. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe just me. I mean, it's not like I was having flashbacks and crying. Yeah, exactly. It was just like, I appreciated that part of the film where it was like, okay, like I, if I can feel it, then like the director of photography understood this. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but when it, when it came to the actual, um, tactics and the way they kind of portrayed the characters i was kind of like man if i was these guys i would be pissed right now they do like the scene where they have bad guys on the rooftop of their building and nobody goes up there i'm like what are we doing guys he's not even pulling security on the stairs he's like looking away from the stairs i'm i'm i'm like a broken record and my wife is looking at me i'm like dude they're not even pulling security what are they doing right now pull up son there are people just shooting at them from the building they're in and they're just like oh that's all upstairs we're We don't need to worry about that. Okay, I'll be quick on this last one. Sorry, Tom. He's getting very furious with me right now. No, because I was going to ask about 1917. Okay. I did see that. What did you think about the one take 1917? That was a beautiful film. I thought that was cool. Very well put together. Yeah, I thought that was really good. About the messenger who had to literally cross 60 kilometers to just transfer a message that the war is over. That was the gist of the film. Yeah, and it was shot like a one take. Yeah. Very well put together. I really like those kind of films. I wish I could remember that director's name, but he did a hell of a job. He's done a couple films now. He's really good. Is it Christopher Nolan? Was that Nolan? Nolan did do that, I think. No, that wasn't Nolan. Sam Mendes. Oh, Mendes.
SPEAKER_01:Sam Mendes. Yeah, phenomenal job, Mr. Mendes. What do you think about Lone Survivor?
SPEAKER_02:Now, before, I will say that I read the book twice before the Marcus Luttrell book, Lone Survivor, twice before I watched the film. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But holy shit, like having, and you might attest to this because you did two over in Afghanistan. There were like some really valuable moments in that film where I was like,
SPEAKER_02:Oh yeah. Okay. I mean, okay. My like determined, it's, it's hard for me to watch those movies. Not because I get some kind of feeling, but as soon as I see Hollywood kind of take over, try to portray something like somebody throws a hand grenade and you see like a giant fireball come out of it. I'm like, well, it's not real. I'm out of it now. Yeah. It's just a dust cloud brother. And you're going to be, you know, a lot of pain after. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, I thought, I thought it was a good movie. I mean, it was entertaining. Well, was another one
SPEAKER_01:in afghanistan the guy that his name's chris i read the book operation god damn it uh the guy from pirates of the caribbean was in it um what was that afghanistan war movie um god damn it it's so good i read it it's operation something damn
SPEAKER_02:it lone survivor outpost that's what it was the outpost oh i Films are tied together. The
SPEAKER_01:Outpost is a Hollywood cinematic film. The Restrepo film you've seen, that's just a helmet cam footage
SPEAKER_02:basically shot, whatever. So in Restrepo, you hear about their sister company that got taken over. Like halfway through the film, they're like, hey, our Charlie company, sister company has been enveloped. Like they're shutting down. They're getting the fuck out. Enemy in the wire. It was really, really bad. And they portrayed that in Restrepo. That's what the Outpost was about. It was the same um uh what is it 10th mount or uh i can't remember whatever
SPEAKER_01:mountain division but that was them that got overran that's what that film's about 10th mountain 10th mountain yes um yeah it was really
SPEAKER_02:bad interesting the film's not bad but the book is better uh i read the book by there's been a few soldiers that were in that deployment that have written books but there's one like new york times
SPEAKER_01:bestseller and that was a phenomenal book
SPEAKER_02:so did you go marines off the rip yeah so like what was that boot camp like is it I mean, out of all the boot camps, I'm not military, but out of all the military boot camps that we've had people in for, I always hear about the Marines being the toughest. I mean, you hear Goggins' story.
SPEAKER_01:Watch your fucking mouth, brother. I'm right here, dude. We're best friends.
SPEAKER_02:Can I get one of those? This dude's such a dick. You want a plat? Yeah, give me one. Tell me why the Army sucks. Tell me how you're disappointing me again, Dad. Did you have anybody die in basic? No. No, I did. No. We had a kid die of a heart attack. That was when Jack 3D was getting real big. Oh, yeah. And we thought we were going to the gym to do PT, 4 o'clock in the morning, 5 o'clock in the morning. He takes a scoop of Jack 3D, puts it in his water, slams it. No, slams it. I thought he put it in his monster. No, then drank a monster right before formation for PT, slammed a shot of 3D, and then drank a monster. And then we're getting ready for formation, and they're like, all right, we're doing 12 miles today.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. Fuck. Is that a Yelp? He died right in front of my company building, bro. Yeah. He just answered the question for you. I mean, they had Monster and Jack 3D in boot camp. Right. Do you remember Jack 3D when
SPEAKER_01:it first came out? No, they didn't have that in the Marine boot camp. We
SPEAKER_02:had water and a green canteen, period. Nice. Yeah, no. Well, we're a bunch of bitches. I'm sorry. You know what he should have done? He should have pulled out the stress card. Probably. This wasn't Fort Jackson, though. This was Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the infantry. Kill anything that moves. I got questions. Sand Hill, baby. Did you have to swim with your hands tied? No, not in boot camp. Not in boot camp? We just did a swim test. You do a bunch of swimming, though, right? Like pool work? Yeah. Which is basically drowning. You don't do a lot in boot camp from what I can remember. I mean, hell, it was 20 something years ago. What is it, like 500 meters? And that's like the minimum? Probably. And then you got to swim with like your camis on and be able to tread water. With boots? Yeah. That's a nightmare. I don't remember the details of it. And that's for Marines, right? You're not in Navy boot camp. Like the Marines have their own boot camp. No, we have two boot camps. Right? Even
SPEAKER_01:though they're
SPEAKER_02:like tied to one another? East coast,
SPEAKER_01:west coast. Yeah. The Navy and the Marines are kind of the same.
SPEAKER_00:No, I think the
SPEAKER_02:Navy calls
SPEAKER_01:the
SPEAKER_02:Marines in. for help as
SPEAKER_01:like a private sector person that rides on the boat, right? Explain it to me so I'm not stupid.
SPEAKER_02:The Marine Corps is under the Department of the Navy. Okay. But they're not tied together. That's where the connection is. Yeah, okay. I knew it was something. We have a good working relationship with the Navy, but Marine Corps is its own command. Got it. Like, period. You guys have your own general that you guys report to, like the main commandant or whatever you guys are. Like the, you know, the Joint Chiefs. Yeah. You know, we have a Joint Chief. Yeah. And then you have the Secretary of the Army. There's a Secretary of the Navy. We don't have a Secretary of the Marine Corps because we're under that department. You
SPEAKER_01:guys are too manly to have secretaries.
SPEAKER_02:Well, we always say we're the men's department. I've
SPEAKER_01:heard that before.
SPEAKER_02:So another one of our
SPEAKER_01:podcasts you should watch is the guy that was Marines and then switched to Army. He's in the Army currently as a recruiter. We did a film blanking on his name. I'm so bad
SPEAKER_02:at names brother morgan howard jesus christ yeah morgan howard's interview is really really entertaining because he is a guy that did like two years or four years whatever the minimum is for the name for the marines probably four he did a four year yeah and on his way out he was like i'm gonna switch to army and then he switched over to army and now he's a fucking recruiter what did he want to do in the army i wonder recruit i don't know how they got him that's how you can do that in the marine corps i don't know how they got so like i want to know they got him like so Did the Marines, once you get through boot camp or whatever, do they analyze what you would be a specialist at and then assign you based on that? No, you find out before you go. Okay. I'm sure it's just like in the Army. You take your ASVAB. They tell you what you qualify for? Yeah. Like, hey, you're smart enough to do these jobs or you're not very smart. Do you remember all your options? Yeah. I mean, they probably say it to everybody. Like, hey, you did really good on that. You can be anything you want. They didn't tell Brian that. They told me it could be two things. I think your ASVAB's the same as mine, or it would have been back then. 35 is the minimum. I don't even remember. I got a 36. They were like,
SPEAKER_01:you could ride in
SPEAKER_02:a tank or walk around with a gun. I was like, I'll walk around with a gun. ASVAB waiver right there. Hell yeah. You got a GED, right? We'll give you a gun. Let's go. Dude, they were reluctant, too. They were like, fuck. Do we got to take him? Yeah. All right. Get in here. You went in in 2009.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, 2009. That was peak ASVAB. Afghan time, man. That was a good... Afghan, yeah. Yeah, that was right before we smacked Osama. Yep. Osama went down in 10, I think. We were actively patrolling
SPEAKER_02:the Chinese and Paki kind of border. Yeah. And actually, where I was... Can you pull up a Chark Logar? Chark...
SPEAKER_01:Logar, you just search the city chart, Logar, Afghanistan. So he has geographic reference, but it's not far from the Paki Chinese border, actually. So
SPEAKER_02:up north then? Northeast. Yeah, northeast. Yeah, northeast area. So we were RC East, right? Yeah. But yeah, there were a lot
SPEAKER_01:of munitions moving through there. Yeah, you're getting close. Here we go. Here's Logar. Yeah, Logar touches
SPEAKER_02:Pakistan
SPEAKER_01:and
SPEAKER_02:China, I thought. Yeah. China's further north. Kabul. Yeah. China would be up here. Yeah. I am mistaken. It's only the Paki border, but it was, it was a hot little AO.
SPEAKER_01:It was nice, dude. It was real nice. That's where fob shank. If you've been there, that's where fob shank
SPEAKER_02:is. I never made it over that. That's who
SPEAKER_01:we, that was like our sister or parent fob that
SPEAKER_02:we, that was where everybody went. They got blown the fuck.
SPEAKER_01:What did, what path did you choose?
SPEAKER_02:Uh, so when I got a backup, so I graduated high school in oh two when I was a senior uh 9-11 happened. I watched it. I was in first grade. In history. First grade.
SPEAKER_01:I remember it. Dude, we talk about it sometimes. They
SPEAKER_02:sent me to therapy for it because I was drawing on the top of every school paper two towers and planes hitting them and smoking
SPEAKER_01:them. They sent me to therapy. That's
SPEAKER_02:what's wrong with kids these days. Actually, no. That's what's wrong with Tom. He's a sociopath. All right. Yeah, bro. He's really regretting coming on the podcast. If I didn't have a pneumothorax And I would have enlisted, but they wouldn't take me because of the pneumothorax. You had a pneumothorax? Yeah. I've treated a few of those. At like 17, 18. Yeah, you had a lung collapse. Did you get hit by something? No. I was tubing on a lake.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. He also passes out at the sight of blood, which is a vague word. Or too much talk of it, which would have been interesting in the military. No kidding. So, yeah, that's one thing I will preface with when we get in. If you want to talk blood, guts, and gore,
SPEAKER_02:which I'm totally cool with. I'm totally cool with that. But
SPEAKER_01:we did once on the show. not even military related a guy was a runner and he was telling us about an injury that he sustained but we can we can chill you know he said you can stop now yeah we've been we've been boozing you know like it's funny like as I do substances alcohol whatever like my tolerance for the talk lowers but like I mean I passed out at work this is something
SPEAKER_02:that you're not comfortable with
SPEAKER_01:yeah like to a degree it's happened ever since I was little it's
SPEAKER_02:his brain dude he's got a bad brain cause I'm sitting here like alright let me think of what I could say he'll drop I'm already buzzy he'll drop I could die definitely make you pass oh yeah like they don't want to take much dog like i listened to a lance armstrong podcast and they mentioned blood doping and i passed out just blood i get the image in my head and it plays on a loop and
SPEAKER_01:all right let's shut the fuck up because i know right i'm watching my heart rate right now we're getting in the thick of things yeah i don't want to ruin this interview halfway through
SPEAKER_02:brother so i'm a senior yeah so you're a senior so so i had just like signed my selective service card and everything you know because i was 18 and
SPEAKER_01:for the draft yeah and explain that people that don't know what that is a lot of people just sign that paper and don't even ever normally their parents just sign it for them or they have you know what I mean but what is
SPEAKER_02:the selective service from what I can remember it was it's you put your name in all males you
SPEAKER_01:have to do that when you turn 18 yeah I just asked him you got
SPEAKER_02:to do it when you're 18 you put your name in the lottery in case there's never a draft again yeah but yeah 9-11 and I was like oh I mean I like to say I was 18 and I could I understood what was happening but nobody really understood what was happening you're a fucking child And I was like, mom, I'm going to the Marine Corps. And she was like, no, give me one year of college first. So I was like, all right. And I went to Ball State for film. Shout out to the Cards, dude. Yeah, for film. Shout out to the Cards. I was like an art guy. I wanted to make movies and films. Had you played with cameras at all before that? Yeah, yeah. No shit. You were just filming like your metal shows? We would film that and my buddies, we would make little stupid videos, kind of like Jackass before there was
SPEAKER_01:Jackass. Yeah, Brian did that when he got back. Brother, I think you and I are a lot more like the defense. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So I was like, and it's really weird when, when I talk to my buddies now and they're like, are you into college? Like, yeah. What'd you do? I was filmed. They're like, no.
SPEAKER_01:We're using camcorders.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. We had the handhelds for a while. I don't think we even had digital
SPEAKER_01:at all. Remember when the mini tapes in the side? Yeah. CKY when that shit.
SPEAKER_02:Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Dude, CKY. Fuck it. And then Jackass came in and
SPEAKER_02:just fucking changed the game, dude. Oh, we did all that stuff around, you know, around town and we would just make little movies. Then there was like a motocross one too. I forget what that one was. was called before Nitro Circus before Nitro Circus yeah it was before that there was one there was like CKY then Jackass came into the game and then there was
SPEAKER_01:some dude was Pastrana involved in that one I think so it was like Pastrana and his boys had something they would put on YouTube or something Nitro
SPEAKER_02:Circus so it would have been whatever their side project
SPEAKER_01:was before
SPEAKER_02:that but it was just a really that was a dope time to be alive dude it was yeah god damn yeah it was I'm telling you man oh dude anyway okay so yeah we would make like little horror movies I'm a big horror fan
SPEAKER_01:hell yeah I'm a big horror guy me too we're gonna have to talk on that yeah
SPEAKER_02:so we did that i love horse yeah we did that and uh you know i was up there i mean i got good enough grades but it was just like i'm just wasting i'm wasting money you're just idle you're not in totally 100 in on it no and i moved back and went to usi for like a half a semester and was just like i've had enough you pulled out half semester dude yeah no shit yeah i was like this is not gonna work and i which prof was it that walked you out the door like who was it you know what i don't It wasn't like a thing that happened where you were like, fuck this. You didn't attend one of Dr. Perry Burnett's classes and just get your mind blown? No, I'm telling you. I was just at USI two weeks ago for a conference, and I don't have a single memory of that campus or any class. Not a single memory. It's totally different from 20 years ago, brother. Yeah, I was just like... where am i right now but uh yeah there's probably a lot it's a
SPEAKER_01:d1 campus now bro yeah it's a
SPEAKER_02:fucking big deal it's like a city yeah so i i mean i i didn't get recruited you know i i just i walked right into the marine corps and said hey i want to be in the marines dude neither did i i walked straight in yeah i was like bro i'm here and they were like hey yeah like we can you can i said i want to be in the infantry and they said well we can we can get you in you can be a combat engineer you can do this right now and i was like no i'll wait i'll wait all right i'll wait for someone to die over I mean, it was 2004 when I had finally got in, but I was just like, yeah, there's no shortage of infantry.
SPEAKER_01:Bro, I was talking, I think it was Morgan Hauer I was talking to. I was like,
SPEAKER_02:you know, talking about infantry guys and why we're so easy to recruit. It's because we're fucking constantly dying. You know what I mean? It's just like, it's so easy. A high replacement rate. It's so easy to like rank up in the infantry too because like people just die. So like the selection, you know what I mean? Like you rank so high. It's much faster than if you go and be a– Or they get hurt or wounded or, yeah. Yeah, and then they got an ETS out or whatever. But, yeah, then you're just– So what was boot camp like? Yeah, let's get into boot camp. What was that like, dude? Oh, man, boot camp. Where did you go? Parris Island? Parris Island. And that's in California? Nope. That's on East Coast, South Carolina. What's the West Coast one? Hell, I don't know. They call it– it's MCRD. No. No, that's– So Parris Island is where? MCRD is Marine Corps Recruit Depot. There's one, the West Coast. San Diego area. I don't know the name of the base. No, you're good. Is that where the translator and logistics people go? No, it's basically the Mississippi River. Gotcha. You split.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, so if you sign up for the Marines and you're east of the Mississippi, you go to Parris
SPEAKER_02:Island. If
SPEAKER_01:you're west of the Mississippi,
SPEAKER_02:you go to California. Yeah. I mean, there's some exceptions in there, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Roughly. That's the rough estimation. I got you. So tell me a little bit about Parris Island. What did you think? Did you do the shark attack thing right off the bus? Is
SPEAKER_02:Parris Island the place where all the people came over when they first came? No. Different place. No, it's Ellis Island. It's in New York. Rhymes. Both islands. Yeah. See where your head's at, brother. Yeah, no. The yellow footprints, you know, they come out and they scream at you. You know, you get your hair cut. So you did get the shark attack. Yeah. Like day one. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Day one. So you're like grabbing four bags over your shoulders and shit. Yeah, there's no mercy. Yeah. I mean, from day one to graduate. On graduation, there's no mercy. So walk me through a little bit about boot camp. Yeah. I'm sure there were phases, like phase one, two, three,
SPEAKER_01:four, A, B, C, D. Or was there ever
SPEAKER_02:a time you wanted to quit boot camp? Not really, no. I mean, boot camp, it's tough, right? It's tough for any 17, 18-year-old going. I was 20 when I was going. Yeah, I was 20. So I was like an old man. Yeah, you're a man. You're grown. There's a lot of breaking you down mentally. Build you back up. To build you back up. And that breakdown. And I could kind of see it, but man, I had such a hard time. I'm just laughing a lot because I was like, this is silly. Why are we doing this? Oh, you would actually laugh out loud? Oh, and I would get destroyed for it. Brother. Yeah. Made you stronger. I would try to hide. Made you stronger. I'd be laughing. I mean, it's... And they're like, do 20 push-ups and you're laughing that you got to do 20 push-ups. So, I mean, and I say this all the time because it's funny, but it just seemed like this big... It's like everybody get naked and jump in the shower. And it's like, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? This is so weird. But you know, we, we, yeah, I was like, I don't know if this is like lightheaded. I laugh so hard. I'm like, is this a standard or you guys have some kind of fetish? Are we going to be doing this full time later at some point? Yeah. Uh, but I would laugh like I would just, they would say, they would say shit and I would laugh so hard. It's ridiculous. There's a good story. I'm sure there's like benefits to it though. Cause like if something happened, like if a shower got, If you got bombed, you can't be afraid to see Joe blow his dick. It's like mentally breaking you down, and you're uncomfortable. You've got to be. A bunch of dudes, mostly, are uncomfortable. Yeah, if we were doing this podcast naked. You're squishing into each other. Yeah, it'd be weird.
SPEAKER_01:I'd be glad I'm behind the table.
SPEAKER_02:Take your pants off. Let's do it. So
SPEAKER_01:you had thought of a funny story. Tom's real good at interrupting people, if you haven't gathered that at this point. I'm a terrible person.
SPEAKER_02:I'm a terrible person.
SPEAKER_01:It's true. You're not wrong. Your grandpa was way cooler. You
SPEAKER_02:probably had it in your boot camp. You had to do, like, an inspection. They would bring in, like, the battalion surgeon or whoever, the head doctor, just like a wellness check. Okay. And you'd have to stand on your footlocker naked. So, you know, imagine 60 guys, 30 on each side standing. You're standing like this, and they would come up to you, and you'd have to, like, you know, this recruit has no whatever, whatever, no problems. Are you in draws or are you dick out? No, dick out. Oh, my God. I'm enjoying this. The guy across. Did
SPEAKER_01:you guys do drag racing?
SPEAKER_02:The guy across me was uncircumcised.
SPEAKER_01:Oh,
SPEAKER_02:nice, dude. A little anteater? And the drill instructor came up and he just stops. And he just points at it and asks him, you know, what is that? And then he started calling him a bivy sack. Oh,
SPEAKER_01:remind me what that
SPEAKER_02:is. A bivy sack is the thing that carries your... Your sleeping bag. It zips over you and protects you. Yeah, and you can zip it shut at the top. Yeah, you zip it shut at the top. Yeah, and he started calling him a bivy sack, dude. And I was laughing. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, dude. Yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_01:Hell yeah.
SPEAKER_02:He was rocking a heavy, heavy bivy sack, dude. So, like, initially... What the hell is that? There's a lot of this. There's a lot of this, like, making you uncomfortable and just ridiculous, you know, hazing. I mean, ridiculous. It's harassment. Yeah, I mean... It is. They're making you stronger, though. Yeah. Yeah. The physical fitness was really good. I mean, it sucked. Can we pivot here? Yeah. Actually, this is a good stopping
SPEAKER_01:point. I want to mention this because, like, so I had multiple buddies that, like, went into ranger school. A couple of buddies of mine from my deployment have now gone into
SPEAKER_02:special operations with the Army. Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:As far as PT goes, when I was in basic training, basic training for the Army, PT was fucking cake. Yeah, it's not hard. The quote, the testing? Yeah. Run two miles sub 15 minutes or some stupid shit? Yeah, we were three miles.
SPEAKER_01:Do you see this thing? I did. Well, I want to say,
SPEAKER_02:I knew somebody that was in the Marines, and they did some training thing, and they had something. You had to carry a dummy, like, go retrieve a dummy. Oh yeah. But it was covered in like pig guts, like real life pig guts. I didn't know like if that was, it's a new APFT standard, which you just retired a year ago. So you may have been a part of that where a couple of years back, at least in the army, I know for sure they changed the PT test to an APFT test and it's whatever the fuck that acronym. Yeah. I would've got up to the bottom and fainted and had to carry me back. You know what I mean? But it does involve like buddy carries. It does involve, we have a combat fitness test and a physical fitness test. They did that probably like 15 years ago, maybe 10, yeah, 15 years ago. When they changed it for the Marines? We still have the PFT, physical fitness test, but then they added the combat because there was a lot of guys who could run three miles in 18 minutes. Really fast. Yeah, but they couldn't run in boots and utes or carry something or they have to throw a grenade and you have to low crawl and you have to do a bunch of stuff like ammo can lifts. Yeah, that's kind of what the APFT. And the guys that excel at that are like David Goggins doing 200 miles on no knees. Yeah. You see that? He just finished
SPEAKER_01:a 200 miler. I believe it. I believe it. Yeah, I
SPEAKER_02:believe it.
SPEAKER_01:The funny thing is I do want to stop on like the SF thing. That was going to be my question is like because I'm like such a short statured fella, I'm like 5'9". Right now I'm heavy. I'm
SPEAKER_02:lifting a lot. I'm doing a lot less cardio. I'm about 200 pounds. But in my prime. Bulking phase. Yeah, in my prime. Like in my like prime fighting fitness, I'd be like 170. Oh, nice. 170, 180. That's like where I thrive.
SPEAKER_01:But like I noticed that like the PT challenging in Boot Camp or basic was super not challenging whatsoever no and then a lot of my buddies when
SPEAKER_02:we came back from afghanistan they got all these cool schools and i was getting out they were telling me about the pt standards that they fucking hold and i was like yeah why the fuck is the army standard not not that like it's a lot worse like the the selection or like rasp or whatever you are doing three four five miles on some of these tests and you've got to do it in a you're rocking and yeah you're swimming across the lake in kit like there's all this crazy shit i'm like why don't they just make the army pt like a little more intense well they wouldn't have anybody to serve we're gonna get into your later like in the swimming like are there any like did you ever swim when you were overseas never no it's all mountains that's what like i wonder if like in the future of like schooling aspect like we'll get out of like away from the military even but like i feel like you're gonna find like like kids athletes i Like our generation of kids growing up, athletes, you played every single sport until you found one that you were good at. And then you maybe played another sport in the off season.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But kids nowadays are finding baseball, only training baseball, only training for baseball. And they're like blowing the standard out the
SPEAKER_01:ubiquity. He's getting at ubiquity. I wonder if like,
SPEAKER_02:don't you think like, all right, if you're training to fight a war in the middle East, you would do less swimming training more. Well, to that point. So the, I like what you're about to say. I already know what you're going to say. They, I mean, sure. You didn't probably do a lot of swimming. We're, we're Marines. We're amphibious. We are on ship a lot. Ship sink sometimes, you know, so you gotta have, you gotta know how to swim and you're not just training for the war right now. You're training for any possibility. I mean, something could pop, pop up at any moment. And, you know, I mean, it always seems silly to me. Like, why are we, why, you know, why would I go to dive school? There's no oceans around, you know, Iraq. I'm not going to go dive anywhere over there. You But then when you got to blow up an oil line to Europe, here's a contemporary real world example. Like when we were at war in Iraq before 9-11, the army had mountain course training
SPEAKER_01:that you could do. Yeah. It was a real thing. Yep. And at the time, guys signing up for Operation whatever the fuck it was over there. I don't know. The first go around when we fucking... set up shop and shut the whole thing down in like 72 hours, that whole
SPEAKER_02:thing.
SPEAKER_01:When that was popping off over in Kuwait, this mountain training, they're like, why is this a school? Why is this even a class? And then flashback to hashtag never forget,
SPEAKER_00:now
SPEAKER_01:we're climbing, we're goddamn billy goats with fully automatic machine guns 8,000 feet above sea level at the base of the mountain in Afghanistan. They
SPEAKER_02:still have cold weather training. But that's the point. That's the point is that if some shit pops off in Siberia brother, you better be ready to go. Right. You know what I'm saying? A little side note. Where'd you meet your wife in this?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's such a good question. You are a married man, so gentlemen, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_02:Man, I'm trying to think of the year. Was she from Evansville? Yeah. So you met her like in high school before you deployed? I knew her. Well, she knew me in high school. I didn't know her. She was a freshman. I was a senior. Okay. So I didn't know. That's good.
SPEAKER_01:That's
SPEAKER_02:good. And then I had come home for leave, gosh, I want to say probably 12 years ago, 13. She's going to kill me. So you've already done a few deployments before you met her? Oh, yeah. Yeah. We can pause there and
SPEAKER_01:go back to your first deployment. Let's do that. I just wanted to make a mental note of where this is. where she was in the timeline. So let's, let's go to
SPEAKER_02:like your first deployment. You get out of basic, you get to go home or bootcamp. Where do you get to go home? Where do you get stationed at? I, so I got stationed in, uh, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. I was in first battalion, six Marines. Okay. Did you guys have a cool nickname? Uh, the death walkers. There's shout out to the death walkers. Yeah. Uh, tell some of your boys to check this out. Yeah, no, they will. Hey, and if they ever want to come on and they're in town, we'll totally have them in. Yeah. So, I mean... the relationships that you develop when you're in the infantry, you know, and I went on to do different things, but that core group of guys, man, I still talk to them. It's hard to put words to. Yeah. Yeah. Especially when you're out. I mean, so we get to Camp Lejeune. I had to go to infantry school for a couple months and then we got to one six. And I mean, probably four months later, five months later, I was in Fallujah.
SPEAKER_01:And you're doing, so we're clear that one of the biggest differences that I've always known since F-A-L-U Two L's. I can't
SPEAKER_02:remember. F-A-L-L-U-J-I-H. He said La Fajita. Dude, you are not even close, but anyways. F-A-L-L-U. Yeah, F-A-L-L-U. There you go. J-A-H. Al Fallujah.
SPEAKER_01:Al Fallujah, that top one there. But anyways, to your point, though, it is really hard to describe those. Oh, yeah. You can have a brother that you loved your entire life, all the way into when you turned 18, and then go meet a guy from from wisconsin and his name is dave yeah and you hung out with him for six months
SPEAKER_02:and you're like i love you more than my brother i don't know what it is uh no
SPEAKER_01:it's weird it's it is a weird way
SPEAKER_02:to but anyway so sorry do they teach you like any thing about like iraq and the culture there yeah any arabic before you go no i mean the arabic that we learned was like salam alaikum yeah stop hi drop the gun you know what you know basic command where's the gold Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Where's the
SPEAKER_02:gold? And it was, I mean, this was, this was one six is first deployment to Iraq. You guys are like, this is a baby unit. It's like a, no, no, no. It's been, it's been around for forever, but you know, the war had just kind of really started 2000. This is 2005, five early, early 2005. I got there. And Fallujah is like one of the deadliest cities in the bad place. I can't, Ramadi. Yeah, I've been to Ramadi too. Ramadi's near Fallujah, right? Yeah, it's just, I think Fallujah's west
SPEAKER_01:of Ramadi. We'll get into JSSs and stuff like that, but he had a good point, like the buildup. So you get to your unit, 1-6, and
SPEAKER_02:then what's the lead up to? A lot of like small unit training, like understanding, you know, basic formations and then a lot of CQB they were trying to do. You're kicking a lot of fucking doors over there. Well, but we don't, I mean, the Marine Corps, for all of its greatness, you know, they, not a lot of resources, but they pride and doing something out of nothing. Explain that a little bit. So we didn't just, I mean, our training before going into one of the heaviest urban combat places in our lifetime was like engineer tape on the ground in the shape of houses and rooms. And you would just, you know, you would learn how to stack up and go into houses, you know, and it was, Looking back on it now, it's like, how did any of us survive? I got a side question. Katrina happened in 2005. Did you hear anything about it while you were overseas? Yeah, I remember hearing about it. Such a weird side note. I've been on a Katrina rabbit hole lately, and it just... All right, yeah. That doesn't pertain to the conversation at all. I just didn't know what the news process was like if something like that got wind to people overseas. Yeah, I mean, you'd be heard about. I had a buddy that lived in New Orleans when that all happened,
SPEAKER_01:so shout out to Chris. So you're doing a lot of CQB training. You're learning about the culture you're about to be immersed in. You're trying to, yeah. You're learning
SPEAKER_02:six words in fucking whatever they speak in Iraq. Yeah. And that's kind of your lead up. Do you fly into Germany first? No, I think we flew into... We flew into Ireland. Oh, sick, dude. We stayed in the airport. Yeah, same. They wouldn't let us go. Same for me and Jeremy. I swear to God we've talked about that. Yeah, they're not letting us go out there. They
SPEAKER_01:won't cut us loose. Half the guys wouldn't make it back. It's a hazard to the society. Did you guys have a separate part of the airport? Yeah. They separated. Okay, yeah,
SPEAKER_02:yeah. Same thing in Iceland. We had a separate part of the airport. I swear to God, dude. I think it's only for infantry guys. Everybody else can go get coffee and they're civil. We flew from there and I think we made another stop and then we went to Kuwait. We were in Kuwait for about a week. Sweet spot. Then we flew into Iraq. What was your Jalalabad in Iraq? Jabad is like primary Afghan ops area.
SPEAKER_01:That's like the main fob. When you tell anybody that's been deployed to Afghanistan, if you say Jabad, they know it's Jalalabad. What was that main... Was there something even like that or were you in the game... so early that we had no foundation. We
SPEAKER_02:had, um, we had camp Fallujah and hurricane point, I think was another smaller, but it had an airfield. Okay. Um, big landing strip. That was kind of outside the city. Um, that's where we guys flying at night. No hurricane point was in Ramadi. Yeah. So that was a real, really weird experience. Cause I had, you know, I had never been on a C one 30 before combat landing at this point. And we were taken off and you're sitting on the red, you know, um, netting netting. Yeah. Cargo netting. And you can hear the props and all of a sudden, and the props turned off and we just nosedived. Brother, that combat landing, they do not fucking prepare you for it. Nobody told me. It wasn't in the pamphlet, bro. It was not in the pamphlet, dude. I thought we were going down. I mean, you're like the Gravitron. We were stuck to the walls and we were panicking. That's why I ask because so many people, like I'm not military, but so many people we have on that have been in the military, I'm like, do you fly in at night? And it always leads to that. Like, yeah, and they didn't tell anybody anything. There were people asleep, waking up. There's
SPEAKER_01:the redneck. I met a C-17 warrant officer in J-Bed. We were, like, getting coffee at the same time, and I was just telling him, you know, like, what's up, sir? And he was like, where are you out of? Cop chart. Oh, okay, nice. We were just kind of bullshitting. Yeah. We somehow got on to the
SPEAKER_02:combat landing, like how they didn't fucking warn me. And he was like... yeah basically we just try not to get shot down by fucking anti-aircraft weaponry yeah it's like back then it was really prevalent they basically like shut the engine off there's no signature coming through and they they wing down and then they come back and then they wing down the other way and then you're I'm like god damn dude
SPEAKER_01:bro so you have like a like a you know like a all life experience landing but then like like
SPEAKER_02:what's your first like outside the base like cause that's we've talked about that before four people that's like a completely different you're in the compound like your guys' showers got blown up the first day but like when you finally leave this like I mean it's not safety of your base but like that out the wire what was going out the wire like for the first time that's what he's trying to ask you I'm so sorry when we got there we were there kind of on the tail end of Phantom Fury maybe my Iraq vets know what you're talking about oh yeah it was I mean everybody my age knows what phantom fury is just like a hard hard nose like offensive it was yeah it was uh you know general mattis basically saying you need to leave the city that's when they dropped the pamphlets yeah like get the fuck out of the city you're in the city you're an enemy you are an enemy yeah and we're gonna kill everything in here yeah i do know what you're that was phantom fury yeah okay so people started they were kind of starting to come back in and we were there you know just patrolling a lot of patrolling and moving around and um it was pretty wild you know going So you get there. You get to Camp Lejeune. What was the camp that you operated out of? It wasn't a camp we lived in. It was like an old. Was it a JSS? It was like an outpost, basically. Didn't they call those JSSs in Iraq? No, I'm trying to think of what they called them. A FOB, basically. It was a small FOB. Yeah. Okay. It was an old apartment complex kind of thing. Okay. But when you get there, you have HESCO barriers and barbed wire and T-walls and the little zigzaggy thing. you gotta drive through the concertina concertina wire but anyway so like when you get there how long is it until you're like okay boys left seat right seat we're going on mission oh probably like day two a day yeah day two day three and then you're out there and you you would go you know a couple of us would go out with with the existing platoon that was there and then you know after about two patrols they're like all right you guys got it okay now i have a follow-up question and then i'll let you do it because i feel
SPEAKER_01:like you have a question coming um for me cop chart day one i land in the middle of the night on a blackhawk uh no idea it's like me and like six other dudes or whatever coming in late get in there total darkness never been to this cop before don't know the layout yeah don't have my nods on i'm just stumbling
SPEAKER_02:through the dark yeah uh and then day two like you know quote day two or day one i wake up that next morning indirect fire like we talked about almost immediately culture shock immediately you're like i'm gonna die here uh then they say you're gonna we're doing left seat right seat and you're on because we had mission patrol security patrol patrol and um op control uh patrol like op those are the three things you would do at any given time yeah mission pull security on the cop or op yeah because we only had three platoons for me i got uh op so day two i go hiking up a fucking 4 000 foot tall mountain go up this thing pull this op and i'm just hanging out for a couple weeks up there or whatever but literally on my day two i watched one of my buddies almost like fucking die like it was hardcore gunfight in the heart of the city Oh yeah. So what was your day to like, was it just a total culture shock? Like
SPEAKER_01:what
SPEAKER_02:the fuck is this? I mean, or was it pretty chill and it took a few weeks for you to like see? No, it was, it was almost immediate. Felicia was pretty violent. Um, that we, we had a partner force with us, some police and some army and we, yeah, they weren't, they weren't, uh, they don't speak English real good. They weren't very great. Um, no, it was, you know, like kind of day to kind of man I think I've told this story before but like that culture shock that was Fallujah was the first place I ever saw a dead human being yeah I never even went to a funeral growing up and that's rough dude yeah and we're you know patrolling and we hear all these women screaming outside of this house and we're just like what is that so we go and check it out and there's a body with a blanket over it and you know our corpsman's there and he comes over and he you know, pulls it back. He was executed right through the forehead. He was a guy who was driving supplies for the American troops and they grabbed him up and murdered him. And I remember like, like, wow, that's a dead person. Like I was standing at his head looking down at him and it was, and it has this kind of sick twist to it, which probably just transformed my whole thought process for the rest of my life. But we're watching and they're talking to the family and trying to figure out what happened. And all of a sudden, the blankets just starts moving down by his feet. And I'm like, the hell's going on here, you know? And I'm thinking this dude's like reanimating and like coming back to life or something like a zombie, but a fan had kicked on and was blowing air underneath it. So high speed come apart. We're kind of laughing about it. Like, Oh shit. You know, we're laughing about it later, but it kind of gave me this kind of, um, I don't know, like a humorous side to like an awful thing.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Which was able to really help me out later on in life. It also kind of for me, like same goes for me, like I had been to funerals and stuff, but like it was my first dead body I'd seen like in the thick of things. Oh, yeah. Like in combat. And when you see that, you're like, this guy was a warrior. So you hadn't even gotten a firefight at that point. I don't know if I had. We got in a firefight like the second or third day. But it's a juxtaposition. Yeah. standing there and you're observing this thing that used to be a warrior or you know whatever yeah for me it was a warrior with a gun belt ammunitions belt and everything yeah a bit and I was like that guy is literally me he's just on the wrong end if I was born here it's a weird it's a weird juxtaposition where you realize all of a sudden that this ain't this
SPEAKER_01:ain't yeah this ain't no fucking laser
SPEAKER_02:tag no yeah I mean it it's a lot different when you're when you're at at like a five or a cop and you're behind a four to five position with a machine gun. There's a certain sense of security there. Yeah, you got your, all your buddies are downstairs or right there with you. Everybody's shooting back. It's a lot different than being out on patrol and getting shot at. No one there, bro. What's QRF? 30 minutes? Yeah. Sometimes, and we'll get
SPEAKER_01:to it, I want to get to it faster than slower, but sometimes QRF can be four, five, six hours away.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And you're in the thick of it. Oh, yeah. And it's like, hey, you're going to have to hold what you got.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. Four hours? Four fucking, okay. Yeah, black airs. Sorry. Yeah. Hold what you got. Yeah. Okay. Roger that. Yeah. You're like, fuck dude. I mean, I mean, it was just like, we just didn't, we were not well equipped from, you know, it was very early on in the war. I mean, we would take these, I mean, like the old Humvees that had the, like the cloth doors, you know, and we would, we would drape, sorry, we would drape. Don't let it happen again. I'm only joking, dude. There we go. I do this all the time. No, you're good. I talk with my hands. You're good. God bless you. Thank you. You know, we would drape Kevlar blankets over the– like put sandbags on the floorboard. Do what you got to do, brother. Because IEDs were just starting to be a big thing. Do what you got to do. Yeah, we lost– I think we lost the battalion. We lost, I think, 14 guys at deployment and probably a couple hundred casualties. For the folks at home, battalion, at least in the Army, I don't know, a few thousand. What's a battalion in the Marines? Probably about 800 or 900. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Maybe a battalion's not a couple thousand. Maybe
SPEAKER_02:I'm thinking division. I don't know. Google that. I could be way off. What's the average Marine battalion size? There's four companies. The company's like... Company is like 100-something. Yeah, 150 people. What's the average battalion? B-A-T-T-A-L-I-O-N. He's not a strong speller, brother. So sorry about
SPEAKER_01:that. Google figures it out. You know what I'm saying? Like at the top there. That's meant for people like me. You're right. 800 to 1,200. 800 to 1,200. Okay, so I was thinking division. But yeah, battalion is about 1,000 soldiers, and you lose 14.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, you don't want to lose any. 14 dead. You don't want to lose any. Yeah, we probably lost another 200 wounded. Purple hearts. Yeah. You don't want to lose any. No. You don't. Not a single. No. But, italicize. But. Yeah. 14 to 1,000. pretty fucking rock solid. Yeah. Yeah. When you think about what you said. Oh yeah. Oh, and that was just that tour. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about coming back. Cause
SPEAKER_01:I do like you get done with tour one. How long does that last?
SPEAKER_02:Uh, we did, we did nine months in Fallujah. And then, so like coming back, what's that like coming back? Oh man. Yeah. How did you integrate? Yeah. I'll tell you how I integrated. I went back to the, to the barracks and, uh, we partied just black and, you know, I re I think I re enlisted that time. No, I didn't re enlisted yet, But burn all your money you save on deployment. Doesn't matter. Trucks and booze and you name it. Living life because you survived. Oh, yeah. You feel like you're unstoppable. So you're back for how long? And they're like, hey, boys, we're going back. I think I was back for about. Same unit for the second deployment? Yeah. I think I was back maybe nine months maybe. And they're like, we're going back. And then we went to Ramadi.
SPEAKER_01:Did some of your boys hit you up? Like some of the guys you deployed with? Or are you still like in the roster? I don't know how that works. Like you do a deployment and you're done or do you do
SPEAKER_02:a deployment and you're still on roster? It depends on where you're at in your, in your enlistment. Right. So some of the senior guys, they would either get out or go to another unit, but all my buddies, we were all, you know, that's why E2s and E3s. Yeah. So we all just stayed together. And I mean, some of these guys I did three deployments with. Fuck. Yeah. So, so nine months goes by and they're like, Hey boys. Yep. Saddle up. We're going back. We went to Ramadi, which was, uh, now talk about the differences. This is what I'm curious about. Like,
SPEAKER_01:from the first deployment to this deployment. How
SPEAKER_02:far away is Ramadi from... Not far. Okay. I think Ramadi is east of Fallujah, probably like 50 miles, maybe. Not even. You're in the same fucking town. Yeah. They had a thing called like the... I think it's like the Death Triangle or something like that. Yeah. It was like Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad were the three most dangerous places in Iraq. Well, you got two out of three, brother. Yeah. Never made it to Baghdad. I'm okay with that. But anyway, so you've gained some rank in... Nine months, right? Yeah. You got ranked up? When I got to Ramadi, I was a corporal, well, E4. And a corporal is a leadership position. Yep. I was a fire team leader, so I was in charge of four Marines. So you're now an NCO. Yep. What does that look like? Now,
SPEAKER_01:compare, I just want to talk, we don't have to go into deep detail with Ramadi, because if you're familiar with Iraq and the war in Iraq, Ramadi, both Ramadi and Fallujah,
SPEAKER_02:fucking bloodbaths. Yeah. Just a fucking, just a fuck puppet show. Well, it depends on what time you caught them, too. Really? We were in Ramadi in 06. Pretty heavy. I mean, it was violent. It was the most violent place I've ever been in my life. So what are some of the biggest differences that you saw from your eyeball or eyeball there? Ramadi was different, and the IED game had really stepped up. Went up a notch. I mean, they were tricky and clever in the styles and ways. We would adapt to their tactics. Explain that a little bit. Explain that. How did they? it tricky a lot like and i from my perspective right there's a lot uh like they kind of started off with um like command debt like they'd be a guy sitting in a
SPEAKER_01:bush about one of these in a previous
SPEAKER_02:episode where
SPEAKER_01:they had lined up stones to look
SPEAKER_02:like crosshairs and as soon as they would have crosshairs and they would you know they would you have to have a guy physically hit something and then it then it turned into remote remote so and then we started making jammers and we'd have jammers to block signals so they're sitting there hitting this cell phone on it. It's not working. And then it turned into pressure plates. That's the fuck, which are the worst. And then, I mean, we, we saw things like we had a guy, we had these like, uh, all-stars enemy over there that we would name, you know? Yeah. There was one guy called the fisherman. We
SPEAKER_01:had a couple of those.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. We had, uh, the, uh, we had like a guy, something sniper. It was like the name of the town and the sniper. Yeah. So we, we had the fisherman and he had, he had cut a hole and there was a couple of buildings stacked up by the main, uh, MSR. Roadway. roadway and he had chipped out holes along the floor about you know two feet high yeah couple rooms back and he would you would we could watch it convoys come and he would push with a big pole he pushed this IED out in the middle of the road
SPEAKER_01:what a cunt
SPEAKER_02:and then if they stopped and they started you know investigating kind of counter countering that IED yeah he had it on a rope he would wheel it back in what a cunt and then they would just drive off and then he would wait for the next one he'd push it back out yeah well found him. What was his,
SPEAKER_01:what was his cool ass name
SPEAKER_02:again? The fisherman, the fisherman. Yeah. Fucking dude. He's no longer with us. He's not, he has met a lot. We caught onto that pretty quickly. But, uh, what are some of the other key differences? You're a leader now. You've got four, you've got three guys under you. Yeah. Yeah. So I was in a leadership position. I had three under me. That's the smallest, uh, kind of, uh, the smallest unit in the Marine Corps. Um, you know, I, I, Ramadi was extreme. Like during, we did not go out during the, you went out during the day. You were a thousand percent. Getting contact. Not just contact. Like you're, you're getting somebody killed or somebody, somebody is getting hit no matter what. Yeah. What else, man? I don't want to cut you off. There was a lot of that. I mean, you would go out during the day, man. And I would carry like five or six smokes, like smoke grenades. You have to. Cause you're in these alleys and there's walls. I mean, and you got, foot oh yeah and you're you're just popping smoke and trying to get to somewhere on foot the entire oh yeah you're so let's i i was i also did some mobile stuff yeah but humvees but it wasn't okay but mostly on foot building the building road to road alley to alley yep um yeah smokes are a integral as a light infantryman yeah that's your best oh yeah fucking friend yeah uh you gotta call helo in you gotta fucking get out of this field you gotta get out of this neighborhood pop pop smoke is a saying for a reason yep pop fucking smoke and it's that warfare movie we were talking about that I was in Ramadi when they were filming that in Ramadi or where it took place so that's why it really hit me because I was there at the same time when they were making it not when they were making it but when it took place I gotcha yeah
SPEAKER_01:one interesting thing I do want to ask a difference between Iraq and Afghanistan Afghanistan had a fighting season we did yeah it was it was about 10 months long not months long it was basically from like when the snow caps started melting so like march like when the snow comes off
SPEAKER_02:the mountain until the snow starts building again and that's usually october november nobody wants to fight in the snow well they don't know but we're still out there fucking patrolling in it you bet your sweet dick we are uh but it was like a down time yeah did short of like ramadan and shit like did you guys have like a down season no i mean it was just full force the whole time i got there we got We got there in September, and we didn't leave until May. And it's just full, dumped the clutch. I mean, every single day, because we had our positions. Absolutely. I mean, I had just done Fallujah, and I would go on post to guard, because we had our cycles, right? You'd be on guard or whatever. OP watch, where you sit in the sandbag bunker with a.50 cal machine gun, and you're just... Hopefully nobody shoots at me today. And OP, for the record, we've mentioned it twice now, observation posts. For non-military folks, it's just you sitting far away observing your boys, your team on mission or
SPEAKER_01:watching a high kinetic area or something like that.
SPEAKER_02:Essentially, it's just a guard tower on top of it. So if anybody's trying to come in at night, we can catch them. Eyes on. Yeah. But yeah, that's interesting. So we would do that. How did it feel leading men through all this chaos? Did you lose any of the guys? I did not. Okay. I did not. This is a new thing for you.
SPEAKER_01:It was. Because before, it was more survivability, take orders. Yeah, I was a point man. I just navigated patrols. You had to
SPEAKER_02:commit to those orders, and you just did what you were told to do, and you did it to the best of your ability. Now, you're the guy saying, hey, I've got two guys above me saying, I need you guys to do this and do it right now. Yeah. What was that feeling like, leading men in pure chaos? Man, it's... It's kind of scary. You look at these guys like they're family. You don't want them to get hurt. You want to make sure you're making the right calls. As you know, everything's so reactionary. You just kind of roll with it. There's no proactivity in warfare. There's no... book you can read to be like hey if i just study this we will be good and they will come home alive you know it's just chaos yeah um there's somebody has a saying
SPEAKER_01:about warfare that emulates that it's something along the lines of like it's just pure like how chaotic war oh yeah and it's a i can't it's a really profound quote and it's on the tip of my i can't remember but it really is it's
SPEAKER_02:just like you're standing here everything's fine and then everything's on fire and it's like figure it the fuck out yeah that was i mean we got there on we actually We got there on September 11th, which was funny. And I remember like four or five days into it. I mean, we had a, I mean, this is a big difference from Fallujah to Ramadi. They would have coordinated attacks on us. I mean, they would come at us with 15, 20 guys, L shapes. Oh yeah. But I mean, they would, I mean, they would come and they would RPGs, you know, and you name it. And man, we would be getting after it. Indirect while their forces are pushing up. Yeah. And then, and it's not like, Oh, we shoot and they shoot and it's over. I mean, we're talking like four or five, six hour gunfights, you know, where you're dropping, you know, Gimblers. Full throttle. Oh, yeah. I used to have a helmet cam video. I had a helmet cam at one point in time. A friend let me borrow it, and this was 10 days into it. Yeah. Big gunfight, and I'd been blown out of the post from an RPG, and I'm going down to a saw, a machine gun.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And I'm changing the ammo on it, the feed tray cover. I'm lifting it up, and my hands are shaking like this. Oh, yeah, brother. And I don't remember it at the time. There was so much adrenaline that my body couldn't control it. You probably didn't even notice your hands. No, and I didn't even notice until I looked at it later, and I'm changing the feed tray. Because in your mind's eye, you're like, I've done this a thousand times. Feed tray up, sweep out, put the belt in, brass the grass. You know what I'm saying? Man, I haven't heard that in a long time. Yeah, brass the grass, baby. Yeah, dude. Belts up. Butter, butter, jam. Let's go, dude. Brass the grass. But anyway, so you guys, you get out of Ramadi, full team, everyone. of your second deployment? Yeah, in May, the second deployment that was over. And that's when you come home and meet your wife? Nope. Okay. I came home and continued. The chaos. The chaos. The drinking and the partying. A lot of drinking. A lot of just. Because what else do you do? I knew guys that went with me to Afghanistan that never touched alcohol. And then when we came back from Cop Chart, they were fucking animals. Oh, yeah. Just caged animals. Just like they had that first shot of fucking Jaeger. Oh, yeah. And then it was just like that's all you, that's, I felt like at the time that was all you could do to just like get even keel. Oh, you know what I mean? To get level headed. There was just a lot of that, dude. I mean, like some of the, some guys, man, the way they came back, I was talking to somebody about this the other day, you know, like some of my best friends in the world, I, I never hung out with them outside of work because they were just animals. Yeah. I mean, I'd go to war with them any day, but coming back here, it was just like, it was too much. Complete wild card. Yeah. You're just, you know, don't know what's going to happen. There's a lot of guys like that out there, unfortunately. But those are the ones you want to go to war with. Absolutely. 100%. I go to war with you. You're not going to babysit my kids, but you can go to war. Actually, I'm not going to even give you my address. Yeah, exactly. I can hang out with you one time a year. And I'll meet you at an undisclosed location at this time. UDT, Eastern Central Standard. Anyways, so you're back for how long? What happens? What's the next big step in your career? So you come back from that and then we were going on a Mew, a Marine Expeditionary Unit. What does that mean? It's when every, the Navy always has ships out, right? In the Pacific or in the Mediterranean. They're just out there. They're out there always. There's always a unit of Marines on there in case they need to go somewhere. You know, they're always like, oh, there's some Marines in off this ship. They're already sitting out on ship for three or four months and then they get called in. Yeah, they're in the Atlantic just vibing, waiting for something to pop off. Or they were just going to go somewhere directly. but have the ship there. Was that your first time like at sea versus being like flown into country? So we trained on ship. Okay. And... They were just like coming up to, hey, we're just, you're not going to do, we're just going to fly you to Afghanistan. We're not even going to take the ships anymore. So Afghanistan, your first Afghanistan is you as a proper Marine infantryman. Yeah, yeah. I was in 08. So I've heard nightmare stories. Oh yeah. About Marines just getting fucking chewed up. Yeah. How, why was it so different for, I've heard bad stories about Army. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard a dozen. I get it. Like we were all and why were Marines just getting chewed? It seems like every week there was a story, 12 Marines dead and 10 Marines dead, five Marines dead in ambush. Why were you guys going down? What was the, was it the change in theater? The change in theater had a lot to do with it. I think also the Taliban were a much more sophisticated fighting force than the guys we were fighting in Iraq. And no one talks about the supplementary forces either. In Iraq. The Czech fighters and stuff they had coming in. Yeah. They had some dogs coming in. oh yeah they had some dogs in afghanistan they uh yeah we had one of those out there running around after us they
SPEAKER_01:had
SPEAKER_02:a
SPEAKER_01:nickname for them like black stands out but i don't think i can't remember but yeah all the guys
SPEAKER_02:that weren't afghanis but they were like like recruiting them yeah come fight for the taliban yeah they were like red-headed and white yeah and you're just like they're like czech boys and fucking uh just balkan guys yeah yeah
SPEAKER_01:and the balkan community we just talked about this the other day um the balkan community like those dudes, those people are bred to fight. Oh yeah. The people that grew up in the Balkan mountains, like they are just born, they are ready to fuck. A lot
SPEAKER_02:of that area has been fighting since the beginning of time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Since their country became a country, they're just
SPEAKER_02:fighting. But I mean, I think like the biggest difference that we had, well, in Iraq, for the most part, you're in some type of position, unless you're patrolling, you're in a position or a base or a fob or some, whatever you want to call it. You have a stance. You have a place where you can go and sleep at night and relatively be safe yeah right and then you can refit and you can get out and go after it yeah refit refit or refit and rekit and get the fuck after yeah when we went into afghan we um we went to an area in helmand province garmser where there had not been any americans yet there was a couple of brit forces but they were all kind of holed up in their um their little gay little base yeah yeah and a little fucking girl scout uniforms they had i mean we did we did a helleborn assault a marine unit did like i mean we we It was the first time I had heard. I don't know if this is accurate. I've done a couple of those. It was like the largest one that a Marine force had done since like Vietnam. But they had a whole company load up. I was first stick, first wave coming in. And we just, here's your LZ. This is your objective when you land. Yeah. And you get out and, you know, we're moving through this village and, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Like parachuting in and then regrouping. Not parachuting, helicopters coming in
SPEAKER_02:and running off the back. Gotcha. And we would live in these little kind of, you know, I say houses, but they're like four mud walls, maybe a roof or just a giant waddy hole in the ground where you put a little tarp up over. And I lived in a, lived in a hole in the ground for four months. Um, and then you would patrol out of that. But these guys, man, they were, I mean, we got, I got personally got ambushed twice. Really good. Yeah. They were just, they were smarter in their tactics and they, man, it, it, it was a learning curve. Well, what was it 40 years before that they were fighting a essentially D1 college in Russia on their own turf. You know what I mean? A thousand years before that, they were fighting Alexander the Great. I mean, again, the Balkan countries, Afghan people are not afraid to fight. Yeah, no. They were better. And also, you're not clapping dudes in gym shorts with no shirt and flip-flops. With an AK spraying around a corner, you're going against a unit. Well, and you're fighting in the middle of open field nowhere to hide there's no cover no i mean hardly anywhere um so you had to i mean you know i'm up he sees me i'm down bounding tactics we were actually doing those which you think why am i doing we're never going to do this we're in the city we're not going to do this and you're out in the middle of a poppy field and you get caught off guard by you know nine guys shooting at you with rpks and it's like okay this is real dish because that's a game changer oh yeah that dish will fuck
SPEAKER_01:your life up did you miss the kiowa so the kiowas i've been told the helicopter that
SPEAKER_02:The Kiowas were rather popular in Iraq. Yeah. For like gun runs and stuff. I've flown on them, but different units, different times. But they don't do Kiowas in Afghanistan because the elevation is too high. No, we had Huey Cobra teams. I don't know what a Huey Cobra is. No, a Huey and a Cobra. So a Cobra is... Like a Huey helicopter? Huey helicopter, yeah. You guys were flying Hueys in Afghanistan? Oh, yeah. What the fuck? When did I miss that? They would have 50 cals on them, you know, like miniguns. Yeah, and then the Cobras, they would have Hellfire missiles. That's hot. And it was, they were awesome. I mean, I was calling for fire regularly. I was a sergeant at this time, E5, and I had 12 Marines under me.
SPEAKER_01:What was...
SPEAKER_02:leadership like having guys underneath you in iraq yeah level ground
SPEAKER_01:flat nearly close to sea level yep what was it like leading men there and then having to lead men in afghanistan i mean well where i
SPEAKER_02:was at in afghanistan level flat it was all elevation oh hell i don't even remember but i
SPEAKER_01:think the whole country of afghanistan is like 5 000
SPEAKER_02:feet above sea level yeah i mean it's still yeah it took you a while to get used to right you know so like how taxing it is and how gassed you are yeah you still have to lead that's what I'm getting at
SPEAKER_01:and you're yeah so you're finding a disadvantage to people who well and
SPEAKER_02:these are guys that they were in my in my team when I was in Ramadi you know and then I became a squad leader and they were my fire team leaders nice you know so we came up together yeah shout out Marty Graham and Will Ash Shane Gibney man those were my boys dude Gibney's a dope last name yeah yeah uh Gibney dude those yeah those guys were my fire team leaders man and they were great um Um, going out with them, you know, it was, it was different. I was going to tell a story that kind of tied it in, but you might pass out. Don't do it, dude. Uh,
SPEAKER_01:no. Can you tell it without all the, the, the blood and the guts?
SPEAKER_02:There's no blood necessarily, but there's some details, but, um, if he passes out, you and I'll just keep going.
SPEAKER_01:Uh, it's like, it's like back in like 20 minutes. It's like
SPEAKER_02:those, those bonds that you make with guys and, and, and, and horrible and in great situations. Right. And, um, In Ramadi one night, we were going out, we were in this, the souk is what they called it. Imagine like a- Like an area, and that's the name of the area? It's like a market area. And imagine like storage units with the garage doors that roll up. Just a bunch of those with sheets and shit. Like a bazaar. Yeah. Okay. And we had some Iraqi police with us, and we open up one of them, and there's a bunch of explosives in there. And we were like, all right, everybody get back. Nobody touch anything. Red flags. So we're backing up. And, of course, you know, a couple of the Iraqi policemen go in there, and they picked up what I had heard was a video camera, and it detonated. Why would you touch anything? So, I mean, they died. Well, two of them died instantly. Had to be. One of them, he was missing his legs. Okay. Yeah. Earmuffs. Yeah. Earmuffs. But we had gotten him out, you know, and I was actually pulling him out. They were cauterized, so there was no blood.
UNKNOWN:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:And we run this body over to the aid station with a little truck, the meat wagons, what we called it. And two of my guys in my fire team, they were on security. And I said, they're looking back at us. And I'm like, hey, I'm getting ready to come back by here with some money. Don't turn around. Just keep looking that way. Also, mind your field of fire, you fucking asshole. And then the one, of course, he couldn't resist. And he turns, and he starts throwing up. Ah. And I'm like, yeah. I'm like, I told you, buddy. Don't turn around. Yeah, that was. That would have been Tom. He would have taken a peek and then just fell asleep on his machine gun. There's some more details that I'll tell you afterwards. Yeah, we'll leave it alone. But like those were the guys that were in charge of my fire teams now. Like
SPEAKER_01:those type of dudes. How did you see? Okay, I have an insightful question on them specifically. How did they evolve? How did you? Because you're evolving with them at the same time. And now you're taking on 10 guys. Yeah. Or you're taking on eight
SPEAKER_02:guys. Yeah. How did those two
SPEAKER_01:or three. At like what? age 26 oh no no
SPEAKER_02:i was probably 24 24 i was 24 and i mean they were probably gosh they were young they were probably 19 20 years old what did you see in them what did you notice it was it was actually i mean watching them the growth as like a like you know you have an eye you can identify guys who are going to be leaders you have one i have two that's true okay yeah but you know i get it yeah you have an eye for this you can see some guys they got it have it yeah and then it's just trying to develop that with them as best you can. Like, I don't know everything about this, right? I'm learning too. And I think they gave me a lot of grace with that. What do you do with a guy that doesn't have it and is in a leadership position? You give him a saw. I have a question about that. I only say that because I had a saw. No, a saw. A machine gun. A squad automatic weapon. Yeah, that's what I was saying. He's the machine gunner. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was not in a leadership position in Afghanistan, but I did have a saw for like half the deployment I'm a big 2-2-3 guy. Also very stupid. Jake will attest to that. I'm very stupid. I run fast. I'll shoot. It's not so much the smartness, right? It's like you need someone. You got to give them direction. Yeah. You don't put them in a position where they need to try to make decisions. It's just, hey, point the gun that way and shoot until we say stop. Instincts takes over at that point. Let me go one step further. Let's say the individual is a commissioned officer. I've dealt with that before. What is that? And a commissioned officer, for the record, you have a non-commissioned officer, which is your enlisted gentleman who typically don't have college degrees. Not always. Sometimes they do. But the commissioned officers are the guys that run groups of 30 men or larger. You know what I mean? They're the guys playing the chess board, not the... They're the chess player. Yes. And sometimes you have this chess player on missions with you, right?
SPEAKER_01:Your lower end. Yeah, the lieutenants. Butter bars, silver bars. I had a butter bar in Afghanistan who replaced a first lieutenant who had gotten blown up. And this butter bar came in from the States straight into our cop and was like, all right, I got this shit. Let's go. Where am I? You know, just looked like a stud. Uh, name was
SPEAKER_02:funny enough. Name. Perfect name. Hand to God. You can't make this shit up. Jake knew knows what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but anyways, he takes over. He's like, where are the frequent points of attack? What's going on? What are you seeing? He's brand new. to country, takes over our platoon,
SPEAKER_02:and we get in our first gunfight. Not good. I think he got dismissed and I can't remember what. And again, I'm not here to judge anybody's character, but that's an example of not having that dog. What do you do about that? If you're enlisted and you're looking at a commissioned officer and you're like, sir, with all due respect, let's get it fucking going. How do you handle that? There's two ways you can handle it, I think. One is you know just be um completely against him and get the whole platoon against him which is going to just be no i mean like resistance is is what i kind of i guess what i'm trying to say right yeah and then and then you know you just resist them at all top at all costs right and you're just the cohesion in that unit's going to be garbage and you're all going to get killed And the other way, and I've kind of dabbled a little bit of that because I didn't like a leader that I had. It happens. If you don't like it, change it. Pray that you have a great platoon sergeant, the enlisted equivalent of the platoon leader. And then you mentor and you shape and you suggest and you try to get them to that level. Try to get them to see.
SPEAKER_01:Were you thinking like that at the age that you experienced this?
SPEAKER_02:No, no, no, no, definitely not. Cause
SPEAKER_01:he's not, that's insight looking
SPEAKER_02:back, looking back now. Right. Um, and I, and I've done both. Right. And, um, you know, you don't get to pick. You don't. But do you want to go home alive? Yeah. So you can sit here and fight this guy all day long and tell him he's an idiot and get the whole platoon against him and they hate him. It's not going to go well for you. You're just going to cause angst and animosity. Or you try as hard as you can to work with him and you just keep trying to get to that point, make suggestions, but not tell him what to do because he's in charge. So the individual
SPEAKER_01:I'm
SPEAKER_02:referencing,
SPEAKER_01:his worst failure was the lack of the inability Yep. Yep. Make the wrong
SPEAKER_02:decision. I don't care, but make a goddamn decision. Make a decision. Because we'll get out of this dark hole you're going to take us into, but get me to that dark hole we're getting shot at. We're going to back you either way. Just let's go.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. We're ride or die. And that's what I think a lot of junior commissioned officers, the ones that don't have it, I think in decisions, that's one of the biggest things a lot of these brand new butter bars don't have. Or they're worried about the wrong thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know, they're not, I think as long as a leader can genuinely put the interest of the men in their charge as their priority and not what higher-ups are going to think or what their career looks like. If you have a genuine love for that unit... I think you're going to be good. Yeah. You're going to be good. I want to get into your
SPEAKER_01:later. I wanted to do like,
SPEAKER_02:yeah, he said he's not pressed for time, so we'll just go. Okay. We can edit out whatever you need. Yeah. But, uh, we can even drop
SPEAKER_01:two parts. I mean, we used to drop three, four hour long episodes, but the retention's not there. So we might just chop it up into two different episodes. Anyways, you were going to say, so I was going to say like, so like
SPEAKER_02:going back from how long were you in Afghanistan? Uh, six, six months. And that's another tour. And then you come back home. Yep. Then I came back home. So like the, you had like, you made more with less in Afghanistan. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't, we didn't have, I mean, we, when we landed, they said third world person. Yeah. They said, we're going to do a seven to 10 day op. And we were out there almost four months. Yeah. I mean, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't have a change of underwear. You're getting airdrops. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, yeah, literally airdrops, which is like a mission in itself to go. Oh yeah. Then you got to go recover it. And you got to carry back like 200 water bottles. That's such a funny story. Dude, we got, we got airdropped everything at my cop. And there was a time where our civilian airdropper, it's coming in on a prop plane, started taking dish to fire. So he fucking bailed out of his flight path to the cop and just dropped the payload. Oh yeah. Fucking town. Yeah. Yeah. That we fucking hate. Yeah. And they hate us. The parachute fails and everything explodes on the ground. Immediately. They were like, Hey, uh, we, don't have any water we got to go to this really bad town to go get our water yeah it's like the worst but like coming back from that and having to make the most out of like the worst and then like coming back yeah and like you meet your wife in that that gap uh nope i didn't meet her there no no i just keep jumping the gun so you go back a fourth time before your well then so when i was there i mean we were like on the front line you know just slugging it out with these guys every day and i remember one night in particular there was a tar it kind of you know like a click away and I start seeing this and a click is what a half a mile yeah half a mile roughly I see this you know AC-130 overhead just dropping Ordinance. Ordinance. And then I see a helicopter come in. I see these guys get out, and I'm like, man, that's what I want to do. Just some fucking dirty ass. Yeah, like this is bullshit. We're just sitting here shooting back and forth every day. Are those like military contractors? No, these are SF. These are special ops guys. There's a term. Do you have to do so many tours before you can qualify for that? No. You can go right in. Well, not in the Marine Corps. You can't. You can't? Just no tours? No. experiences like on your third tour that's when you experience that for the first time and you're like i was a sergeant and i saw it for the first time and got to understand air and you know i was you know you're just kind of living in a phase when you're young uh you know like my first four years in the marine corps like god i i didn't know anything about the marine corps or military or fighting to tell you the truth you know i we thought we did yeah you're just graduating with like your what's the first degree you get in college associates degree
SPEAKER_01:yeah you got an associates degree in warfare
SPEAKER_02:i Yeah, but you think you know it all. No. So after Sergeant, there's Staff Sergeant, which that's the platoon sergeant level, E6, a little bit more of an administrative role. And I did not want to do that. And I said, well, I'll just, what's next? I'll go to Marine Recon. And they said, hey, there's this new thing, MARSOC, Marine Special Operations Command. You should try that out. And I was like, okay. Can you explain something to me before we get into this? Sure. MARSOC. Is that a part of SOCOM? Yes. Okay. All right. That's all I need to know. Yep. SOCOM. Okay. SOCOM is Special Operations Communication. No, Special Operations Command. Command. So it's Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, SOCOM. Those are the branches of service, roughly.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_02:And then under SOCOM, you would have, like, the Navy has Navy SEALs. Navy SEALs. The Navy has Marine Raiders. The Army has Army Green Berets and Rangers. Air Force has, I can't remember what the hell they're called, but they have a version. Para. Yeah, Para or TACP or something like that. I can't remember. Cool guy. but I just can't remember the name of their ship. They've got a couple different units inside of it. I want to say it's like Parajump. I can't remember. Yeah. So Marine Special Operations is under SOCOM. So you go to– they're like there's this opening with MARSOC. Yeah. Selection is open. I went to Selection. What was that? Walk me through that because that's an experience. That's three months, four months, right? Selection was– I want to say it was like a month. So this is like the gatekeeper before you can go and even try to be a raider. Yeah. We weren't even Raiders and the name didn't even exist until like 2012, but, um, it was very new. I think I was like the 11th, 10th or 11th selection class ever. Um, a lot of walking around with rocks on figuring out impossible problems. Is this like two classes a year, like two graduate? I don't know how many they do. They probably do. And was it like one a year that would graduate? It was probably, I don't know, maybe three or four. Cause they're only about a month long. So you could do. So you were probably in like the, I mean, again, to your point, the infancy stage of this program yeah but probably like the second or third year of the program that it yeah yeah of quote Raiders yeah right yeah so I mean I think we started off with like 110 guys and I think 30 of us made it through selection that's tough it just sucked you know walk me through the course walk me through so you make it through selections so now you're through the gatekeeping because it's a bunch of running and it's a lot of swimming and running and you know logical games and a lot of psychological Psychological evaluations and tests and written tests. Are they having you like run and swim and then do these tests? Sometimes, yeah. But a lot of it like personality tests and, you know, to try to see if there's any sociopaths or psychopaths out there really. where were you so like we we talked a bit before the show like you're catholic now were you religious then or like where did that come into play in your no i mean i i was a cradle catholic grew up that way and you know live in the last four or five years of just pretty violent uh existence i had gotten away from it uh for a long time there um actually didn't really get really back into it until about maybe seven years ago what made you find it um my wife my wife opened the door for me all right
SPEAKER_01:there you go so like do you go and do your
SPEAKER_02:so like do you do one deployment with the special like the what would you call msac marsock marsock yeah marsock um uh i did five deployments with marsock
SPEAKER_01:and how many did you do before you met your wife
SPEAKER_02:um Four, five. Yeah. Gotcha. Five. So she, she's done five. And those are like more intense. Like this is your squad. Here's the mission. Get in, get out. Infantry. I did three infantry just like that. And then like the MARSOC, um, we're kind of bouncing ahead a little bit. That's all right. But I, I went to the Philippines twice, a lot of like partner training. We did some missions over there that were pretty cool. Um, yeah, you did really jump the time. Did you eat any menudo? Like any, um, what, isn't that what it's called? Menudo? Menudo is a cow. Oh, what's the, it's like a- Balut. Balut, yeah, the chicken, the egg. It's a duck egg, yeah. Duck egg. Like half fermented. I've eaten a lot of those. It's not good. It's fully developed. You're like chewing a beak. Yeah, there's a beak and sometimes little feathers. Let's come back, Thomas. Jesus Christ. So selection, and then you go to ITC, which is individual training course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a nine-month course that makes you a Marine Raider, where you get your- God bless you. Thank you. Seals have their tridents. We have our little Raider Jack.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Are commonly known as a stripper chicken. I like a stripper chicken. Yeah. Can you Google stripper chicken real quick? Yeah, you'll probably see it. Look up stripper chicken. I don't know what you'll see, actually. I'm real scared. There's just a bunch of hairless chickens. A bunch of chickens being defamed. If you type in like, just type in MARSOC, you'll probably see the jack on there somewhere.
SPEAKER_01:N-A-R-S-O-C. Yep. S-O-C. No, S-O-C. There you
SPEAKER_02:go. There it is. Because they said it looks like a chicken on a stripper pole. Yeah. It's a stripper chicken. So that's what we wear. Cleverly named. Yeah. Cleverly named stripper chicken. So that, so you received your stripper chicken. Yep. I got it. And we, I was class, there's some debate about this, but all my homies will attest to this, but we were class one. Oh shit. Okay. There was a pilot course before us that had gone through it. And then they had, they graduated and they had to bring them back to do some amphibious stuff. And it was like a pilot. So it doesn't really count. Yeah. Right. I love all those guys, but it didn't count. We were class one. Uh, Oh, yeah, brother. Which is kind of like OG stuff. I feel pretty proud about that. Yeah, you guys are a fucking bunch of gangsters. They're on like SEAL class, like probably 280 right now. And I was class one. That's crazy. Wait, SEAL class? Yeah. SEAL class. I thought we were talking MARSA. No, I said SEALs are probably on class. Oh. You know, when you add
SPEAKER_01:them
SPEAKER_02:up. 223. Or 234. See what the current one is. That was a TV show they did. Oh, yeah. Do current class. I said 280. Let's see how far off I am. I am. Not getting a lot of good answers here. Elaboration, 24 week. Okay, we're talking about the class. What class are they fucking on, dude? Yeah, I don't know. It's somewhere probably around there, right? Yeah, 280 probably. Oh. 364. 365. I was way off. Okay. Yeah. I would have agreed with you. You could have told me that in solidarity. That is the truth. I was like, he's right. He's right. My friend Paul is correct. Google doesn't know. Google's wrong, dude. Bunch of hippies. But anyways. So yeah, we go through that. You get your stripper chicken. It's brutal. Yeah, we get through that. What was the worst part about it? I don't want to linger because we are far in, but what was the worst part of the MARSOC training? Like the boot camp of March Sock, if you will. I think the hardest part. ITV, I think you called it, right? What's that? The course is called ITC. ITC. Yeah. What was the worst part of ITC? I think the worst part for a lot of guys was like the CQB package. You do like a couple months of just shooting. What? I mean, constant. That's like the best part. Yeah, but I mean, any mistake, you know, you have what you guys call accidental discharges. We call them a negligent discharge. No, it's a negligent discharge. Indy. Yeah, you're gone. No shit. There you go. Cut you from the course. You're completely gone. You don't pass the standard. You don't pass the, and the quals were hard. Were you making fun of the guys that like you're doing it with one eye? No, no, but I did have to, I mean. Did they make fun of you? Like, oh, one eye. Eagle eye. Yeah. Oh, eagle eye. That was the first place I really shot a pistol. Yeah, because you don't really. I shot right-handed my whole life. And when I went to boot camp was the first time I had to shoot left-handed because I couldn't see out of my right eye. So now I shoot a rifle left-handed and I shoot a pistol right-handed. No shit. I shoot rifle left-handed. Actually,
SPEAKER_01:I'm ambidextrous. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know where I
SPEAKER_01:get that from? Just fun fact. Switch hitting in baseball. Yeah. It's so weird how it translates. But like
SPEAKER_02:I would in school, I would switch hit and it would piss the pitcher off. I would start off right-handed, throw my hand up, do my little stretch or whatever. Get on the other side. And then I would go around the other side and that pitcher's like, mother fucker. Yeah, yeah. So now I can shoot a rifle left or right-handed. Yeah. Oh, you have to do that during all calls anyway because you're leaning corners and stuff yeah yeah so i would shoot left-handed uh rifle but that was the first place i really they were trying to get me to shoot a pistol left-handed it just didn't feel right so yeah it feels right like that now yeah i get it i get it yeah we get through that and i did i did a couple deployments i got on a team and we did a couple deployments to the philippines um what does that look like a deployment to the philippines man they were pretty cool war there well there's there's plenty of action going on there and people getting shot oh yeah in the philippines oh yeah Dude, My Way is out of control in the Philippines right now, dude. Do you know about My Way? Oh, yeah. You know about the My Way thing? The Frank Sinatra My Way song? Oh, no, no, no, no. You don't know about that? I was thinking Why Way. Brother, we just lost our monitor. Tom's doing a horrible job here. But apparently, not apparently, we've Googled this multiple times on the show. You are not allowed to sing the song by Frank Sinatra, My Way, in the Philippines.
SPEAKER_01:Karaoke is the
SPEAKER_02:national pastime
SPEAKER_01:there. And they will not If you try to sing my way, bars won't let you select the song. Yeah, bars won't let you pick.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, because there have been so many violent altercations. They love the song. They love Frank Sinatra so much. Yeah. They're like, you're not allowed to fucking, you know, dude, don't do it. Don't you dare. So do you think like as a Marine, you get to experience more of the like local culture, like later in these years of like this group that you're deployed with, like you get to. Yeah, like going to the Philippines, it wasn't like a war zone, but I mean, Abu Sayyaf and J.I., there was terrorism. Islamic terrorist groups that they're still down there today. And they would, I mean, the, the, the Filipino Marines and special forces, they would be actively fighting these guys. And we were there living on base in the jungle with these, uh, friendly forces and helping train and plan and assist. And, you know, I politely ask, did you stack or zip
SPEAKER_01:tie more bodies in the Philippines? Is that a polite question? Yeah. I'm going to
SPEAKER_02:go ahead
SPEAKER_01:and ask. No, no. Did
SPEAKER_02:you stack more bodies or is zip tie more bodies no we you know what I'm saying we weren't around like a lot of what we were doing was training was getting these guys and pushing them out the door to go and do it oh so you're just helping the Philippine forces we didn't have a lot of like direct okay okay okay confrontation yeah so you're not getting we had to be I think the we had to be two terrain features away and there was always this debate on like well what's a terrain feature you know there's a little hill that's on there railroad tracks yeah we're going we're going dude so I mean we would we would somebody build a stop sign real fast yeah that's an intersection it wasn't like it wasn't like uh you know like a normal type of thing so you did two of those did two of those what happens after those after those i went to uh tunisia i was in what the fuck is that right where is that north africa oh bullhorn area um right there on the med yeah it's beautiful country oh i'm so got algeria to the west right you're literally on the horn of so did you get to go like see some of these ancient ruins yeah i went to to that Coliseum, El Jim. I'm so jealous. That's where they filmed The Gladiator. No, it's not. I'll show you afterwards. I got pictures of me up there. You can text it right now. Yeah, if you text it, I'll plug it into the show afterwards. Does he have your number? He has my number, so it won't, but I'll plug it in the video. Oh, my God. That's
SPEAKER_01:where they filmed
SPEAKER_02:Gladiator? Yeah, it was really cool. No shit. Actually, a lot of Star Wars was filmed over there, too. I was in Luke Skywalker's house in the hole in the ground. That's so cool. Yeah, yeah. It's like a hotel kind of restaurant. Oh, my God, dude.
SPEAKER_01:Shout out to, fuck, in Tunisia,
SPEAKER_02:dude. Damn, they're doing it right, dude. Is there any food you got to experience on this
SPEAKER_01:that you were like, fuck, I wish we had that here?
SPEAKER_02:You know what? I miss naan and just goat meat. Naan is really good. And it's not like the same, you get it like yak and yeti here. Well, they had a great I never liked olives until I went to Tunisia. Now I love olives. That's like the heartland of olives. Yeah, that's olive country, dude. It's an old, I mean, you would have like the Roman ruins on top of the Carthage ruins, you know, like I would go down to old little, little mini Colosseums. I'd just go there for lunch and just go sit on them and eat lunch. I worked, I worked out of the embassy. I lived in an apartment downtown and had my own car. And let me bluntly ask after Mars, like once you've made it through selection, you've done a couple of tours to these other places, helping out supplementary forces. You're doing some training, some side-by-side stuff. You're helping people kind of like get out the door and like go do some stuff. Um, What do you get to see combat as MARSOC? I'm sorry, what was the question? Do you get to see any combat as MARSOC? Do you see combat as a raider? Do you go on a combat tour somewhere? Yes, but I wasn't working in MARSOC at the time. That's after you met your wife? Yeah. Let's get to that. Yeah, so I went to Tunisia. That was fun. Sorry, I'm not
SPEAKER_01:diminishing that. That's fucking sick. I want to hit the timeline. Then I
SPEAKER_02:went to Mauritania, which is southwest of there. I did two deployments to Mauritania. Is that a country? Yeah, it's an awful country. It's an awful country. Yeah. Let's see how I spell it. When I say awful, I mean, it's just like Sahara, M-A-R, Mauritania. There you go. Yeah, nice, dude. Oh, right there in Nuwakchot. Yep. Oh, okay. Damn, you did quite a bit of time in Africa, my man. Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Africa. I've heard it's beautiful. So, like, do you get sick ever, or did the military... I get sick all the time. I get sick all the time. Did you get to see this castle looking thing? No. I got Giardia. I've got dysentery a few times. Dysentery. Just peeing out of your butt. Dude, it's the worst. It's a thing. I had parasites from the Philippines. Yeah, dude. My unit. Dude, funny enough, my unit got dysentery. The whole cop did. And I was on leave. I just happened to be gone the two weeks. It happened. And then I came back and it was over. I was like, man, that sucks for you guys.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So like you come back, I saw your wife's Catholic as well. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So that's how you get, you had to see. I met her right before I went to Tunisia and then, so yeah. So then, um, Mauritania. So at that time in my career, I was transitioning from like heavy ops into more Intel related things. Yeah. Um, behind the scenes. Yeah. Like wearing local stuff and, you know, kind of sneaking around. I started doing a lot of that and that's what I did in Mauritania a lot. Did you have to learn, like you, had to go to like I went to French school
SPEAKER_01:did they do that in Marsauk like they teach you a
SPEAKER_02:language yeah if you want or if you get directed so like in this was French school though like was there a lot of French speaking I assumed like Arabic or Aramaic well in Mauritania and Tunisia it's it's those well Mauritania specifically was a French colony so very English French heavy okay okay very nice French French will help you more in West Africa than Arabic will okay okay fair enough yeah I feel like nor Northeastern Africa is your heavy Arabic. The language of love and angry people. French. Yeah. That checks out. Time in Morocco, time in Senegal down there, a couple other little places. They speak French in Morocco? Oh, yeah. Really? I thought Arabic would have been big. No, they speak both. I mean, every household speaks both. They're all dual, tri-lingual. And some will speak English. Yeah, everybody. It's just they grow up speaking it. We're so stupid here in America. Do you ever, like, now that you've traveled and you've been around, you're like, God damn, we're dumb here. I just think, no, I look at it as, well, we got it right. We don't need any other languages. We don't need to be cultured. We're self-sufficient. Just make China build all our shit, dude. Somebody else speak Mandarin. So I did a couple of deployments to Mauritania. The halfway through my last one, we got pulled up to Germany. I was in Germany for three months. How and why did you get pulled? The program was getting shut down and we were starting a new program. Oh, in Mauritania? Yeah. Did you get to Mauritania? Oh, yeah. I I went to, gosh, me and my buddy Ryan, we went to probably 10 different countries while we were there. That's so sick, dude. Yeah. I mean, I flew my, I was married in between Mauritania trips. I got married. Gotcha. Nice, dude. And I flew my wife over to Germany and then we took a first class train over to Paris and did a whole week in Paris. It was really cool. The whole romantic. Yeah. Yeah. And you could speak French, so I'm sure it came off even better. I could, I could mumble through it. You could At least order. Yeah. So, um, so what, I guess like, dude, what happened? So is Marsock the end of your career? Well, so I'm, I was, I was a Marine Raider the whole time. And then after that deployment, I had been, um, kind of looking for other things to do. Cause I was, Like more intense things? Well, I was kind of like, I don't know, once you do that type of deployment a couple times, you kind of max out in it, right? And I was like, all right, what's next? What's next? Almost stagnation. It becomes common. It's like a common trend with me. What's the next thing? What's the next level? And I was fortunate and lucky, and I was able to take a selection and go up to a special missions unit where I worked for the last six years. And from there— Explain that a little bit. What's a SMU special missions unit? SMU. So more of a, um, um, I'm trying to think of the best way to say it. Um, it's like, it's a, it's a, like a next level or more specific special operations command. Okay. Yeah. Um, a little bit Marines. No, no, no, no. So you're changing. I was, no, I was a Marine. I was basically like TD or TAD or TDY to a command. Okay. Yeah. So I worked with, um, administratively I was still under the Marine Corps, but operationally I was under this command. And at the command, it was great. I did my only move ever in the military in 20 years. I moved once, which is unheard of. That is, in fact, unheard of. You are a rare breed, sir. And I did a couple of deployments over to Afghanistan where there was a lot of that kind of low-vis intelligence types of things. Integrated into society. Yeah, like the long beard, the long hair, the man jammies. Yeah. Did you have to learn Arabic then? No, hell no. I could never learn Arabic. If I dedicated 20 years of my life to it, I wouldn't know it.
SPEAKER_01:There's a guy that we interviewed from your brother's bookstore.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but he couldn't talk about much of anything. It was strictly intelligence, translator stuff he saw.
SPEAKER_01:But how long did he go to school to learn Pashtunwali?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, it was probably a year and a half. Yeah, at least a year. So he was in intelligence. And again, we didn't gain any knowledge sure like we didn't open anything but uh we did talk about his time and i think it was like a
SPEAKER_01:year and a half
SPEAKER_02:just of college level learning only the language and different you know like if they say this instead of this like they're from this region like you had to learn the different dialect it's intense no i didn't mess with that i had an interpreter so you're integrated right well and you're you're no i i lived on a a small base in the green zone area and your wife wasn't allowed Oh, no. No, no, not a combat zone. it's a different level of danger. If you get nabbed up. Oh yeah. You're done. Oh yeah. You're done. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it's a different kind of, so, so what are, what is your average? Well, you said you did five years, like five more deployments in that time before you get out. Yeah. So, uh, I guess what does your average mission look like when you're integrated like that? It's like six months? Is that what you're asking, the time frame? We did shorter deployments on that. We did probably three-and-a-half, four-month deployments. And again, we're not trying to gain any information from you, but just being, like you said, in the man dress with the weird funny hat and the beard, and now you're rocking maybe sunglasses to hide your... No, if nobody wears sunglasses, you'd stick out. with those on. So what do you do to like, what does an average mission look like? They're like, hey, there's this dude out here. A lot of it's just kind of like reconnaissance, intel gathering, you know, kind of surveillance type operations. But you're not speaking the language. Is the interpreter doing most of the work gaining this knowledge? No, we're just chatting and I'm chatting with him asking, I'm like, hey man, what's that? What does that mean? He'll tell me. And if we get stopped, he's really there if I get stopped. A lot of it's in vehicles. I wasn't walking around the streets.
SPEAKER_01:No, absolutely not. But if you have a couple of guys that are like tallies and they're talking and there are two tables down from you at the bazaar and you're just having coffee with your tour.
SPEAKER_02:You know what I mean? They're talking about something important. You know what I mean? Does he do most of the work there? And he's like, hey, man, they're talking about. Yeah. So if I wanted to go talk to him, right? I'm looking at them talking. They're responding and he's just being. in the voice for both this is before AI came out with the mic yeah and it's the same thing if I wanted to go and you know I get stopped at a checkpoint by some police you know I'm not saying anything I'm just like hey what's up and he's just like hey and then we're out did people not ever were you ever dude to me I'd be so scared like if I was to interact with some tallies and I've got my my terp and he's doing all the talking and I'm not talking well yeah because you don't know what there's well he's relaying it but not It's the fact that they know that I'm not speaking. They're like, what's wrong with this deaf, dumb mute over here? You know what I mean? It's like, what's up with homeboy here with the pale complexion? Well, if they're already on you talking, they already know you're not from there. Really? We're trying to pass a first look is kind of the standard. Just from afar. You're driving by, somebody sees like, oh, it's just another bearded guy. So you're gaining intel less from personnel, but more from like... Lay of the land. Right. Is that safe to say? Yeah. A little mix of both.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Okay. Well,
SPEAKER_02:so like fast forward through there,
SPEAKER_01:like you get out now and like, I assume since you did 20 years in, you've kind of accustomed to this, like on off, like, cause you
SPEAKER_02:go on tour, you come back, you go on tour, you come back. So like, you've kind of built in a custom, but like, what was that transition? Like, I was like, Hey, I'm retired from this. Still going through it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. You're only a
SPEAKER_02:year out. I retired in June last year. So were you doing therapy at all in between? tween tours or did you just get into it well when my last probably two or three years of being in the unit like we were kind of required to talk to a psych at least once a month just by the nature yeah by the nature of what we were doing and I got kind of used to it there and then like in a good way or a bad way in a good way okay I've had bad experiences with psychs as well so used to it but not immune to it yeah okay and then when I got out I did a it's like Um, it was free and it was like a nonprofit that works with guys like me. Um, it's, it was video zoom, which it was better than nothing. And I, I mean, I worked with this lady for like a year and it was, she helped me through a lot of things. Um, and I still, I still talk to a psych or a therapist, I don't know, every two, three weeks.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's good.
SPEAKER_02:And a lot of it's just to kind of maintain, to make sure I'm okay. You know, it's not because there's something specific I really need to talk about sometimes. Yeah. after two or three weeks and you're like, I'm cool, what's up with you?
SPEAKER_01:You know what I mean? And you're like, how are the kids?
SPEAKER_02:You know what I mean? And sometimes it's like you really want to talk to them about something. You're like, I thought about killing a guy in traffic today.
SPEAKER_01:But like, that transition out, so you're like a year and a half out. When do you find mission, do you come up with the, where does
SPEAKER_02:that? So right before I got out, I had met just an awesome person, Sean Georges, and he was He had kind of introduced me to this idea of, because he was asking me, hey, what are you going to do when you get out? And I said, I have no idea. And we started kind of communicating and I came home on leave. We had coffee and I met him and he was telling me about Mission First. And I just said, yeah, that sounds awesome. And like, I didn't want to get out and just go right into contracting, which is what all of my friends do. And that's where like you can go back over and just do. Yeah, you're basically just like, yeah, you're a civilian. You're a civilian for hire. Mercenary, essentially. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. And a nicer word. Yeah, yeah. Contractor is a new word for mercenary,
SPEAKER_01:but yeah. What was that movie they put out about the Hillary thing? What was it,
SPEAKER_02:37 Hours or whatever, 20, 20, I don't remember. Was it 13 Hours? 13 Hours, yeah, yeah, 13 Hours. Yeah, it's basically, those guys were all contracts. Yeah, they were all contracts, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I... I think I was really looking, I didn't want to, um, I don't want to just get into the, the cycle of going and working some job at somebody I don't care about and some company I don't care about. I was looking to privatized. It's like you're detached. I wanted to do something that had purpose. Um, and you know, helping vets out was just seemed like a good fit. Um, and it, it has been, I mean, you said it before the show kind of while we were BS and setting up the mics and the cameras and everything, but like we don't do enough for our vet no just as a as a unit like the united states of america like as a country we do not do enough for our veterans i think it's common knowledge at this point yeah um so it's really really important that we have foundations uh like like what like who you're working with to kind of stand up and be that voice it's a big problem you know i mean for 20 years we're sending guys out to go fight wars and i mean and people always think that the biggest problem with vets are combat trauma you know when maybe five percent of them saw combat you know a lot of it is just ruining their lives with alcohol or drugs or uh you know their lifestyle choices destroying marriages i mean look at the divorce rate in the military
SPEAKER_01:what i think from what i saw with you what um when you had casey's dugout when we had casey going on and you like were on their instagram and we saw and you guys said like we lose 22 soldiers a day
SPEAKER_02:yeah 22 22 a day it's crazy that's i mean Surely that's gone up too because that's been 22 a day for the last decade. It has been. Hopefully it's gone down but that's kind of where we're hoping. We're trying to really catch guys and gals before they kind of get to that point of crisis. I feel like Brian should eventually maybe pivot into some career like this but I feel like military guys have better, they take advice better from somebody that's been there and done that versus somebody that doesn't know what they're talking about. All of our programming is going to be peer-based so you're not gonna have somebody who doesn't know a shit about combat trying to tell you about how you feel that's the fucking worst like you would come and you would talk to somebody like me and we just get along and talk through it that's the worst when you meet a therapist oh yeah like oh what was it like holding a dude's head you know yeah like yeah nah you don't get it and you talk to him for two minutes and like okay here's seven medications
SPEAKER_01:i want you to take and it's like benzodiazepine uh ritalin so let's gabapentin yeah gabapentin is like no dude it's like no that's not the answer what all what all will the sanctuary on the hill like like host, like what all will be on. What is it? We haven't even talked about the foundation. So what is
SPEAKER_02:it? Mission First is, I'm the development director of Mission First. I'm the chief fundraiser, but I basically do a lot. My wife and I are a tag team partner in this and she does all our social media. I do all the speaking and talking and the meeting people and just really getting the awareness out there. We have a fantastic board right now, mostly vets, a few army, some Marines. We I don't really care for the way you said that. You said some army. We had to get things done. We got a couple of turds. Everything from Vietnam all the way down to a guy that's seven years younger than me. We have a good spread. Veteran is just a qualification. Just be a veteran. The whole idea is just as you can probably know some people. I know you know people. These guys that are kind of just they're just kind of floating they're kind of lost they don't have a purpose ah you're talking about me yeah all right settle down i didn't know i signed up for therapy today well i mean the the military gives you a sense of purpose like you know what you're doing man you know what you're doing every day it's for a common goal a common drive a mission
SPEAKER_01:that's what i always tell brian i'm envious of like the military of like i didn't go into the military like the military teaches you structure it teaches you all these like like things that like if you can cope with with your experience in the military, you're more set up for like life
SPEAKER_02:than somebody that just didn't do anything with their life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and so what we're really trying to do is just trying to get those guys and gals, I keep saying guys, guys back into like, get them back motivated, get them finding that sense of purpose again, give them something to just wake up to and believe in every day. We're going to have a series of programs for that. And it's not just for the vets, for their spouse and their children, because they always get left behind. Always.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Nobody, it seems like the general population just, they, you know, you come home from a deployment, you're Mr. Hero. You're so awesome. And your wife who just was by herself with three kids at home. She's fine. 800 miles from family. Yeah, she's fine. Yeah, you did great. Anyway, I want to talk about your war hero husband. And it's just, it's a tragedy. Right. They're trying to make ends meet, raise kids, all this. It's a lot harder job than what I was doing. Yeah. And, you know, so we're offering a bunch of different things. out here. You can see the renderings, but we're going to have a horse arena for equine therapy if that's
SPEAKER_01:something. We talked about this. I'm a big equestrian
SPEAKER_02:fan. We're going to be doing, I mean, there's a lake on it. We're going to be doing fishing and trails and hiking and just being outside. It's out in the middle of 92 acres right by Bluegrass Fish and Wildlife area off of 69. Okay, that's Linville area. That's my territory. Yeah, like Boonville, Linville kind of area. Yeah, brother, I like that. He doesn't like Boonville, but I do. No, I like Bluegrass's Yeah. I'll catch a whole mess of bluegill up there, dude. Yeah. I love some bluegrass. If you're a bluegrass, you're like a couple miles from us. Oh, yeah. ADHD
SPEAKER_01:tangent. Were you into hunting before the military? I know you're a hunting guy.
SPEAKER_02:Not before. Okay. No, I didn't grow up hunting. I started hunting when I was probably 20, right when I joined the Marine Corps. Had some buddies take me out, and I just fell in love with it. Nice, dude. And now I'm like... It's therapy. It's life-saving. That's my chi. I'm jealous, dude. I need
SPEAKER_01:to go. Yeah, I'm trying to plug Brian in with some people. He's going to start butchering meat rabbits at my house this year. There you go. Because he can't do it. Yeah, because I pass out.
SPEAKER_02:Don't spill the blood and guts. You can come out with me. Hell, I'll be out Saturday trapping beavers. Brian needs to learn. Yeah, dude. I'm always... I'm a big hands-on guy. I got to introduce you to my buddy, Jeff. If I can pull a liver out and then just... You know what I'm saying, dude? Yeah, it's just liver king. Get a Tesco in my mouth, dude. Raw, not from the beast. We get after it. The foundation just got poured. They're going to start all the framing on
SPEAKER_01:tomorrow. I think I actually saw that on the Instagram here.
SPEAKER_02:They were starting. Dude, I like it. I like it. I love it, dude. That's it. Fuck yes. Tearing up ground, that's a different feeling. You can look at renderings and you can look at drawings and you can look at hypothetical and you can talk about it on paper and here's the funny, here's the numbers. Shake this guy's hand, shake this girl's hand. But dude, when you fucking chew that dirt up, that's gotta be like, oh, it's fucking happening. It's just been a lot for a year and I'm like, finally, it's happening. You like take your shoes off and ground in it or are you not that heavy? Put my feet in the wet concrete. It's a major project. I mean, it's major and the community has just, they've really come together and just like been super supportive of And as they should be. Yeah. I mean, you guys are, you guys have just scrolling. You see the, the coffee there. Shout out. Zach. Oh dude. I love Mr. Parsons, dude. Zach did a, uh, did a blend for us. Love Mr. Parsons, man. Shout out. Just a great partner for us. Love having them. What
SPEAKER_01:other, like, uh, like Casey's dugout. Does it give back? What other, what
SPEAKER_02:other places could people get like plugged into that? Maybe like give some. So right now in August, um, It's a, it's a weird story. We see the Novix right there. Um, that's a, it's a tree stand company. Okay. My friend, Jeff clump owns it and he lives about 10 minutes from me and he had called me. We had met probably 12 years ago, hadn't talked to him since. And he called me cause he wanted to give some money back to the veteran. He's up Marine as well. He wanted to give some money, uh, to help out what we were doing. And I'm like, yeah, that's awesome, man. And I'm scrolling through the website cause I had never heard of Novix before. And so, man, you got a tree stand called a Marine or called a Raider. And he's like, yeah. I was like, man, I am a Marine Raider. If you ever want any help marketing that. Let me cop one of those, bro. And then he was like, let me call you back. And his marketing director called me. And then now you see I'm like the face of the Raider tree stand
SPEAKER_01:now. Nice, dude.
SPEAKER_02:And so this month of August, he's given a percentage of sales and donation to us. Shit, yeah, dude. Yeah. Shit, yeah, brother. So he's just a good dude trying to help out. Right. We'll have to order some shirts after this episode. Yeah. They got some cool swag. Damn, boy.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So, um, I don't know, man. So like, uh, well, I
SPEAKER_01:mean, we can always get you
SPEAKER_02:in
SPEAKER_01:for a part two to go more in depth. Like once the building gets up and the foundation is going, but I have
SPEAKER_02:you out there doing it.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah. We'll film it there, but we're, we're two hours and 15 minutes and maybe minus some cuts. So like, we'll definitely get you in for a part two where we love this sort of stuff. Yeah. And any of your buddies, you can send them our way. Yeah. But like on this journey in the military for like 20 years, and then getting out and going full in with Mission First. Was there ever a moment where you just wanted to throw in the towel and
SPEAKER_02:just be like, I'm done with this? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You're more than willing to go into detail on it, but we care more about what
SPEAKER_02:pulled you through that. What was your light at the end of the tunnel when everything else, all hope was lost? Yeah. It was shortly after I actually got out and a lot of... a lot of realities were coming to light, you know, different. I mean, everything was changing and it was just, um, a lot of just things I'd been avoiding and kind of running away from were catching up to me. And I was at the lowest point. Um, which is why I told you, I mean, I brought you a bottle of bourbon. I quit drinking a little over a year ago. And also, congratulations. Yeah. You're plus sober. Yeah. Good for you, brother. So I, I, I had to make some, some life changes. I mean, I had to really look at myself. And the only things that really got me through that were, first and foremost, probably my faith. I mean, I... dove headfirst into my faith. I'm a devout Catholic and just the great people that I've met along the way that have helped me. And then my wife just being just, I mean, unbelievably strong and being able to just deal with me. There's no way I would be here and be who I am today without her. And she's gone through God, when I'm talking, you know, a home alone with three kids, 800 miles from any family, that's her, you know, times three or four, you know, she's just, she, she, man, she's brutal. The cornerstone for you. She's a savage, yeah. She takes no prisoners. And she's always there to really check my ego, too. It works out. We all need to kill our ego every once in a while. I swear to God, dude. Sometimes I get too hyped up.
SPEAKER_01:I did that on a float once a year. I like
SPEAKER_02:to say, you know, my wife's always there to check me. Even if I'm just feeling good about myself one day, she's there to shit on me real quick. And I'm like, all right, fair enough. I need that, though. Your legs look small today. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. no dude i dude i i don't know your wife's name i've never met her but i'll tell you what i'm alex yeah alex shout out to alex dude um she sounds like a fucking and you guys are killing it like as a team like you know
SPEAKER_01:making making the dream happen
SPEAKER_02:this is intense we're all in i mean very similar to how we even found each other from casey and bissy over there i mean dude that's the hardest working man in evansville man i'm telling you i love that dude like a brother that dude's a beast bro yeah casey's Yeah. Beast. If I learned anything in my entire life, if I'm good at anything, I should say, it's like surrounding myself with good people. Just dogs. Just great humans. That's what advice you would give to the next generation. I mean, anything that I've ever gotten or gained or achieved in my life is from standing on the shoulders of just great people that I've surrounded myself by. And I give all the credit to them, all the way down to those fire team leaders I was talking about. Yeah, I applaud you for that yeah I did we didn't have to even cue you on that you just kept reiterating like yeah it was these junior leaders and yeah junior leaders and yeah these guys right here I know them by name here's their names yeah they grew they came they led like yeah you're just a really good dude I got a lot of work to do yet but we all do brother we all do brother but I'm very very envious of you you are you seem very solid you're doing some really great shit with you know mission first the sanctuary on on the hill we're taking off man pouring concrete uh foundations are coming together do we have an eta on sanctuary um so the first two buildings the lodge and the activity center should be finished in eight to nine months is what we're hoping okay uh weather dependent of course absolutely so that that big building there that'll be the activity center and the lodge will be next so there's gonna be some i mean it's it's gonna be we're we're starting to do stuff now we're not waiting around so we're gonna have we have something going on with all of the children at youth first who are children of veterans. So helping those children out. And then we're going to have a kids of veterans fishing tournament out there in October. That's going to be so, we're trying to just build a whole community, just build it up. And yeah, if you haven't followed us, get on there and follow us. I think we're like eight people away from 1.3 K. Well, and what's cool. So like for people out there that don't want, after you like something, you can click this three dots and hit invite friends and you can invite up to a thousand friends a day. Thank you for saying that. We were just getting ready to make a post about that. Oh dude, it's so easy. Dude, I, boost so many people's pay it's like all you got to do is for like a week log on every day and like invite all your friends to like it and then forget about it after after a week and if it's if it's something garbage like my podcast that's one thing but if it's something beautiful i think we've already like we already liked your podcast but if it's something like this that benefits people that have already done and and sacrifice things that nobody should ever have to do and or sacrifice there's no excuse click the damn button and invite some people man i I mean, it's just too easy. Like, tell some people about this, man. This is great. I'm very excited. This is a really beautiful thing that you're doing. Seriously. You ought to come out and check it out. I'm very excited. Please. Yeah, absolutely. What is it? 30 minutes away? 100%. Yeah. 100%. Please, please, please. And I want to come out and gut some ducks or whatever you were talking about earlier. We're trapping beavers next week. Oh, dude. I'll do a beaver right now, bro. That's my gamer tag on Xbox. A beaver hunter. There you go. Not for the same reason. You get it. Different reasons. We're talking about the aquatic animal. Yeah. dude
SPEAKER_01:paul it's been nothing short of a pleasure to get to know you for the last like two and a half hours do you
SPEAKER_02:have any questions for us before we uh put a bow on today no man let's do it again sometime yeah please i feel like you know 20 years there's a lot of stories in there it takes a lot of time dude i swear to god and some dude our listeners love a good military podcast so we're gonna have to have you come
SPEAKER_01:back yeah more um tom i don't have anything else do you have anything else sir i think this has been another thrilling episode of the day's grim podcast my My name is Brian Michael Day. My name is Thomas Graham. And this has been Paul.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you so much, sir.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, brother.
SPEAKER_02:Appreciate it.