#118 Nick Irving - "The Reaper"

Nick Irving is a New York Times bestselling author and former Sergeant and Sniper with the Special Operations unit, 75th Ranger Regiment 3rd Ranger battalion. Nicknamed "The Reaper," Irving has 33 confirmed kills in a single, three and a half month deployment. His authored works include: The Reaper and Way of the Reaper, hit thriller novel Reaper: Ghost Target and Reaper: The Board. Irving also starred in the FOX reality TV show American Grit. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://shopify.com/shawn https://moinkbox.com/shawn https://mypatriotsupply.com https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Nick Irving Links: Book - https://a.co/d/gCmhu9c IG - https://www.instagram.com/officialreaper33 X - https://x.com/irving_nicholas FB - https://www.facebook.com/officialreaper33 Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:46Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  Nick Irving. Welcome to the show, man.

• 1:07Speaker 06

  Thank you, brother.

• 1:08Shawn Ryan?

  We have, uh, I've been tracking you for a long time, years, and, uh, been trying to get your attention. And then finally, what, about six months ago-ish?

• 1:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18Shawn Ryan?

  Finally got through to you, and, uh, and, uh, man, I'm just honored to have you here. And I think you're a great representation of the community that you come from, the Ranger, the Ranger community. And, um, and, uh, I'm really excited to dive into this, so.

• 1:33Speaker 06

  Kind words, man. Thank you, thank you.

• 1:36Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure.

• 1:36Speaker 06

  Hope I live up to it, you know?

• 1:38Shawn Ryan?

  You will. There's not a doubt in my mind. But, um, starting off with your introduction here. So you're a husband and father. You've been married for 16 years, going on 17.

• 1:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:51Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:52Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:53Shawn Ryan?

  It's crazy, man. I've been getting, you know, there's like a 90, what is there? Like a 90-something percent divorce rate in special ops?

• 1:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:00Shawn Ryan?

  And about the past five or six guys I've had on have all had lengthy 10 years plus married.

• 2:06Speaker 06

  That's a good thing, then. It's a rarity. Like, you don't see it often. I think it's just, uh, it's a, it's a, it's a good thing. Yeah, I say it's a good thing. To be able to stick with someone that long, yeah.

• 2:17Shawn Ryan?

  The deadliest sniper named The Reaper with thirty-three confirmed kills over the course of just four months. New York Times bestselling author of The Reaper and Way of the Reaper, author of Reaper, The Board. Served six years in US Army Special Operations, Third Ranger Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. You're the first African-American to deploy into the global war on terrorism as a sniper in your battalion. Owner of Hard Shoot. You train personnel in the art of long-range shooting and former mentor on the Fox reality show American Grit.

• 2:54Speaker 06

  That sums it up pretty good, yeah.

• 2:57Shawn Ryan?

  Did I miss anything?

• 2:58Speaker 06

  No, no, no. I don't even care anymore about that stuff, man. To be honest, like, there's a few TV shows and movies, but no.

• 3:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:07Speaker 06

  I don't even care, man.

• 3:08Shawn Ryan?

  Do you like doing the TV stuff?

• 3:10Speaker 06

  Not anymore. I lost that itch. I was doing a show for Discovery Channel and I lost the itch thereafter. The show was called Master of Arms. It was like a forge and fire where you make, they would forge stuff.

• 3:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Speaker 06

  And I was one of the judges, but I would just test the weapons. And I just had a bad experience with that. And then thereafter, I was supposed to do a TV show with Tim Kennedy and a few other snipers. And it was my second go around with that stuff and I just kind of lost the itch after it. The, I guess, the Hollywood lifestyle. I've done like the Transformers stuff and...

• 3:53Shawn Ryan?

  You were in Transformers 2?

• 3:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. Transformers. Then I helped with the show, or the movie, The Wall. Terrible movie. It was like, it's, it's like a two-star movie on Amazon. But it's called The Wall and it was, it was a cool experience because I got a chance to hang with, one of my good friends is John Cena. We've been hanging out since like 2015, I believe. Fourteen or fifteen. Good guy and it was cool to work with him, but other than that, and the guy who did, Jason Bourne, the director. Cool experience, but it was just, it, it, I lost the taste after that.

• 4:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 06

  All the stuff that is going on in Hollywood that you hear about. I've had my taste of nothing along those lines of just just weird stuff in Hollywood after my last show with Discovery. Discovery Channel, yeah.

• 4:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, definitely. A lot is coming out about the circles in Hollywood.

• 4:49Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:50Shawn Ryan?

  None of it seems to be positive.

• 4:54Speaker 06

  No.

• 4:54Shawn Ryan?

  By any means, but but moving on. So I have a subscription account on Patreon that's they've been here since the beginning. They're top supporters and so I give them an opportunity to ask every guest possible a question. And so here is a question from Stephen Casey. What is the best decision that you've ever made and how has that helped you?

• 5:26Speaker 06

  That's the first question.

• 5:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's a

• 5:28Speaker 06

  That's a deep one. Wow. What's the best decision I've ever made? And how has it helped me? Stop caring so much. That's probably been the best decision. Stop caring so much about the outside and care more about care more so about what's on the inside, meaning what's going on in my life, observing that, how I'm feeling emotionally, the the issues that I've had. Acknowledging that, taking care of that, even if you're not, I wasn't taking care of it, you know, when I first started to acknowledge it.

• 6:06Shawn Ryan?

  Are you are you talking about quit paying attention to external influences?

• 6:11Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 6:13Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's crazy. I was just on a podcast yesterday and that's I said the exact same thing.

• 6:17Speaker 06

  Really?

• 6:18Shawn Ryan?

  That's crazy.

• 6:19Speaker 06

  Hey, man. I was remote viewing and I heard you say that. That's what happened. But that's that's like the best thing or best advice that I've taken from myself was so yeah, stop caring so much about the external forces and things that are out of my control. I can't control what other people think, what they believe, what they you know, want to believe about me or anything. I can't control that. Only thing I can control is is myself. So not worrying so much about the outside, you know, just more so about taking care of me. Like when we die, we're all gonna go in that casket by ourselves, you know, and I think that that is

• 7:04Speaker 06

  My biggest takeaway, knowing that at the end of the day, it's just gonna be me anyways. So I really shouldn't have to care about the outside forces and other things that I can't control, you know? I have to stand before the judge by myself at the end, so.

• 7:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, that's, uh, man, that's great. I'm glad you said that. What led you to, to start looking internally instead of externally? And, and how did that, I mean, affect your daily life? Maybe your business life, anything?

• 7:37Speaker 06

  I would say the birth of my son. So, long story. I've always wanted a family, like a kid. I wanted two originally. I still want two, just the way things are. I don't have control over that. But I knew before I turned 30, I said, before I turn 30, my 30th birthday, I want to have my first child. Fast forward, my 30th birthday, on the date, my son pops out. Being there and witnessing that, seeing that, and the, the struggle that he had to go through. He was born with like a weird heart condition. This, you know, it's healed up thankfully now. But it was, uh, it was hard to, to watch and not have, to feel so much power of wanting to,

• 8:22Speaker 06

  dang, I'm gonna already choke up, dude. But yeah, having no control of that circumstance and realizing like, I guess what, how important life really is, you know? It all came in that moment. And that's when the switch went on of, you know, like nothing, nothing really matters. And I wanted to be there for him in the long run. So that's when the, the switch definitely changed was, yeah, I wanted to stick around for him.

• 8:52Shawn Ryan?

  How did, how did it affect your life?

• 8:55Speaker 06

  Oh, man, drastically. I, I, I was too caught up in.

• 9:02Speaker 06

  Outside circumstances, outside forces that I had no control over. I was too caught up in the outside world and having that center point, that center focus being my son and like everything, I guess went away if you want to, yeah. All the, the issues that I had, not issues, but my perspective of what was important in life changed. And what was important for me would be able to, to raise my son and, and be there for him. So it definitely helped out as far as ignoring what everybody else thought. I wanted my son to think, you know, my dad is the, you know, coolest.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  I can go to my dad at any time, no matter what, I'm gonna be, you know, I'm, I'm always gonna be his dad. I don't, I can't always be what some guy on the internet or some family member wants me to be. I can't be that. I can't be all those things at once, but what I can be is better for my son. So, yeah.

• 10:01Shawn Ryan?

  Man, thanks for sharing that.

• 10:03Speaker 06

  I appreciate it.

• 10:04Shawn Ryan?

  But before we get in, man, we, we already starting to get deep here, but, uh, but before we get into your life story, and that's what I want to do, we're gonna start the childhood, go into your military career, go into your transition civilian career, businesses that you run. And, uh, but before we do that, everybody gets a gift.

• 10:26Speaker 06

  What do we got, man?

• 10:28Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody gets a gift.

• 10:29Speaker 06

  We just talked about this.

• 10:30Shawn Ryan?

  That we, we did.

• 10:31Speaker 06

  The gummies, man.

• 10:32Shawn Ryan?

  Did. Now, those are made in the USA and are legal in all 50 states.

• 10:38Speaker 06

  They are legal.

• 10:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don't know.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  I can make it work, man. I can make it work. Dude, my wife used to send me pounds of these overseas, pounds. I ate in one sitting, a full pound of gummy bears and.

• 10:55Speaker 06

  By the time it came out, I had one large gummy bear in the toilet.

• 11:01Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, but um.

• 11:03Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 11:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you're welcome, but um, so let's dive in. Let's start with childhood. Where did you grow up?

• 11:09Speaker 06

  Grew up, well, born in Augsburg, Germany. Uh, both of my parents were counterintelligence in the army. Uh, during the Cold War time, copying Morse code, deciphering Morse code and uh, sending it off to the NSA, I believe at the time. After they left the army or during that transition, we moved from Augsburg to Florida. I stayed in Florida for about a year in Pensacola, a year or two. My parents, my mom retired. My dad stayed in for a little bit longer and we moved to Maryland at this place, at a, at a place called uh, what was it, on Walker Drive, near Fort Meade, near NSA.

• 11:54Speaker 06

  Um, not on Fort Meade, the base, but near it. It was like a government housing and stayed there for, from eighty, geez, I forget the eight. Eighty, let's see, eighty-nine or ninety to ninety-three. Stayed in this haunted house that was built on a graveyard and cemetery and.

• 12:18Shawn Ryan?

  Legitimately haunted?

• 12:19Speaker 06

  Legitimately haunted.

• 12:21Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we gotta dive into this.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  Legit, bro.

• 12:24Shawn Ryan?

  How, hold on, how old are you?

• 12:27Speaker 06

  I was at the time, let's, four, five years old.

• 12:33Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 12:33Speaker 06

  Four or five years old. That was my first experience when I, I'll never forget this experience. So I'm laying in bed on this, you can look up this old place, it's Walker Drive, Fort Meade, near Fort Meade. There's no more houses there. It's just all built up and, and torn down. But um, lived in this all brick house that was uh, connected to another home that if you poked a hole through the, to the, the wall, you could see the neighbors in the adjacent room. Few hundred square foot home, very, very, very small. And my dad would always say, if you stood in the front door, you could spit and you'd hit the backyard. It's very small home.

• 13:15Speaker 06

  So as a kid, we would always hear like people running upstairs footsteps. And my parents would, you know, ignore it. It's just a house creaking or whatever. And these footsteps would start to come down the stairs. You'd hear heavy footsteps just going around upstairs and they start to go downstairs and they would stop. Few other times you would hear conversations, but like whispers or like staticky whispers on a radio station you couldn't tune into all the way. And as a kid, you don't think too much of it. You just hear stuff, but the scariest, most traumatizing, if you want to call it that,

• 13:54Speaker 06

  experience that I've had, I was laying in bed and now to this day, I'm paranoid of sleeping on my back because of it. Laying in bed on my back and something woke me up and I see a soldier who, at the time I had no idea what his uniform looked like. It was different than my dad's. I didn't find out later that it was like a old civil war style uniform. And I see a soldier walk past my doorway. I rubbed my eyes, put the blankets over my head, rub them some more and look back down. And now it's not just one, there's soldiers, a line of them walking and they would turn to go down the stairs into the the main living room space. Maybe 10 soldiers passed by.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  The last soldier, he got in my doorway, turned, looked and started to walk into my room towards me. Jumped out of my bed, ran through him into the bathroom, curled up on the toilet and started screaming. My dad runs out and I'm screaming at him, please don't spank me, please don't spank me. Cause that's what normally would happen. And he came in, grabbed me, held me. And I told him what I saw as best as I could. And he says, I know, son, I know, I saw it too. That was my first real ghost experience. Whoa, he's he did see it too? Yeah, well, to pass by, uh, his room was to the left of my room.

• 15:21Speaker 06

  Um, and yeah, so I guess they were coming out the wall in the hallway, walking past his door and my door before they went downstairs and he saw it, I saw it. Terrified me and the looks of their clothes, uh, I'll never forget the uniforms they wore, wore the, the long gun with the musket or not musket, but it had a long, not sword, but knife bayonet at the tip of it. And they were marching with the little cap hats down the stairs. I had never seen that uniform a day in my life and I won't forget it. And the last guy walking into my room. Yeah.

• 15:59Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have more experiences?

• 16:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I've had one, I guess more recent when, within the past 15 years or so, I was working at a gun range, uh, called rifles only. It's a big, uh, precision rifle, uh, training facility. And me and one of the instructors, his name's Wen, and we're driving down this dirt road to get to where the facility is. It's at nighttime. We had just gotten back from the bar. I wasn't drinking. I was designated driver, but I was sitting passenger seat. But regardless, we're driving and I hear, it sounded like a radio came

• 16:40Speaker 06

  on, the static, and I heard this old lady chuckling, laughing and saying something. I couldn't understand what she was saying, but it sounded like she was in the floorboard. That's what it sounded like. And I look at him and he looks over at me and it's, it, it completely went off. It stopped. He looks over at me and he's like, did you hear that? And I'm like, dude, you heard that, right? And he's like, it's not my radio. His, he had an old pickup truck. The wires are all over the place and it's an old beat up pickup truck. Radio does not work. And we just kind of ignored it after that. Never talked about it. He didn't want to believe it, but we both heard what we heard. It was an old lady

• 17:23Speaker 06

  in the floorboard talking some, I don't know what she was saying. So old lady. Wen, if you're out there, you know what I'm talking about.

• 17:31Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 17:33Speaker 06

  But that's my experience.

• 17:35Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's go back to childhood. So you grew up in a haunted house in Maryland?

• 17:41Speaker 06

  Yep, and it was built on a cemetery.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  That was like, pretty much, and as a kid, I remember, okay, so this is the weird portion. My mom, her side of the family, my grandmother, they've been introduced to like voodoo or magic. And I knew this trick as a kid of how to listen to hell.

• 18:09Speaker 06

  With a sewing needle and a cup and, you know, to listen to the screams of hell. I don't know if I never heard anything, but you hear, I think it's just the echo inside the cup. But we would leave a devil pie for the devil or whatever. We would make it out of mud and stuff like that. Me and my next door's neighbor Kia and Tasha, two girls. And we were doing stuff like that as kids, like weird stuff like that. My sister, another scary story for you. She, we hear a knock on the door, or she did, and she goes to the back door. And there's two women standing there in all white. There's no white people where we live at.

• 18:53Speaker 06

  There's two blond haired ladies standing at the door. They took her out to the playground and when she came back, she learned how to make a, where you take a, like a gallon of milk, cut it out to make a bird feeder. And she came back with that and the ladies taught her how to make it, but there were no ladies. So, yeah, that was another incident.

• 19:18Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 19:19Speaker 06

  I don't know, she knows that one vividly.

• 19:22Shawn Ryan?

  Very strange.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:24Shawn Ryan?

  Very strange. How many siblings did you have?

• 19:26Speaker 06

  At that time, living with us, we had three. So me, my younger sister and my older sister. And I have another sister, I just found out about like a year ago.

• 19:40Speaker 06

  And my brother, I thought was my friend when I first met him in Florida. I thought that this kid was cool, but turned out he was my brother too. So I have, that I know of, yeah, five.

• 19:53Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, my dad was getting around, man. He was getting around. Right, right on.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  Well, let's, let's go back. So you grew up around voodoo? I knew about it, um, like different spells and stuff like that, if you want to call it that. Like how to make a woman fall in love with you, how a woman, she makes a guy fall in love with her, how to listen to hell and stuff like that. How would this, how would these subjects get broached in your household? My grandmother, at the time when she, she grew up around it more. My mom had a spell put on her supposedly. And it made her stomach swell up with they don't know what. But she was, she used to steal oranges and stuff off of people's trees in Georgia.

• 20:46Speaker 06

  And one of the neighbors in where she lived at on this dirt road and told her to stop doing it or she was gonna put a spell on her. And she hung up something in the tree. My mom ate it and she got like inflated or something. So that's where we got, I guess, introduced to it. And my cousins, the older ones, they would teach us stuff too. Like, don't eat spaghetti from a chick you just met or if she offers it to you. Why? Because, do you, you wanna know, I guess? Yeah, yeah, let's hear it. Well, it's nasty. But her menstrual cycle blood, making the sauce for the pasta.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  They would use that and give it to the guy to make the guy fall in love. Yeah. Or that attachment. And for a guy to do it, he would use his underarm sweat. And cook it in that noodle water, put his underarm sweat in it to make a female do the same thing. Are you serio- is this stuff real? I mean, what do you think? I've never, I've never been. You didn't pull that on your wife, did you? No, and if I did, I wouldn't tell her. No, no. That was, that was destined to be, I think. How prevalent was that in the, in your household? I mean, was that? My parents did, they had like a Ouija board and stuff and. Back before they had, I guess, their religious awakening.

• 22:14Speaker 06

  Well, you had a Ouija board and stuff like that, but I was never exposed greatly to it. It was more so like my dad would show us how to lift people. When they sit in a chair and you stack your hands up on top of them until you all feel the heat rise up. And then you lift the person out of the chair and they float, stuff like that, but that's like.

• 22:38Shawn Ryan?

  What, he taught you how to do that?

• 22:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:41Shawn Ryan?

  What, let's go into that. I've never heard anything like this. Uh, I've never, I've never.

• 22:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:47Shawn Ryan?

  I've never, I've never.

• 22:49Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 22:49Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know anything about this stuff.

• 22:51Speaker 06

  So you sit in a chair, right? Um, like a stool or a little chair and you have one person on each. So you have one person on this knee, this knee, this elbow, this elbow, and one at the back of the.

• 23:04Shawn Ryan?

  Like touching or sitting or?

• 23:06Speaker 06

  Not touching yet. Then they're all standing around you. The person in the chair is sitting. Everybody else is standing around you. Then they take their hands and they stack their right hand first. And then they stack their left hand on top of that. So it's a big pattern. Each one is stacking over and over until all the hands are complete. Then when the top person, the top hand says they feel the heat and everybody's going to be calling out, I feel the heat. When they feel the whatever is rising up through their hand. When it gets to the top person, they all go like this and they touch this side, this side, this elbow, this elbow. And the person at the back of the neck does that and you lift the person up and they float.

• 23:50Shawn Ryan?

  He's saying this happens?

• 23:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I've done it to my sister, me and my cousins.

• 23:56Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 23:57Speaker 06

  I swear to God, yeah.

• 23:58Shawn Ryan?

  I gotta look this up.

• 23:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:00Shawn Ryan?

  What do you call it?

• 24:01Speaker 06

  I don't know. I have no idea. Um.

• 24:04Shawn Ryan?

  Like they're legitimately floating?

• 24:06Speaker 06

  Legitimately, well, you're touching them and they're in the air.

• 24:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's like some levitation.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  Like that, but they're not, you don't let go. You keep your fingertips on them and I think that's where the, the energy goes back into them and they lower back down. Yeah.

• 24:24Shawn Ryan?

  Whoa.

• 24:25Speaker 06

  You should look it up, yeah.

• 24:26Shawn Ryan?

  I will look it up.

• 24:27Speaker 06

  Definitely.

• 24:28Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  We'll do it one time. Need some more people, but it's legit.

• 24:32Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, my dad used to do, um, he did it in the army during a, what do you call those things where, like a talent contest or something like that, where they were just, just like some people would go up and like sing or a talent.

• 24:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, talent show.

• 24:50Speaker 06

  Talent show. And that's what my dad did with some of his coworkers. And they had the biggest guy sit in a chair and he had females do it, all women, and he lifted up the biggest guy in their unit out of the chair. Yeah.

• 25:05Shawn Ryan?

  Whoa.

• 25:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's crazy, dude. Totally wasn't expected to go down this road.

• 25:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. 100% man.

• 25:15Shawn Ryan?

  So what, I mean, what is it? Is it a religion?

• 25:18Speaker 06

  Hmm, well, not really necessarily. Um, like voodoo comes from Africa and it was like, according to who you talk to or what the belief is, that was our original

• 25:33Speaker 06

  religion, but it was not religion. It was just a spirituality of the manipulation of the spirit world. And that's what they practiced before religion was introduced and they were killed and stuff like that for practicing what they perceived to be is black magic from black people's magic. So they said no more and introduced a different form of spirituality, which I'm not against. I think that there's a, I think all spirit religion is a form of magic, even prayer is a form of, of, of magic, you know, it's just the, you're the belief that you're

• 26:12Speaker 06

  putting something into the spirit realm, asking a deity or an entity to whatever you want. Ask and you shall receive, as above, so below, as within, so without, all these things. So they all coincide with each other. I think all roads lead to Rome. It's just how we interpret and practice different beliefs.

• 26:33Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:35Shawn Ryan?

  Back to childhood.

• 26:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:37Shawn Ryan?

  So what, what were you, other than voodoo?

• 26:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:41Shawn Ryan?

  What were you into as a kid? What, what grabbed your interest?

• 26:45Speaker 06

  Wow. Uh, I love space. I love, I used to want to be an astronaut. Um, my dad was a big space geek. He was always, you know, taking me outside to look at the, look through the telescope, to look at the moon and look at the stars and show me where Orion's Belt was at and how to find the North Star, the Big Dipper, Little Dipper. Like, I teach my son this stuff, you know, at, at his age now, and he's seven, but, you know, how to find north, south, east and west and different star constellations and how to read them. So I've always wanted to be an astronaut, like, originally, that was my first dream. So for fun, pretending I was an astronaut, making cardboard boxes and wanting to blast

• 27:30Speaker 06

  off into space, that was like my original dream, until my dad showed me Chuck Norris, Delta Force, and Charlie Sheen, Navy SEALs. Then my whole perspective of what I wanted to do changed. And then school. I got into school and I wasn't, like, too great at it, and the astronaut thing was out of the window. Why weren't you great at school? You weren't into it, or? I wasn't really into it. Um, my first grade was easy, anybody can say that, but I, I just liked to play and I liked to joke around and, I don't know if I had, like, ADHD or something like that,

• 28:12Speaker 06

  but it was hard for me to, to focus. And the way I used to read, and I guess I still do read, um, like, for me, I would read one sentence and build that story, as opposed to reading the whole paragraph and then building it, or building it as you go along. I would break each sentence out of that paragraph or chapter into my mind to build that story, and I guess it just took too long and, you know, and I wasn't great at math and anything, so. Started to realize I wasn't great at school, like, the second or third grade, and that's when I used to get into a lot of trouble at home for not bringing home, you know, good grades.

• 28:57Speaker 06

  So, yeah. And after, oh, after the haunted house, I moved to a little bit nearer, uh...

• 29:07Speaker 06

  In the, near the city portion of Baltimore, Maryland, not this city, but in Maryland. And that's where I stayed from nineteen ninety-three to two thousand and four, when I graduated. And that's where we spent my entire life, pretty much. What did you enjoy doing as a kid? Were you an athlete, like a beaufort woods? Yeah, I loved, well, I loved being in the woods with my granddad. We would take trips to a small place called Hogansville, Georgia. A small, small spot in Georgia. And my granddad had a lot of land.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  So, yeah, the whole like slave lineage, my great, great, great, great granddad was a slave. And I was slave owner, I'm sorry. And ended up raping one of the women. And so we come from like that lineage and that land and that plot of land ended up staying with the family. Because the guy who is a white guy, who was a slave owner, of course, and having a relationship and with one of the slaves and mistresses, whatever you want to call her. And somehow that land, because he loved her, got inherited to our family.

• 30:30Speaker 06

  And he has a, like a bunch of land out there. And, uh, yeah. My mom, my grandmother and my mom picked cotton and cleaned homes for people. So, yeah, it was like that. But I would go down there in the summertime and I loved being outdoors with them. He would take me hunting and show me how to shoot my first gun, which was a twenty gauge shotgun, and how to farm. So I loved to, I liked farming. Not, I'm not a farmer, but I liked to grow and plan and maintain the crops and stuff. I liked doing that as a kid. Very cool. Yeah, and then I guess around middle school is where I got into the whole sniper thing.

• 31:14Speaker 06

  And well, the sixth grade, uh, my mom helped me make my first ghillie suit out of. Yarn, green yarn, sewing yarn and a black jumpsuit that I had. And I called that my first ghillie suit, laying outside in the field or in the grass and trying to scare people. And then I actually learned how to make a ghillie suit in middle school with the burlap on an old uniform and yeah, hiding out in my front yard, sneaking home from school or pretending to be sick, uh, sick. So I could come home from school early. So when the kids got off the school bus, I could scare them when they got off the school

• 31:55Speaker 06

  bus and sometimes take pop shots, I don't know, pop shots with a little BB gun and stuff like that. They were all my friends and stuff, but that's what we used to do as, as kids. Shoot each other with the one pump.

• 32:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 06

  Uh, BB guns and yeah. So that was like my thing, I guess as a kid. Sports wise, I was never great. I tried them all minus tennis and golf. No, my best friend Andre, his granddad is a Vietnam vet and he had golf clubs and we stole his one day and I ended up, uh, getting in trouble, but it was cool to, I guess the concept of golf, I think was okay. I just never like could hit the ball good. So wasn't good at that. Sucked at soccer. Football, I was okay. I just liked to hit people and I was like, never really great though. Um, by

• 32:48Speaker 06

  far I had no future in it. Basketball, too short, you know? Not great at it either. So sports, no, not so much.

• 32:59Shawn Ryan?

  So pretty average kid, not, not, not a tremendous amount of athletic ability, not great in school.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:08Shawn Ryan?

  What was the home life like? Were you close with your parents and siblings?

• 33:12Speaker 06

  No. Um, so my older sister, our second oldest, uh, she was in and out.

• 33:21Speaker 06

  For the beginning portion of my life, my younger years, she would be in and out for a year or two. So we never really had like a close relationship. She had my back when I would get into fights. I got into a lot of fights and she would help out when she could and. But she was always gone too. My younger sister, she's always been there. We have the same mom and dad and we're tight, we're close. Just like your average brother and sister, like we, we fight, we used to always fight. She's tough, but. Other than that, it was, I think. As far as my family, my mom and dad, no, we were.

• 34:04Speaker 06

  They didn't know how to love in their defense and they've been open about that. They didn't know how to love.

• 34:11Speaker 06

  They come from a, a broken home that, you know, for, for fun, my dad would get beat up by his dad. And his eight brothers and sisters and my mom's eight sisters and brothers. Like that's what the dads did in the household. They would get wasted and, and beat the kids with whatever objects they could find. Oh, man. Yeah, so. They didn't know how to, and that lineage has just, you know, gone on and gone on, so. When I popped out and we did it, it was. Didn't, they didn't know how to love or how to show emotion. My mom was never told by her dad that he loved her for, you know, her entire life. My dad's dad died when he was in the sixth grade and.

• 34:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, and then it was just a, a hard lifestyle for him. They were both poor. Yeah, very poor, so it was, they didn't know how to love. So for me. How my parents would. Deal with anything was violence or, yeah, was by that, so it was, it was like that. Yeah. Do you think that affects you to this day? A hundred percent. Really? One hundred percent. Me and my sister were having a conversation about it. Because she, she has issues too. She was raped as a. As a kid and. Shit. Yeah, by a close friend.

• 35:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, it was not the best childhood, but as far as it affecting us now, one hundred percent.

• 35:47Speaker 06

  I tried and I'm, you know, I don't, I don't want to be like that. So I stay away from that, but because I know what it does to a child, you know? And I don't want that for my son. But for my sister and I, it's uh, one hundred percent affects us to this day.

• 36:07Speaker 06

  Not many friends, I think. We push people away a lot, you know? This is gonna sound weird, but like, we weren't allowed to have friends growing up. My parents were very, yeah, controlling in that nature of who we could hang out with, who could be our friends and yeah. It was. Why do you think that is? I, I don't know. I've, I've questioned that so much and I'm, I don't know. I, I, at one point, I thought it was because they did not want the word to get out that, yeah, I get spanked and, or beat, you know, at least three, four times a week, you know? And that was normal. That was extremely normal.

• 36:50Speaker 06

  But whether you didn't do anything, or if someone was having a bad day, or it didn't matter. You just always felt that you weren't good enough. So it was my fault that I just was not being a good son. So it was, in my mind, it makes sense why I would get spanked and beat.

• 37:10Speaker 06

  Looking back at it, of course, I, I don't think that that was the reason. I know I wasn't a, a bad kid, you know? But then also, growing up, I had, you know, my next door neighbor, the only friend, my friend to this day, Andre. We've helped each other a lot. I've seen his mom be beaten by her boyfriends and I've had to help with his mom. And I've seen him and his brother get absolutely destroyed by their two hundred and fifty pound dad or stepdad at the time. I just grew up around that, so it wasn't like. My next door neighbors sold drugs and I've seen them fight and,

• 37:54Speaker 06

  you know, with people who owed them money or whatever and it was just normal. So I didn't feel like I had it that bad, you know?

• 38:01Shawn Ryan?

  How did you, I mean, how did you and your sister navigate your way through that?

• 38:05Speaker 06

  Stayed in our room, yeah. Mainly for her. I would stay outside as long as I could, but it always felt like if I was having too much fun, my dad would cut it short, yeah. Like, come inside and do something. Go clean up something or, yeah. It was never really, it never really felt like I was allowed to be me or have that much fun without having mom or dad or whatever. Pick something out and

• 38:39Speaker 06

  bash you for it, you know?

• 38:40Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, man.

• 38:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:43Shawn Ryan?

  What would you say to kids that are growing up in abusive

• 38:47Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 38:48Shawn Ryan?

  environments today?

• 38:50Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 38:50Shawn Ryan?

  If you had a piece of advice for them?

• 38:55Speaker 06

  Man.

• 38:58Speaker 06

  It's gonna end one day.

• 39:02Speaker 06

  If you have someone to talk to, talk to them, but it's just the whole, you have to be careful about it. I, I get it that you don't want to get anyone in trouble in the wrong way and you don't want to also get yourself in even more trouble. That's a tough one. I mean, for me, what I did, but I don't think it's the healthiest way. You just know it's gonna end one day and I wanted to leave my home at a young age, you know, young age. And couldn't wait to leave home. I haven't been back since like that, so it's gonna end one day. Staying strong and yeah, that's like, it sucks not having, I've never thought about that.

• 39:46Speaker 06

  I don't know. It's a, it's a really tough one. I can just, you know, go by my experience, but also see what that's done to, to me and my family. It's uh, not saying, yeah. Did you ever run away? Yeah, yeah. How, how young were you when that started? Oh my, old enough to where I thought running away was where you take a stick and a bandana and you tie it at the end of it and put your stuff in there. And I went like down the block and stayed for a few hours and realized I don't have anywhere to sleep. Um, so I went back home and I ran away to my friend's house one time and I knew that if I stayed away too long, that when I got back, my parents were gonna destroy me.

• 40:27Speaker 06

  So I just came back and got the lesser spanking as opposed to,

• 40:35Speaker 06

  you know, getting laid on pretty good. Wow. So you graduated in 2004? Yeah. And what happened then? Immediately thereafter. I was, I signed the contract while in high school. I was um, so in the 10th and 11th grade, I went to Annapolis. I was in ROTC and I was in Navy SEAL Cadet Corps. And I went to this baby SEAL program, um, where you have to, like to get in, you take the, the, the, the real SEAL PFT or test where I think it was like a 500 meter swim and 12 minutes, 30 seconds or something and two and a half mile run and pull-ups, sit-ups and it's to the standard, but

• 41:20Speaker 06

  did that at 16, got SCUBA qualified. My whole route was Navy SEAL and it didn't pan out that way. I'm colorblind and Navy didn't want me. So in my senior year is when I signed the Army contract and I had to get the parental consent from my parents to sign me off and two weeks after I graduated, I was on the bus heading to uh, airport to go to Fort Benning.

• 41:48Shawn Ryan?

  Real quick, so you wanted to be a SEAL.

• 41:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:50Shawn Ryan?

  You couldn't get in because you were colorblind.

• 41:52Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:52Shawn Ryan?

  How did Rangers come up? How did they get introduced to you?

• 41:56Speaker 06

  So I failed the color vision test the first time. And it was called the Easy Horror Test, like this book and they, you see the, the numbers in that pattern of colors. And I didn't see any number except for the number you're not supposed to see. And they told me I was colorblind and I could not be a SEAL or anything of that nature. I had like a very small, uh, I guess, list of all of jobs that I could do in, in the Navy, none of which I wanted to do. And my ASVAB score was not high enough to get those jobs. So I came back and I studied online, dial-up internet.

• 42:39Speaker 06

  The, not dial-up, it was the, it ran on a modem. But I downloaded all the Easy Horror Tests that I possibly could think of or find on the internet at the time. And I studied them and the answers. So when I went back, hopefully, when I retake the test, I could pass it because I studied the test and I know the answers to it. I went back a month or two later, not even, not even two months, maybe like a month later. And instead of the Easy Horror Test, they had this weird light test. And it looked like a traffic light, but different colors of light. And I completely failed that one too. So I broke down, I'm crying.

• 43:21Speaker 06

  And next door, this army chick, a nurse, she heard me crying. She came in, or as I'm walking out, she peeked her head into the doorway and she said, you know, come over to, to her room. Went over there and it was an army recruiter there she had, she was talking to and she introduced me to him and he start talking about. Do I know what Army Rangers are and Green Berets? I was like, oh, I know what a Green Beret is. Um, but I'm not too fond of what a Ranger is. I saw them in Black Hawk Down, but I didn't like what they were doing. It was not what Delta was doing. So I thought, I didn't really know what a Ranger was. And he said, well, they're like Navy SEALs, but they just, they don't swim.

• 44:06Speaker 06

  I was like, okay, well, that's fine. I can do that then. And the lady who was going to administer, administer the color vision test, she held out the book and she traced her fingers on the number. So I just called it out. I was like, oh, 12, 5, and I couldn't see anything. And I still have the document where I had zero out of 14 to 14 out of 14 of my color vision test.

• 44:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 44:33Speaker 06

  And that's how I got into the Army.

• 44:36Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, no kidding?

• 44:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:37Shawn Ryan?

  And 9/11 had already happened.

• 44:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:39Shawn Ryan?

  So we're already, it's this 2004 timeframe, so we're already at war.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:45Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, is that what you wanted to do?

• 44:47Speaker 06

  Oh, 100%, 100%. After I saw what happened and like, uh, some of the seniors during that time were in ROTC, they were gonna go off and, you know, join the military too. And, um, I just didn't wanna feel like left out and missed the party. I already felt like I missed the party, but I wanted to at least get in and, and contribute some type of way. I had no other option. I was not, I couldn't do college. I graduated with the 1.7 GPA from high school and I barely pulled that off. So it was the only option for me was the military. And yeah, I went there after 9/11 and knew I was going to deploy once I found out the, exactly what Rangers do.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  Granted, as long as I made it, if I made it, then I knew for a fact I was gonna go to combat, so. That was partially my driving force. The other was I grew up telling my, you know, best friend Andre and, you know, my family that I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to. I can't come back. So to fail and not make that would mean, I, I, I, yeah, it was not an option. I couldn't let it happen. I had to do it. What about the sniper thing? Always, well, not always, wanted to be a sniper. Um, since ghillie suit days is when I wanted to be a, a sniper. Like, I was a decent shot as a kid growing up and going out to the country. I was okay, but not like, you know, anything that would make

• 46:17Speaker 06

  me stand out. But the sniper thing came after. So for us, it is you go through, at the time, it was called RIP. This was after basic and after airborne. Um, make it through airborne, overcome my fear of heights, my shattered tibia, fibia, pull that off, and going on to RIP, Ranger Indoctrination Program. It was like a month, I believe. I want to say it was a month long. And all it was, was just a beat down fest of, you just get smoked. We had ninety-eight, ninety-five or ninety-eight guys going in, and we graduated six from

• 46:57Speaker 06

  that original class and seven with the rollover. So we had a seven-man graduation and, um, made it through that and got into battalion. So that's less than a ten percent Yeah. That was a weird class. It was a, it was a brutal class. It was bad. It was a smoke fest. After that is when they, uh, slowly started to come out with RASP. How long is RIP? At that time, it was like a month long, a little over a month, I think. What, what is, is it a selection process? Yeah, yeah. It's a selection to get to battalion, uh, the seventy-fifth. Um, now it's called RASP, Ranger Assessment Selection Program, or some, I forget what it's called.

• 47:40Speaker 06

  But now it's RASP, and it's essentially the same thing, but they've extended it to where they teach you something now. So when you get to the battalion, you're just not like some guy who's just a beat up, weak, private, who can't

• 47:56Speaker 06

  Do the basics of a door breach or breaching a door or clearing a room. So now they've incorporated that.

• 48:04Speaker 06

  Back then it wasn't like that. And so, yeah, we graduated. I go into battalion. I get there right as my guys were coming back from Afghanistan. I did an entire train up with them and I deployed to Krit, Iraq.

• 48:19Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, hold on. Before we get into the deployments of the regiment, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about what it was like for you showing up at the regiment.

• 48:28Speaker 06

  Oh, my, yeah.

• 48:30Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.

• 49:09Speaker 00

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• 49:38Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 50:02Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.

• 50:12Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Nick. We're back from the break. You're checking into the regiment. How did that feel coming from RASP? Walking into the regiment? I'm guessing this is probably around 2005-ish.

• 50:26Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 50:27Shawn Ryan?

  A very hot time in both wars. Both the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war. I'm sure there's a lot of experience coming home that had to be pretty intimidating.

• 50:39Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Dude, it was like...

• 50:44Speaker 06

  When you put on that tan beret, you feel like a Ranger. You look like a Ranger. But... And I felt like I had really accomplished something, you know? Which I did, but...

• 50:56Shawn Ryan?

  Do you get... So do you get the tan beret after RASP? When does that happen?

• 51:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, as soon as you graduate RASP, you get the tan beret. So you start off with the black beret, which used to be the Rangers beret. Then regular army adopted the black beret. Rangers got the tan. And as soon as you graduate RASP, like you're doing your ceremony, you do your Ranger creed, and you get your tan beret, and you don your tan beret. And from there, you... I had to walk across the street, do this big privacy brown fence, and like 200 yards away, and that was Sturtevant Ranger Battalion. So I didn't have to like get on a bus or anything. Just carried my bags, went over to the compound, checked in, got my room. And I had two duffel bags, my bed, and some empty drawers in my room.

• 51:44Speaker 06

  And I lived out those duffel bags like my entire stay at the barracks. But, yeah, my first day there, no one was back in, you know, battalion. They were all coming back from that deployment. So I had it pretty much to myself for like two or three days a weekend or so. So I didn't really know what to expect. I sat in my room the most of the time and stared at the four walls, called family every once in a while.

• 52:13Shawn Ryan?

  What's your family think now that you've made it? I mean, it sounds like your parents were really hard on you.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:20Shawn Ryan?

  They...

• 52:21Speaker 06

  Had to go, I tell you.

• 52:22Shawn Ryan?

  Sounded like they were pretty upset that you... Your grades weren't phenomenal.

• 52:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:27Shawn Ryan?

  You weren't a stellar athlete. It's... Forgive me for saying this, I feel the same way about my childhood. So it sounds like you felt like you were a very unimpressive human being at the time.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:41Shawn Ryan?

  So what was it like when you got your Tan Bray?

• 52:46Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 52:46Shawn Ryan?

  And?

• 52:49Shawn Ryan?

  How did that feel to tell your family? Or did you even care?

• 52:52Speaker 06

  I didn't, they didn't, it didn't, well, they cared to the degree of, well, at first, no one thought that I was gonna make it. So in basic training, I didn't like it. You know, I didn't like waking up at 4 a.m. I wasn't used to that. I wasn't used to running, rocking and all that. So I wanted to quit basic training like early on, very early on. And I remember calling home on the payphone on a break we had during basic. And I called my dad on the payphone and I'm telling him I don't want to be there and I want to come home. And I was just going through it and he told me, you can't come home.

• 53:36Speaker 06

  Like, no, stick with it, suck it up, I guess. Um, so I never really wanted to be there until like after, I don't know, the first seven weeks or so out of the 14 week basic. Is when I kind of, you know, fell in the groove of things and it was not smooth sailing. I messed up, fractured my tibia fibias and, and both legs and, uh, it was kind of smooth sailing. They came to that graduation.

• 54:07Shawn Ryan?

  To your boot camp graduation?

• 54:08Speaker 06

  To my boot camp one, and they came to the airborne graduation where I got honor grad and.

• 54:15Shawn Ryan?

  You got honor grad?

• 54:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, from the kid who, I still struggle with heights to this day. Anything above 10 feet, it's like, I could blackout, bro. I could, I could blackout. So it was traumatizing, but it was cool to overcome that. And I don't know if that's why I got honor grad, but I got honor grad and they came to that graduation. And I think that's when the realization of, he might actually go through with this. And I became a Ranger and it was like.

• 54:49Speaker 06

  They were happy, but I guess scared at the same time because they knew it comes after that was going to be combat or war. So I think they, at that point, wanted to separate themselves from that. Um, my mom, she claims to this day, or she says that a lot of her depression comes from that time in my life was the constant deployment. But I just never understood that because I didn't feel that love at home, you know? So when it came time and I actually did become what I was gonna, what I've been saying all those years, it was like the realization for everybody kicked in, but it was too late. So.

• 55:27Shawn Ryan?

  Can we backtrack just a second? Cause I, excuse my ignorance. I get, sometimes I get it confused between Ranger School and, and RASP. It sounds like RASP is the biggest kick in the ass out of the two, correct?

• 55:39Speaker 06

  100%, 100%.

• 55:40Shawn Ryan?

  So I'd like to revisit RASP. I mean, how long is RASP?

• 55:44Speaker 06

  About a month, a month long.

• 55:46Shawn Ryan?

  It's a month?

• 55:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, a RASP now? I'm not sure. It's over a month. What I was going through, it was a month, a month long. No days off.

• 55:54Shawn Ryan?

  What does that entail?

• 55:55Speaker 06

  Oh yeah. Monday through Monday, physical, like a beat down. Um, it really kicks off. For you guys, you have Hell Week and for us, we have Cold Range. We march out, I believe it's a 12 or 15 mile ruck to Cold Range and the time limit given, which was like, I forget, three hours, four hours. And I forget the time hack for it, but we make it there, we march out there. A lot of guys normally don't make the time hack. Um, so you've lost, let's say 10 guys out of that portion. You get to Cold Range and there's no like facility you live in. It's all outdoors and it's just like Hell Week, I guess, minus the water

• 56:38Speaker 06

  and all the boat carrying. Like we carry logs and a lot of running, a lot of just physical beat down. Uh, you do land nav, there's no sleep. You sleep maybe out of the three days, I believe, four days. We slept once, but it was a, a short sleep. Um, I remember during Cold Range, it's like max, mass exodus of guys just quitting, quitting, quitting. 10 one day, 20 the next day. And for me, it was like. I thought that I was gonna be that guy because I looked at everyone else and I'm like, man, they're taller, they are built like, you know, rest his soul, Pat Tillman.

• 57:20Speaker 06

  Like many Pat Tillmans, like football players are built good. And I just wasn't built that way of, you know, what I expected a Ranger to be or a spec ops guy.

• 57:32Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, Rangers do have a stereotype of being skinny.

• 57:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:36Shawn Ryan?

  Wiry.

• 57:38Speaker 06

  And short.

• 57:38Shawn Ryan?

  Individuals.

• 57:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I've always got seals to be the opposite. I think to be a swimmer, I always thought you had to be like Michael Phelps height or whatever. But yeah, I can tell a Ranger out of a crowd. There's a very distinct personality and look. But yeah, so it was just a mass beat down.

• 57:59Shawn Ryan?

  We're talking like a 90% attrition rate.

• 58:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was brutal, man. It was brutal. And it was the biggest shock for me, but everything was kind of like a blur. It all blurred together of no sleep, little food, and just a continuous, just beat down, man, physical beat down. Everything's hurting. Everything hurts. You're never on time. Nothing's ever good enough. It was just a massive, a smoke fest, a smoke fest. Like you might get put in a room and do pushups for, I don't know, a few hours until the room sweats. That's what we make it rain. So we, you know, a bunch of guys in a room sweating, it's hot, humid.

• 58:43Speaker 06

  They crank the air up, turn the heat on and you just, it's just, it looks like it rained in there. There's just so much sweat all over the place. And sometimes you'd have condensation buildup on the, on the walls in a small room. It was just stuff like that. A lot of running. It's like every Ranger was a marathon runner. And I'm just, I was never built to run like that. I could do my five mile in 40 minutes. I'm like a 38 minute, five miler. And that's like my, my max. The mile runs those guys could do, you know, the fastest I've seen was like a five thirty, five twenty something, five thirty something. And fastest I've ever got was like a six thirty.

• 59:28Speaker 06

  And it was one, on one occasion, fluke of nature, maybe the clock was wrong, but that's the fastest I've ever been. I'm normally a seven minute, seven minute guy. But, um, and Rangers just run and run and run. And that's what I didn't like about it was that's all we do for PT and that's all like we focused on was the endurance and long distance running. And I, I hated that, hated that. And ruck marches, um, a lot of that, a lot of physical beat down. And like I said, by the end of, end of the class, it was dwindled down to six guys and we had the rollover come in the last portion. Is there any team events? Are there any team events? Yeah, and rest. Not.

• 1:00:14Speaker 06

  It's all individual. Yeah, it's pretty much individual, like especially, uh, at LAN nav and night LAN nav and. Yeah, I, I would say it's, it's a fair amount of just being by yourself or doing things to a standard just for you. As opposed to a team. And if one guy messed up, then the whole class would get, you know, in trouble for it. But at the end of the day, it was, it came down to just who wanted to quit and who would not quit. They had, um, like one event at Coal Range where.

• 1:00:46Speaker 06

  We're standing in formation, we had just got done getting our balls smoked off. And we're standing in formation outside of the, the big tarp trucks, the deuce and a halves. And the instructors are by this big barrel fire. And they're cooking and roasting hot dogs and they had pizza. Out there and they're like, all you have to do is just come over. You know, we know you're hurt, we know you're sucking, it's cold. Just come over, got a hot coffee. We got pizza and, and hot dogs for you guys waiting on the other side. But if you come over here, you can't come back. And a few guys left to go get the food.

• 1:01:23Speaker 06

  And that was it for them. They told us to all get on the back of the trucks. We're heading back. And they drove around for like thirty minutes and you think you lost all concept of time. So you're thinking, oh, we're finally gonna go back and hit the sack for a little bit, at least be in a, a room on a nice bed. And we drove around for a little bit and they opened the tarps and we're still at cold range where we started off at. And that was a big demoralizer. So that more guys quit, um, after we arrived back at cold range, got smoked some more, got back on the trucks and then we finally went back to the barracks and. Was there ever a time where you wanted to check out? Every day, every day. What kept you going? Watching other guys quit. Watching other guys quit.

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  I would, um, I guess not feed off of it. I guess you could say feed off of it where

• 1:02:13Speaker 06

  at least I wasn't that guy. So if I wasn't that guy, I can go a little bit longer until maybe somebody else quits. They can't have us all quit. I just have to outlast that guy or the next guy or someone else. But every single day I wanted to quit. More so in Ranger School, but every day I wanted, I wanted to quit. I think I was just too stupid to, to even do it at the time. Too much ego, too much ego to get up there and, and you get respect for quitting. They respect you and they don't treat you and call you names. They don't treat you bad. So it was more so of an ego thing for me of not wanting to quit. But yeah, I wanted to every day. Interesting. So then make it appealing to quit? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Huh.

• 1:02:57Speaker 06

  So that was the biggest thing about RIP? And I think that's what I think made it hard too is it was different than basic training. You're more on your own and you're given a set of instructions to do something and you do it. Um, you're not like in basic training where they hold your hand the whole way. It was. Different in that aspect, too. And just how mean they were. Like, these guys were demonic, it felt like. I was terrified of Rangers going in. I saw a guy with the tambourade. As a kid, I'm, you know, avert your eyes. And I would always say to myself, oh, my gosh, this guy's probably killed people. And that would terrify me because they, a Ranger to me, always looked very neat. Very, you know, yeah, very neat, very well put together.

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  And knowing that this guy are thinking that, you know, this guy has taken a life was like weird to me. It scared me. So I was always scared to look these guys in the eye of, yeah, that. So I was scared of all my instructors.

• 1:03:56Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:03:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so let's move forward again.

• 1:03:59Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:00Shawn Ryan?

  You're checked in. You're at Third Ranger Battalion.

• 1:04:03Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:06Shawn Ryan?

  What's it like when you meet your team?

• 1:04:08Speaker 06

  Terrifying. I heard a mass, like a stampede, coming through the barracks. They're screaming loud, doors being kicked, and they're screaming, where's the fucking new guy? And I'm huddled in my room, sitting on my bed, terrified. Like, there's no way they're gonna find out I'm in here. And all of a sudden, I locked my door, and I see my door shaking, and they're picking the lock. Then they kick my door open. All these guys come in, and they flood my room with beers in hand. And like, you gotta drink all this. So I'm looking at them, like, I'm not even a drinker like that. I haven't, I had like one Heineken in airborne, and I hated it.

• 1:04:53Speaker 06

  So now I'm stuck with this room full of Rangers shoving beer down my mouth and throat. And I'm, well, let's take that back. That sounds really bad. But they're giving me a bunch of beer and stuff like that to drink. And I remember getting just absolutely shitfaced. And that next morning, we had to run like six miles and me throwing up. But it was, it wasn't as bad as I thought. It was as terrifying that these guys, in my mind, all just came back from killing people in war. And now...

• 1:05:28Shawn Ryan?

  Had they?

• 1:05:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. They were in Afghanistan during that time. And they did a few recovery operations with the SEAL team. And most of the stuff in Afghanistan, that's when they were getting into more of the direct action type stuff, so they were upping their package and their amount of combat that they did see. Prior to that, it was a lot of working with Delta and pulling security and stuff like that before, you know, I guess they got their hands full, Delta, and we started picking up the more direct action and purely just direct action raids and sometimes doing side by sides where Delta's hitting one building and we're hitting the other building and, you

• 1:06:14Speaker 06

  know, working with them in that, that nature. Yeah, it was terrifying, but also at the same time, I felt like it was good to be a part of a group like that. I just wasn't sure if I could hang because they were animals, physically fit, and I didn't, I had no idea if I was gonna be able to even keep up with these guys. So I thought my time was gonna be short-lived because like these guys could be hammered one night and the next morning, running six-mile runs like it's nothing. And it was, you know, I didn't think I was gonna be able to keep up with these guys. And then we went on to the training cycle, six months training cycle,

• 1:06:56Speaker 06

  started off with airfield seizure, and that was my first introduction. This was like two weeks, a few weeks after I arrived. And my first exercise was taking over an airfield and had no idea how to do it, except for how to jump out of a plane. And it was my first nighttime jump in full combat gear and equipment. And as a new guy, you're stacked onto this C-17 and the Humvees are in the middle of the, the formation, lined up on the, the bed of the C-17 and watching them get sucked out the, the back ramp as a new guy, never seeing

• 1:07:36Speaker 06

  this, my mind's blown of like, wow, this is pretty neat. I'm actually doing like cool guy stuff. And it's time to jump. My first jump in battalion, I'm weighted down. You jump out into this pitch blackness and my risers got stuck under my left leg. I ended up tumbling, tumbled through my risers and I get a cigarette roll. So I'm falling and I knew something was wrong because I can still hear the wind, of the whistling of the wind and the black figures bodies like passing me at a higher rate than what I knew was, you know, not right. And I can hear people as I'm following, "Pull your reserve, pull your reserve",

• 1:08:20Speaker 06

  screaming, "Pull my reserve", and I watched this thing come out like slow motion and it, you know, comes out and I'm looking down. I don't have much room left, maybe 500 feet, a little less than 500 feet or so. And I'm coming in on the tarmac of the runway. So I'm trying to slip and pull my risers on my reserve, but those don't steer the way your main parachute will. And I'm all tangled up and tied out. My gun, a Mark 48 machine gun, is flung out somewhere and lost in the field. It popped out and yeah, bad experience. I landed on one leg, tore up my pants, had no weapon. And I show up to the rally point in the middle of this airfield,

• 1:09:04Speaker 06

  about to take over the airfield. And I'm mimicking like I have a gun because I didn't want to say, "Hey, I lost my gun", as a new guy, my first jump. So I'm mimicking like I have a gun and hoping no one's gonna notice. And the first thing they notice like, "Irv, where the fuck is your gun?" And I say, "I don't know, Sergeant, it's somewhere in the field, I lost it." And he blew his lid. So I had to mimic the entire taking over the airfield without a weapon, just nods, a helmet and yeah, nothing. So got the entire battalion in trouble.

• 1:09:38Shawn Ryan?

  That had to be pretty humiliating as a new guy.

• 1:09:41Speaker 06

  Very, and not on top of that, the next morning, we had to all get on formation, the entire battalion pretty much, and walk the airfield while I stood on the back of a truck and watched all the guys look for my equipment to make me stand out. So that was my first experience.

• 1:10:02Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 1:10:03Speaker 06

  After that, it was, never happened again.

• 1:10:06Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that can create a lot of hatred.

• 1:10:09Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, it was a lot.

• 1:10:11Shawn Ryan?

  How did you rectify that?

• 1:10:14Speaker 06

  Didn't fuck up anymore and performed to my best or as best as I could, not failing anything. I wasn't allowed to. Like, that's the whole, I guess, the big thing about Rangers is the standard. Like, if you mess up a standard or if you don't perform to standard, you get R F S, um, which was released for standards. At any point in time in your career, you can be released. So, I guess to rectify that was keeping a, staying the gray man for as long as possible until my first deployment and keeping my head down and just performing. And I figured, and which happened, was after my first deployment is where I started to

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  get respect and become a part of that, that team of doing my job on deployment. I think that's where most of it came from.

• 1:11:04Shawn Ryan?

  It was on deployment?

• 1:11:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Shawn Ryan?

  When did you figure out where you were going for your first deployment?

• 1:11:11Speaker 06

  Oh, like, the last month, a month prior. It's always fluctuating. One minute you're going to Baghdad, maybe Afghanistan, Jalalabad, or you're going to, to Krit or Mosul. Um, it's always a toss-up. The, like, the last moment is where you kind of find out, within that last month or so. Uh, we found out we were going to, to Krit, Iraq, and they were saying it was a pretty hot environment at the time, which it was, and, like, we ended up doing that deployment, a hundred and twenty missions, and that ninety-day deployment, we were doing ninety days at a time before we went to the one twenty to keep up with

• 1:11:51Speaker 06

  uh, Delta's rotation. But the ninety-day, a hundred and twenty missions was, like, average for-

• 1:11:58Shawn Ryan?

  You did a hundred and twenty missions in ninety days?

• 1:12:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:02Shawn Ryan?

  What's going through your head when you figure out you're going to de-Krit Iraq?

• 1:12:08Speaker 06

  I was scared. I thought it was gonna be like Saving Private Ryan. Where you get off the, for me, I thought when we lower the ramp on the C-17. It's because we get picked up in our backyard. So we don't go to like the airport. It's not announced when we're leaving. It's just the. C-17 lands in the back runway behind our compound. You get on. And we fly to Germany. From Germany, we go to where we're going. I thought when they lower the ramp. It was gonna be bullets flying. I'm gonna come out charging and that's how you enter war. Um, but instead it was the exact opposite. We uh, and I kinda got that picture as a new guy when.

• 1:12:49Speaker 06

  I was also high on Ambien. I took the Ambien pill before I was supposed to. And I didn't know what Ambien was. I knew it was a sleeping aid, but I took it before I was supposed to. So I had to fight staying awake while on this C-17 waiting to taxi off the runway. And as I'm sitting there waiting, I started to see faces pop out of the chairs. I'm hallucinating like I'm. Cracked off this Ambien and I'm hallucinating and I'm seeing stuff. And my team leader Salzar, he's like, did you, did you take your Ambien before? And I'm like, yes, I'm, I'm tripping. And he's like, dude, just wait. Finally get an opportunity to sleep, but um. Yeah, we get off the C-17, we're running off, or I think we're gonna run off.

• 1:13:33Speaker 06

  And I don't have a mag for my gun with bullets. I'm like, where do we get bullets that I missed that? That meeting where they handed out the bullets before we go on this deployment? And I'm saying to myself, well, when we run off the C-17. I'm gonna pick up the first guy's ammo that drops, like Saving Private Ryan, but.

• 1:13:52Shawn Ryan?

  You legitimately thought that's why.

• 1:13:53Speaker 06

  I thought that's how we come into war. And they lowered the ramp and you see people walking around. Little uh, coffee bean.

• 1:14:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Speaker 06

  Shops and Burger King joints and stuff like that and. Food places and it smelled like, not bad. It smelled like, well, Iraq, but where we first landed at it just smelled normal. I didn't smell like. Bombs and anything like that, burning bodies. No, it was pretty, pretty chill when we landed. Um, drove to our compound. It's a compound within the big compound, but it's all sectioned off with big. 12-foot T-barriers and.

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  Satellite communications in there and you have to have a badge to get into this compound and stuff like that. It was pretty neat. And within the first eight hours we were in country is when we got our first mission. And I remember going out that night, landing from our, we were on a Black Hawk helicopter, feet hanging out the, off the side doors and we land and get off and I see them raid this home. I'm a machine gunner at the time. So I'm pulling security and just hearing the stuff going on and inside and how they got to the. What was the op? Uh, direct action. We were going to go kill or capture a high value target. And they got there, the assault teams went in, did their thing. And looking at it through

• 1:15:17Speaker 06

  nods was just like, it was like watching the news almost of, it didn't feel like I was really there. It was like an outer body experience, you know, of watching these guys do their thing. And I had been watching them my entire training cycle, but seeing them in combat do it. And I wasn't sure if it was a nine banger going off, or just a regular banger, or if it was gunshots going off inside the, this little home we were raiding. But it was cool seeing them do that. And I got a chance for the first time to see how fast they were and how good they were. But it was just surreal. Like, I didn't feel like I was really there. Like, did I really earn my spot to be here as a new guy? Or I didn't

• 1:15:59Speaker 06

  feel like I was really, I was ready yet. I didn't feel like I was ready yet. Six months went by really fast. Yeah. You know? So I felt like that. But got into the groove really quick. Got a really good team leader. Were there any engagements on that first op? Not the first one, no. Um, just bangers going off that I thought were, you know, gunshots, but it was just, I guess, a normal routine op. We didn't start getting into firefights until.

• 1:16:27Speaker 06

  Maybe a few ops after that, it was very, it happened pretty quick. Within the first three or four ops, five ops, we were getting into pretty good contact.

• 1:16:36Shawn Ryan?

  How, how long after you got in the country were you on your first operation?

• 1:16:42Speaker 06

  Eight hours, yeah.

• 1:16:43Shawn Ryan?

  Eight hours?

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, eight hours. Sometimes it's fast. I've, we've done some where as soon as you land, it's, you're getting geared up and you're heading out the door within a few hours. You know, it's really quick.

• 1:16:56Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:57Speaker 06

  And there, it's, I think the way we trade off. So there's always a battalion overseas. So for us, being third range of battalion, we would replace the outgoing battalion, which would be first. Our, uh,

• 1:17:12Speaker 06

  first would come in to replace us. So we were replacing second. And the way we would pass off information and the packages and the intel that we've gathered, it's, we just pick it up and continue on with the missions that they were going to be doing anyways, if they would have stayed for another three months or so. And we build our intel and stuff like that from the homes that we raid and build more packages and stuff that way.

• 1:17:36Shawn Ryan?

  So if I remember correctly, on your first deployment, you did a hundred and twenty operations within ninety days.

• 1:17:43Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:44Shawn Ryan?

  About?

• 1:17:45Speaker 06

  We were doing multiple a day sometimes, too.

• 1:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  Five or six, after five or six is when you started getting into full-blown engagements.

• 1:17:54Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:55Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about the first operation where you and your team and/or team

• 1:18:03Shawn Ryan?

  got into an engagement.

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. We were in...

• 1:18:07Shawn Ryan?

  What was the operation?

• 1:18:09Speaker 06

  I'm not too, it was regarding Zarqawi. Um, around that time, we weren't going after him yet. It was around that time, going after somebody else. Um...

• 1:18:22Speaker 06

  With the group that he, the guys that he ran with. And I remember landing, landing on the Blackhawks. We get off and walking to the objective. We were walking down this long field through like palm groves. And we get to this compound with like a scattered buildings around it. And my back is up against this brick wall, partly destroyed brick wall. My team leader, leader is next to me and I have, we call him ramrod. Um, another machine gunner next to me. I'm a machine gunner and waiting for the snipers to gain position, to overwatch the objective before the assault team goes in.

• 1:19:06Speaker 06

  And I started hearing, at first I thought my, uh, my peltor, my, my hearing protection. I forgot, I thought that I forgot to change batteries and it was malfunctioning because I heard these weird clicks and snaps in my, in my hearing protection. And all of a sudden I, I can feel like gravel crumbling and hitting my helmet in my back a little bit. The next thing I felt was my team leader shoving me to the ground. Rams down on the ground and I'm confused like, what is going on? And he's like, dude, we're getting shot at. And that's what that noise was. I, I thought gunshots were like the movies are boom, boom.

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  You hear that and not the, that snap that goes by. That's what I was hearing, thinking that my hearing protection was like malfunctioning. So he pins me on the ground and I started to hear the snipers engaging on the rooftop. And I'm hearing the snaps coming more and more. We pick up, change positions, uh, set up a support by fire line. The assault team goes on the rooftop and I think they smoked like 14 guys or 15 guys up there. Um, like we have a newspaper article, I have a newspaper article from that engagement. Helicopter goes down, a little bird hits a power line, it goes down. I see that and I never saw anything like that. It just looked like maybe he popped flares or something.

• 1:20:36Speaker 06

  I was not sure what had happened, but then I see the helicopter go down into this big, wide open field. Um, then we get the call over comms, he lows down, we have to go rescue this helicopter pilot and get him out. So they're still engaging the main objective. A small team, me, my team leader, two or three other guys, we all pick up and we run to the down helicopter, like a mile away, a little less than a mile away. We pick up, run there. It's the fastest I've ever ran a mile in full kit. We get there and you see the helicopter pilot, the little bird pilot, like huddled down. He had a small MP5, like

• 1:21:21Speaker 06

  the, the short MP5s. Um, he had one of those and he's eyes are as big as, you know, saucers, man. And he's scared. We set up a support by fire line overlooking him. And that's when AC-130 started kicking in and laying down people that were, they were all coming in from that, uh, a village nearby, coming to get the pilot and helicopter pieces. I don't know. And yeah, we start, that was a, a pretty intense operation on that one. Damn. That was the first time that I've been, that we, I was engaged and had to like witness and, and experience that. Yeah. Everything after, I'd never pulled the trigger, like,

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  that was the first time I would say, not out of fear, but more so out of like, I didn't know what I was shooting at, you know? It was to put fire down in this general direction and you traverse and search, if I'm correct, where you traverse and search with your, like a heartbeat. Uh, you're doing that with your machine gun and helping the AC-130 and all the other things we had going on, mortars and stuff. But I never like saw line my laser up on someone and pulled the trigger on them. That didn't happen till. Well, shortly after, and it was weirdly with an M4. I had been a Mark 48 gunner that entire time, but also drove strikers that deployment.

• 1:22:48Speaker 06

  So I was, uh, to go to striker driver school in Seattle. Or, no, uh, it's in Washington State. It's where, uh, I forget the place now. It's in Washington State. If I remember, I'll bring it up, but it's where we, uh, uh, drive strikers and learn how to drive strikers. It's that 40 ton vehicle. Uh, so I was a driver and as a driver, you keep your M4 in the cockpit with you. And I was the guy that, you know, uh, would pop out the hatch and use my M4 if need be. And my first real engagement where I saw a body drop was, I take that back. I'm going too far ahead. The first person I ever saw was the 50 cal guy.

• 1:23:32Speaker 06

  And that was my first experience with killing someone, but he was not shooting at us. He had a vehicle full of the, uh, uh, ID of V bed. But in the back at the time, they had the, um, what's that chemical, uh, that you clean pools with? Oh, um, chlorine. Chlorine, yeah. They had the back full of chlorine and explosives, like a chlorine bomb or whatever. That was their thing then. Um, that was the first time I ever had to engage a person on the top of a striker on the 50 cal. And when I got the call to engage this guy, I was like, what the, you know, why? And he's coming V lining straight towards us in our convoy.

• 1:24:14Speaker 06

  And he's, you know, maneuvering to, to come right at us. And I wasn't understanding what was going on, ever trained for that, you know? And he's like, my PL slaps me on the helmet and he's shoot this mother, you know, cussing me out. And I'm like, all right, put the sights on the hood of the car, this white car. And put the butterfly switches on it, the butterfly trigger and skip the rounds. Nine round burst from the hood all the way into the driver's seat. And he went veered off the road. We got out and the assaulters did and.

• 1:24:50Speaker 06

  You know, did their little SSE and investigated what had happened and found the explosives and yeah. But when they opened the car, I remember him like spilling out the car.

• 1:25:00Shawn Ryan?

  How did that feel, knowing that you had just taken another man's life for the first time?

• 1:25:04Speaker 06

  It did not make sense to me. It didn't make sense until I got back and I went to sleep. And that's when I had my first weird dream of like, I didn't feel anything. I didn't feel, it didn't feel real because it's not what I expected. I thought it was gonna be like in the movies, you know?

• 1:25:22Shawn Ryan?

  Big decision-making process?

• 1:25:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. This was like, I'm not even being shot at. This guy's just driving at us at a high rate of speed and I don't, I didn't train for that, you know? And yeah, it was just, it was a weird feeling. I didn't have a disconnect. I didn't feel anything. But I went to bed that night and that's when I had the dream of that guy was the ceiling fan. And his arms were the blades and his head was the centerpiece where the light would be. And he started spinning and I'm strapped to my bed and it's spinning faster and faster until his body like starts to rip apart in my room and he just bathes my, or soaks my room with blood and I'm like bathing in his blood and his face stayed still and was just screaming, but no sound was coming out.

• 1:26:08Speaker 06

  And that's when I was like, oh, I guess, I don't know what I, I just felt I woke up scared, but I guess that was the first real moment where I had a chance to say, or say to myself, man, I killed someone, you know? But after that, it was like, not a normal thing, but it was

• 1:26:28Speaker 06

  as a machine gunner back then, it was, it was a lot of shooting, you know? A lot of, yeah, a lot of laying down fire during ambushes and things of that nature. So it was, it was different, but it was not what I expected. Uh, the first time I shot someone with an M4 was, I was hanging out the, the hatch of the Striker and my guys were just The assaulters were in this, it was almost like a trench warfare scenario where they had this trench thing, there were foreign fighters and they had this trench system that we had to, the assaulters had to fight through.

• 1:27:09Speaker 06

  My vehicle blocked off the portion of the road so they couldn't squirt across. One guy did and I remember, I'm parked next to another striker, Rico two or whatever, and I remember him looking at this guy and he puts his laser on the guy and in his floodlight, when his floodlight hits him, that's when you see the AK. And he's running back looking at our guys and he's running with an AK. That guy starts shooting, my guy starts shooting at him, so I'm like, well, we gotta light this guy up. And I'm, my first time doing that with an M4, I clicked, I hit the safety, or not the safety, I hit the mag release on the side of my M4. Mag falls out, click, boom, one bullet comes out, hit the guy in the back and he falls

• 1:27:54Speaker 06

  down, tumbles and, and I was like the first experience I had with shooting a person and seeing the laser go on the guy and pulling the trigger and watching him collapse. But I wasn't like the sole contributor. I didn't like, I don't think I killed him myself. It was a joint thing where he was being shot up by- Lots of lasers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was my first experience, but with that though, you know, but I don't contribute to, no, my bullet dead, it was a few lasers lighting this guy up. Yeah. And it was like that for, pretty much that entire deployment was just a lot of direct

• 1:28:35Speaker 06

  action, but the firefights were never to where we thought that we were being overrun or gonna lose a firefight. It was pretty one-sided and happened, was over pretty quick. Did you guys lose anybody on that first deployment?

• 1:28:50Speaker 06

  No, no, we did not. We lost somebody in a different platoon. Um, I believe second platoon. We lost one guy in, during an IED blast that blew up his striker and a, a nut that goes on to one of the screws in his striker, blew and punctured the back of his back and went through him and he bled out. That's the only guy we lost on that deployment. That I can, that I knew.

• 1:29:16Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like a very kinetic deployment.

• 1:29:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Most of them were, except for one. And I was working with SEAL Team Six and Jill Allabout. And that's the difference, yeah. I got my, it wasn't fun.

• 1:29:35Shawn Ryan?

  We'll get there, get there. So you do a 90-day deployment, about 120 raids or ops. What, what is it that you think? I mean, if I remember in your outline, we talk about you, you know, your first. I mean, how did you gain your guys' respect? What was it about you that?

• 1:29:58Speaker 06

  I went along with the program. I, I just fell in line. I didn't, like, I got in trouble for stupid new guy drunk stuff that everybody was getting in trouble for at the time. You know, barracks fights and stuff like that or. One time I mouthed off to a team leader because we just got back from Kentucky. We were doing some air, air, uh, air assault stuff, like fast rope. And somewhere in Kentucky and my, a team leader who was not my team leader wanted me to re-clean some 240s and Mark 48. And everybody else was going to bed and I'm like, dude, I'm not gonna do that. And he chewed me out and the next day when I went back to work,

• 1:30:42Speaker 06

  there was a handful of team leaders who were waiting for me and ready to take care of things the way they take care of things in, in battalion, behind the back of the shed. So I got rectified quick. Followed in quick, yeah.

• 1:31:05Shawn Ryan?

  So let's wrap up your first deployment. You come home, I mean, very kinetic deployment. Sounds like a lot of killing.

• 1:31:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:14Shawn Ryan?

  How are you processing this at home?

• 1:31:17Speaker 06

  I really wasn't, man. I just, uh... I felt like, I felt like Robin amongst a bunch of Batmen. You know, I was just Robin. Just a, just, yeah, I was just a sidekick, it felt like. So I didn't really... Nothing really processed, I think. It happened relatively quick and I got wasted, you know, to be honest with you. Like, that was the first thing we did when we got back, was just drink and drink and drink and drink for like two days of binge drinking. And as soon as you're done that, you're back in the training. Like, there was no time to... We had two weeks, thirteen days. We're allotted two weeks per year, one month per year.

• 1:32:02Speaker 06

  So two weeks before deployment, two weeks after, you're allotted for that. So... Yeah, I went home to Maryland, stayed with my friend, did some cool stuff, I guess, got drunk and just hung out with friends. I didn't really think about too much of anything. Like, I didn't have bad dreams or anything like that. Um, it just felt weird. I felt different. As, I tell you what, I felt that I was never gonna get picked on again. Like, my senior, eleventh grade and twelfth grade was, I wasn't allowed to, my last year in high school, I was not allowed to get suspended anymore for fighting. I had been,

• 1:32:43Speaker 06

  I had used up all my fight days, if you wanna call it that, before expulsion and I would have to come back and repeat and just go to a different school. Um, like, I was bullied a little bit, I guess you could say, because I didn't fit with the, the crowd of guys who just lived a different lifestyle, you know? I wasn't... I, I couldn't afford to. My parents would not let me be that guy. Um, so not being able to fall into like the guys with the streets or whatever, you would get picked on. But, so I, I had to fight a lot, you know? And after that deployment, coming back, I knew I was never gonna get picked on ever

• 1:33:26Speaker 06

  again, because it was, yeah, I felt like that, that I've...

• 1:33:32Speaker 06

  Kill people, you know, and I don't. It was not a big thing to me, like I didn't cry about it. It wasn't like the movies or anything. It just was, it just was what it was. So I carried that back and I, you know, I still to this day carry it of. I don't ever want to kill anyone again, but. Cause I think it does take a piece of your soul every time you do it. I don't know, my opinion. But if I had to, of course I would, I would, yeah.

• 1:34:03Speaker 06

  At what point did your wife come into the picture? Two thousand and six. Oh, so during that deployment. During like the, the later portion, I'm on MySpace. I had snuck out to go to the MWR. So that was the only place where MySpace was allowed. We were not allowed to have it on our compound or anything like that. I go across the street to an MWR that the legs used, the regular army guys, and. I go in there and I hop on MySpace and this girl Jessica, she messages me and her picture didn't pop up at first. And she just says, hey, we went to school, elementary school together, just wanted to reconnect or see how you were doing.

• 1:34:45Speaker 06

  And I thought it was a different Jessica that I did not like. So I clicked X and I was like, there's nothing there. But it ate me up for the rest of that day and, cause I wanted to see if it was the right Jessica. I go back the next day and her page loads up. And it's the girl that I went to school with in elementary school in the first grade, the girl I used to. Pick on and threw a frog on and a spider on and stuff like that. And dated elementary school style, same girl, but just looked way hotter. And I looked at my friend who was next to me. I'm like, dude, I'm going to marry this chick. And he laughed, he chuckled about it, printed out her picture, messaged her, got her phone number.

• 1:35:29Speaker 06

  Came back and I called her from a sat phone. Um, and we talked. She knew I was in Iraq, but she didn't know what I was doing. She knows I'm in the army and I was overseas in Iraq. Like, it's all I was allowed to say at the time or whatever. And I met her that, after that deployment. I got a flight to Maryland and I got a flight to San Antonio. And I went to go see her and stayed with her as a friend for a few days. Um, I couldn't afford a hotel. I had spent all my money on, on some rims. Twenty inch rims.

• 1:36:07Speaker 06

  And, uh, I got ripped off. They charged me like ten grand for something that was, that didn't even fit on my car. So I, it was a bad story. But spent all my money on that and, uh, and plane tickets. So when I went to go see her, I was broke, but I was broke balling. I made it, you know, it was a, it was a good time. And, uh, yeah, she liked me, but I guess not the way I wanted her to like me. She wanted to be friends, but I'm the type of guy who's very, that's not gonna happen. And she was just getting out of a relationship. So,

• 1:36:48Speaker 06

  and he was still trying to talk to her. And my way of telling her I'm the right guy was, I will beat your guy's ass. And, yeah, I just did my little work, my magic, no voodoo. And we ended up dating in two thousand and seven. Got married in two thousand and seven, November. After my second deployment in Ranger School. Yeah, our third deployment, got married. So, second or third deployment, Ranger School and then my second deployment, got married.

• 1:37:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so you came home.

• 1:37:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Shawn Ryan?

  You met your wife.

• 1:37:27Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:28Shawn Ryan?

  Go on another deployment.

• 1:37:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Shawn Ryan?

  When did it start getting serious between you and her?

• 1:37:35Speaker 06

  Well, okay, so.

• 1:37:38Speaker 06

  It was always serious to me. Uh huh. She, I introduced her to my friend Andre. The one I grew up with and I introduced her as my girlfriend and she was like, no, we're just friends. And uh, I was way on to her early on. More so than she was me. All the way to when I proposed to her. Like her parents. They're old fashioned Mexican. And I was a gentleman. I approached the mom, told her my plans. I don't know how she felt about it. She seemed like she was cool about it. Until it was time to talk to the dad and I kind of understood it that he said no.

• 1:38:21Speaker 06

  But I didn't understand the why of what he, what he believed in. So. It was, when I proposed to her, it was tough because. The parents were not for it, you know, they did not want any of that. Intermixing, you know, so she was disowned really quick, really quick. And it's more so after we had our child. Um, she was pregnant before that, had a miscarriage. I think during my, I had to move her down. So it was like two thousand and eight. And the backlash she got from that initially was pretty bad. And it just went downhill from, hill from there as far as like.

• 1:39:06Speaker 06

  You know, they just don't like. They don't believe in interracial, you know, at all and. They told me things about what they, what they believed about what I was as a. Black guy and what they, their stereotypical. Ideas were and why they didn't, you know, necessarily want me dating their daughter or marrying her. So it was, it was like that, still is and now they just don't talk and haven't in. Oh man, they never got over that? No, no, no. I remember when we had our child and. Yeah. Her dad uh, held him and like discussed.

• 1:39:47Speaker 06

  Gave him back and never saw him again and never, has not talked to his daughter in almost a decade.

• 1:39:55Shawn Ryan?

  Shit, man, I'm sorry to hear that.

• 1:39:57Speaker 06

  Dude, it's all good. I think people like that are just, hey, man, you know, you can't change that mentality. One, two, it's not my first rodeo as, as far as being like, not liked because of what I look like. So it was nothing like new. It was more so new to her. But that's what she was, you know, she grew up hearing that was you're allowed to be friends with them, but you're not allowed to be in a relationship with them. So she was already going against that from what she was brought up with. But I don't know, it's, I can't, I'm not mad at it, though. I think it hurt her more, more than anything else, though, you know?

• 1:40:38Shawn Ryan?

  We'll dive into that more later. What, so you, you meet your wife.

• 1:40:43Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:45Shawn Ryan?

  You haven't won her over yet, but you go on a second deployment.

• 1:40:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, after I proposed to her, she says yes. And as I'm leaving to go on deployment, she said no, parents got in the ear. So that bummed me out. I'm hurt, dude, you know? Going on this deployment, I just got that news that she doesn't want to anymore. So my whole focus going over there was winning her back, you know? So I spent like that first month or so just constantly typing and trying to call and talking to her and trying to win her back over. And she finally did during that deployment. And we made the decision we were gonna get married finally, like when I got back. And then I got the news during that deployment in oh seven, we were in Mosul.

• 1:41:33Shawn Ryan?

  This is second deployment.

• 1:41:34Speaker 06

  Yes, that was a terrible deployment of mainly IEDs, a threat of IEDs. And yeah, like my first day in country, the first stop we did, we were supposed to be driving around. We had a guide who had been there and showing us like different routes we could take around the city of Mosul. We go through this one place called RPG Alley. Nothing happens, there's no RPGs. And then we go down to where, going down this uh neighborhood or segment of this route we were taking. And the guy, the guide says, yeah, there's, nothing ever happens here. It's, you know, silent, don't have to worry about anything here.

• 1:42:16Speaker 06

  And the striker in front of me blows up, lifts off the ground, boom. And I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. So I call IED over the comms. We go to our, you know, procedure as far as how to secure that site and provide cover. And that was the first, within the first few hours in country, like watching my roommate get blown up by a, it's like a 50-pound or something IED. But they buried it too low or upside down or something that it didn't split the striker in half. But it lifted it off the ground by a few feet and snapped the axle on it. And they had to uh, you know, come get it out with the big esc, or big machine, big crane or something.

• 1:43:02Shawn Ryan?

  Was anybody injured?

• 1:43:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, the driver was, he was injured. Nothing too serious though, he just covered in oil. And like, I think he broke his ankle or something like that.

• 1:43:14Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:14Speaker 06

  Something small, minute, but yeah, that was my first experience being in Mosul. And it was like that every, every day. And we ran about the same amount, 110 plus missions in those 90 days. And that was a brutal deployment as far as the pace that we were trying to keep up and being run to the ground. And that was a deployment where I went dry on all my ammo. The 50 gal, 50 cal gunners all went dry on all seven strikers. The Kiowa helicopters all went dry, the pilots were hanging out. The side of their doors on the Kiowas doing strafing runs with their M4s and on full auto doing strafing runs on a, we were gonna go take down this.

• 1:43:57Speaker 06

  Apartment building, like a big apartment building. We were introduced to it, this leg unit who lived nearby to our compound, knew who we were. And our rules of engagement were different at the time. So they came over and they needed help because every time they went down this road, they would get ambushed. Their SOP was to just blow through it, but they were tired of constantly getting hit. So they asked, you know, could we help out using our ROE? So we dressed up like them, put their patches on to look like them. Went down the road and drove down that route and no shit, man, we get ambushed by this big like apartment building, few hundred guys in there.

• 1:44:42Speaker 06

  And dude, we parked the vehicles, all turned 50 cows that way. Everybody dismounted except for the drivers and we start hammering this building. And it was like playing whack a mole. Like I'm looking through the ACOG of my M4. And a head would pop up and you'd send off a round or two and you don't know if you hit the guy, but another head would pop up and another head would pop up. And we were just, we stayed there, I think it was like six hours, we're just laying into this building. Until everybody went dry, drive back and they dropped two 500 pound bombs on it after we left and leveled the place and yeah.

• 1:45:23Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:45:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. No idea how many people, anybody, it was just chaotic, chaotic of, yeah, leveling this place.

• 1:45:32Shawn Ryan?

  How did you get your head right from being basically turned down for your marriage proposal?

• 1:45:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:41Shawn Ryan?

  By your future wife and walking into

• 1:45:46Shawn Ryan?

  an extreme hostile, engaging environment full of combat?

• 1:45:52Speaker 06

  Being shot at?

• 1:45:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was the only thing that made it, you know, take my mind off of what was going on back at home. The only thing, it's up until that point, like there was a, you know, you're just waiting to get, I guess, shot at or get that, that rush of your only focus is kill the bad guy and make it home. Well, once you make it home, and once I made it home, then I would go back into. Rushed to the phone to call Jess and try to work this thing out, but I was always going into the mission prior to that, like, I guess you could say depressed, you know, crushed. I wasn't used to that. Um, so yeah, just the firefights and it was a constant, we were always, you know, getting in the firefight. So it was easy to keep your mind off of it.

• 1:46:38Speaker 06

  But it didn't have to last long. It was like a month into that deployment and she was okay with it and we decided to get married and I was back on my A game after that mentally, I guess you could say mentally. She was the only person to ever be there when I got back from deployment. Like family, never, I never had family members. Your family never did come around? No, on, after my deployments. And like my first deployment, I was sad. You'd watch the guys have girlfriends meet them and family. I just got off the bus and went to the room, got drunk with the guys and, you know. So having her and she was there for all of them after that, you know, always there was really, really good.

• 1:47:24Speaker 06

  At what point does the sniper come on the radar? I always had it on from day one. It was just the process of getting there. I knew I had to go to Ranger School and I wanted to stay far away from Ranger School as possible because it was a 62 day course if you go all the way through and it's rare that guys do. And Why do you say that it's rare that guys do? From my experience in battalion, it was rare you saw a guy, unless he was really on his A game, he could, even if you were, it was just luck, you know, you could still be peered or somebody, you could have a bad, a bad, uh, I honestly forget what they call

• 1:48:05Speaker 06

  it, where a graded portion of the school where you take lead and you're, you know, in charge of all your guys, you plan all your, your routes and, you know. Basically like mission planning. Your op award. What, so when did you go to Ranger School? Was it after second deployment? After that in 2007. So we're pushing almost winter time now. And I'll never forget when I'm watching 24 with Jack Bauer. Mm hmm. 24 and my team leader comes in and he stuck his head through the window. He's like, Irv, when we get back, pack your bags, you're going to Ranger School. And I was like, fuck, man. Ah, there's no way.

• 1:48:47Speaker 06

  I planned on, I wanted to get married when I got back and I thought they were doing that to be a dick. And just wanted to throw off that wedding thing, but in order to be a Ranger and stay a Ranger, you have to go to Ranger School anyways, or else you get kicked out. So I knew the time was coming. I just wanted it to be after I got married. So I'm depressed because of that now. Kind of have to call it off the wedding a little bit, push it to whenever I graduate. I said, best case, 62 days plus, maybe 70 days. Worst case, I stay there like another guy I knew in battalion and stayed there for almost a year. You know, just trapped in the school. Don't want to quit because if you fail, you get kicked out of battalion and you go to like Korea or somewhere, Italy.

• 1:49:32Speaker 06

  So go to Ranger School. Um, like first day was your PT test. Your, what, your 15 or 12 mile ruck march, five mile run. No, five, your PT test, five mile run and all that stuff. Your road march comes after the fact. You do your water confidence stuff, uh, which like I'm, I grew up like wanting to be a SEAL and I could swim, but I'm not too comfortable with heights. So like that was my only thing I had to overcome was my height, the fear of heights. And that was all on mainly day one until you get into mountain phase of Ranger School. But it sucked.

• 1:50:17Speaker 06

  Not so much physically, it was just, I was hungry a lot, you know? I was always hungry. I lost thirty-five pounds and like I got sick in Ranger School. I drank some water that I didn't purify and had the worms and I got really, really sick. Painted some trees behind me one day while walking to an objective and just enough to put my pants down and sprayed the bushes behind me and the Ranger instructor was like, "What the hell is wrong with you, man? Uh, go get checked out by the medic, get some IVs, stay for like a day at the hospital and come back out in the field." But I wasn't able to eat solid foods for a while, you know, before it would just pass straight through.

• 1:51:01Speaker 06

  Um, lost thirty-five pounds, couldn't feel my big toes for like a year after, my nails stopped growing. And yeah, got married, extremely malnutritioned and, and yeah, skinny and frail. Got married in the courtroom, in the courthouse, like twenty-five bucks, seventy-five bucks or whatever it was. And her dad didn't show up, so her mom, I believe, walked her down the aisle. My grandmother showed up to mine, uh, rest her soul, she just recently passed away too.

• 1:51:33Shawn Ryan?

  Sorry to hear that.

• 1:51:34Speaker 06

  All good. Yeah, we're losing, lost all my grandparents now. So all in like two years, this past two years, man, it's been crazy. So, yeah, she showed up and my aunt did and that was it. Had a little small wedding after Ranger School and ended up, uh, deploying right after that again, like a couple of weeks after, to Baghdad.

• 1:51:57Shawn Ryan?

  So when it comes to Ranger School and RASP, from what I understand, Ranger School, Ranger School is actually more of a leadership course, correct?

• 1:52:05Speaker 06

  That's exactly, yeah, exactly. And anybody can go, like we had chefs and Green Berets and I think like a Navy SEAL or two Navy SEALs in that.

• 1:52:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we had a couple of guys go.

• 1:52:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay. But yeah, it was just like a leadership course, though.

• 1:52:19Shawn Ryan?

  What did you find more difficult, Ranger School or RASP?

• 1:52:24Speaker 06

  I would say... For me, RIP. It was harder. It was, RIP was harder. Like.

• 1:52:32Shawn Ryan?

  Does Ranger School have a 90% attrition rate as well?

• 1:52:35Speaker 06

  No, it's like 60%, 60%. Um, but it's not so physical. It's just fighting sleep, hunger, and still being able to lead people and plan and find your way around the mountains, the jungle, the swamps, doing water operations and stuff like that.

• 1:52:56Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:57Speaker 06

  It was tough, but your day-to-day job in battalion was way tougher than anything in Ranger School. It was way tougher. It was the, the structure of Ranger School that made it hard, you know? Like, my first go-around, I didn't make it all the way through. I had to recycle Darby, the first phase. And after that, I went all the way through, but, no, it wasn't too, too tough. It just sucked.

• 1:53:25Shawn Ryan?

  So you get done with Ranger School, you're married.

• 1:53:29Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:53:32Shawn Ryan?

  And then you're going on your third deployment.

• 1:53:33Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:53:34Shawn Ryan?

  Where's your third deployment to?

• 1:53:35Speaker 06

  Baghdad.

• 1:53:36Shawn Ryan?

  Baghdad. So Iraq, Iraq, Iraq again.

• 1:53:39Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. And that wasn't, that deployment, it wasn't like as intense. It was fun. We got to work, we got a chance to work with SEALs on, I think they were Mark V boats or some, like a SWCC boat.

• 1:53:52Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:53:53Speaker 06

  They had machine guns all over it and it was like a riverine type.

• 1:53:57Shawn Ryan?

  Like a rib?

• 1:53:59Speaker 06

  Almost. I guess.

• 1:54:00Shawn Ryan?

  Mark V is like a speedboat.

• 1:54:01Speaker 06

  No, it wasn't that then. Like a rib. Okay, yeah. Um, that was cool working with them and, you know, I didn't know anything about those boats, but it was cool riding down the river and stuff like that and.

• 1:54:14Shawn Ryan?

  What was your experience? I mean, it sounds like you wanted to be a SEAL.

• 1:54:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Shawn Ryan?

  Colorblindness thing didn't work out.

• 1:54:22Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54:23Shawn Ryan?

  You went Rangers, now you're working side-by-side with SEALs. What was your experience like?

• 1:54:28Speaker 06

  Working with the regular SEAL teams was not bad. They were cool. They weren't as, it wasn't what I expected. And I chalked it up to, I just, my personal belief, I think they're really good at water operations. Like, no Ranger could ever do that, you know? But I think when it came to land work and direct action. We were pretty good and we just had a lot more time with it.

• 1:54:54Speaker 06

  It wasn't like until I worked with SEAL Team Six that I didn't like, I didn't want to be a SEAL anymore. You know, I didn't like. Yeah, it was not a good experience working with them. They were dicks, man. But, yeah. There were a few times where, it was back when McChrystal was the, or was it McChrystal? Who was a SEAL at one point and he was in charge of like the SEALs or JSOC or whatever at that time. And he had to.

• 1:55:34Shawn Ryan?

  Are we talking about your experience with Six?

• 1:55:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, with Six.

• 1:55:37Shawn Ryan?

  Let's, we'll get there. Let's keep it in chronological order.

• 1:55:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:41Shawn Ryan?

  It helps me.

• 1:55:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're good.

• 1:55:42Shawn Ryan?

  It helps me.

• 1:55:43Speaker 06

  That's my ADD kicking in.

• 1:55:44Shawn Ryan?

  So you go, so you're back in Iraq and I think I know what this is like. It was they, they stood up a new task force. And I can't remember what they call it, like Task Force Twenty One.

• 1:55:55Speaker 06

  I was on that, yeah. One, two, one or something like that.

• 1:55:58Shawn Ryan?

  Something, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was, it was TF Red and the.

• 1:56:03Speaker 06

  That's it, yeah.

• 1:56:04Shawn Ryan?

  And the, and the teams.

• 1:56:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:07Shawn Ryan?

  And so, did you guys get to, I mean, what were you doing together?

• 1:56:12Speaker 06

  Lot of direct action. Like my, like one of my coolest awards, I guess, came with, with working with SEALs and, and you know, doing joint stuff with them.

• 1:56:25Speaker 06

  They were cool guys. It was like working with Rangers, but I just knew they were SEALs, you know?

• 1:56:32Speaker 06

  And you guys had, they had cool equipment. It was different than ours and your guys' weapons were cooler. It was cool in that aspect and.

• 1:56:39Shawn Ryan?

  How so? What was different?

• 1:56:41Speaker 06

  You guys had the boats with the machine guns on them.

• 1:56:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, some of your weapons were different, like your handguns. We had Berettas at the time. Your handguns were different.

• 1:56:54Speaker 06

  Other than that, like we both had Mark Forty Eights. I thought that was cool and it was like working with Rangers, but you guys had a little bit, like little cooler stuff, like the boats and.

• 1:57:03Shawn Ryan?

  But you just had a better budget.

• 1:57:05Speaker 06

  Better budget, yeah. It was cool in that aspect, seeing the things that you guys had and the missions were pretty routine. It wasn't like I got a chance to see, you know, SEALs do anything. Like spectacular, we weren't doing anything what I consider spectacular. Just regular, you know, gonna go kill bad guys in this building or capture bad guys if we can. It was just pretty much that and we would get there by water sometimes and I thought that was cool. Um, yeah, it wasn't like anything that really stood out. We never butted heads or anything like that. They pulled their weight, we pulled our weight. It wasn't until I got to SEAL Team Six and. Was it competitive at all? No, not well.

• 1:57:50Speaker 06

  The only competitiveness that I saw was with Six. Um, of like when we would be clearing one objective or side by sides. Who could, you know, who was getting their objective cleared the fastest and first? Um, we would win. But, and I have a crazy story. I don't know if I want to embarrass anybody, but with working with them. But, uh, regular SEALs are pretty cool. They were cool. Longer hair. I was envious of that. Longer hair. It seems like you guys' standards were a little bit more relaxed and. Hands in pocket, first name basis was, it was cool, you know, in that aspect. Um, we were very strict, you know? So I liked seeing that. I didn't want to cross over. It didn't make me want to cross over.

• 1:58:35Speaker 06

  I felt that we're kind of doing the same stuff and I really didn't want to be cold and wet and sandy after. You know, being a Ranger and that I don't like the water like that, you know, it takes a different, different, different breed. That's just not for me, you know? I'm glad I was not a SEAL because I think, I don't think I would have been. A good SEAL because I don't like water that much at all. And I don't, I'm not comfortable with scuba diving. I got a scuba certified young, but I'm not, I'm not like. I'm terrified of it at the same time, you know, claustrophobic, scared of heights. And yeah, I don't like swimming that much and the ocean freaks me out, you know?

• 1:59:19Shawn Ryan?

  Doesn't sound like a spectacular deployment.

• 1:59:22Speaker 06

  No, no, it wasn't spectacular, no. But it was, it was, it was cool.

• 1:59:26Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think maybe it was also with the fact that you're doing, this was your third deployment to Iraq?

• 1:59:32Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:59:33Shawn Ryan?

  And so it, I mean, were things becoming very routine?

• 1:59:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, routine and it was kinda dying down at that time, too. It wasn't as hot as it was like in oh six, oh five, oh seven. No, far from it. It was, it was not, we were not running like a hundred twenty missions at that point. It was like maybe seventy missions, eighty missions, ninety, s- lower amount, not triple digits.

• 1:59:56Shawn Ryan?

  In a ninety day deployment or are you up to one twenty now?

• 1:59:59Speaker 06

  At this point, yeah. So it was not, a lot more free time and it just was not as intense, you know? But it was, you're right, one hundred percent routine. Um, the change up didn't come for me until Afghanistan.

• 2:00:11Shawn Ryan?

  Have, had you, had you lost anybody that you know up to this point yet?

• 2:00:16Speaker 06

  At that point, no, not personally, no. I knew guys who were, who happened to, you know, be killed in combat or, or blown up or something, but I wasn't like, I knew of them. We, you know, butted heads a few times walking to chow and I'm at a cinnamon chow or PT or something, but I didn't know them like that.

• 2:00:38Shawn Ryan?

  When did you find out you were going to become a sniper?

• 2:00:43Speaker 06

  After my wife told me to go ahead and pursue it and I knew a hundred percent. I was skeptical after.

• 2:00:49Shawn Ryan?

  This is after the third deployment?

• 2:00:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, after that, I was skeptical of going because I had built such a bond with my guys. I didn't wanna lose that, you know?

• 2:00:58Shawn Ryan?

  So when you go, I got questions about this because that is, correct me if I'm wrong, did you go to RRD?

• 2:01:05Speaker 06

  Negative, no.

• 2:01:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:07Speaker 06

  We get an invite, um, just like we get invites from Delta or whatever.

• 2:01:13Shawn Ryan?

  What is RRD?

• 2:01:14Speaker 06

  Uh, Ranger Reconnaissance Detachment. Back then it was RRC, Ranger Reconnaissance Company at the time. And it's like our only tier one unit. Um, the first, I had no idea they existed. I just would randomly see guys with long beards, long hair, never in uniform on our compound. And I didn't know who they were. I thought they were workers or contractors or something. Never knew who they were. You, it's like. It's rare you see these guys. They're, I don't know where they even stay, to be honest with you. My entire time in battalion, I've may have, may have seen one or two of those guys throughout my entire career. You know, and I always thought they were contractors or something like that.

• 2:02:00Speaker 06

  Worked with them twice overseas and I have no idea what they were even doing. I just know that they, uh, they did a, a halo jump into Afghanistan and we went to go pick them up. And drop them off somewhere in the, in the mountains and I have no idea what they were doing.

• 2:02:19Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:02:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. We don't know too much about, I mean, we know a little bit, but it's very, very secretive. Yeah.

• 2:02:26Shawn Ryan?

  So you get home from third deployment.

• 2:02:28Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 2:02:29Shawn Ryan?

  What's the, what's the discussion between you and your li- wife with going to?

• 2:02:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:35Shawn Ryan?

  Cyber.

• 2:02:36Speaker 06

  Should I go? I didn't wanna lose that bond with my guys and the selection process. I'm, you're not even sure if you're gonna make it. You know, you could fail the board and they could simply not like you for a person and you don't make it. So I didn't wanna experience that and like I would have still gone back to my, to my guys or whatnot. But I just didn't wanna experience that, that fail, that failure. Um, and I didn't wanna leave my guys either. So I was kind of, and I, I was so tired of schools at that point and, and deploying. I didn't have like free time, it felt like with my, you know, brand new wife at the time.

• 2:03:17Speaker 06

  So I was skeptical on it. I asked her and she's like, you know what? You should follow your dream. I've, I had told her since, you know, when we first got, when we were dating, I've wanted to be a sniper for a long time. And up until that time, she knew I was a Ranger, but we never talked about deployment stuff. She didn't know about any of that stuff until one of my guys, she went to come pick me up after a deployment. As I'm downloading equipment, guys come around and they talk about me smoking some guy with the 50 count. And she's like, what the heck is going on? She had no idea like, I would always tell her, man, we go over there. We watch stuff, nothing really happens. I say Marines do most of the work.

• 2:03:58Speaker 06

  Like those are the guys who are, you know, first to fight with all your might. Those are the guys and we don't really do much, you know? And I was like, how much can you possibly do in that little amount of time? You don't have time to do anything. So she believed it to that point. And she didn't really care or ask any questions about it. Until she overheard it about, you know, we were, me and my guys were talking after a deployment. And that's where she was kind of like, wow, you know, I didn't think about that. You guys are doing stuff like that or killing people. So kept it from her for a while and.

• 2:04:33Shawn Ryan?

  Did it change? Did your relationship change?

• 2:04:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:04:36Shawn Ryan?

  When that came out? Were there a lot of questions?

• 2:04:40Speaker 06

  I think there were a lot of questions, questions that she wanted to ask, but didn't know how.

• 2:04:48Speaker 06

  She mainly asked, like, did I know anybody who died? Or was I scared of coming back or anything? But after that, mainly it changed for her when she would drop me off the tears, man. She would bawl her eyes out because now she knew that I was on the ground fighting. But she never really brought up, she's very quiet at the time, reserved, you know? Very quiet. She didn't want to bring that stuff up because she didn't know how to approach it, I guess, either. And I didn't, I didn't really talk about it, you know, at all. I mean, she's seen me cry in the car once, but that's about it.

• 2:05:30Speaker 06

  And she didn't really ask, she just asked if I was okay, I wanted to talk about anything. She's always been open to talking, if I want to talk about anything. And no, you know, at that time. So it was more so that with her. She didn't change any other way, like she still loved me the same and treated me the same. Just was more asking if I was okay, you know, or I wanted to talk about anything.

• 2:05:59Shawn Ryan?

  Did she have any support group or anything when you were gone?

• 2:06:03Speaker 06

  No.

• 2:06:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you're, you don't have a healthy relationship with your parents. It doesn't sound like her parents had written her and you off.

• 2:06:12Speaker 06

  Yep, yep.

• 2:06:13Shawn Ryan?

  For, for racial issues?

• 2:06:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:06:16Shawn Ryan?

  And what about the team?

• 2:06:19Speaker 06

  The team, my guys?

• 2:06:20Shawn Ryan?

  Do you guys have a support network?

• 2:06:22Speaker 06

  We had an FRG, uh, family readiness group. But that was like a lot of drama, you know, a lot of drama.

• 2:06:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, so she stayed away from that. Her, I feel so bad, you know, for looking back at it. You know, she moves to a place she's never been before. Ex- and experiencing these long durations of just not having me around. And she had a job at the mall and the bank for a little bit. And other than that, she had no like, we had a, a dog. And that's about it. She didn't, but I would call her every day whenever I could. But no, she was a, a lonely person too, a lonely person too, you know? So I guess we kind of fit good in that aspect. We matched of, we could both deal with loneliness together, you know?

• 2:07:17Shawn Ryan?

  How was it getting into sniper? I mean, what is the, do you put in for it?

• 2:07:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, you put in a packet. You, uh, through your chain of command, like your, your squad leader to your, you know, platoon leader, platoon sergeant, platoon leader, uh, first sergeant, platoon leader, all the way up to the chain of command. And they review it to make sure you're good to go. Uh, you go qualify with the, you know, A, A, M4 open sights to make sure that you can hold a group, uh, to make, yeah, to get in. And then that's where the selection portion starts, which is your basic PT test, more shooting test, and then a board of a panel.

• 2:08:05Speaker 06

  You go into this, or you take a psychological evaluation first, a couple of those written, then you talk to a psych. Then depending on what the psych says, and if you've passed everything else, the physical portion and the shooting portion, the psych portion, then you have to go to the board and they sit you down and interview you, uh, interview you about.

• 2:08:27Speaker 06

  Your basic knowledge of what it is to be a Ranger. Different operations, who you are as a person, family man, and just to get to know who you are. Then they send you out the room and you'll find out later that day or the next day. If you've been selected and out of the, I think 14 guys we had, seven of us got selected. And we joined the sniper section and there was 12 total at that time.

• 2:08:54Shawn Ryan?

  Students?

• 2:08:55Speaker 06

  Snipers, uh, not full-fledged snipers at that time. Um, the seven who were. Made it through the selection process, plus the guys who were already there. Most of the guys had gotten out. So we had the, you know, the veteran snipers who had been there for a few rotations go in and. Uh, after that you get sent to sniper school. But for us it was, we had to do, it was when we got like an increase in the budget. So we sent guys to, um, like these civilian courses that. For, I went to like long range precision, uh, mountain precision. Um, this place down in Corpus Christi or Kingsville, Texas.

• 2:09:40Speaker 06

  That does all types of crazy type of long range and moving target stuff and. It was a sick course, man. It, the best shooting I've ever done, the best I've ever been at shooting. Was after that course. Um, then I went to sniper school.

• 2:09:59Shawn Ryan?

  No shit. So they're sending you to all these civilian courses leading up to?

• 2:10:03Speaker 06

  Sniper school.

• 2:10:04Shawn Ryan?

  Sniper school?

• 2:10:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:10:05Shawn Ryan?

  Is the sniper school army sniper school?

• 2:10:07Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, army sniper school.

• 2:10:09Shawn Ryan?

  Or is it specific to Rangers?

• 2:10:11Speaker 06

  No, it's army sniper school.

• 2:10:13Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:10:13Speaker 06

  At that time it was, I think it's an eight week sniper course or, I forget. I think it's.

• 2:10:18Shawn Ryan?

  Had you done any stalking?

• 2:10:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:10:20Shawn Ryan?

  Or was it all shooting courses before you went to sniper school?

• 2:10:25Speaker 06

  Most of it was.

• 2:10:26Shawn Ryan?

  Army sniper school?

• 2:10:27Speaker 06

  Most of the civilian courses were shooting. We did a stalk here and there.

• 2:10:32Speaker 06

  It wasn't like harped on or focused on like the extreme long range shooting course was strictly shooting and the mountainous stuff in California, high angle stuff, uh, not the marine high angle. It's a civilian course that that was all 100% shooting. The only physical thing was getting up to the top of the mountain. Um, and then we learned like, um, like

• 2:10:57Shawn Ryan?

  Were there other civilians in the course?

• 2:10:59Speaker 06

  No, not at that time.

• 2:11:00Shawn Ryan?

  It was just you guys?

• 2:11:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:11:02Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. So was this basically, what did you say, seven of you? And you guys are just filling these courses, these, these civilian?

• 2:11:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:11:11Shawn Ryan?

  That's pretty badass.

• 2:11:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. Best shooting courses I've been to were the civilian ones and like by the time you get to sniper school, the shooting is the easiest part. The stalking is where it gets like, okay, well, this is a whole different ballgame. Um, all of us should, I mean, all the guys passed that. And then from there we'll start to send out guys to, uh, marine scout sniper, their high angle course and

• 2:11:40Shawn Ryan?

  What did you find the most challenging portion of army sniper school to be?

• 2:11:45Speaker 06

  Target detection. That was the hardest portion of it. Stalking was easy. I've never, like I was, I could have gotten honor grad, but I was being a ranger in a regular army school and digging off with my other ranger guys and being sneaky, doing stupid stuff. So we were, I wasn't allowed to get, you know, honor grad from that, but stalking was easy. My last stalk, um, so it's like a tradition where you wear whatever you want to wear and you do your final stalk or whatever after you've passed all of them. Um, like one of our guys, um, keep his name, I'll call him M, a legend, really, really

• 2:12:23Speaker 06

  great guy, good sniper. He did his in like a yellow t-shirt and he stalked and made, he passed his stalk in a yellow t-shirt. So for me and my spotter, we went in t-shirt and jeans and we managed to pass a stalk in t-shirt and jeans and stalking was the easiest portion, but target detection was like the hardest for me. Hiding or finding the hidden objects in the, in the field and dude, that's just, I don't know. It takes a different And I'm not the best.

• 2:12:56Shawn Ryan?

  Describe it a little bit.

• 2:12:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, so target detection would be, imagine ten military items.

• 2:13:04Speaker 06

  A bullet casing, a compass, protractor, dog tags, a bootlace, things of that nature. And they put it out fifty, a hundred yards in front of you and they hide it in the woods or in an urban environment. One example, like one of the hardest ones I had to find was a protractor, the clear square protractors that you use on maps, was taped on the side of a brick wall, a white cinder block wall.

• 2:13:31Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:13:32Speaker 06

  Taped to the side of that. And the only thing that stood out, which you had to look for, as you're looking on the edges or the edge of the, the building, you're looking for that irregular, it goes from hard edge, hard edge, smooth, and now you have little ticks on that one. Let me focus in on that. Oh, there's a protractor there, but it's clear, but I can see the, the ticks on the protractor, so, okay, I can outline that. Or taping a toothbrush to a branch in the, in the woods or whatever. And I'm looking for the irregularity from crooked branches, nothing in nature goes straight lines. I'm looking for the straight line of the toothbrush, I see that, now I see the bristles on it. That is the hardest portion of sniper school. Finding glints, that's always easy.

• 2:14:17Speaker 06

  It's the

• 2:14:20Speaker 06

  objects that don't have glint blends in and you're only looking for a straight line or something that just does not fit. And, yeah, that was the hardest portion. For me.

• 2:14:33Shawn Ryan?

  That doesn't sound easy.

• 2:14:34Speaker 06

  No, man, that was the most stressful, I failed.

• 2:14:37Shawn Ryan?

  Finding a clear protractor at a hundred yards?

• 2:14:40Speaker 06

  On a wall, in an urban, yeah, that was the.

• 2:14:43Shawn Ryan?

  Did they give you any parameters or is it a three hundred and sixty degree environment?

• 2:14:47Speaker 06

  No, so there's like a, a, a tape line in front of you? And they give you your sectors, you know, left and right field of sectors. And everything in front of you from the tape line to a hundred yards or further, whatever. It's fair play. There's ten military items in there. Write them down, identify them, describe them, and draw a picture of them. Of where they're at. So you're looking for shape, color, description, dimensions, and you're putting all this down.

• 2:15:23Speaker 06

  Sometimes they would put a hand grenade right in front of you, like, right across the line. And that would be the only one you don't find, because it's right in front of your face. But I took that, I had that mentality with me, and I carry it to this day. That sometimes things can be so close that you don't even see it or notice it. It's like your nose. You know, if you focus on it, you can see, oh, I have a nose right there. But how often do we really see the nose that's sticking right out in front of our face? It's rare. So most of the stuff that we're looking for, nine times out of ten, the hardest things to find can be the things that are right in front of your face. That no one thinks to see because they're too busy looking elsewhere. So that was like the biggest takeaway I learned from sniper school.

• 2:16:07Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:16:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:16:11Speaker 06

  Hope it makes sense.

• 2:16:11Shawn Ryan?

  It makes perfect sense.

• 2:16:15Shawn Ryan?

  So you get done with sniper school, you go to a couple more schools. You went to a Marine High Angle course?

• 2:16:20Speaker 06

  No, we would send guys to Marine High Angle. I didn't go to Marine. I was, one, too long of a course. And I had seniority at the time, so I would, I sent one of the newer guys who came in right after me, I sent him to Marine Scout Sniper. And then he went to Marine High Angle, or where the green berets go.

• 2:16:41Speaker 06

  They have their sniper.

• 2:16:43Shawn Ryan?

  Is it Sodik?

• 2:16:44Speaker 06

  Sodik, there you go. Yeah, we would send a lot of guys to that. I wanted to so bad, but their course, dude, I was married. I did not want to do any more long schools, so I passed it up. Looking back at it, I wish, I really do wish I went to that and Marine Scout Sniper. I really do. More so Marine Scout Sniper. Cause those guys are dudes so badass, man. Working with those guys overseas was like working with Carlos Hathcock. What I think, my idol at the time, and I to this day think is the greatest sniper is Carlos Hathcock, but.

• 2:17:22Shawn Ryan?

  Who is that?

• 2:17:23Speaker 06

  A Marine Scout, a Marine Sniper with the 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam, like one of the deadliest ones. His spotter had more, but his significance, the role that he played, you know, the reason why we have a Barrett 50 cal today is because of Carlos Hathcock. He decided to put a scope on top of the Ma Deuce and single fire the 50 cal using a scope mounted on top that he mounted to it. Dropped a guy with it too. But, so yeah, I think he's the best and his stalking story of stalking this NVA high value target.

• 2:17:59Speaker 06

  Thousand yard stalk, taking out his target. He was not supposed to come back. It was a suicide mission. And his whole story about that dude, it's like cutting slits in the back of his uniform to shove grass through to makeshift like a little ghillie suit and stalking this guy and taking him out was just so badass, man. Never got a chance to do anything like that, but close working with the Marines. The Marines, I got a chance to see them work their good magic, man. And it was phenomenal.

• 2:18:28Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go back just a little bit. Let's talk about the sniper.

• 2:18:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:18:31Shawn Ryan?

  Spotter relationship.

• 2:18:33Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:35Shawn Ryan?

  How does that happen?

• 2:18:38Speaker 06

  In regular army, there you have a traditional spotter and sniper. In range of battalion, there is, we call them spotters, but they're snipers too. There is no spotter in range of battalion. You're kind of both snipers, just know how to do the spotter work. You only practice spotting in sniper school just to get qualified and to pass the course. But after that, there's no more spotter stuff. We know how to do it, but the work we're doing, direct action stuff, there's really no need for it. You know, it's more typical engagement is closest I shot someone was like 20 feet and the furthest was like half a mile.

• 2:19:23Speaker 06

  And but that was an extreme rarity. Most of the engagements was-

• 2:19:27Shawn Ryan?

  Which was an extreme rarity?

• 2:19:29Speaker 06

  The long distance, half mile shot.

• 2:19:31Shawn Ryan?

  What would you say the average shot was?

• 2:19:34Speaker 06

  A hundred yards, within 300, within 300, definitely within 300. Average, about 100 yards, yeah.

• 2:19:40Shawn Ryan?

  Well, before we get into your sniper work,

• 2:19:45Shawn Ryan?

  you get done with the sniper school. You've been talking about being a sniper since you were a little kid.

• 2:19:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:19:51Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how did that feel graduating sniper school, knowing that you're going to go to combat as a regimental sniper?

• 2:20:04Speaker 06

  A dream, man, a dream. Like, it did, dude, everything that I as a kid wanted to do and imagine myself doing, laying around in a ghillie suit, to be able to actually do it and have the title now was,

• 2:20:20Speaker 06

  meant everything, you know? All the days that I wanted to quit didn't matter anymore. It was like, I'm glad I stuck with it and stayed with this dream because I could have talked myself out of it so easily. It was, you know, had it not been for my wife saying, no, pursue it, I would not have pursued it, you know? But actually doing it, it meant, it meant everything. It felt, you can't describe it. It was, it was a legit dream come true, man. A legit dream, legit, you know?

• 2:20:52Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man.

• 2:20:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:20:54Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a break. When we come back, we'll get into your next deployment as a sniper.

• 2:20:57Speaker 06

  Oh, good.

• 2:21:02Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 2:21:05Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 2:21:11Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 2:21:12Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 2:21:16Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 2:21:18Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 2:21:22Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:21:26Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 2:21:27Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 2:21:40Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 2:21:41Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 2:21:46Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 2:21:47Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 2:21:51Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 2:21:53Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 2:21:57Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:22:00Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 2:22:02Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 2:22:11Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Nick, we're back from the break. You had just gone through all your sniper training. You're now a regimental sniper, getting ready to go on deployment. Where are you going?

• 2:22:23Speaker 06

  I'm going to Afghanistan.

• 2:22:26Shawn Ryan?

  For the first time?

• 2:22:27Speaker 06

  First time.

• 2:22:28Shawn Ryan?

  What year?

• 2:22:29Speaker 06

  08, late or early 08, early 08. So it's, uh, or mid 08, Jalalabad. That deployment, we hopped around. It was like a terrible.

• 2:22:38Shawn Ryan?

  Is this the deployment you go and work with six?

• 2:22:41Speaker 06

  That's it, yeah. So I'm in Jalalabad, Alalabad, and Bagram.

• 2:22:48Shawn Ryan?

  Asadabad?

• 2:22:49Speaker 06

  Asadabad. One of the, it's a weird name.

• 2:22:51Shawn Ryan?

  Asadabad is a hot.

• 2:22:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. It wasn't as hot when we went, though. I mean, it was hot in...

• 2:23:01Speaker 06

  The SEALs just did more stuff. Like, they treated us...

• 2:23:06Speaker 06

  Dude, it was really bad. Like...

• 2:23:10Speaker 06

  They would make us carry their equipment that they could not carry. They'd pass it on to us. We almost got into a big brawl with them and their general, some general had to come in. I think it was McChrystal. I know he signed an award for me and gave me a medal. And that was the only time I shook his hand, met him. But I think it was him or one of their generals came in and gave us. General or an admiral? Admiral, admiral, admiral, I'm sorry. Admiral. And he came in and gave a speech to the SEALs and us because we were bumping heads. One guy, we were on this mission doing a hostage rescue with SEAL Team Six.

• 2:23:53Speaker 06

  Up in the mountains somewhere. And one of my guys walking up the mountain, he fell down and where he didn't break his leg, but it folded back in. So like dislocated his, whatever tendon is right here or whatnot. He snapped his leg back. Had to carry him out. When we got to the, you know, debrief room, there was a bottle of vaginal seal that the SEAL guys had placed where he used to sit. And we got into an argument about that, almost got into a fight. Admiral came in and he's like, set us down, had a big speech and basically said, there's way more Rangers, I don't care how badass you guys are.

• 2:24:36Speaker 06

  There's like 35 of these guys and a handful of you guys, like you're, you know, probably not going to end up the way you wanted, wanted to. So they put up this green fence in between our compound, the SEAL Team Six compound and the Rangers and we had different chow times to eat. And I remember we were going into, well, we were doing a mission with SEAL Team Six and I won't say we were going, we were going out of Afghanistan.

• 2:25:08Speaker 06

  We were going out of Afghanistan to a different place. Something happened. One of their guys drowned. And we came back without the body. And we were told to, we had to go out and get that guy. And this happened, yeah, around 2008. There's a story about it. He drowned and went down the river into some other country.

• 2:25:35Shawn Ryan?

  I'm very familiar with it.

• 2:25:36Speaker 06

  What's that?

• 2:25:36Shawn Ryan?

  I'm very familiar with that.

• 2:25:38Speaker 06

  There for that one, that was a weird operation and how we were treated thereafter. And like, we wanted to do the cool stuff with them. They just seemed like that they were just way better. And we didn't know anything, you know? And we had been doing DA operations with, you know, tier one units long before we were doing stuff with SEAL Team Six. And like, we were getting really, really good at it. We were good at it. You know, we had one of their CAG commanders or first sergeants come in and give us awards. We took over one of their missions. They had to go do something else. They were originally supposed to do this hit. And we ended up doing it and they were impressed by it.

• 2:26:22Speaker 06

  You know, came in, congratulated us and thanked us and went on about their way. We were good at what we were doing, but it was just working with them. They were, like, it was not fun to work with. Like, you didn't not get a chance to show what you were capable of doing. It was like they just brushed us off to the side so they could get the glory or whatever it was. And I will say this, every hostage rescue that I have been on with them, dude, I remember hostages getting shot, you know? I remember carrying out one female. And I was a kid. So I kinda made a joke about it, but I said, man, this chick must have done like a cartwheel because she was shot in her arms and legs and that was it.

• 2:27:06Speaker 06

  We had to carry her out in the stretcher. They made us carry her to the uh, the helo and that was basically what we were used for, just like to carry other equipment, other weapons that they couldn't carry and stuff like that. And once we got to the objective, they would take it from us and they would do their thing. It was like that, so we were pissed, you know?

• 2:27:27Shawn Ryan?

  The whole deployment was like that?

• 2:27:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:29Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:27:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. Working with, you know, CAG was, or Delta was way better, way better. When they came into Afghanistan, I got a chance to work with their vehicle interdiction team, they were doing a lot of that at the time and that was like the first time I'd ever seen a vehicle interdiction.

• 2:27:49Shawn Ryan?

  Are we talking CAG or are we talking?

• 2:27:51Speaker 06

  CAG, yeah.

• 2:27:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:52Speaker 06

  And how good they were and professional, they treated us like little brothers, but with respect, taught us a lot of stuff and yeah, it was cool working with them because you got a chance to see how fast and good these guys really were, like phenomenal, phenomenal.

• 2:28:07Shawn Ryan?

  So you're basically saying Delta took you guys under their wing?

• 2:28:11Speaker 06

  Big time.

• 2:28:11Shawn Ryan?

  And took what you, took your knowledge and improved upon it when their counterpart,

• 2:28:19Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:20Shawn Ryan?

  Six, basically, just kinda pushed you off?

• 2:28:24Speaker 06

  Yep, yeah, exactly that, exactly that. Most of the guys in CAG like come from regiment. I knew a lot of guys who went to CAG. I had the opportunity, but something about walking forty miles, no. I sucked at fifteen, so forty, no. That's where I drew the line.

• 2:28:43Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Well, that's, that's uh, pretty disheartening to hear.

• 2:28:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, put a bad taste in my mouth.

• 2:28:52Shawn Ryan?

  I can imagine, I can imagine. Well, let's skip that deployment.

• 2:28:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:57Shawn Ryan?

  Unless you have anything else you wanna bring up from that deployment?

• 2:29:00Speaker 06

  No, that was a, pretty, yeah, it was like that. Saw some weird stuff, weird stuff.

• 2:29:09Shawn Ryan?

  Like what?

• 2:29:11Speaker 06

  I don't know if I can say on this, but just their ROE was different. Their ROE was different, the use of bombs were different. And I had questions and I've also seen them, I've seen them get kicked out of country a couple of times.

• 2:29:28Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:29:29Speaker 06

  From questionable, you know, I don't know.

• 2:29:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was too young to understand, I chalk it up to that, you know?

• 2:29:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:29:39Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's move forward.

• 2:29:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:43Shawn Ryan?

  How was the next?

• 2:29:46Speaker 06

  It was.

• 2:29:46Shawn Ryan?

  How was the, I mean, what, I actually do have some questions. So you come home from that. What's your leadership telling you after a deployment like that? I mean, that could discourage a lot of guys into getting out and, and I mean, I could, I could imagine a very disgruntled team.

• 2:30:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, we never wanted to work with them again. Not necessarily get out. It was just never, ever wanting to work with them again. You do such a big train up. Most of the guys at that point, they've had, you know, three, four, five deployments and to go on a deployment and you're told to, you know, stand back and stand by. It's disheartening, but it just is, you know, you're never going to do it again if you have the opportunity to. Work with CAG if you can. And during Afghanistan, like they were not even, CAG wasn't really in country like that, it was mainly SEALs and

• 2:30:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:39Speaker 06

  You know, CAG was still in, in Iraq, but I remember when they first came over, their small element that they took over and I brought over to Afghanistan, they attached to us for a little bit and went out on our missions and helped out and one of the coolest CAG guys that I met. Uh, like E6 or E7, cool guy, but he came over and deployed with us, did missions with us, taught us a lot. Uh, it was one of the first times I had a compliment from somebody of that caliber I looked up to. Of like, dude, good job, man. It wasn't, it's rare to, you know, normally it's just, hey, you did your job and, and that was it. They were more like, you know, congratulating and hey, man, that was some good work you did out there, you know, like that.

• 2:31:23Speaker 06

  So it felt good hearing that from CAG and working with the FBI, HRT guys that were coming over and attached to us and stuff like that was pretty neat. So yeah, it was, it was a cool experience in that, in that aspect, yeah.

• 2:31:40Shawn Ryan?

  So we're coming to your last deployment, correct?

• 2:31:42Speaker 06

  Close to, yeah.

• 2:31:43Shawn Ryan?

  So is that to Af- that's I know that's to Afghanistan?

• 2:31:48Speaker 06

  Back to Afghanistan, yeah.

• 2:31:49Shawn Ryan?

  This is thirty-three kills in four months.

• 2:31:51Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:31:52Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about this deployment.

• 2:31:53Speaker 06

  Rough, man. That deployment was at the height of, I guess, when, who was the president? It was Obama at the time, and he had that big influx of sending the big troop, or the wave of troops coming into Afghanistan is the largest influx since the invasion of the war, something like that, in two thousand nine. And we were mainly working in Helmand and Marja. Marja was like the wild, wild west, and they hadn't cleared it out yet since early on in the war. Yeah, you know, a few guys here and there, but it wasn't like, it was at the time Taliban's

• 2:32:36Speaker 06

  safe haven, so I didn't know it at the time, but when we went on-

• 2:32:40Shawn Ryan?

  What year is this? Do you remember?

• 2:32:41Speaker 06

  Two thousand nine.

• 2:32:42Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:43Speaker 06

  Month, it was, you see, cop died in July, so March, March, April, April, April, May timeframe is when we got there. And, yeah, April or May timeframe. We get there, and first few hours, routing country, and I'm, I'm coming with the mindset of like, Afghanistan is lame, dude. There's not much going on unless you're, you know, in one of those very few hotspots up in the mountains somewhere, the outpost or whatever. And I wasn't expecting too much, so I told my wife the same, I'm like, you know, after my last deployment to Afghanistan, like, there's nothing that's gonna happen. Um, and it was the exact opposite, dude.

• 2:33:25Speaker 06

  It was the omen of me being on my last deployment, and normally guys on their last deployment don't make it back or they get hurt, they get shot.

• 2:33:34Shawn Ryan?

  You knew this was gonna be your last deployment?

• 2:33:36Speaker 06

  I knew on my contract.

• 2:33:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:38Speaker 06

  Depending on how it went, determined if I was gonna sign up again, or re-enlist to do another, you know, two, three, four years or whatever. But-

• 2:33:48Speaker 06

  We get there and shortly, like a few hours in country, we go to Marja. And that's the Taliban safe haven. And I remember landing the Chinooks outside the city of Marja or town of Marja, whatever, the outskirts of it. And as we landed there, I just started seeing traces go up in the air. My, that's pretty, pretty neat or weird. I didn't think too much of it. And it was their early warning system. So as we, we literally, when we step foot in the, in the city and start walking through the, the homes and little huts and whatnot, we get ambushed. Our first mission out, and I remember, no, the first mission is where I had, we didn't

• 2:34:31Speaker 06

  get ambushed. I had, I killed three guys in a tree line. They were countering to, uh, cut off our avenue to our extraction area. And I plucked three guys, me and my spotter. They had AKs and RP, uh, RPKs or PKM machine guns and was setting up, trying to set up an ambush point. And that was my first kill as a sniper and- How did that feel for you? What was the distance? 300 yards, like- 300 yards? Yeah, 300 yards, a little over 300. But I remember being on top of the rooftop and the sun is coming up, so I can see now. Normally, like 98% of our missions are at night. This is the first time I remember seeing like Afghanistan or overseas in the daylight

• 2:35:16Speaker 06

  like that. And I see these figures in the tree line moving and bobbing up and down. And I'm like, that doesn't seem right. So I looked through my scope and that's where I see they are, they carrying the weapons. And one guy's setting up here, one guy's trying to set up and take his little friend further down in the tree line. So I'm looking at him and I'm like, wait, this doesn't make any sense. We're not being shot at, but they have weapons. I called it up to our ground force commander and he's like, anybody with weapons that is deemed as a threat, engage. And I remember looking at my spotter and like, dude, we're gonna smoke these dudes, man, before they, you know, start shooting at us.

• 2:35:55Speaker 06

  Um, took the shot, my first shot missed, but I remember the recoil of the, and the smell of the- When you first fire that round and you've got a clean weapon, it's oiled up and you get that gas blowback. I was shooting an SR25 and shot the first guy, first shot missed, hit him the second time, went down to the second guy, my spotter picked up the third guy, and I remember with his 300 Win Mag and it didn't, it felt good, but it also didn't feel like it was real. My first time shooting a three-dimensional moving human target, I was not expecting, I don't know, it just felt weird of, normally with the

• 2:36:40Speaker 06

  machine gun, it's more bullets, or with the AR or M4, it's way more, but just putting one round and watching the body go down was just, it was weird, it was weird. But it felt good to know that I was like doing my job of, hey, I don't ever like to say I did something of I saved the team or prevented something. No, it was just right place, right time, and it felt good to facilitate the extraction for the guys and taking these guys out. That was first day in Afghanistan, got those kills and we were going out every day thereafter. The next day, we went to Marjah, and that's where I get into the story.

• 2:37:21Speaker 06

  We're walking into the, we step foot in the perimeter city of Marjah, and we get ambushed. And I remember this tracer, to me, it looked like a lightsaber. It was long and a glowing like lightsaber, and it went past my head, and it felt like slow motion, like what the heck was that? I knew what it was, but it took a minute. I got down, and that's when we start getting ambushed from the rooftop. Forget how many guys were on the rooftop. I'll pick it up in a minute. But I was at the back of the formation, and me and my spotter, our sniper, Pemberton, we, I pick him up, I'm the sniper team lead, so I would

• 2:38:02Speaker 06

  say, let's go to the middle of this formation, provide precision fire, so at least our guys can get out of this kill zone and make their way down to the objective. So I get in the middle of the formation, me and Pemberton, there's an M203 gunner next to me, and I remember telling him, hey,

• 2:38:23Speaker 06

  Shoots some 203 on the backside of the house that these guys were on in case they try to flee out the back and we went to cut that avenue off. So he launched off a 203 and I remember I didn't have my air pro in and that boom, the crack of that 203 going off was like wow, woke me up a little bit.

• 2:38:43Shawn Ryan?

  For those in the audience that don't know what a 203 is, that is a grenade launcher.

• 2:38:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, mounted on the bottom of his M4 and yeah, he shoots off two rounds of that. It thuds in the back. Me and him set up, I go prone, put my biopods down. He's kind of behind me and he's using his floodlight to infrared flood laser to illuminate the guys on the rooftop. And I could see like their heads pop up and just the whites of their eyes would glow when it bounces off their eyes or whatnot. And I lined up and I tell him, hey, we're gonna, you know, pick these guys off. I'm gonna start on that side. That's how we would work is I'd, you know, work on the outside,

• 2:39:27Speaker 06

  work our way in. And we go for the countdown. I shoot and I hear a click on his end. And I'm like, what the heck was that? And he chambers around, he goes click, click again. No, nothing, no fire. And I think when it ended up happening, not too sure, but I think San got in his bolt action and prevented the hammer from fully striking the primer. I'm not sure, but it never happened again. It's like the only time I've ever chewed someone out and, you know, was pissed. But I guess the good side, I got a chance to kill all the guys myself. But as they were popping up, I just said, hey, keep your flood laser on them and walk with me, meaning I'm gonna engage one guy

• 2:40:10Speaker 06

  and go to the next guy and illuminate his head. So they were popping up and they're shooting at us and I would just line up the scope and pull the trigger. First shot I remember hit the, the lip of the top of the roof where they were peeking over and it struck low. Not sure if the distance was off or the angle I was shooting at, I don't know, or jitters, who knows what. I was rarely a first shot impact guy, mainly because of the range. You don't have time to, I was doing everything mill dot formula. So if I know like, I always used.

• 2:40:45Speaker 06

  If I have your body from top of the head to groin, I knew the constant for that was, uh, what is it? Forty times twenty-five point four. And I think that's like one thousand sixteen, if I'm not mistaken. That would be my constant. And I would just quickly divide the mill dots into that ten sixteen. But I would just make it a whole number, my constant to a thousand, to get me within close range. So let's say if I'm, I measure you from top of the head to the groin, two mill dots, I know that's five hundred meters. You know, two into a thousand. Uh, so yeah, I would play it, I guess, by ear like that. The distance was off. I'm not saying that they were five hundred meters away.

• 2:41:29Speaker 06

  They were relatively close, like within a hundred and fifty meters away. Shot the guy, cleaned up my second shot, shot him in his head. And I remember his head busting and it sounded like a gallon of milk, spoiled milk being poured over the, the edge of the rooftop. How, how, how close were you? It was within a hundred and fifty yards. You could hear that? I could hear the chunks or I could hear splashing. Shit. I could hear splashing. My distance, dude, honestly, could be off. It was not, it was no long, no more than a hundred and fifty. Nighttime, I don't know, it was within, no more than a hundred and fifty. It could have been less than that, less than a hundred, less than. Um,

• 2:42:15Speaker 06

  I don't know. I don't know if I'm not going to say I heard it. I could have been making that up in my brain if what I saw. But I don't know. My, I don't know. I think the body. Scriptive. Yeah. Like even the first guy that I remember a sniper shooting overseas, my brain registered pack, sack of potatoes. And that's what I saw. I thought someone dumped over a sack of potatoes off of a ledge. And that's what my mind made up, you know, of, I don't know, the mind. It happens all the time. You know? I'm not saying it didn't happen. No, no, dude, no. No, there was also no sack of potatoes, obviously, but no, I know that. I don't know if it's the way my brain. Make sense of things or whatnot, um, I'm not sure, but to me, it was like a jug of milk

• 2:43:00Speaker 06

  being poured off the side of the ledge. That's what my brain told myself. Whether or not the sound was audible or not.

• 2:43:07Shawn Ryan?

  Did he fall over?

• 2:43:08Speaker 06

  No, it was like his head was mugged over.

• 2:43:11Shawn Ryan?

  The ledge?

• 2:43:12Speaker 06

  No, he was not off the ledge, but hanging off the, off the ledge, like from this portion up. So his body was on the roof and he was halfway spilled over. The second guy, I shot his head, he disappeared. And at this time, we have ISR above and they're describing what's going on on the rooftop. And I thought it was a dog, the third guy. Um, but he was crawling on his hands, on his hands and knees. So I just saw the long portion of his back or his spine and I thought it was a dog. So I shot and he went down. I didn't find out it was a guy until we went on to the rooftop and I saw the dead bodies there. Uh, yeah.

• 2:43:54Speaker 06

  My guys after that, they pushed on to the objective. We got ambushed thereafter. I think we got ambushed like eight times that night before we got to the objective. It was an eight hour running ambush, but that was the normal for Marja. Um, that was normal of my, one of my good friends, Paul Martinez was a sniper, came in after I did, but he was on that deployment with me. He was in charge of all the, uh, interpreters, or not the interpreters, the, the ANA, the Afghan Army guys. And I was always around him and he got a chance to see me do a lot of cool stuff and that's what made him want to be a sniper. But it was, uh, in his

• 2:44:36Speaker 06

  book, he describes it way better than I ever could of the amount of rolling ambushes every few hundred meters or so, we're getting ambushed, ambushed, ambushed, uh, before we even got to the objective. And then by the time we got to the objective, the sun is coming up. So now we have to, to run out to the, uh, pickup location, the extraction. Um, that was like routine for that deployment. Um, that mission, I remember, so I killed those guys on the rooftop and then. I may be tying these two missions together, but if I'm not mistaken, after that is where

• 2:45:17Speaker 06

  I called in the AC 130 to drop 105s on a handful of dudes, like five or a handful of guys. And uh, help blow these guys up.

• 2:45:33Speaker 06

  But I also might be tying these missions together too. It was like that, but in my mind, I think that was the

• 2:45:41Speaker 06

  at the tail end of that mission is dropping the 105 howitz rounds. I'll look at the date on the award and I'll send you a copy to, I may be mixing two missions together, but my mind, that's how it feels. It was all one. And uh, dropped those guys and I think that was the first time where I got a chance to feel like a sniper, where you're using air assets, precision rifle. Um, and prior to that, I was shooting guys in the tree line. We're being ambushed again. And an assault team went up to this tree line and I'll never forget looking through the scope. They had to walk across this field. Me and my spotter sniper were tucked into another wood line.

• 2:46:23Speaker 06

  And there's a couple hundred meters or so to the next tree line. Some guys had squirted off the objective and had honked down and was setting up an ambush point in the wood line. Uh, ISR fed us that information and the assault team started to press them. And they have a dog with them. The dog's barking. He's honing in on something in the wood line. And I see these like flashes. I'm like, oh shit, that's, those are eyeballs, you know? Blinking in the tree line. I don't have a clear shot. Nothing's really happening. And then you just see sparks erupt from the tree line and Long goes down, Keith goes down. Our dog starts running weird, shooting through the tree line and making a circle. I'm like, what is going on?

• 2:47:08Speaker 06

  I start shooting, then I see Long, one of the team leaders, and he's picking up Keith. And we hear man down, he's shot in the head and all this stuff, right? And I'm like, what the fuck? Or what, excuse me. And I start shooting guys in the tree line, but I'm not. Is, I can't really see where the bodies are. I could see flashes of light. I know I hit one guy. After that, my spotter, he's calling guys out. I don't know what happened after, if I'm hitting anybody after that. I'm laying down more so like suppressive fire. As they're dragging their guys back. The dog is just running weird. He finally, finally call, comes back to his dog handler.

• 2:47:50Speaker 06

  He gets picked up. The dog is shot. He took around in his side. Keith took around through his night vision and Long took around through his helmet. We called up a Carl Gustaf. He puts, I think it was flakette rounds, I think, into the tree line. A what round? Flakette. I've never even heard of that. It's like a bunch of, it's the big ordinance, but when it explodes, it sends out like shrapnel, like razor blades. Fragmentation? Yeah, I, something like that. I was not a Gustaf guy, but I'm pretty sure it was called flakette rounds. And it would shoot out these like a, like shrapnel in, you know, into the tree line. And he shot that. It didn't really do much or anything that we could see.

• 2:48:35Speaker 06

  I think it hit low. And that's when we called in the AC 130. Uh, at first the rounds were hitting like, they were to the right and behind the guys. Off quite a distance. So I call up and I'm like, hey, I say, uh, like left 75. Plus 50. I'm giving calls like that to bracket the, the rounds. Once I saw the rounds hitting where the ambush was coming from, where I knew the guys were at. In this sector of the tree line, you know, fire for effect. And they just started raining danger close, like 105s down. Then I remember walking, closing the distance after the rounds were expended.

• 2:49:20Speaker 06

  Walking across the field and the smoke is rising up. It looks like something out of a movie. And I'll never forget this guy. I think he was in shock or something, but he's walking. I don't know where he came from. But he's walking through this smoke and I had changed mags by this point. I lined up with him and he turns to go do his thing. I don't know if he was out of it or what, but he's about to shoot, I perceive, or what? I don't know what he was gonna do, but he was just dazed. And he's got his AK with the wrapped up tape around it. And he turns and I remember plucking him, but it felt like my gun didn't go off or nothing ejected. And I thought I had like a squib round.

• 2:50:04Speaker 06

  I fired and assault team lights this guy up. So I'm stuck looking at, empty out, I take my mag out, looking at what's going on, trying to figure out if I have a squib or whatever. My gun's jacked up. I had no idea that I was shooting subsonic. I had pulled the wrong mag, so I shot subsonic at him. And with the subsonic, you have to re-chamber around each time and sign enough blowback to chamber the next round. I had no idea I was doing that. Finally figured it out, changed out my mag and we carried on from that mission. But I remember going into the tree line, seeing body parts. And the first thing I came across was a hand and it looked like, I hear again, my mind does a weird trick where I say Mickey Mouse glove.

• 2:50:48Speaker 06

  Like the swollen Mickey Mouse hand glove. It looked like that. Then I saw the arm, legs, like butt cheek, I think. Heads popped off and weird stuff like that. So we were told by our commander, we have to figure out how many guys for our AAR or after action report to, and called it up how many EKIA. So we're putting the bodies together essentially to see how many bodies there were. And it got called off pretty quick after, you know, guys are gagging and it's like, dude.

• 2:51:21Shawn Ryan?

  You guys were picking up limbs?

• 2:51:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:51:23Shawn Ryan?

  And piecing bodies together?

• 2:51:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:51:27Shawn Ryan?

  For an after actions report?

• 2:51:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, oh yeah. To make, to see how many guys that we killed. And we called it off early on, like after two or three bodies. The ground force commander looks at me, says Sierra, my call sign. Hey, how many guys were, you know, were in here? I'm like, five. I know for a fact five, so we left it at five. Had no, I'm pretty sure it was- Is that like standard SOP? Have you done that before? Yeah. I mean, not to that degree. We've done missions where- Like what's wrong with just an estimation? Like, I don't know, five bodies? I don't know. I don't, we've done BDA's battle damage assessments where, you know, you have a big Hellfire missile or something would be, we had one in Iraq. Hellfire missile gets called in on a Hilux vehicle, blows up,

• 2:52:13Speaker 06

  we drive out to do a battle damage assessment and examine the bodies, take pictures and see how many guys that we, you know, took out. But that was, yeah, not routine, but it happened. Damn. Where, yeah, if we weren't cutting off fingers, you know, but that was not my job. I've seen the assault guys do it, but yeah, taking off or taking teeth. We had a suicide bomber, working with the FBI and suicide bomber blows himself up in the back of a pickup truck as we're approaching him. I remember seeing, uh, one of the assault team leaders, I didn't like him, so I'm just gonna call him M.

• 2:52:54Speaker 06

  He lifts up, he flies back to the air and like something out of a movie. Uh, we get hit with the blast and luckily none of us got injured or hurt, but I remember hearing his body parts falling and his head was sitting in the back of the, no, on the ground near the back of the truck and the FBI guy put it up there and we pulled some teeth using our Gerber knife and stuff like that. Um, yeah, it was routine for us to do that, like cutting off fingerprint, our fingers and you know, taking it to a compound that was not ours. I'm at one of those agency, you know, places and yeah, that was, uh, that was my first experience in Marja. And it was like that every, every mission in Marja.

• 2:53:39Speaker 06

  All the way until we were about to do our final mission, our push in Marja before the Marines came through that invasion, um, and our mission was to-

• 2:53:52Speaker 06

  To have two platoons, one was gonna be on the east, one was gonna be on the west. We were gonna close in and kill everybody outside at night deemed a threat.

• 2:54:05Speaker 06

  And luckily that got called off, because I was sure we were gonna have casualties. You know, luckily it got called off and we ended up doing a mission out in Kandahar. And we got hit by the Afghan police out there and that was a hell of a ride. But Marjah was like that and some days I would kill one guy, some days I'd kill

• 2:54:29Speaker 06

  five, six guys, you know, but it was a, it was, Marjah was all, all like that. I didn't find out until I got home, I was watching the news in my apartment with my wife and I saw the Marines were going into Marjah and that's when it all made sense of like what we were doing there, of like, oh, you know, we were supposed to, we, our whole job was to kill as many fighters, enemy fighters as we could, as we possibly could in Marjah before the Marines got there. And we killed that deployment, like over a thousand guys total. You guys, you guys killed over a thousand enemy combatants? Yes, oh yeah. My wife was there during the ceremony when they announced it. When, when they, we got our awards, I got two awards from that deployment, one was

• 2:55:14Speaker 06

  a valorous, the one where I dropped the bombs was the valorous award.

• 2:55:20Speaker 06

  Then I have some joint commendation medals from that deployment, but we smoked a lot of people on that deployment, a lot. Wow. Yeah. A thousand. Not all bullets though, it was a lot of bombs being dropped and we were killing people every night though, every night. The ground guys, we were killing, like as a, the entire platoon, you could get, man, nine, fifteen, twenty guys in a night and that was a good, you know, a good night, a good night. But most of it was a lot of, a lot of five hundred pound bombs, a lot of ordnance, a lot of one oh fives and thirty mic mics and yeah, a lot of that. Let's go back to that first mission. Mm-hmm.

• 2:56:03Speaker 06

  It sounds like two Rangers were killed that night. Oh, no. Cool story.

• 2:56:10Speaker 06

  Keith, when he got shot through his nods, the bullet did not penetrate all the way through and deflected, so he ended up not getting hit. That's the second Ranger I knew who got shot in the head. Woman caught it. Well, the guy, other guy who got shot in his nods, he was climbing up on a rooftop on a ladder, a sniper. He got shot through his nods, but I think the bullet went into his brain. It didn't kill him. He fell off the ladder and I remember him chunking a grenade up there to kill the guy that shot him in the head. And he killed that guy. And Keith is the other guy that I knew who got shot through his nods and the bullet didn't kill him. But when we got back, I remember Keith from when he first came in. I'm like, dude, what did that look like?

• 2:56:53Speaker 06

  He's like, bro, I thought it was a beach ball coming at me. I'm like, you could see the bullet? Did you see trace? As a sniper, I'm like, when you're sniping, you can see the trace of the bullet? I wanted to know if he could see the back end of the trace? And he didn't know what I was talking about. But he said he thought it was a beach ball. Someone threw a beach ball at him and it got big and he was knocked down after that. Uh, Long got shot in his helmet and he was fine too. The dog survived. We had to carry him out. And I remember the ambush and walking through the water, this river ravine. And the dog handler patched him up and he's carrying his dog, Chico, on his shoulder and us getting ambushed. And that was the closest one where I shot someone. 20 feet away.

• 2:57:37Speaker 06

  It was an older gentleman who was a, I guess he felt that Allah or whoever was on his side and he wanted to just run through us for whatever reason. And we got the call to drop him.

• 2:57:53Speaker 06

  He didn't want to stop. We gave him commands. I remember shouting at him and posh too and putting my red laser on him and circling his chest with it, putting around at his feet, putting around next to him. And he is just focused on coming at us. And I was like, damn. He was wearing all white, never forget it. And I looked through my scope and I put the scope on, it looked like a button on his shirt. Or a pattern. And I pulled the trigger, it was just all white. I didn't see body parts or anything, it was just all white. What he was wearing, the garment. And shot, and I looked, and then he was down. I was like, wow. That was, I never shot someone that close before. With a 308, you know?

• 2:58:36Speaker 06

  That was weird, and took the dog out, got ambushed the entire way out and got picked up and did it again the next day. Yeah. Of course, minus the dog and Keith and Long, yeah. They got back in the fight pretty quick though.

• 2:58:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:58:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. I got pictures from that one I'll have to send you. Or, I'm sure they get posted up, yeah.

• 2:59:00Shawn Ryan?

  We'll put them up.

• 2:59:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:59:01Shawn Ryan?

  We'll put them over, uh, while we're speaking here.

• 2:59:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:59:04Shawn Ryan?

  What we're speaking about, but, you know, it's, what was your, as a sniper, and you guys are getting after it every night, you just, we just mentioned a thousand plus killed.

• 2:59:16Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:59:17Shawn Ryan?

  In what, four months?

• 2:59:19Speaker 06

  Four months, yeah. It, but it's a combination of like, different platoons. Our platoon was, we had the lucky spot of going to Marja, but we were right next door to, I want to say second platoon, or third platoon. So let's combine, you know, fifty, sixty guys, yeah, killed about a thousand.

• 2:59:37Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:59:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:59:39Shawn Ryan?

  That is a lot of work.

• 2:59:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:59:42Shawn Ryan?

  What is, is, is a sniper that's getting that much action? What do you prefer to carry?

• 2:59:53Speaker 06

  Oh, semi-automatic sniper rifle. I wanted to take the bolt action, but it didn't carry enough rounds, and it wasn't fast enough to like, traverse targets. Um, my spotter, he carried a 300 Win Mag, and I saw that, not the struggle that he had, it was just slower. But when he hit someone, it was definite, you know? Um...

• 3:00:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, I would definitely, I would pick the SR25 any day of the week. Before that, I had the Mark 13, the 556. Was it a Mark 13? My nomenclature's off. It was a 556 DDM rifle. Yeah, was that the Mark 11? Mark 11, one of those, yeah. Um, so I've always been like a semi-automatic guy, not as accurate, you know, past. I was gonna be cocky and say like 800 meters, bro, but in all actuality, semi-automatic. I think I'm, I'm really good up to 700.

• 3:00:53Speaker 06

  Bolt action, past that to, if it's a 308, like, I wouldn't, I could pull off 1,000 yards with it, but not first shot, maybe not second shot. It would take a minute, maybe, and that's just because, you know, the like density altitude, I knew played a lot with the ballistics and how far I could reach out accurately. Or before I hit transonic or the bullet started to tumble at a certain distance and it just wasn't as accurate as it would be. Let's say if I'm shooting a target at 600, 700, but reaching out to 1,300 wind mag,

• 3:01:34Speaker 06

  bolt action, is what I would go to. And the luckiest I've ever been was at 1,000 yards, a little under 1,000 yards with the SR25. And that was my longest further shot and I think a lot of it had to do with luck. But, and I didn't, yeah, like I said, not first round impact. I remember when the guy looked at the splash on the ground and when he looked up, the second round was already in flight. And I remember when it hit him and Martinez, he looked over at me and he was like, dude, badass. And I just looked at him and was like, holy shit. I didn't want anybody to know that, dude, I didn't think I could hit this guy that far away.

• 3:02:16Speaker 06

  But they were shooting at us from, as we were extracting, we were getting ambushed from. The side, there was this big wall and we had Kiowa, our Cobra helicopters flying in. And I remember hearing like grass being like mowed or something like that, like lawnmower going off. And that was the machine gun from the helicopter shooting over us into a courtyard that was ambushing us, trying to shoot through the wall. And we're leaning up against this wall and had no idea, well, we had an idea. I just didn't make sense of it that we were getting ambushed from that side and they were trying to shoot through the wall to shoot us.

• 3:02:55Speaker 06

  And then we were getting ambushed across this, like a dam, almost, like a small dam or ravine, concrete ravine. And up on this hill, uh, being ambushed from machine gun fire. And the first group of guys at that distance, I missed. He had fled behind a house or the backside of his, wherever he was shooting from, a house hut, whatever you want to call it. Um, then the second group of guys is where I redeemed myself and was like, no, I'm going to get this sucker. Um, I had made a bad judgment call in, in distance. I was way off, like two mils low and I was half a mil to the left of him.

• 3:03:40Speaker 06

  And off on distance, so I compensated for the second group of guys I was going after. First shot missed, I was still low, but I was within enough of a, where I could make a second shot correction. Just copied and paste a splash of, you know, splashes here, let's say half mil, low, mil low, and just pulled it up and held a little bit right, quarter mil right, to compensate for whatever wind that was out there that day. And the second round, I'm pretty sure hit him square in his chest, just based on the way that he fell, like in his own footprint, the way he fell. But that's my cleanest shot and working with the Marines and saving. I hate using that word, man. I didn't save anybody.

• 3:04:27Speaker 06

  I just shot a guy that had an RPG. He popped around a corner. And I was overwatching this Marine. I had, I was attached with them on this five day operation with recce guys and uh, like the third or fourth day. They were, every morning they would get ambushed by the surrounding town. They had overtaken this school. Me and the Marine scout snipers, we stalked out, broke into some abandoned home, cleared it, set up a sniper position. Waited all night and waited for the ambush to come. Ambush didn't come. I don't know if they knew we were out there. I'm not sure. I don't think they knew, but for some odd reason, they did not engage that day.

• 3:05:09Speaker 06

  The Marines decided they were going to, they called it movement to contact, I believe, where they just got in their vehicles and went out to the city and waited to get shot at or get engaged. And I remember that being weird. I had never done anything like that. I'm overwatching them and I see the, the Humvees come out and I could see the Marines in it. And no shit, there's a guy, well, they started getting shot at and I couldn't tell where it was coming from or couldn't pinpoint it. We had some mortars land beside, or not beside, it was pretty far off, but mortars landing near our position.

• 3:05:48Speaker 06

  And you could hear snaps of bullets and the Marine convoys that was rolling through, this guy popped out with the uh RPG. And he lined up, pointed it at the Humvee, the lead Humvee, and it was a snapshot. Like I had been out there all night. So I had pretty good distance of where different buildings were and, you know, landmarks that we had determined. And I shot that guy and that was a, I guess luck. I don't know. It was a really good shot, really good shot. And I hit him and I remember they brought me back his uh, sandal. Um, couldn't take it and their Marine commander or whatever uh, shook my hand, Pemberton's hand,

• 3:06:32Speaker 06

  and wanted to give us an award and a write up, but our commander was against it. And we were out that night to do the worst mission of my life, man. Yeah. But.

• 3:06:46Speaker 06

  I met up with one of the Marines at a book signing. And he shook my hand and, you know, he says I saved his life or whatever and I always just feel weird about that. Like Keith, he emailed me years later, dude, years later. And he was like, you know, people call you the Reaper or the Angel of Death. But he was like, dude, you're my guardian angel. And I'm like, I don't know. It feels weird, I guess, because I don't. It's a weird, I don't know. It's just weird to, to think, I guess, that you save someone. I don't know. I just don't. I don't think I like it too much, you know?

• 3:07:24Shawn Ryan?

  Why is that?

• 3:07:26Speaker 06

  I feel weird about it. I, it's just, I feel weird about it. I don't know. I feel like.

• 3:07:35Speaker 06

  I don't, like, I'm not that good to, to have that, like. I don't know, responsibility or honor to do that, yeah. To save someone's life is like an honor. So, yeah, I don't think I'm. I don't, I feel weird about it, you know? Feel weird about it. If I did, if you feel that way, then cool, but.

• 3:07:58Speaker 06

  I don't know. Keep it, I don't know. I feel bad saying keep it to yourself, but. I just don't want that, you know?

• 3:08:05Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 3:08:06Speaker 06

  Let me just, I was just, I was just. There, right place, I guess, yeah. But I don't feel that way, yeah.

• 3:08:15Shawn Ryan?

  Well, if you wouldn't have been there.

• 3:08:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I, I don't think of it like that. I don't, I don't, I, I don't know. If I go too far down that rabbit hole, it's like. Well, what if, you know, the guys that did not make it back? Did I not do my job, you know? Yeah.

• 3:08:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:08:40Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to go under the worst mission of your life? Are you all right?

• 3:08:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:08:50Speaker 06

  One second, bro.

• 3:08:52Shawn Ryan?

  It's all right, man.

• 3:08:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. You don't get this a lot, do you?

• 3:09:01Shawn Ryan?

  All the time.

• 3:09:02Speaker 06

  Man.

• 3:09:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, whenever you're ready, bro.

• 3:09:09Shawn Ryan?

  It's all good, man. We're on your timeline.

• 3:09:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:09:16Speaker 06

  I don't call these tears. I don't know what they are. Sweat, bro. It's hot in here.

• 3:09:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:09:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:09:27Shawn Ryan?

  We don't have to do this.

• 3:09:28Speaker 06

  No, I'm good, bro. Open buck, man. Open buck. Open buck. Yeah. But, yeah. After that mission...

• 3:09:41Speaker 00

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• 3:10:11Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah. So, in the beginning of that mission, like, it was a five-day op. I was approached by the reconnaissance guys. And they had caught wind of the good work I was doing and I had racked up a pretty good amount of kills at that point. So they came over to my sniper team and they're like, "Hey, man, have, uh, what do you think about this?" They gave me a scenario. If a car was a thousand yards away, coming down an alleyway, and you had a clear line of sight to shoot the driver, could you pull that shot off? Honestly, no. But I told them yes, because I really wanted to work with these guys. And...

• 3:10:58Speaker 06

  They're like, cool, get your team together. Uh, we're gonna go after, we've been tracking this high-value target. We're gonna go after them. And, yeah, we want you guys to tag along. Five-day op. At first, we were gonna like infill like a twenty-something mile walk. And I'm like, geez, I picked the wrong time to do this. You know, I didn't, I'm not a big rocker. And we were carrying everything we were gonna need to survive with, batteries, ammo, food, everything for five days. And it was a, uh, five, six-man team, me, Pemberton, radio, medic, team lead, so like six guys. And, yeah, six-man team, and I remember

• 3:11:44Speaker 06

  calling my wife, telling her, because I was used to calling her every day. So I'm like, I won't be able to talk to you for like a week and can't say much, but I'll call you when I get back. Don't worry about anything if I don't call for, you know, a week or whatever. So, and to do that, I had to use the FBI SAT phone because our phone calls were always monitored at the, where we had our little phone area. Um, so I used the FBI, I used my roommate, or lived next door to me. I used the SAT phone, called her, told her that. And I was on my way. I remember being on the back of a Chinook with six guys. And the, the crew chiefs were like, who are you guys?

• 3:12:27Speaker 06

  And we couldn't tell them who we were or whatever. He's like, this is it, the six of you? And we're like, yeah. And we slept, I slept for a little bit, like an hour, not even an hour flight, a thirty, forty-minute flight to get to where we were going. And we had maps. That's all I knew. We were going to this location and I'm tagging along with the recce guys. And they're gonna do all their communication, satellite stuff, however they track, phone, I don't know, how they do that cool guy stuff. But I was ju- just there to, you know, provide support by fire with precision rifle.

• 3:13:05Speaker 06

  Didn't sleep for like the first three days, maybe got cat naps here and there. We teamed up with some Marines from two five, the two five Marines and being attached with them for a little bit, helping out with their snipers and learning some cool stuff from them and how they operate and things of that nature. We finally tracked the guy, we had him pinned down to this location and after I had that engagement with the RPG guy and the Marines, we were on a flight sooner after that night to do, uh, conduct this mission to capture the high value target. So we called in the platoon to facilitate that and like we had the guy pinpointed the assault

• 3:13:49Speaker 06

  team was gonna go in and get this guy. And the mission from the get-go just felt weird, man. It felt rushed, it felt pushed, like this particular platoon had not had a chance to do its thing that whole deployment. And I think the commander wanted a ribbon, you know, so we had a lot of that. And we don't work in daylight operation, like we don't really do that. So we start off the mission and I remember dude getting there was, was a, was like hell, riding on the

• 3:14:30Speaker 06

  back of these Marine trucks. I don't know what they were called, like Deuce and a Haves, like a, uh, big trucks, very uncomfortable. We drive out there, we get dropped off and I remember it looking like a scene out of Aladdin. The, the sand dunes and all the stars in the sky looked like that. That was pretty peaceful and I remember falling asleep, nodding off and I was like begging for a firefight. It's like, dude, I'm, I'm sucking right now, tired, day five, going on day five now. And the walk there took forever. Started off at night, by the time we got there, it was like

• 3:15:11Speaker 06

  the sun was coming up. So I already had a bad feeling about that to begin with, but they kept pressing on with this mission. And I remember when we, so my plan for my team was to set up like a blocking position, a good distance away from the actual, where the target building was at. And to, you know, block this avenue of approach that was going into the, uh, the town where the house was at. We set up in this open field, but I remember walking through the open field and there's these craters, like holes in the ground. I'm like, what is this stuff? So I looked back at my spotter and something told me, I was like, dude, if something goes, goes wrong,

• 3:15:53Speaker 06

  we're coming back to these holes. No shit, man. Make it past this hole, maybe fifty meters or so. We lay down. I'm pulling security along this long road and the town starts to wake up and I'm just getting these bad vibes. Took my night vision off, try to blend in with the terrain as much as possible. And I see this, uh, the, the mopeds, what do you call those little, like a moped? And there's two guys on a moped and he rolls up and I put my laser on him. I'm like, dude, he's going, you know, to the objective. Put my laser on him, my laser light.

• 3:16:34Speaker 06

  And he sees it and I'm waving around in his chest. He, he can't see me in the grass yet, but he looks down at his chest. He stops the bike. And he looks down at his chest and he looks up in that direction of where I was at. Uh, never forget to look in his eyes of hate, just hate, bro. And he backs up, does a yui and goes away. And I was like, this isn't good. This is not good. And then in front of us, a huddle forms, like a football huddle. These guys get into a huddle.

• 3:17:08Speaker 06

  And me and my spotter are looking at them. I call back to the recce team lead. I'm like, hey, uh, can we smoke these guys? He's like, do they have weapons? And I'm like, no, but I just got a bad feeling, man. Like the way they're, everything about them. They, they were planning and looking around, looking at where they thought we were and it just felt weird. They were all in this huddle and then no shit, bro. They're like, ready, break. They scatter. A minute or two later, bro, like the grass.

• 3:17:41Speaker 06

  It was like waist high that we were in. And I remember like dude, the grass being mowed around us. It just started getting chopped down in all directions, all 360 it lit up. And I remember looking back at my spotter. The recce guys are already breaking contact. We go back and four of us jumped into the hole. I'm second guy in the hole. We had the recce team lead go in. Pemberton's on top of me. I'm sorry, the other guy, he's right on the outside of the hole and he's in a star fort like sprawled out. And we had the medic behind him also sprawled out.

• 3:18:23Speaker 06

  And dude, we were getting lit up, bro. I cannot describe how intense the fire was around us. And then it like stopped and we just heard pow, just one crack at a time. But the intervals were very consistent and very accurate. And I'm like, oh shit, we're getting engaged by a sniper. And then it clicked with the Marines told me before coming into that area. They were like, dude, one, we cannot go with anything less than a brigade. And we're out there with less than 35 guys. Two, there's a Chechen sniper that's working that area and he's been out there for a while. He has a, you know, supposedly a big kill record.

• 3:19:06Speaker 06

  He's been fighting for way longer than your average fighter, supposedly like the Soviet days or whatnot. And has been like a mercenary in that area and from a Chechen sniper. Um, so I deduced it down to this is him. He's good, really good. So I called it up. We're being engaged by a sniper. So I'm trying to do a snap bang where I hear the crack and I wait for the rapport of the rifle, like lightning and thunder, and I'm getting a general idea of how far away the sniper is. So I pinpoint him to this tall building. It's the only, it's where I would be if I were a sniper. Zoom in, I'm looking and I'm not too sure.

• 3:19:50Speaker 06

  So I go to pick up my head and crack, bullet goes by. Look at Pemberton, he goes to roll over, crack, bullet snaps and pops up dust next to him. Then it started getting way more accurate. Me and the, I call him Jay, the team lead from Recky. Me and him pop up and we're almost helmet to helmet, bro. And a bullet between us, he pushes off of me, I push off of him. And the next thing I heard was the medic screaming, "Who's hit? Who's hit?" Team lead thinks my head is gone, I think his head is gone. He's like, "I'm good, I'm good. Are you good? Check yourself." I'm checking my face like, dude, I'm hit. Something's happened.

• 3:20:35Speaker 06

  Nothing. And that went on for three hours of playing volleyball with this sniper. In this small hole, and the fire just got more accurate. Every movement that you would make, he'd take a snap at it. He was going off of movement. And I would put rounds to where I think he's at, but I know I'm not gonna hit him because I think he's shooting from back inside of the room, outside the window, or this little slit, or a hole in the side of the wall, or, yeah, the building. But he's backed away from it, so I know I'm not gonna hit this guy, so I'm just putting rounds into it. Then we started to hear the enemy closing on us, and you can hear him, "Ala Akbar",

• 3:21:18Speaker 06

  and all that, and at one point they got close where you could hear the footsteps. My spotter starts engaging, guys who are close, bro, close to us with the 300 Win Mag. And he's laying some hate down and it gets picked back up. We're calling in for airstrikes. I'm damn near crying, bro. I've never cussed out a Colonel in my life, but cuss this Colonel out like, "We need bombs. We need help, bad. We're about to be on CNN getting our freaking heads chopped off, you know?"

• 3:21:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, yeah, they could not drop any bombs. Why? Obama's rule of engagement, bro. We could not have anything with 0.1 collateral percent collateral damage. Meaning if we dropped a bomb and their home got hit with shrapnel, that would be a bad deal for, we were, it was all about winning the hearts and minds. So getting a bomb dropped at that time was impossible. And we couldn't drop it to where, I had pinpointed where I figured this guy was at. The sniper, found his location on the map. We called it in for an airstrike. The best that they said they could do was do a flyover, show of force.

• 3:22:38Speaker 06

  The first thing that came over was a, I think it was an F-16 or F-15, one of those jets. He came over, didn't do anything. Next, I looked up and I thought I saw a UFO. I'm tired borderline hallucinating. So I'm like, yeah, that's a UFO. And it's just this thin, black, looked like a disc. And as it's low, bro, low, and as soon as it gets closer, I'm like, that's a, that's a B2 stealth bomber. I've never seen one of these things before in my life, except for like on TV. And it was way bigger than what I expected and thinner than I expected. And I remember he had his bay doors open and he dropped flares.

• 3:23:19Speaker 06

  And that didn't do anything. So then we called in for bombs to be dropped on our location. So I'm calling up like, drop, drop them on us because we're getting, you know, overrun. And I'm, I'm playing volleyball with a sniper I can barely see. And I picked some machine gunners off on a rooftop who was shooting at us. Picked some more guys off in the field. And then, uh, yeah. When we thought it was over, I look at, uh, look at the, the, the, uh, rec team lead and I'm like, dude, do you have a grenade? And he already knew I was going with it.

• 3:24:02Speaker 06

  If they get in close, we're gonna pull this grenade, hug it. And we're gonna kill them with us, right? So he pulls out his grenade.

• 3:24:14Speaker 06

  Man, one second, bro.

• 3:24:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:24:24Speaker 06

  That's where I fist bump Mike Pemberton.

• 3:24:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, we said our goodbyes.

• 3:24:35Speaker 06

  You know?

• 3:24:39Speaker 06

  One second. Okay, man. Like I said, this is the worst one, so I'm good after this one, but and I haven't talked about in a while. So I think that is different, but yeah. Uh, say our goodbyes, I fist pound Mike Pemberton and I'm like, dude, tell my wife I was not a bitch. And he's like, dude, I'm not telling her anything. She's Mexican. She'll cut me. I'm like, yes, she will.

• 3:25:09Speaker 06

  And, uh, yeah, he did our little goodbyes, whatever. Waited to these guys to, you know, overrun us. And look over my shoulder and here's my dumb brain again, my kid brain. I thought it was the Road Runner. The like when someone's running real fast and you can see the dust kicking up from the back of their feet. It was a machine gun team, cop. Eric Ennis, those guys. Uh, they heard the call.

• 3:25:41Speaker 06

  And dude.

• 3:25:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:25:47Speaker 06

  They heard the call of, uh, you know, we were pinned down pretty good and, uh, they came in and extract extracted us and we popped smoke. Murphy's Law, we popped smoke and the wind blew it the opposite direction. So we had no cover like screen cover or anything like that to to bound out. We were gonna bound out, bound out in twos. And, uh, me and, uh, Mike Pemberton, we're gonna be the last guys to bound out. Covering them as best as we could as, you know, they made it back to the machine gun team on this, on the road that we were originally overlooking. And, uh, sniper's trying to pick us off as they're running. So I tell Mike, I'm like, dude, zigzag.

• 3:26:31Speaker 06

  And I learned this from just, you know, where I grew up. I'm like, dude, if you're getting shot at zigzag.

• 3:26:38Speaker 06

  And I didn't zigzag, I just V lined it and it's the fastest. I felt like I was running on clouds, man. I could not feel the ground beneath my feet. V lined it to the machine gun team, Mike's right behind me and you can hear the tracks of the rifle and you see the ground pop up and made it back to the machine gun team. I look at cop, I'm like, dude, I am sucking. I need water bad. Haven't had water in, you know, like, felt like a day or whatever and really thirsty and mouth was sticking together and couldn't form any spit. He gives me water out his back, uh, his backpack. I drank half the bottle, gave the rest to Mike and it's up to me, you know, hey, where we going?

• 3:27:23Speaker 06

  I'm like, well, let's bound, make our way back to the main element where you guys came from and we'll join up with them. And finish out this mission.

• 3:27:33Speaker 06

  And as we pick up to move out, I see some guy pop out from the backside of this little house. And I put my rifle over Pemberton's shoulder. We're both like facing that direction. I used his shoulder as a brace because we're standing. And I, you know, shot this guy and as, as he poked out from behind the house and like a walking firefight. Um, and I made the dumbest call of my life, man, of skirting the tree line. Yeah.

• 3:28:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. Should've went in it and

• 3:28:08Speaker 06

  skirted the tree line, probably tired. Wanted to get to the element as quickly as we could. Because they were also in a huge firefight, throwing grenades and back and forth. Uh, borderline hand to hand combat in this little like ravine. It was intense, bro. Making it back to them. Skirted the tree line and shit you not, I saw the ground open up. Like a

• 3:28:41Speaker 06

  Guy come out the ground, he lifted up the grass and he came out of the ground and it's a team of guys and they started engaging us from dude me to that that wall, danger close. Shit. And we get ambushed and I remember diving headfirst, I didn't care how deep this ditch was or what was in it, dove in, hit water, like chest deep water, we all jump into it and I look over and I can see cop, the guy who had just rescued us, he's got his leg up on the embankment. Yeah.

• 3:29:22Speaker 06

  Laying down a cover fire and I'm, I can see the uh like the dude's heads and in the ground and I start shooting and what I could hit, I know I hit one and uh got back down and as I get into like cover from the embankment portion, I'm like this high in water, chest high, neck high at this point and uh I hear this loud sound like an M4, an M4 was right by my ear and uh I'm like, I go to look over like dude, back away a

• 3:30:03Speaker 06

  little bit and there's no one right there, but then I see the embankment behind me, the mud like blowing up and I'm like, holy shit, that's a, that's gunfire, so I move off to the side a little bit and that's when I'm going back up to engage and I hear this weird slap and I heard cop scream, I look and I see like a water hose, dumb brain again, pumping red water, like squirting into the field, like what is that, then I see him fall and he's screaming, bro, screaming, cussing and screaming and his femoral artery was

• 3:30:44Speaker 06

  hit, snapped up into his body and uh he took two rounds to it and I remember the ravine, the water we were in, like turning different color, dark brown and it tasted like pennies. And uh.

• 3:31:03Speaker 06

  Look at the commander of the lead who's with us and by this point he's next to me. So I grab him, I pull him in close to, I could talk, so I could talk to him in his ear screaming. "We need to get, there's like 300 meters down this ravine or down here to this opening." That's where we take our dog leg and go across this field and the safe haven, the safe house was gonna be there. "We have to go now, we're screwed in this little ravine and is, yeah, screwed." And as I'm talking to him, I feel a splash of warm water slap my face and then he just got weightless.

• 3:31:47Speaker 06

  And I thought, I don't know what I thought, I just thought he just sat down really fast. And he goes down, I wipe the water off my face and it wasn't water, it was his blood. And I see this, right above his body arm is gaping hamburger meat hanging out of his chest. I go back up against the embankment, Pemberton comes over and he just puts his hand inside the wound. And I remember him like screaming, "Yeah." And I went black, bro. I went, it's the only time in combat where I like blacked out for a second. I'm staring in his eyes and watching his chest open up and Pemberton's hand in it and him screaming.

• 3:32:31Speaker 06

  And cop had stopped screaming at this point and our medic is working on him, badass medic, Melvin. His kit bag is floating in the water and he's doing like surgery, bro, you know? Shit. Put on two tourniquets, bleeding wouldn't stop. He's packing it, trying to, you know, get it to stop.

• 3:32:57Speaker 06

  Watkins got hit in his foot, or his ankle.

• 3:33:02Speaker 06

  So we're down three. And, uh...

• 3:33:09Speaker 06

  One of the recce guys came over and slapped me on my helmet.

• 3:33:13Speaker 06

  He slapped me on my helmet and he's like, "Dude, get back in it," you know? I'm like, "Oh shit, yeah."

• 3:33:20Speaker 06

  And, uh, he's like, "Come over here, the sniper, he's not engaging him." And he's like, "Come over here to me, behind this weird little fallen tree." And as soon as I get up next to him to get eyes on anything, we get shot at. And he pushes me, was like, "Dude, he's targeting you," you know? Everywhere I went down this ravine, pow, crack, crack. And, uh...

• 3:33:46Speaker 06

  The plead, the cries, and, you know, everybody's jacked up and cops going in and out of consciousness and we finally made the decision to, "Let's just move, we can't get pinned down here." So he passed his body up on the stretcher. And, uh, I remember him passing by and just white.

• 3:34:11Speaker 06

  And, uh, like, when we would take cover, we'd shout like, "Yeah dude, hold your breath," you know? We'd have to go underwater to get him to safety and, uh, yeah, he, you know, was out of it. Lost a lot of blood. And, uh, we get to the end of the river ravine. And, um, I remember popping out the other side and going into the safe house and dude, it felt like World War III opened up and I go down. Pemberton looks back at me, he's like, "Thought I was hit." He comes and grabs me and starts pulling me. I'm looking up at him like,

• 3:34:56Speaker 06

  "Dude, what the, what are you doing?" And he's like, "I said, 'We're getting shot at.'" He's like, "No, those are our guys." We had support by fire, machine guns up on top and I was just so, you know, out of it a little bit. And, uh, we get into the safe haven, the little... House we had taken over and the first sergeant was in there and he's like, hey, you guys get up on top. And we were the first ones to get up on top to provide cover as, you know, cop and everybody else was coming out. And we were just told to engage everything that was a threat.

• 3:35:36Speaker 06

  And I remember looking out and dudes were getting dropped off in like vans with the sliding doors taking off and mopeds and bikes with like four guys, three guys on them and RPGs and ammo and machine guns piling out into the city. Pretty far away and couldn't engage them too far away and tried some shots. Too far away and just picked off everything else that I could pick off and yeah. And we called for reinforcements, the Marines to come in and they couldn't do it. They had to have more people, like I said, a brigade and we were told that the best

• 3:36:20Speaker 06

  they could do was park their vehicles like a mile away and we had to run to them. That was like not really an option at the moment. We were going to stay and fight. So we had the guys who from my platoon put speedballs together, ready to go ammo and stuff like that. They were gonna fly the helicopters in low, drop off the speedballs and we were gonna get it out and fight all night. Watch the medevac come in and provide a cover for them. It's an old school like medevac with the big cross on the side and watching the guys

• 3:36:58Speaker 06

  carry out the wounded and covering them and stayed to fight. Had 210 bullets and had six when it was over, left. Did a lot of shooting and yeah. We had to, that was the initial call was to, was to remain overnight.

• 3:37:24Speaker 06

  Luckily, that wasn't the case. And as we were running low on ammo, I'll never forget the call. My first sergeant was like, if you got a bayonet, if you have a knife, get ready. We're going hand to hand. If, you know, these guys are going to overrun this compound. So in my mind, I'm like, you know what, I'm going to smoke a guy, get his AK and fight with that. And if we go hand to hand, hey, Hodge is pretty small. We're good. So luckily, that did not happen. Uh, we did make the decision to run out. Everybody was like timid, not timid. It was a rough day. Um, like hour eight, nine at this point. We have to run out the wide open field, a mile to get to the Marines that finally made

• 3:38:08Speaker 06

  it. And I volunteered. It was like, you know, I, I wanted to kill myself so much that day. It was like, after, yeah, after, like assault, the third guy was hit, debated standing up, getting my head taken off, you know? Just tired of it. Yeah. So I was like, you know, I'll, I'll volunteer. And dude, I'm not like crying too much, am I?

• 3:38:36Shawn Ryan?

  You're all good, man.

• 3:38:37Speaker 06

  I'm.

• 3:38:38Shawn Ryan?

  I've never heard anything like this.

• 3:38:40Speaker 06

  I'm sucking, bro. But, so yeah, we, uh, I volunteered to lead us out. I had like six bullets left. And I told Pemberton, I was like, you take up the rear for the assault team, make sure we're good. And I'll get the front. We're just gonna book it. I don't have time to shoot, you know? So we just start running when they opened up the big blue doors, the gates. I have a picture of it, of, uh, yeah, before we ran out. I just booked it, man. See the Marines on top of a hill and.

• 3:39:21Speaker 06

  They didn't have enough vehicles for us or whatever, so, yeah. We had to fit like thirty guys and four Humvees and

• 3:39:32Speaker 06

  all Humvees and piled in and I had a big five hundred pound Marine fifty cal gunner laying on my chest and I'm laying across Pemberton's lap and another Assaulter's lap, he's being stood on, it's cram packed in there.

• 3:39:50Speaker 06

  Some guys are piled on and we drive out, I asked for a cigarette and this Marine was like, gave me one and I go to flick it out the hatch and it landed back in my I always say that was like the worst part of that whole mission was having that cigarette burn my back and Lions are, this other guy, an Assaulter, pouring his canteen out on me, dousing me, I'm like dude, it's just a cigarette, but we get back and

• 3:40:17Speaker 06

  we got the target we were going after, captured him and I remember doing the quick AAR when we got back and I'm sitting next to a prisoner before we fly him out to where we have to fly him out to and I'm sitting next to a prisoner and I'm leaning up against my rucksack and dude, I'm dozing off and I do doze off and I heard a clear as day, man, a bullet snapped past my head, so I wake up, I'm looking around, I'm wondering, you know, why is no one else freaking out? You know, everyone's just pretty calm and chill, waiting for the helicopters to come in. I'm like, damn, that was not even a gunshot, I'm, I'm still hearing

• 3:40:59Speaker 06

  bullets snap, you know? And I knew I was like hurt after that.

• 3:41:07Speaker 06

  And then

• 3:41:10Speaker 06

  a few days, a few days later, yeah, a cop died. The first hospital he went to, power went out.

• 3:41:18Speaker 06

  So they had to take him to another hospital.

• 3:41:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:41:31Speaker 06

  So that's the guy who saved my life.

• 3:41:39Speaker 06

  I've never heard anything like that before. My bad, bro. Oh, man. Haven't talked about it like that in a while either. But, yeah. Think about it every day. Every day. Every day, man.

• 3:41:55Speaker 06

  You wanna take a break? Let's take a break.

• 3:42:00Shawn Ryan?

  How many guys out there are worried about brain health? You know, all we hear about is fitness. Everybody's getting ready for bikini season 'cause spring's right around the corner. I'm personally more concerned about my brain. You look around, you see all these brain diseases that are getting out of control. I'm gonna take everything I can to improve the health of my brain. And I'm gonna tell you about my five favorite supplements from Laird Superfoods that help with brain health. All right, the first thing I do every morning is I have Laird Superfood Creamer. It's got adaptogens and functional mushrooms, which are great for brain health. I put this in my tea. Tastes amazing. Who likes vegetables?

• 3:42:45Shawn Ryan?

  Cool, me neither. That's why I take Laird's Daily Greens. Just pour it in a cup, shoot it real quick. You got your daily vegetable intake. Plus, guess what? Yep, that's right. Functional mushroom extract. There are six different kinds in here. Once again, great for brain health. After greens, we got daily reds. This one doesn't actually have any functional mushrooms in it. But I can't stand beets. I think they taste like shit. And so I take one scoop of this, put it in my water, and I don't have to eat beets anymore. All right, we're winding down the day now. This is the next supplement I take every single night. Laird's Sleep and Recovery. Helps me sleep, helps me recover from my daily workout. And guess what? Yep, you're right. It has mushroom extract. Guess what? It's good for your brain.

• 3:43:31Shawn Ryan?

  And I saved the best for last. Most of you know this. My favorite supplement at Laird's is Performance Mushrooms. Has a ton of mushroom extract. Super, super good for your brain. Take it every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. These are my five favorite supplements from Laird Superfoods. You can go over to lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS, save 20%. Ladies and gents, I would not have partnered with this company if I didn't believe in them. They take the cleanest ingredients. They try to source everything in America, unless they find a better ingredient that's more quality somewhere else.

• 3:44:11Shawn Ryan?

  I think we can all appreciate that. Once again, lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS. That'll save you 20%.

• 3:44:22Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan Show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys, or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern about self-defense, home defense,

• 3:45:05Shawn Ryan?

  crimes on the rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on, at the end of every month, where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it. Check it out. And, if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping,

• 3:45:47Shawn Ryan?

  all the firearm stuff, pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there. And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it either way. Love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you.

• 3:46:18Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Nick.

• 3:46:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:46:20Shawn Ryan?

  That was a heavy segment, man.

• 3:46:21Speaker 06

  Dude, that chef is finally gone, man. He was cutting up all those onions. I'm surprised you didn't.

• 3:46:25Shawn Ryan?

  (laughing)

• 3:46:26Speaker 06

  You know, I'm glad you kicked him out. That dude was rough, man.

• 3:46:29Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that, uh, you know, I just, uh...

• 3:46:34Shawn Ryan?

  I've not heard of anything that intense.

• 3:46:37Speaker 06

  Really?

• 3:46:39Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think, ever.

• 3:46:40Speaker 06

  That's what caused me to get out, man.

• 3:46:42Shawn Ryan?

  That was it?

• 3:46:43Speaker 06

  That was it. I finally, um, yeah, I was on my way out the door, but that like sealed the deal of learning of cops' death and just that whole mission, man. And I watched guys get Bronze Stars for just saying, "Go do this," you know, and never stepped foot on the field of, you know, never had to do anything like that, but they walk away with the Bronze Star and, you know, I'm never about medals anyways. I was supposed to get a Bronze Star with V. But they pulled it and reduced it to a

• 3:47:17Speaker 06

  A RCOM Joint Commendation Medal or Army Commendation Medal with V? Reduced it to that.

• 3:47:28Speaker 06

  Only because they told me I was just doing my job, so there was no point of, and I don't care, you know, but I watched a guy who's sitting at it behind a desk get a Bronze Star.

• 3:47:38Shawn Ryan?

  I remember when we came back from deployment in Iraq.

• 3:47:42Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:47:43Shawn Ryan?

  And we did some really good sniper stuff for conventional guys.

• 3:47:49Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:47:49Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, which opened up a lot of routes, you know, a lot of logistical routes. We came home and I remember watching a guy get a Bronze Star who stayed back in Little Creek, Virginia for stocking the candy machines because the candy machines were stocked every day.

• 3:48:08Speaker 06

  What?

• 3:48:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we're sitting there at a, you know, the morning muster and that's, we're watching this guy get a fucking Bronze Star for stocking candy machines at SEAL Team 2. I couldn't believe it.

• 3:48:21Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 3:48:23Shawn Ryan?

  And that is about the moment I knew that I was making the right decision to get the fuck out.

• 3:48:27Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 3:48:28Shawn Ryan?

  But, um...

• 3:48:30Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, you know, we had a, we had, we just had a good conversation off camera and I kind of cut it because I think it's important to have it on here about... About the ego, you know, that runs within the SOF community. And in the competitiveness, the characters that come out afterwards. We had talked about a couple of individuals that we both know that will remain nameless on camera. But, you know, we're, it kind of, the conversation kind of started with, you know, how do you, how do some of these guys live with themselves? You know, people that you knew in service, people that I knew in service.

• 3:49:12Shawn Ryan?

  And then you see them on social media, you see them on YouTube, you see them on the news, you see them everywhere, and you know, that's

• 3:49:21Speaker 06

  Not that guy.

• 3:49:22Shawn Ryan?

  That's not you.

• 3:49:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:49:24Shawn Ryan?

  And now they're trapped

• 3:49:25Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:49:26Shawn Ryan?

  into, into being that, that character, likely for the rest of their life.

• 3:49:33Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, yeah.

• 3:49:34Shawn Ryan?

  And there are some very controversial individuals from that community, from the, especially from the SOF community, that are living a lie.

• 3:49:48Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:49:49Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, and that brought us into, you know, the killing.

• 3:49:56Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 3:49:57Shawn Ryan?

  And how that, I mean, I'll let you pick up the conversation.

• 3:50:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, from the killing portion, um?

• 3:50:07Shawn Ryan?

  When it comes to ego.

• 3:50:08Speaker 06

  Oh, the, while you're overseas deployed?

• 3:50:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, the competitiveness on killing. And it becomes, you know, I think it starts as you're killing for the country, you're killing for your team, and then it gets competitive.

• 3:50:25Speaker 06

  I think you go in with the mindset of that. Like, I would say, my first deployment, I felt like I was doing it for the country, you know, after payback for nine eleven, I'm finally here and I get a chance to deal out my payback. But then, I want to say maybe my third deployment is when I started to see and notice that, more so when I was a sniper, um...

• 3:50:52Speaker 06

  Like killing the guy, bad guys, or whatever you want to call them, killing people, getting back, and the guys who did not get a chance to go on the operation would show jealousy or, you know, envy towards that. And it became a competition really quick as who could get, and I never thought it was a competition, you know? I was right place, right time, um, and I didn't have to look for it. I enjoyed being a sniper and I enjoyed looking over my guys so that they could do what they had to do on the ground. I enjoyed it and I liked working by myself and having that leadership role, but the killing

• 3:51:35Speaker 06

  was never something I, I expected, like especially as a Ranger sniper, it's rare that you even get a chance to pull the trigger. So I'd never went into it with that mentality or mindset. I thought I was gonna do more, I wanted to do the stalking, you know, setting up hide sites, that's what I wanted to do the most. I thought that part was the coolest thing about being a sniper. The shooting portion, it's cool and all, but it's so rare, so I didn't expect it. All the snipers that I knew, some had zero kills. My replacement sniper, so after Pemberton fell down this 75 plus foot well, had to get

• 3:52:15Speaker 06

  medevac'd out, um, I was replaced with another sniper who had, I think he was in the section for like two or three years and never had a kill, um, until he started working with me and that was just because we were getting ambushed like literally every day and he had to shoot people, but prior to that, he'd never killed anyone, so I was used to that. The, our, the, the snipers that had been in the, in the section for so long, they never talked about killing because it was rare. You might have guys with two or three kills, some guys with zero. Um, but it wasn't a big thing that we harped on, you know? Until I started to see that competition, when that's all it became about was just killing

• 3:52:59Speaker 06

  and killing and killing and, well, I have more than you and I have more than you and I'm catching up to you and I'm like, dude, I don't, one, I don't care, you know? I don't really care and...

• 3:53:10Speaker 06

  No one knew what I felt like after the fact. So after everybody I've ever taken out or anything, I've always felt bad about. I've always felt that, I guess, coming from a religious background, I felt that it rips out a piece of your soul. I think that spiritually, we're all connected in some way, shape, or form. We all share one thing in common, and that's the soul. And we're all connected by it. So eliminating or cutting that tether of somebody else's life, it's like you feel that I felt the same way that a tether was connected also.

• 3:53:51Speaker 06

  Because you know, deep down, I don't know, some people in our community, maybe they are telling the truth when they say, oh, I don't feel anything. And I, I don't, I don't buy it. I don't buy it.

• 3:54:06Shawn Ryan?

  Did you feel anything at the time when you were killing?

• 3:54:10Speaker 06

  After the fact?

• 3:54:10Shawn Ryan?

  Or was it, was it years later?

• 3:54:13Speaker 06

  No, during the killing. So it was, I would ride like this weird roller coaster of emotion of a big rush, adrenaline dump, I'm about to kill this guy. I can see he has a weapon or he's shooting. And I get like a rush before a hunter would shoot a deer. After that, though, it was like this crazy, like you reach the peak of a, of a roller coaster. And right when you come down, it was like that free fall of, it didn't feel, it's a weird, you don't, it feels weird. It feels like remorseful. The remorse part came when I got back to my room. And I had privacy away from the guys.

• 3:54:55Speaker 06

  And I didn't cry. I just felt weird. I felt sad. I did feel remorseful, like, man, I, in my mind, would play tricks of like, did he have a family or, you know, who was he before that? When he woke up that more, it was always weird to me that.

• 3:55:14Speaker 06

  Like, when a person wakes up, they have no idea that they're gonna die, you know? And if they did, would they change their life leading up to that point? If there was no getting around the fact that you're going to die in two hours from now? What would you have changed differently? And that part is what I played with in my mind. Like, did they carry on about their day? Did they have a good day? Did they? I don't know, you know? So it was weird in that aspect of like, wondering their life prior to that, of the kill.

• 3:55:50Speaker 06

  And I felt like I was a young guy killing grown men, which was weird to me too, you know? It was just weird to kill someone that was like my dad's age, you know? And it was weird. It was weird. But I always felt remorse thereafter. I never, I didn't show up to the guys. I didn't show anything until I got back, my last deployment. And that's where my wife saw me crying in the car after cop died. And I had called my dad. This is the only time I've called my dad on that deployment. I masked my cry with the sounds of the jets taking off on the runway and this big generator behind our barracks overseas.

• 3:56:34Speaker 06

  Called on the satellite phone and I didn't say anything. I just waited for the afterburners on the jet to kick in before he took off and I used that to cry, so the guys wouldn't hear me. And that's like the only time he just, he was pretty much like, "It's okay, son." And, you know, I guess he understood. I'm not sure, but that's all he said. And it, yeah, that's the only time I cried like that and like, let it all out, pretty much, yeah. And then, of course, when I got back. But I didn't really care about the competition of killing or who had the most. My career leading up to that. All the guys in my platoon, like the assaulters were, and I was not an assaulter.

• 3:57:15Speaker 06

  I was a machine gunner, machine gun team leader, designated marksman and sniper. I served a brief role when I first got to battalion as an assaulter. And then I lost my gun on my first jump in and like, no, I just was never that guy to always kick in the door and go kill bad guys, you know? That wasn't my thing. Those guys were doing all the killing to me, like they were really doing it a lot. But I didn't look at them and envy them because they killed more people. It was just cool to be amongst them of, hey, these guys are really good at what they do. And it's like a dream come true being in the special operations community and doing

• 3:57:58Speaker 06

  these cool jobs at the time, at that age. But I never looked at someone and said, man, I want to have as, you know, much kills as you do. It just turned out that way. And I don't have, like as a sniper, I have, you know, quite a few, but like my entire career, there's guys I'm sure out there who have way more, you know, way more. But I don't look at them any better than what I, you know, did. All did our job and it is what it is. We're here today and hopefully we're making today count and yeah.

• 3:58:31Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you had mentioned off camera that every kill that you had, you felt took a piece of your soul. What do you mean by that?

• 3:58:44Speaker 06

  Like literally a piece of your soul. Gets disconnected. I think we're all connected, bro. Like that's my belief now and from what I've seen from my experience in spirituality. I believe that we're more connected than we think we are. It's just that this realm that we're in, this place, this earth that we're in, and I read the Bible and the ruler of this world is Satan.

• 3:59:18Shawn Ryan?

  You read the Bible?

• 3:59:19Speaker 06

  Every day, every day.

• 3:59:22Shawn Ryan?

  I thought, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna go down some rabbit holes here. So we had talked about, let's talk about your, your, we'll call it your journey to God.

• 3:59:37Shawn Ryan?

  How did that, I mean, what sent you down that rabbit hole after? What were you searching for? I mean, you've had some of the most kinetic deployments that I've ever heard of. Some of the most descriptive combat accounts I've ever heard. And so, I guess I shouldn't make any assumptions, but I would assume that your transition was

• 4:00:04Speaker 06

  Rough.

• 4:00:04Shawn Ryan?

  Rough.

• 4:00:05Speaker 06

  Yes. Um, well, like, so Ranger Battalion, it's crazy you say that, like, to me, it doesn't seem like a lot because we know, and anybody can look it up, it's the only unit with the most kills and captures and continuously deployed since GWAT began is Ranger Battalion. It's the most killed, captured, combined than, more than the Marine Corps, Air Force, Green Marines, you name it, combined, we've killed and captured more enemy high-value targets than any unit combined. And that's Google, whatever you wanna use to look it up. So it was not, it's not weird to me that

• 4:00:47Speaker 06

  it was like that, like, the most deployments that I've seen a Ranger have was like 14, 14 deployments, and thought he was badass. But, um, I think he's badass.

• 4:01:00Speaker 06

  But I think that for my transition was like anybody else's, I think, who's been through that. Um, a lot of self-medication in the wrong way. I struggled a lot with alcoholism. It runs deep in my family. Depression. And thoughts that I wish I didn't have, you know? Not wanting to be here anymore, you know? Still got the scars to prove it. Yeah, so, um, I've struggled, I struggled with that for a long time.

• 4:01:40Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean, you still have the scars to prove it? Internal or external?

• 4:01:46Speaker 06

  External.

• 4:01:47Shawn Ryan?

  What had happened?

• 4:01:48Speaker 06

  What's that?

• 4:01:49Shawn Ryan?

  Is this a suicide attempt?

• 4:01:52Speaker 06

  Not that one, per se, just hurt. I just wanted to see blood. Just wanted to see blood.

• 4:01:57Shawn Ryan?

  What happened?

• 4:01:59Speaker 06

  Just decided to take a razor blade, bro, and start carving. Yeah. In front of, yeah.

• 4:02:07Shawn Ryan?

  In front of?

• 4:02:09Speaker 06

  My wife, she saw it.

• 4:02:10Shawn Ryan?

  She saw that?

• 4:02:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:02:12Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 4:02:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. Did that and had a bottle of Jack one day and decided to... Dude, my life was crumbling down when I got out. Uh, I had no idea what I was gonna do. Did contracting, got out, wasn't for me. I was tired of being away from home, you know? So I bought a home. And I just felt empty. I felt just useless, empty. I couldn't apply all the stuff that I'd learned and was, you know, good at. Like, I was terrible at school, wasn't a good kid. Tried to be a good husband, but I just felt like empty. So decided with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a Glock pistol

• 4:02:57Speaker 06

  to go outside in the backyard and stare at the stars and have a conversation with my inner self. And, yeah, scary times, scary times, man, scary times.

• 4:03:09Shawn Ryan?

  What did that conversation entail?

• 4:03:12Speaker 06

  With myself?

• 4:03:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:03:14Speaker 06

  Why am I here?

• 4:03:17Speaker 06

  Basically, why am I here? And is there any importance as to why I'm here? Why am I here and why are my guys not? And the message I got out of that was, if I do this, everything that they did would have been in vain, you know? By not living life. And that's what kind of, I guess, pulled me out of that at that moment. But I teetered a lot with depression, anger,

• 4:03:45Speaker 06

  resentment, a lot of that. And just nowhere to fit in, you know? Nowhere to fit in. So I would self-medicate daily until I couldn't remember and I felt like I didn't exist anymore. I would just drink until I was in... I called it my dark space, where nothing exists anymore, no feeling, no emotion, just darkness. And I liked being there for a while, you know? A while.

• 4:04:13Shawn Ryan?

  You liked being there?

• 4:04:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:04:16Shawn Ryan?

  You liked being there or you didn't know how to be anywhere else?

• 4:04:19Speaker 06

  Ooh, that's deeper. I didn't know how to be anywhere else, yeah. I didn't know how to be anywhere else. I didn't know how to process...

• 4:04:32Speaker 06

  The outside world, as far as struggle, like overseas when you get mad and you're faced with a situation, it was easy. And being overseas, everything was cut and dry. You just stay alive. That's it. You don't have to worry about your light bill. You don't have to worry about the water bill. I had no job after I got out of contracting. Everything seemed like it was, you know, falling apart. Just got a new house in Texas and I had nothing. You know, I was empty, bro. Empty. I was losing everything. Everything. And decided one day to lock myself in a room and I just started to write my whole deployment. And I called it Team Reaper at the first. Because the Reaper just did not...

• 4:05:17Speaker 06

  And originally, I don't know if I've ever really told this story, because I don't care. But the original The Reaper term came from that deployment. And I called after an Assaulter, WR, because I don't like this guy anymore. Um, well, whatever. No judgment. That's his path. But he gave me that title, The Angel of Death. And I was like, or Pemberton was like, "Oh, like The Reaper? Blue Oyster Cult." I had no idea who Blue Oyster Cult was or anything. And he's an older guy, Pemberton, so he introduced me to it. "Baby, don't fear The Reaper."

• 4:06:02Speaker 06

  And that stuck. I always called us Team Reaper. I don't like, we're a team, you know? Me and him were a team. He was just as good as I was. I was just on a semi-automatic, I guess, and I was the sniper team leader. But my original, when we got back, we had a deployment video. And on that deployment video, Team Reaper, Blue Oyster Cult's playing in the background, and that was our thing. The first book I ever wrote was Team Reaper. I didn't want to be The Reaper. That came up along the lines when I got into the big book publishing company. And they did not want it to be a team. It wanted to be about me. Regardless if it was Nick was The Reaper in Battalion or not,

• 4:06:47Speaker 06

  I wanted my guy to be a part of it. That's why I incorporated Pemberton in everything. And I still keep in contact with Pemberton. And he's always been my guy. Loyal.

• 4:07:01Speaker 06

  My guy, you know? So the first book I ever wrote was terrible. I wrote it completely wasted. Sitting in my computer room, trapped myself in there and just wrote. Team Reaper, unedited. That was the first original book. So it's always Team Reaper from the beginning. I just didn't wanna be singled out as the Reaper. Regardless of what some other title someone gave me. It went along with that. But the first book I ever wrote was not even about me. I just wanted to talk about the things that me and my team did. And that's why I got out of the whole, after the first book. I was... I'm gonna say I didn't like it. It was cool.

• 4:07:43Speaker 06

  But the individual, uh, uh... The solo, that it was just me out there. Um, I, no. My spotter and the guys on the ground were just as good, if not better than I was. I was just right place, right time. You know? And that's why I got out the big book publishing world and stopped doing the autobiography stuff and made up my own character that he can do whatever he want. Like, I grew up reading like Tom Clancy and those guys. And that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to build a character that is not real, not me, but is what I would envision a spec op guy to be and what he would be like when he's out.

• 4:08:28Speaker 06

  The life that he's trying to live. So I started going along. That's why I write what I write now. It's to take me out of it. Now let me just show you. Like, I've been writing since I was a little kid. My mom has one of my original books that I wrote in elementary school, based on The Haunted House, bro. No kidding? Yeah. It was a Goosebumps style book, but I called it Goose Lumps. And me and my friend Andre made it a short book, scary book, supposed to be. But I've always loved telling stories and writing. So that's been something I've guessed before the sniper thing. It was what I've liked doing and I continue to do. And I, I'm not the best at it, but I've gotten really good at it.

• 4:09:11Speaker 06

  And accord, like the feedback that I get from it. I like the feedback and I like not being the main focus character. I don't, I'll, I think it's a, it can be...

• 4:09:25Speaker 06

  Not good for your health. It can be dangerous and you can start to believe whatever thing that you're building up, the character that you've made on yourself and the praise that you get for being this one guy, it can kind of not be good. And I don't want to be singled out. Like dude, I was telling you, I don't wanna, on my tombstone, I don't want to be the Reaper, you know? I don't want to be that. I just, I'm a writer. I love to write. I love to tell stories. I'm not Tom Clancy or Stephen King. I'm not those guys. I don't want to be those guys. I just want to tell my stories that I spend six months planning and about the same amount of time writing, telling those stories of things

• 4:10:08Speaker 06

  that, you know, Tom Clancy would write about or one of those guys. But just from my perspective and how I would do things, like, I'm into conspiracy theories. And if anybody like reads my books, especially like my latest ones or whatever, they can see I'm more than just a sniper. Like, I'm a nerd, bro. I love conspiracy theories. I love, I'm big into space, aliens, things of that nature, you know? Everything is not about war to me anymore. I'm trying to leave that away from me as much as possible because I know where that

• 4:10:49Speaker 06

  leads to. So to stay away from it is by writing fictional stories that I would read as a kid. How many books have you written? Close to twenty. Twenty books? Yeah. Close to twenty. I have five major published, no. Yeah, five major published, and I've written, this is gonna be embarrassing if people look this crap up, man. But, because it's, it goes back. They're going to. I wrote, it's like a picture book about survival. I called it, uh, Basic and Intermediate

• 4:11:27Speaker 06

  Combat Survival. Lame, bro. I wrote Team Reaper and Team Reaper One and Team Reaper Two. I've written three other people's books. I have a pseudonym that I go by. Um, I've written

• 4:11:45Speaker 06

  Books, yeah, other people's autobiographies and I've written on my own fictional books, like five more additional books on that end. So in total, close to twenty, maybe I haven't reached twenty yet, but close to twenty books.

• 4:11:58Shawn Ryan?

  So did writing, I mean, did, how did you pull yourself out of the downward spiral? Was it writing?

• 4:12:05Speaker 06

  Writing, writing was.

• 4:12:07Shawn Ryan?

  Found that therapeutic?

• 4:12:08Speaker 06

  Very therapeutic. I don't, I didn't never, I never used to talk about this stuff, ever, ever. I never, I didn't, I didn't really care, you know? I wanted to, I was, yeah, I just didn't really care. I didn't think I was that big of a deal, you know? I just wanted to tell my side of the story. Other people found out or found it to be a big deal or a cool story and I didn't advertise it that way. Like I didn't go the traditional route and pitch my script. I wrote it on my own, self-published it and sold like five copies. I didn't care, you know? But I got in touch with the Navy SEAL

• 4:12:49Speaker 06

  and he liked the story. He thought it was really neat and he got me in contact with St. Martin's Press and it was on from there. But I left that major publishing book company or book role because I felt that it's too controlling. You don't have much say-so in the way things are done. And I want to tell the story the way I want to tell the story. You know, no filler, nothing, from my perspective, the way I want to do it. And that's why I left it alone and started doing my own self-publishing and started my self-publishing book company and like I said, I've written for other people who've had number one really good bestseller books.

• 4:13:34Speaker 06

  Number one on Amazon, should have had a New York Times bestseller, but because the way that book world works, it's not in physical stores like big books would be, so they don't count it on the Nielsen book scan, even though I wrote a book for someone and they sold, I'm not going to say how many, but they were number one on Amazon and outdid Oprah or Michelle Obama's book at the time.

• 4:13:58Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 4:13:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:14:00Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible.

• 4:14:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. So it's been. A lot of my writing, the way I wanna write, and a lot of, if someone else has an autobiography they wanna write, I've helped them, and I've sat with them and wrote the entire thing in their voice and stepped away from it. I don't really care for it. I like to write. I like to tell stories. You know, but that was the beginning of the therapeutic,

• 4:14:28Speaker 06

  you know, healing session was by writing, and then the birth of my son was when, of course, it

• 4:14:36Speaker 06

  really took a big turn as far as, you know, wanting to stick around and just be a dad and not be...

• 4:14:43Speaker 06

  My son does not care who I was. He sees me on YouTube and, you know, he asked about the interviews and he was excited about this interview. He's like, "I can't wait to watch it." And he likes stuff like that, and he doesn't really care what dad used to do, and we don't talk about it in the household. You know, he doesn't, he might see a few things here and there and ask questions like, "Oh, were you in the army? Did you go to war? And what is war?" I explain it the best I can. Two people have a disagreement, two countries have a disagreement, and they fight over it. Sometimes they kill each other over it. And he's just like, "Okay." You know, he's more into F1 driving, and he wants to be a race car driver, so I'm all about that. If he can be an F1 driver,

• 4:15:26Speaker 06

  dude, go be it. Just make sure you take me along to all the cool places you go. I'll be front and center, you know? That's what

• 4:15:36Speaker 06

  I wanna stick around to see. You know, not following my footsteps. Like, he's told me recently, bro, and it hurts, so, not hurt, but brought me back down

• 4:15:47Speaker 06

  all the way. He said, uh, he's like, "Dad, I wanna be like you when I grow up." I was, "No, you don't. No, you don't. Don't do that." You can walk beside my footsteps, use mine as guide, but don't walk in them. Never, don't walk in my footsteps. You can observe them and see all the way as I went, where I messed up at, where I stumbled, where I fallen, could barely get back up, where I slugged along. But don't walk in them. Walk beside them, observe them, but do your own path. Don't do dad's path. You, no, don't do that. So to stick around and help him to be that guide is like... Yeah, and he's, dude, I want to see him explore life the way I didn't get a chance to,

• 4:16:32Speaker 06

  you know? He's writing a little children's book, or he's writing one, I'm helping him. But I think that's the coolest thing ever, you know, to not put it out for sale, just like, dude, here's your own book, you wrote that, that's your book, keep it, you know, as a memory or of a, I don't know, not even a trophy, just a piece of something that you can be proud of and know that you accomplished that at whatever stage he is in life right now of like, hey, man, you took your brain, you had an imagination, and you helped, you wrote that, like, be proud of that, man, that's an avenue you can go on and explore. You don't have to have the guns and pack on a parachute and rucksack and do what dad did. You also don't have to write books.

• 4:17:16Speaker 06

  I'm a decent driver, but I'm no F1 driver, so dude, do that. Do whatever you want to be, whatever you want to be.

• 4:17:22Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome, man. Let's go, want to dive into a whole bunch of different topics here, but, you know, let's, back to the Bible.

• 4:17:31Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 4:17:32Shawn Ryan?

  What, what along your journey took you to dive into all these different things? You said, we, at the very beginning of this podcast, we had talked about voodoo, and it sounds like, I believe you said you had explored that again in a cult.

• 4:17:55Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, Freemasonic lodges.

• 4:17:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, what's, what, what, where did you start and what got you there? What were you looking for?

• 4:18:04Speaker 06

  Started as a Christian, growing up, that's what I believed in, so my parents believed in later on, and they became really big Christian, you know, followers, and that's what I grew up on. It wasn't until that last deployment when I lost faith and didn't really believe anymore. Like, I'm... You know, I just didn't believe, I saw a lot of stuff and I lost one too many friends to, you know, make me question stuff. I was just sad, being rebellious, you know, against the Most High, God. That was my way of, I guess, showing that of by, well, fine, if you don't want to be here for me,

• 4:18:48Speaker 06

  then in my time of hurt, then I'm not gonna worry about this anymore. I'm gonna go and explore other things.

• 4:19:00Speaker 06

  So about a year or two, I didn't believe in, I didn't practice or really give too much thought to anything anymore, it would cross my mind from time to time, but I would brush it off like, yeah, right, you know? And then I got into, I wanted to get into something or find a higher power, you know? I felt, and I always felt that there's a higher power. I don't believe that anything is a coincidence, coincidence as to why we're here, why we're here, at the time we're here, the experience that we have. I don't think it's all for absolutely nothing, there's something.

• 4:19:37Speaker 06

  There has to be a Creator, you know? Nothing can, nothing, or creation has never came from a nothing. There has to be a something for something to be created, whatever that something is. So I believe that. So I found myself dabbling in witchcraft.

• 4:19:56Shawn Ryan?

  What led, I mean, was it, I know you dabbled with psychedelics as well.

• 4:20:00Speaker 06

  That was after the fact with the, yeah. I got into witchcraft. My older sister, half-sister, she was a, she does stuff like that. And that's where I kinda got the, I guess, idea to wanna give it a shot and try to see what it was about. So I tried witchcraft for about a year. Bought all the books you could buy, read the knowledge, practiced it, did my seances, all that weird stuff that.

• 4:20:33Shawn Ryan?

  What is it? I don't know anything about witchcraft.

• 4:20:37Speaker 06

  It's, well, there's light and dark magic. I was not involved with the dark stuff, mine was more light-focused of.

• 4:20:47Speaker 06

  Not what you see in the movies witchcraft, your stereotypical, bad witchy stuff. I didn't know. Mine was more so of using different powers that are outside of this world to help me become what I thought was going to be a better person and influence certain things in my life. Um, certain guides I would call upon to help facilitate with certain things to help me become better. Like what? The spirit world. Like, is this like manifestation? What is this? Conjuring. Spirit world? Like conjuring, so if I'm chanting chants, if I wanted to,

• 4:21:32Speaker 06

  uh, which one? I was gonna say that one, no. Let's say define peace. There's a chant, define peace, there's candles and chants and certain, for me, what I would do, I would open up a pentagram, um, spiritual pentagram by tracing a pentagram with my, it would look like a wand, but it's not a wand, it looks like a witch's wand. And opening up pentagrams chants to open up and facilitate this new enlightenment in my life, to call in spirits from another world to help guide and help facilitate certain things that I wanted accomplished, I want it done in my life.

• 4:22:14Speaker 06

  But I think I got out of it because I got scared of it. Did it work?

• 4:22:22Speaker 06

  It felt weird. I don't know if it necessarily worked, but in the back of my mind, I had Christianity. That's where I grew up, so I'm thinking, what if something I open up, cause I don't, I haven't practiced this stuff long enough. I've read Aleister Crowley, Crowley, and I've read Manly P. Hall, and I've read Albert Pike, and all these guys with the occult, the Freemasons, I was in a Freemasonic lodge for a short stint, very short stint, and... How was that? Interesting. It was mainly...

• 4:23:03Speaker 06

  My dad was a Freemason, so I was introduced to it early on. I would just see him dress up

• 4:23:10Speaker 06

  from time to time and go to a lodge. He wouldn't talk about it. I didn't find out till much later what he was and what it entailed. And he didn't stay long either, but

• 4:23:22Speaker 06

  as far as I know, he made it to like, I don't know. I don't know what degree Mason he became. He was nowhere near like the thirty-third degree Freemasons or anything like that. Just got out pretty early. I made it as far as you can go as a new guy, if you want to call it that, the third degree. When you get that initially, when you first go into the lodge and you

• 4:23:46Speaker 06

  it's a bunch of old rituals or reenactments of different things that happen, like storytelling through certain rituals like

• 4:23:59Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of rituals?

• 4:24:00Speaker 06

  I don't know if I really want to say. If there's a story of Haram Habef in there and the building of a temple and

• 4:24:11Speaker 06

  you mimic like being a lost traveler and you mimic getting, I don't know if I really want to give away so many of those secrets. I'm not a Freemason, you know, I don't claim to be. I've dabbled in it and I just know that they hold what they have secret and I don't want to.

• 4:24:29Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not going to push you then.

• 4:24:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:24:31Shawn Ryan?

  But do you have, why, why are you reluctant to bring that up? Do you have fear about it?

• 4:24:38Speaker 06

  Not fear, just respect.

• 4:24:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:24:40Speaker 06

  Like what I believe is to respect everyone's altar. And that comes from the forty-two laws of Ma'ad. And that's one of the forty-two laws. So whatever your rules, whatever you do at your altar, I should respect that. And if your thing is to not give away secrets and what happens in a lodge or some of the things that they talk about or what they know, I shouldn't respect it and just not, you know, share that, you know? If people want to find out, I mean, sure, there's like, there's pretty good books out there and or just go to a lodge, ask questions. I just don't want to, it's just.

• 4:25:21Speaker 06

  Like, let me call it rituals. It's like, imagine a play, right? Imagine a play, and you just reenact stuff that happened, and has been happening, and that tradition has been passed down for hundreds and hundreds of years. And they maintain the respect of keeping those traditions alive. And in summary, being a Freemason is about the building of man. The, how to become a better person. I've heard other theories, and I don't know if they're true, about what you find out when you reach the highest level, or anything like that. From my experience, it's just about becoming a better, building Solomon's Temple.

• 4:26:03Speaker 06

  You're building, you're building yourself through different things and understanding of things. And in every Freemasonic Lodge, at its centerpiece, there's a Bible. And you don't have to be a Christian, believe in the Bible. You just have to believe in a higher power. But they use the Bible for, I guess, a means of, of, of guiding them. And they use what the Bible is, the codes within the Bible.

• 4:26:27Shawn Ryan?

  They have Masonic Bibles, correct?

• 4:26:29Speaker 06

  They do, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:26:32Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know how those differ? Did you get that deep in?

• 4:26:36Speaker 06

  I know in the, they have some ancient, like Egyptian stuff in there, you know? Maat, Ra, Isis, stuff like, I don't know. I don't really know too much about it. I know it's a Bible. And it's basically the same exact Bible, but just with the Freemasonic, you know?

• 4:26:56Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 4:26:57Speaker 06

  The energy.

• 4:26:58Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about the occult. Is that how you say it?

• 4:27:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:27:03Shawn Ryan?

  What is that?

• 4:27:05Speaker 06

  If you wanted to, I guess, sum it up, it's like, oh, I think a lot of people think of like, you know who Aleister Crowley is, or Crowley, the, the big?

• 4:27:14Speaker 06

  Some people say he's crazy, but he was in the occult or dabble, not dabble, but he wrote plenty of books on, and he's messed with Freemasonry, he's messed with all types of the Scottish Rite and all these things and the occult as well. And I picked up one of his books and found it interesting. And there's a book that's called, um, not The Secret Teachings of, man, I forget the title of his book. The Aleister Crowley book I'm thinking of, 777, the, uh, I had to send a picture of it, but it's a, that's where I started off that with Aleister Crowley and found it interesting and did a lot of

• 4:27:55Speaker 06

  reading into what he believed and practiced, read a few other books about what they believe in, you know, practice about the occult and the higher secret societies of, of knowledge and learning. I found it intriguing and do I believe it to be real from what I experienced? Yes. I think that they know how to tap into or use ancient knowledge that we all possess to, um. What kind of ancient knowledge? I would say to, uh, reach a higher state of enlightenment. Are you talking about, are we talking about consciousness? Very much so. Very much so. And the meaning of what this body is and what it holds and

• 4:28:37Speaker 06

  possesses and the powers that it has within it and how we can change reality. Um, very much so, very much so. But at a higher level of understanding that your average person wouldn't consider, think about, or simply would not believe because it doesn't, it is kind of crazy, I think, when you, I don't know, if you're just diving into it, it doesn't seem real. Can you give me an example? What, what, what is?

• 4:29:07Shawn Ryan?

  What is it?

• 4:29:08Speaker 06

  Was that a cult, like, or Alister Crowley, what he would practice?

• 4:29:11Shawn Ryan?

  What, what, what is something that I wouldn't believe? Like, if I wanted to get into this, I mean, what?

• 4:29:17Speaker 06

  Would you, things that you would not believe? Let's say if I told you.

• 4:29:22Shawn Ryan?

  Like, what is our body capable of that?

• 4:29:24Speaker 06

  Our body is nothing more than a vehicle for a soul. Nothing more, nothing more. And our body is not who we are. It's not who we are. All we are is a projection from a higher being in a three dimensional world. And this is the projection that we get. And we're not really here. We operate on a higher plane. The only reason why we're here in this physical body is to experience limitations. Things of that nature because of what we are really capable of doing. Nothing is impossible. So we come down to this place to experience limitations. And what it feels like to not be a God or a part of God.

• 4:30:07Speaker 06

  But we're all lowercase g gods, which is also stated in the Bible. Where Jesus, Yahshua, says,

• 4:30:19Speaker 06

  have you not forgotten or that it is written into your law that ye too are also gods?

• 4:30:25Speaker 06

  And, yeah, it's a lot of that. We're all lowercase g gods. We just haven't realized it. And that's one of our main purposes. In this realm and in this thing called life. I think it's a dream, whether it's our higher consciousness that's dreaming in a different realm, or it's the most high, the God's consciousness dreaming. I mean, what point in the Bible did God wake up? When he fell asleep on his day of rest in the Bible?

• 4:30:53Speaker 06

  He didn't wake up yet, still dreaming. This is all a dream. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.

• 4:31:05Speaker 06

  The boat, the stream of life.

• 4:31:10Speaker 06

  You can also look at Jesus walking on water, the significance of water, what that is, the calming of the storm, be able to walk on top of the waves and the tribulations and all the things in life, to be able to walk on it is what I think that entails and what that means, just like rowing your boat down the stream. This vessel going through life, the stream of life, the steady flow of life that's continuously forever running on.

• 4:31:37Speaker 06

  To row it gently, not to get so caught up into things, attached to things, to row it gently down your stream because life is nothing more than just a dream. And we're living, this is a dream world that we're in. There's a higher consciousness that's dreaming and that's what we all share as humans to remind us that every living being dreams and that's our...

• 4:32:01Shawn Ryan?

  So do you think...

• 4:32:04Shawn Ryan?

  See, I don't think that's so hard to believe.

• 4:32:06Speaker 06

  Really?

• 4:32:08Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of people believe that the body is just a vessel.

• 4:32:12Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. And we're living in a dream or a dream world?

• 4:32:15Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think that people think that, I mean, I don't know. You know, I don't, I don't...

• 4:32:22Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 4:32:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:32:24Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I have, you know, a lot of thoughts on a lot of different things and I'm in my own, you know, spiritual journey as well, but, um... But yeah, I do, I think that the...

• 4:32:39Shawn Ryan?

  I think that our body is just a vessel.

• 4:32:41Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:32:41Shawn Ryan?

  And

• 4:32:44Shawn Ryan?

  I think that we are all, I mean, you talk about being connected, everything is connected, we're all part of God, I think.

• 4:32:52Shawn Ryan?

  I think God...

• 4:32:55Shawn Ryan?

  I think that...

• 4:33:00Shawn Ryan?

  Consciousness is God.

• 4:33:03Speaker 06

  There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:33:07Shawn Ryan?

  And I think we're all connected through consciousness.

• 4:33:11Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 4:33:12Shawn Ryan?

  And I think as time goes on, we are all becoming disconnected

• 4:33:17Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 4:33:19Shawn Ryan?

  through

• 4:33:22Shawn Ryan?

  what we consider technology.

• 4:33:25Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. That's the Antichrist, bro.

• 4:33:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's what I think.

• 4:33:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:33:31Shawn Ryan?

  In, in very short, simple terms.

• 4:33:35Speaker 06

  Okay, so yeah, we're along the same lines. I believe that. And I believe that

• 4:33:42Speaker 06

  there's different aspects of consciousness, like there's a feminine and a masculine. And it's represented sometimes in like the ancient Komet, the ancient Egyptians used to believe that, you know, how it was represented, you have, you know, it's not a male or a female, it's, it's both entities combined into one. And it's representative, it can be in the sun and the moon, the feminine and the masculine, and it's represented throughout all nature. God is and what it is. And it uses these signs and symbols to remind us that in the heavens. Yeah. I believe that. And I don't believe,

• 4:34:22Speaker 06

  I believe that the prince of this world and who controls this world is the evil one, Satan, devil, Lucifer, the fallen. I believe that. And that's why things are the way they are here. Um, like reading the Bible, when the fallen, a third of the angels were sent down to earth. They didn't go to hell, they were sent down here, the same place for all sin. This is all one big testing ground to see if we can, as gods, maneuver through something that was designed or set up from what we see by something that is not of this world.

• 4:35:05Speaker 06

  Um, some would consider the devil or Lucifer, the, the morning star. You know, the, the light bearer, that one, I think, has used.

• 4:35:18Speaker 06

  Politics, everything that we're involved in that makes life,

• 4:35:24Speaker 06

  that takes away from life, the meaning of life. Everything that is designed here to do that was on purpose and designed by one of the fallen, or the fallen, and we're here to be tested, like Job in the Bible.

• 4:35:38Shawn Ryan?

  Well, when you say, I would love to get into that too, but when you say

• 4:35:43Shawn Ryan?

  we are,

• 4:35:47Shawn Ryan?

  when, when you say our consciousness is sent here to this vessel to experience limitations. Why do you think we need to be sent here to experience limitations? For a blip in time? Because time doesn't exist. But it does in this reality.

• 4:36:10Speaker 06

  Because we would not, in order for a god to be a god, it would have to experience all aspects of experience. So to only have the experience of I can do everything and all things, and not the experience of having limitations would not have a complete being, one that has full experience. Like to have only one good experience, then there would also be no purpose in life either. Life would make zero sense. If everything was just perfect, then there'd be no point of coming here. So we have to have challenges and we have to have limitations in order to have a full experience of all that is called reality.

• 4:36:52Speaker 06

  Reality cannot be experienced in just one form. We're already doing that, or it's already doing that at its higher state. So to be a full god and an all-powerful god, we have to have limitations, as well as the good, the bad. Everything that's good, there has to be a bad.

• 4:37:11Shawn Ryan?

  Well, to get the full experience just of this world, you would have to live a life of every human being on the planet.

• 4:37:17Speaker 06

  Is it not, isn't that what it's doing though?

• 4:37:22Speaker 06

  If we're all from that, everything, everybody, we're all have, we all have our own experience, and we're all a direct descendant, connection. Imagine the sun and those rays of light. Each ray is a soul being shined down onto the earth. And each one, each ray goes along its own path. It does its own thing, has its own experience. So it's living through all of us in our experience to have one full experience, all the good, all the bad, to complete itself. You get what I'm?

• 4:37:59Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:37:59Speaker 06

  You know, so it's, yeah. It has to experience all things, and that's by living all lives, all different paths. No one's life is exactly the same.

• 4:38:12Shawn Ryan?

  So are we individual souls, or are we one collective soul?

• 4:38:15Speaker 06

  That's the thing. It's almost like saying, is the Holy Trinity separate, or is it all one? Is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all separate, or is it all together? According to biblical scripture, it's all one. They can't be separate. The Trinity is all one. Yeshua, when he walked this earth, he was no different than what he, or his father, or his father, just in a human form. It left us with the Holy Spirit, and it had the Holy Spirit, all existing all at one time.

• 4:38:53Shawn Ryan?

  So the way that, the way that the Holy Trinity has been described to me, maybe you've heard this. This made a lot of sense to me. Water, vapor, ice.

• 4:39:04Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 4:39:04Shawn Ryan?

  It's all one thing, but it's all different things.

• 4:39:07Speaker 06

  Thank you. Yeah, exactly. So I look at it that way, too. We're all different, but the same thing. That's how we're all connected. That's, we're all from the same source. We're just different down here, but all experiencing things differently. But we're all from the same being. We all share the same soul. Your soul is no different than mine. This outer limit, this outer boundary, maybe, our life paths, maybe, your experiences will be different than mine, but the thing that we have, the same, the same thing that you're made of on the inside, I'm made up of, and just like someone else down the street. We all come from that same source. There's no...

• 4:39:49Speaker 06

  There's only one entity that provides soul and spirit.

• 4:39:54Speaker 06

  Only one entity. We get that from one being, and it's just nothing more than a light ray being shined down into a body

• 4:40:02Speaker 06

  to occupy that flesh vessel that we are in. But once you take away all that,

• 4:40:09Speaker 06

  we're all from the same thing. We're all the same thing, just in a physical limitation body, limited body. That's what reality is, I think. It's just one big testing round of to see if we have what it takes to move on to the next level. You know?

• 4:40:27Shawn Ryan?

  What is the next level? What do you think the next level is?

• 4:40:30Speaker 06

  That I'm not too sure of. I would hope it would be what we call as heaven. Rejoining, rejoining the source, going back home or to the father or to the son. I, I, I would believe the next level is that to see if we're actually worthy of being the gods that we are. Of navigating all these tests here. If we're able to navigate that, then we move on to the next one. If not, I don't know if you, there is a place you go to hell, or you just have to come back and do it again.

• 4:41:03Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think there's a possibility this is hell?

• 4:41:06Speaker 06

  I've thought about that too. I believe that, like I said, that

• 4:41:11Speaker 06

  Lucifer rules this place, or he's the prince of this place.

• 4:41:17Speaker 06

  He's allowed to roam and do what he wants here. So according to, by definition, that would make this place hell. You know, maybe we are being punished for something that

• 4:41:30Speaker 06

  we all have, which is ego. And ego is the only thing that, that's what got the devil or Lucifer kicked out of heaven, was by having an ego. And that's the same thing that we all possess here. And it's one of the greatest things we have to overcome on this earth is overcoming our own ego. Our ego is going to kill us. If you let ego take over. Yeah, ego is, is a bad thing, I think. That's why psychedelics, when you have ego death, and you feel that, you know? Yeah, so this place could be like hell or the same place that the devil was sent to. I don't know.

• 4:42:04Shawn Ryan?

  I was just gonna ask you that. I was just gonna get to psychedelics when you brought the ego. Have you had? We talked a little bit of breakfast about this. Have you had a full-blown ego death?

• 4:42:14Speaker 06

  Yes, terrified, terrifying. Having cried so much in my life and felt so scared, I felt like I was dying. Like I said, I had a bad, not a bad experience, an experience with mushrooms. After watching Mike Tyson take a handful, I'm like, it can't be, you know, that crazy. So I took my handful, looked it up on Google, what does 2.5 grams look like? And a picture popped up and it said 2.5 grams. So I looked at my pile and was like, well, that must be about it. And it turned out to be way more than that, like five grams or whatever, and ate it. And I remember when reality shimmered and went away.

• 4:42:56Speaker 06

  And it felt like I was in the presence of God. My wife was sitting next to me and I told her, bow your head, bow your head. So we're, I'm bowing my head, she's bowing her head. And I'm like, I got a message that came through a light in my house and it was on a scroll. And the message said, "The law." And I'm like, what is the law? Follow the law. Like, what is that? Didn't know what the, the law turned out to be, like the 10 commandments, essentially. Follow the law. And I tripped for a few hours and that, well, not even a few hours. I don't know how, time was weird during that whole time.

• 4:43:37Speaker 06

  It felt like an eternity at one moment. It felt like I would go away and be amongst the presence of God, just couldn't see Him. And messages and information that I had no idea about. Like, just being forced at it and having the emotion of me, I felt like I was gonna die and being really scared. And at that time, me and my parents were not talking, had a huge resentment towards them.

• 4:44:12Speaker 06

  And something said, "Call them. Call your mom and dad, because I'm dying. I needed to talk to mom." You know, my wife is calming me down. I'm like, "Get ready to call 911." But then I thought if I called 911, they were gonna... It was all one big play. Like, when I was tripping, reality went away and there was a crowd, like, of every person I had ever interacted with in life and how I treated them, were like, standing up clapping. And then I was judged by them. And how I treated everyone on this earth is how I'm gonna be treated and judged in the afterlife. And it said, "Tread lightly." And it was all one big play.

• 4:44:55Speaker 06

  And everybody was a part of the play, whether they knew it or not. Some were tests to see if I would lose my cool and temper and act aggressively. And some were, you know, family members. There were, you know, everybody you can think of that you've come across, passed, passed by, bumped into, got pissed off in traffic, cussed out, wished some bad, you know, something bad upon them. Like, they were all there. They were all a part of this big play. And this was my life, and it was all for me, because, I don't know. And I died after that, but before I did, I called my parents. They're freaking out. They had never heard about psychedelics or psilocybin mushrooms.

• 4:45:38Speaker 06

  And like, "Where'd you get this stuff from? You bought it online?" I'm like, "No, I can't tell you where I got it from." Um, but it felt like I was dying and sinking into this void, hole of blackness where no love existed. And I didn't exist. My family didn't exist. And I was just alone. And like, naked in front of judgment.

• 4:46:05Speaker 06

  And void of all love and what I perceived as God was hell. Of incomplete darkness and void of nothing. And being stripped of everything that I thought I was and made myself to be. And I felt like a vulnerable, couldn't do anything, like infant. But just void and disconnected from love. And it said, well, it told me that was hell and, you know, oh, the disconnect from love. Fighting so much to stay away from that, pushing people out of my life and like I'm building my own hell and this is what it's gonna be like. And I felt myself like I was dying. Called my parents and I forgave them.

• 4:46:50Speaker 06

  Because I got the message that if I hold on to this, it's gonna cause me to go into this bad, negative place when we die. We never know where we're gonna die or when we're going to die. So it would be best or behoove me to rid myself of all the negativity that I had because I'm building my own hell. And I wanna be full of light, love and as much as possible throughout life, walking in a Christ consciousness. And because you never know when your time is gonna go. And then when that time comes, all that grudge that I had towards my family and my parents. God, the most high, told me, who am I to judge?

• 4:47:35Speaker 06

  And I shut up after that. I'm like, I don't, who am I to judge? I'm not perfect. They're not perfect, but I'm, I'm a non-perfect person judging also a non-perfect person because I don't think they're perfect. But it's coming from tainted, non-perfect eyes to begin with. The only one who's, who can judge should have perfect vision or be perfect. And none of us are. So who are we to judge? And we're gonna be judged accordingly in the afterlife. So, yeah, it's best not to judge because...

• 4:48:09Speaker 06

  We're gonna be treated the exact same way. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And that is as above, so below. You know? How we should carry ourselves that way here because it's gonna happen there. If you believe in the afterlife or not. And sometimes the judgment may come from our own selves. Sometimes we can be the biggest, hardest, hardest judgmental people on the planet is our own self. We will judge ourselves more than anybody else will and being hard on ourselves. So I think it, it, yeah. Judgment was a big message. So I forgave my parents, forgave them, told them who am I to judge? I don't, I can't do that, you know? That's your path. It is what it is.

• 4:48:52Speaker 06

  But to hold on to that grudge is only doing me bad, you know? Lot of darkness and a lot of resentment. I didn't need to carry that, you know? I didn't need to carry that. I've always looked at the pictures on the hieroglyphs, that little bag they're carrying. If you look at those, I've always looked at it as that's the bag of memories that we're gonna take in the afterlife. There's not many, so make them count, make them enjoyable, cuz that's all we're gonna take with this, is a small bag of memory. So either you want that bag full of good, good memories, or you can have it full of terrible memories. But there won't be many, so make it count, you know? Hope that makes sense.

• 4:49:33Shawn Ryan?

  This is a great segment.

• 4:49:36Speaker 06

  I hope, man.

• 4:49:37Shawn Ryan?

  On that note, uh, let's take a break. When we come back, I wanna talk about, do you believe in what we were doing over there?

• 4:49:46Speaker 06

  Hmm, that's a good one, good question. So I saved the answer.

• 4:49:53Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 4:50:15Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we're back from the break. This, this might be the long, we might go for the record here on the longest podcast ever. I think my longest one is with Cody Alfred. And I want to get into, eventually, we were gonna get into, was it worth it over there? Were we there for the right reasons? Are Americans, not Americans, is America the bad guy? Cause I often, yeah, wonder, you know, what, there's just so many things that people don't know about that were going on behind the scenes over there that, uh, they need to come to light. I think a lot of people do know, but they don't understand the significance,

• 4:50:57Shawn Ryan?

  or they just don't, excuse me, believe what, sometimes the truth is hard to believe.

• 4:51:03Speaker 06

  Yep, yep.

• 4:51:04Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, I wanted to, we're on this kind of biblical topic, and I want to talk to you about, you know, maybe not spiritual warfare, but there's all these signs that are, I mean, look at where the world is right now. It's a disaster. And it's, it's, it's not, you know, Americans think, oh, it's just this country, you know, with the, with everything. I mean, the, the, the fentanyl crisis, the, the woke agenda that's gone way out of bounds. The, the crime is on the rise, the border's completely wide open.

• 4:51:49Shawn Ryan?

  Everything, what's up is down, what's black is white. I mean, it's, nothing makes sense anymore. And that's, that's what brought me to faith finally, is I just, I, everything that I stand for is being ruined. And, but when you look at it from a, from a 30,000 foot view, or whatever you want to call it, bird's eye view, this is the whole world now. This isn't just this country, this is everywhere.

• 4:52:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:52:23Shawn Ryan?

  And...

• 4:52:26Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of,

• 4:52:29Shawn Ryan?

  it seems biblical to me. And so I just wanna get your take on that.

• 4:52:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think this, we're in the last leg, man. I think that Revelation, if you wanna call it that, we're in that last leg of, before something biblical happens. And it does talk about in Revelations, like you're gonna see the, plenty of signs in the heavens to let you know that the time is drawing near. And like, I'm into conspiracy theories and I think, I'm into, yeah, I am into conspiracy theories. You'd be surprised at what I dabbled in as far, I go down the rabbit hole. Like, I don't believe the earth is flat.

• 4:53:13Speaker 06

  Some compelling arguments, but I don't think it's flat. But um, I think what's happening now is just a sign of what's to come. You know, the end times before, whatever you believe in happens, either the Savior's gonna come back and help us out, or we're gonna have to go through some tribulation for some time.

• 4:53:37Shawn Ryan?

  Like pedophilia is running rampant.

• 4:53:39Speaker 06

  Dude, it's not even called that anymore. Now it's the attracted to minor people.

• 4:53:43Shawn Ryan?

  Maps, minor attracted persons.

• 4:53:46Speaker 06

  Please, bro.

• 4:53:47Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's, it's everywhere, man. It's, people are, it's, it's just, it's crazy.

• 4:53:54Speaker 06

  The evil one is running out of time. So he's pulling all the tricks out of his hat and putting them here to get as many souls as it can before the end. And I believe the signs that, you can look at it this way, the signs are the times, the signs of the times that we're in biblically, let's say for the solar eclipse coming up. During that time, you have also Jerusalem, the rabbis that are gonna sacrifice the red heifer.

• 4:54:24Shawn Ryan?

  What is the red heifer?

• 4:54:26Speaker 06

  The red cow, it's significant in the Bible. Um, it's only happened, I wanna say, seven or nine times. This may be the 10th,

• 4:54:36Speaker 06

  where they've had this red cow. Perfect without blemishes, without never been set on or set or whatever, some weird has to be perfect, like not a, only so many black hairs can be on it, has to be perfectly clean, never exposed to certain things, never tied to a post. Weird tradition that the, not weird, I just don't understand it, but it's in the Bible about the sacrifice of the red heifer, with that signified and the destroying of the temple before it gets rebuilt, the third temple.

• 4:55:14Speaker 06

  And the sacrifice of the red heifer before, I believe they burn its ashes and bathe in it, this rabbi, a pure rabbi who's pure, I'm not sure how deep down they go into what makes them pure, but a rabbi that's pure is going to bathe himself in it.

• 4:55:37Speaker 06

  And that's going to signify the destruction of the third temple, which they're also talking about doing, destroying that, the temple on the mound are, I forget what, it's that golden cap temple in Israel that the Jews, or not the Jews, the, uh, the Israelis? Israelis and the, um, Muslims believe that they, they go to worship and pray, the, the temple. It says in the Bible, when that third temple is going to be destroyed and rebuilt, that's going to be like a really good indication of, no, this, that we're in the end times. Then you have the total solar eclipse where it seems like America's going just weird,

• 4:56:19Speaker 06

  you know, and it's like happening for three days, over the course of three days. Is it, this is the next one coming up on April 8? April 8, yeah. That's a three day? Three day event, not three days of darkness, but it's a three days solar eclipse event, and during its peak of the solar eclipse is where you're gonna The devil's comet is also, should be visible to the naked eye. Had no idea about that until like recently, that there's a devil's comet that's going to be occurring the same time that the solar eclipse happens, a total solar eclipse. The red heifers being sacrificed and it just, according to Revelation and the Bible, all these signs have already been talked about, written down, and that said that that was going

• 4:57:04Speaker 06

  to mark or signify the times that we're in, the end of days or the end times before the Messiah comes back to rescue his people. But before that, that's why I think we have all this weird stuff happening where nothing makes sense, everything is the opposite. I know that, or I believe that the mockery of the Most High is to be opposite of it. And that's why we're seeing so much opposite. What you believe is up is now down. You know, things that we know as humans are not right, like a male cannot have a baby, or a menstrual cycle, but we're taught to believe, or they're saying to believe, no, no, that can happen. All the things that

• 4:57:48Speaker 06

  we know are not right, an abomination to the Most High, we're doing here on earth. So I think that the evil one is pulling all the tricks out its hat as one final last ditch effort before the Creator destroys it and locks it away forever and we can go back to living in harmony or peace. However many years is you believe it's gonna reign, or he's going to reign on earth and heaven's going to be on earth and heaven on earth can be interpreted as we can make heaven on earth by what we practice, what we believe and what happens in here, because where we're at is not, is far from heaven, or what anybody

• 4:58:32Speaker 06

  would classify as heaven. But I think it's just the last ditch effort as it's being backed into a corner, trying to gather as many souls as it can to join the darkness and reap its benefits by eating that soul. Those who don't fall for it, the temptation, or the lies, the great deceptions, the deceit.

• 4:58:56Speaker 06

  The chosen and be called to stand up against the evil forces in one final battle Armageddon and help destroy that force of evil. I think we're in those times. And I think every great civilization has had these times. From Sodom and Gomorrah to the great flood to flood out the Nephilim. The giants that walked the earth. I think it, history just repeats itself.

• 4:59:28Shawn Ryan?

  What are the giants? I've heard a lot of, I've heard this subject brought up on several different occasions. I don't know much about it.

• 4:59:36Speaker 06

  Well, according to the Bible, when the third of the angels were casted out of heaven and sent here, they loved women and they wanted to have babies with women. So they had babies, those babies came out to be big giants and they roamed the earth. And that's why they were destroyed. It was not supposed to be that way. So they were destroyed in the great flood, according to the Bible. Some religions or Indian beliefs is that these giants are things that came down, were not angels, they're aliens or star people. Mated with the female and had star children.

• 5:00:19Speaker 06

  These special children that obtained certain knowledge and when these things came down, they gave knowledge to mankind. Um, the Bible preaches that too, just as the Indians without the Bible believed and other religions believed that some beings came down from the heavens and advanced our civilization. Taught us technology. Taught us makeup. Taught us all these things that separated us from the true innate light and where we really come from, to separate us from that. And there's multiple stories from different religions that talk about star people, aliens, angels, fallen angels that come down,

• 5:01:02Speaker 06

  mated with women and produced this offspring, whether they're giants or whatever. But that's like throughout multiple religions and I believe something happened, why we went from being Not as intelligent to all of a sudden having this huge leap in technology. You know, in the like the past 50 years, it's hard to tell from, you know, what's real or what's not with AI and this video games, you know, and things look so real nowadays compared to Atari that I was playing as a kid and Nintendo. That advancement in technology in that period alone, I think is pretty significant. But to have gotten to that point, you know, supposedly, we don't know how we made the pyramids.

• 5:01:46Speaker 06

  We just lost that knowledge or was civilization destroyed in some apocalyptic event. And we're forced to restart over again, go back to square one. And we keep making the same mistakes of getting ahead of ourselves. Whether we're getting ahead of ourselves technologically or I look at it like the story in the Bible where they were building the Tower of Babel. And the gods looked down and said, because they know everything, they know everything because they're, they speak the same language. So he destroyed that tower and scattered the people and gave them all languages. And that's why, so he couldn't communicate and be able to accomplish anything.

• 5:02:30Speaker 06

  So he scattered us, gave us all different languages. And that's that story biblically. But I think it was not necessarily speaking the same language. It was the, we were all together, all one, we had the same belief system. And we got ahead of ourselves and before, and the tower was being built to reach God. But not necessarily, I don't believe it was a physical tower. I think this tower was a metaphor for we're almost as a species getting close to God or God like on earth. And to prevent that, it scattered everyone amongst the winds and

• 5:03:12Speaker 06

  made them speak new things or speak new, just not being able to relate with one another. And it separated us that way. We no longer spoke the same language. And I think at that time, the language was love. And it separated us so we could not be all together. And I think that that's what happens in civilizations where you reach this peak in.

• 5:03:37Speaker 06

  Everything's accomplishable, you can do anything and it for some odd reason gets recycled and restarted, or things just get really bad and the morals are not, it's not what drives mankind. The morals have changed, we don't have any anymore, we've become too caught up in the flesh, too caught up in materialistic things and the things that we can't take when we leave with us, which is our spirit, our, uh, the only thing we can take with us is our spirit and we neglect that the most and we feed the external forces to satisfy physical pleasure as opposed to spiritual

• 5:04:14Speaker 06

  pleasure and that separation, I think, is what is driving the forces the way they're being driven today is that we've maybe got caught too much in selfishness, materialism, all that and forgot the thing that mattered the most and it's like erasing the drawing board and, and starting back over again. Um, if you were a god, what would you do? If you looked down and you saw your creation going to absolute shit, you'd probably want to destroy, I would want to destroy it too, like, what's the point? I, you know, he wanted the, according to the Bible, destroy it after Adam

• 5:04:57Speaker 06

  and Eve, when she ate from, or when they ate the fruit and obtained knowledge. That was the thing that, you know, got them kicked out of the Garden of Eden, or if you believe it to be that, you know, it was too much knowledge, too fast and they were forced out of that garden and also in, you know, free will and all that, but he wanted to destroy it after that and we've done nothing but as civilization continuously mess up and go against the natural laws of nature and yeah, morals and being kind to one another, we've become dark, an abomination to, well, I believe this god.

• 5:05:41Shawn Ryan?

  I'm definitely with you.

• 5:05:42Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:05:43Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's getting...

• 5:05:46Shawn Ryan?

  Very hard to tell what's real.

• 5:05:48Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 5:05:49Shawn Ryan?

  With AI.

• 5:05:53Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think we're smarter. I think we are.

• 5:05:56Speaker 06

  There we go, yeah.

• 5:05:57Shawn Ryan?

  I think we are. Take all the technology and all that shit away. I I think we're dumber.

• 5:06:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:06:06Shawn Ryan?

  What do they say, we use 10% of our brain?

• 5:06:08Speaker 06

  That's what they say. I don't I don't know what that really in, you know.

• 5:06:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, if you think about, I had this conversation with another guest, Joe McMonigal, which we were talking about earlier at breakfast, but he, and I can't remember if I had this conversation with him on or off camera, but

• 5:06:26Shawn Ryan?

  we were talking about

• 5:06:29Shawn Ryan?

  our brain and, and he had brought up language. And he was basically saying, he was saying, this stemmed from remote viewing. And he said, I believe that, I don't want to quote him, but if I remember correctly, the conversation was that we all have the capability to do remote viewing.

• 5:06:55Shawn Ryan?

  And we all had a lot more instinct and we were able to communicate a lot more efficiently. And that language, when language was developed, it actually hindered communication. And if you think about that, it does make sense because we do still read each other's body language, which is technically maybe all you need is to read body language. And

• 5:07:28Shawn Ryan?

  at the beginning, you know, it was probably grunting and noises. And it was just immediate communication.

• 5:07:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:07:38Shawn Ryan?

  Not

• 5:07:40Shawn Ryan?

  so in-depth like what we're having now, but it was immediate, effective communication. And then language was developed and that basically slowed communication down. And it's kind of been a downward trend since then, where we've lost a lot of instinct. We've lost

• 5:08:01Shawn Ryan?

  supposed capabilities like.

• 5:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  I would just call it tapping into intuition. I think that humanity has lost a lot of intuition.

• 5:08:12Speaker 06

  And the barrier which calls that is what, not only language, but would you say technology?

• 5:08:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and then it's just, that's what it's all spiraled into, right? Technology now, I mean, I heard a podcast the other day that said that in 10 years, scientists are predicting that because of how addict, how much screen time you're getting on your phone, that they're predicting that we're gonna start losing peripheral vision.

• 5:08:41Speaker 06

  You're kidding.

• 5:08:42Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, who knows, right?

• 5:08:44Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 5:08:44Shawn Ryan?

  It's a prediction, it's, you know what I mean? But it, people think I'm crazy, they'll go, oh, well, what did the science say about, you know, flu season?

• 5:08:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:08:55Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, yeah, I get it, you know what I mean? But, I mean, I don't, people are gonna push back on whatever you say, you know? And, but, part of me is like, man, I could totally see that happening. You know, and, and I could totally see humanity, I mean, there's a saying, you don't use it, you lose it.

• 5:09:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:09:17Shawn Ryan?

  And, I get a lot of screen time on my phone, not near as much as what I see kids and other people doing, because I make it a point to put it away. I'm not gonna say I'm not addicted to it, cuz I am, I'd be lying, you know, if I, if I...

• 5:09:34Speaker 06

  Be sure open about it, man, there's a lot of people who say, you know, I only do two minutes.

• 5:09:37Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not in denial about it.

• 5:09:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:09:40Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, I mean, I talk all the time with my wife about getting up, going back to the flip phone.

• 5:09:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:09:45Shawn Ryan?

  Unfortunately, you have banking and everything is done on the phone, but maybe if,

• 5:09:51Shawn Ryan?

  you know, I leave my phone a lot of times when I'm, when we're doing a family event.

• 5:09:55Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:09:55Shawn Ryan?

  If we leave the house and I wanna be in the moment, that phone stays.

• 5:09:59Speaker 06

  Smart, man.

• 5:09:59Shawn Ryan?

  Home, but, um, but, uh, I, I, long story short, I mean, I think we're, we're dubbed down and dumbed down and, and...

• 5:10:16Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, I just, I got, I, I, I feel like this is some master plan. I mean, even with the pharmaceutical in, going way back, the energy. You know how we could have gone with Nikola Tesla's model, or we could have gone with, you know, fossil fuel model. We took that route because now everybody's stuck on utilities. It's a money grab, you know, the pharmaceuticals. I mean, I had, do you know who Chris Beck is by chance? Yeah, yeah. Brilliant guy. Yeah. Brilliant mind. And had an offline conversation with him about the pharmaceutical industry and how the, was it the Rockefeller family that pumped $800 million back in the early 1900s?

• 5:11:00Shawn Ryan?

  Think about what $800 million is today. Yeah, billions. With inflation. And, you know, uh, over a hundred years. Yeah. Of, of inflation. Now, take $800 million back in the 1900s. Billions. What does that even, what does that even equivalent to now? You could do whatever you want. Exactly. I mean, it's, I would say it's probably beyond the trillionaire level. Yeah, yeah. You know, and they pumped that much money into pharmaceuticals to get away from natural eastern medicine. That works. Yeah.

• 5:11:45Shawn Ryan?

  Psychedelics, perfect example. It works. Yeah. You know, and, and, and you look at all the drugs that, that we're on. Look at all the side effects. It's the same reason, man. May cause suicidal thoughts, may cause suicidal thoughts, may cause, and, and it's, it's, it's the food, everything, you know what I mean, is, is.

• 5:12:10Shawn Ryan?

  I think we're definitely not what we were supposed to be.

• 5:12:14Speaker 06

  That's what I mean. It's not, we've gotten smarter. Technology has become the, the block between us and our natural state, or the state we were supposed to be in or evolve into naturally. I think technology has interfered with that and put us on a, where we thought we were going to go is the exact opposite of we were, where we were thinking we were going to go. Like, the internet, for example, was supposed to bring everyone together, all interconnected. But it's, I don't know, I think it's done the exact opposite. At some points, you can, I guess I can say that being able to talk to them, it's how I met my wife, was on MySpace.

• 5:12:57Speaker 06

  But, social media today and these dating site things and more people are, and that new VR headset thing, that you can live in like the metaverse, you know? Cool technology, but we're separating ourselves more and more each day by being on the phone and, and not interacting the way we used to. And, like, my neighborhood, it's rare. I'd tell my kid to go outside, you know, go outside and play, go make friends or whatever. But, the amount of kids that come outside is so much different from when I was growing up. It's, you don't really see that anymore, at least where I live. And I think we've had, technology has been like an interference, I think,

• 5:13:42Speaker 06

  keeping us more apart, more separate from each other and what I believe to be God, whether that's nature or whatever. But, I think it's definite, like, definitely an interference that it's, that it's put on humanity. And maybe that's the thing too, maybe we've got, gotten to a point where technology has become too much and maybe that's the reason why civilizations fall. You get to an advanced technological level, but you've lost all connection of who you are and what you are, that it gets destroyed. Like, you don't use it, you lose it. And if you're not using who you are as a human being, then I'm, why wouldn't you lose that too? Your right to be a human, you know?

• 5:14:25Shawn Ryan?

  The, the, the lies that we've been fed and the...

• 5:14:33Shawn Ryan?

  So many things that were labeled conspiracy that turned out not to be conspiracy. I mean, it's now to the point where I already question everything. Is...

• 5:14:49Shawn Ryan?

  I think we've all been manipulated a lot more than any of us can even fathom.

• 5:14:55Speaker 06

  Oh, big time.

• 5:14:55Shawn Ryan?

  And I, like, part of me, part of me looks forward to death so that, so that it's all revealed.

• 5:15:07Shawn Ryan?

  Does that make any sense? I don't trust anything anymore. I don't, I think we are already at the point where you cannot believe anything that you see unless it's right in front of you and you can touch it. You know, I think the...

• 5:15:25Speaker 06

  How would you feel if it was all revealed while you were alive, though? Do you think you could...

• 5:15:29Shawn Ryan?

  Process it?

• 5:15:30Speaker 06

  Process it all and understand that?

• 5:15:35Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 5:15:36Speaker 06

  Me neither. And I think that's the scary...

• 5:15:37Shawn Ryan?

  I think there's so much deceit in this world that I don't think that any human could process how much of it is false. I mean...

• 5:15:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think in this lifetime, we're gonna see it, though, a lot of it be revealed. I think the veil is already lifting. And that's why I think we are thinking and talking the way that we are talking now. And I think a lot of people are starting to see stuff is not right. I don't know which degree, but I would hope so, that people are starting to see that we've been fed a bunch of BS and lies that...

• 5:16:15Shawn Ryan?

  Just on this show, you know, I had a, do you know who Jim Caviezel is?

• 5:16:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:16:20Shawn Ryan?

  I had a really very interesting discussion with Jim Caviezel on some of the stuff that's going on in Hollywood. And that episode just disappeared.

• 5:16:32Speaker 06

  Really?

• 5:16:33Shawn Ryan?

  Woke up one day and it was gone.

• 5:16:35Speaker 06

  You two removed it, or...

• 5:16:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, they've removed it. Let's fast forward about six months.

• 5:16:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, last night, before this interview, P. Diddy.

• 5:16:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:16:47Shawn Ryan?

  His house in Miami and his house in Los Angeles got raided.

• 5:16:51Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 5:16:51Shawn Ryan?

  For a big.

• 5:16:52Speaker 06

  Sex trafficking.

• 5:16:53Shawn Ryan?

  Sex trafficking operation.

• 5:16:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:16:56Shawn Ryan?

  That was labeled a conspiracy six months ago.

• 5:16:59Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 5:17:00Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and it's just keep, and more and more and more of these people are getting,

• 5:17:07Shawn Ryan?

  they're getting the light shined on.

• 5:17:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's it.

• 5:17:09Shawn Ryan?

  And.

• 5:17:10Speaker 06

  Where's the light come from?

• 5:17:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 5:17:11Speaker 06

  And who's the source of the light, the source of all light? That's what I think is happening.

• 5:17:16Shawn Ryan?

  We could go on about flu season. We could go, I mean, there's so many things that are just coming out that, that in, in, and that's, I don't think we're even scratching the surface.

• 5:17:27Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 5:17:28Shawn Ryan?

  I think there's gonna be things in space. I think there's gonna be things here on earth.

• 5:17:33Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 5:17:33Shawn Ryan?

  I think there's gonna be history that's revealed.

• 5:17:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:17:36Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of,

• 5:17:39Shawn Ryan?

  more than we could even fathom is gonna be revealed. That is, I, I think just about everything we think we know

• 5:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  on this planet is a lie.

• 5:17:49Speaker 06

  Dude, that's scary.

• 5:17:51Shawn Ryan?

  It scares the shit out of me.

• 5:17:52Speaker 06

  If, yeah, if that's true, which apart, I, I believe it, but then I, I think to save my sanity, I try not to

• 5:18:03Speaker 06

  entertain the idea that what if everything that we've been told is a lie? Then what does that, what does that put us? Like, where, where, where do we go from there?

• 5:18:13Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go into the wars.

• 5:18:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:18:16Shawn Ryan?

  You and I both fought in.

• 5:18:19Speaker 06

  GWOT.

• 5:18:20Shawn Ryan?

  In the GWOT, in the global war on terrorism. Do you think that was a lie?

• 5:18:24Speaker 06

  Hundred percent.

• 5:18:25Shawn Ryan?

  So do I.

• 5:18:26Speaker 06

  Hundred percent.

• 5:18:27Shawn Ryan?

  I think the entire thing was a lie. I mean, let's look, and for those that are gonna go, oh, you're crazy. Okay, let's go, let's look at Dick Cheney.

• 5:18:36Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 5:18:38Shawn Ryan?

  CEO of Halliburton.

• 5:18:41Shawn Ryan?

  We started war in Iraq. Halliburton is a, is a massive logistics company. And you were in Iraq.

• 5:18:51Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 5:18:52Shawn Ryan?

  And I was in Iraq. And everything there was KBR, which is a subsidiary of Halliburton. The mail was delivered by KBR. The chow was cooked by KBR. The people that built the chow hall.

• 5:19:05Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 5:19:06Shawn Ryan?

  Was built by KBR or Halliburton.

• 5:19:08Speaker 06

  Halliburton, yeah.

• 5:19:09Shawn Ryan?

  Fuel, Halliburton. Every, everything, everything there, the entire infrastructure was set up by Halliburton.

• 5:19:19Speaker 06

  There's one guy in charge of that.

• 5:19:21Shawn Ryan?

  Who happened to be the vice president at the time.

• 5:19:25Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. Makes you wonder. And if anyone questions that, I mean, I don't believe in coincidence.

• 5:19:31Shawn Ryan?

  Makes you wonder.

• 5:19:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:19:33Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's right fucking in front of you.

• 5:19:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:19:35Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean?

• 5:19:36Speaker 06

  But some people won't even bat an eye at it.

• 5:19:38Shawn Ryan?

  They won't.

• 5:19:39Speaker 06

  They won't bat an eye. I could dive deeper into the conspiracy thing, but I don't know how deep. I'll just say Building 7 is weird, you know?

• 5:19:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:19:49Speaker 06

  And I, I'm, I would hate to believe that we're so money hungry that we would do something to that nature to just get us into a conflict and waste innocent lives.

• 5:20:01Shawn Ryan?

  Look at Ukraine.

• 5:20:02Speaker 06

  Money, yeah.

• 5:20:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, Woodrow Wilson, was it Woodrow Wilson, the president? Uh, he'd warned us right after World War II about the military industrial complex and how it will likely spin out of control.

• 5:20:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:20:16Shawn Ryan?

  Correct?

• 5:20:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:20:17Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I'm talking about?

• 5:20:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:20:18Shawn Ryan?

  Now look at, then we just talked about the GWAT, and that was just Iraq. That, now we're talking about, look at Ukraine.

• 5:20:25Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:20:26Shawn Ryan?

  We, you know, it's not, we're sending them military supplies so that the military industrial complex companies.

• 5:20:34Speaker 06

  Make more.

• 5:20:34Shawn Ryan?

  Can make more.

• 5:20:35Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:20:36Shawn Ryan?

  And they pay off the politicians to vote on this shit.

• 5:20:40Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 5:20:41Shawn Ryan?

  So that they can make more.

• 5:20:42Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 5:20:43Shawn Ryan?

  And it's, it's all.

• 5:20:46Shawn Ryan?

  I hate saying it's by design because it's so cliche, but it is all a money thing, man. It's a money thing to the politicians. It's a money thing to the military industrial complex companies. Money thing to the president, money thing to the vice president. It's all a greed machine.

• 5:21:08Speaker 06

  A club and we're not in it, man.

• 5:21:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 5:21:10Speaker 06

  We are not in it. Being at that level, at this level, no. And I think that to get to that level, like you sell your soul out a long time ago to even... If the truth came out and it was that, let's say it is all about money, which I believe it's all about money. Then that means that the powers that be are willing to sacrifice 18, 19, 21 year old or anybody for that matter for the benefit of the pocket. Which is just the sacrifice, the offering that you do to gain more money. Who are we controlled by? Then that means that we're evil, bro. Our politi... They're all corrupt and evil.

• 5:21:53Speaker 06

  And if that is true, then why do we continue to participate in their game? If it's a corrupt system, if it's evil, that's why I don't, I don't believe in voting. I don't believe in it because I think that if it's as corrupt as we, as I think it is and back at the last election, there's a belief that, you know, something was going on with that election. Then at what point does your vote really matter? And are you the one really voting? Or is it nothing more than a way to keep track of you and a documentation? You know, I don't know, but I know that if our vote truly mattered, then there would not be lobbyists and people behind the scenes and big corporations and big banks

• 5:22:35Speaker 06

  that pay off these politicians to make votes in the dead of night that we don't get a chance to see until the next morning and it's already a done deal. At what point do we really, the average person who votes, where do we fit in and where do we matter? If they're able to manipulate an election, not just here in any country. So we do that, it's no secret, but...

• 5:22:59Shawn Ryan?

  At what point do we really matter? You know? We don't matter to them. Yeah, we don't. We look at the, look at the FDA. Mm-hmm. You can be paid off. You know what the, you know what the life expectancy is in this country now? Seventy-six? Bingo. Yeah. Seventy-six years old. Yeah. Look at all the shit that gets approved with our drugs, our food, our clothes, our shampoo, our deodorant, our toothpaste. Mm-hmm. And, I mean psychedelics alone. Mm-hmm. Psychedelic, I mean, I did my psychedelic journey two, over two years ago, we talked about this. Haven't had a drop of booze since. There you go.

• 5:23:42Shawn Ryan?

  Not one drop. Huh. And it's, it's not, it wasn't, I didn't even go down to do that. I didn't make it a point to do it, you know? And it's getting, it's curing addiction. Mm-hmm. It's curing anxiety. It's cur, it's, now they're working on it with Alzheimer's. It's curing TBI. Huh. I had a guy, one of my best friends go down there. He was shot in the head. Mm-hmm. With a, in a road rage accident and survived probably the worst car bomb incident I've ever seen. Somebody actually walk out on. Guy couldn't, couldn't walk without a cane, couldn't go outside without sunglasses on, even on a cloudy day because his vertigo was so bad. Wow. Spent three to four days a week bedridden.

• 5:24:28Shawn Ryan?

  I've been trying to talk him into going down there. He finally goes, he does an Ibogaine treatment. Mm-hmm. Leaves his fucking cane there, doesn't need his sunglasses anymore. So sick. Has no more vertigo. It's, I mean. But it's too easy. It's getting people off benzos, it's getting people off opiates, it's getting people off alcohol. I mean, so there goes the entire benzo, you know?

• 5:24:55Speaker 06

  Opioides.

• 5:24:55Shawn Ryan?

  Valium, Xanax.

• 5:24:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:24:58Shawn Ryan?

  Lorazepam. I mean, there's a whole family of them. That knocks, I mean, everybody's on that shit.

• 5:25:03Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I lost a friend too, yeah.

• 5:25:06Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean?

• 5:25:07Speaker 06

  Xanax, yeah.

• 5:25:08Shawn Ryan?

  Oxycontin, hydrocodone, all of that, all that stuff cures it, man. Cures it. How is this shit not legal? We have an opiate crisis and a benzo crisis.

• 5:25:19Speaker 06

  That's the reason.

• 5:25:19Shawn Ryan?

  In the country today, and this shit is illegal.

• 5:25:23Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:25:24Shawn Ryan?

  Like, when the fuck are these people gonna wake up?

• 5:25:26Speaker 06

  So is science real?

• 5:25:27Shawn Ryan?

  They still fucking think that the government, I'm spitting, I'm so fucking pissed off.

• 5:25:31Speaker 06

  No, you're good, you're good, no dude.

• 5:25:32Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know what I mean? What is, when are peop-, they're not going to fucking wake up.

• 5:25:36Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 5:25:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, they, they still think that the fucking government has our best interest. And we're going over war that was started for bullshit, that we both fought in.

• 5:25:46Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:25:47Shawn Ryan?

  Now we're talking about the fucking FDA, we're talking about pharmaceuticals, we're talking about everything. Everywhere you look is deception.

• 5:25:55Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. And it's all powered and ruled by one thing, money, man. Greed and money, greed and money. They don't, our, we don't matter, bro. And I think that's the, the part that I get pissed off is that not enough people are waking up. And when we do wake up, what now? What now?

• 5:26:14Shawn Ryan?

  Well, people don't know how to get organized.

• 5:26:16Speaker 06

  That's the thing. Yeah.

• 5:26:17Shawn Ryan?

  We don't, we, we were talking about that earlier. So this is where we need a Faraday box.

• 5:26:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:26:24Shawn Ryan?

  But, um.

• 5:26:25Speaker 06

  I don't want to encourage anyone to read the deck, no, never mind. But, yeah, we're not organized. We're not, I think to get organized, one, we have to be able to process as a whole. To process and understand what's going on, what's happened. And there has to be, I guess, a leader.

• 5:26:44Shawn Ryan?

  The only way you get organized is when everybody comes to one commonality and, and common core values and beliefs.

• 5:26:51Speaker 06

  Will that happen?

• 5:26:52Shawn Ryan?

  That's where the division happens, you know? That's why, race, let's divide them on race, let's divide them on gender, let's divide them on politics, let's divide them on, let's, every, every, you can't even pick a subject now where they're, where people are not divided. So it's, it's, you know, to, in order to get organized, it's, it's damn near impossible.

• 5:27:11Speaker 06

  Yep, we forgot they were all human, hue, the hue of man. You know, we're all spirit man, spirit beings.

• 5:27:19Shawn Ryan?

  It's sad.

• 5:27:20Speaker 06

  And then black, white, yeah, all that. I hundred percent agree, but I think that maybe we're at a point of no return, you know? I think that too, and I hope in my lifetime I get a chance to see change, but the road we're heading, man, I don't know if I will. I pray my son does though. I pray he does, you know? I really do, cuz I couldn't imagine what's gonna happen in twenty more years from now of heading down this road. Where do we end up?

• 5:27:49Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you know, it's.

• 5:27:54Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, man.

• 5:27:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:27:55Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I think.

• 5:27:55Speaker 06

  That's the nightmare.

• 5:27:56Shawn Ryan?

  Step one is people are putting way too much faith in in humans. You know, it's it's putting all their faith into Joe Biden.

• 5:28:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:28:09Shawn Ryan?

  Or putting all their faith into Donald Trump. Or Elon Musk is gonna fix the so the the the freedom of speech thing. It's like, dude, and I'm not talking shit about it.

• 5:28:21Speaker 06

  No, I.

• 5:28:21Shawn Ryan?

  Any particular one of them.

• 5:28:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:28:23Shawn Ryan?

  There's ones that I hate and there's ones that I don't. But that's because, you I just, look. My beliefs are in my own core values. It's my values, my beliefs, what I stand for. And I think where America's gone wrong in the world is they have put, they they don't even know what they believe in anymore. They don't know what their own values are. And they're putting their their, it's, what's Nick say? I'm gonna believe whatever Nick says.

• 5:28:55Speaker 06

  Mm hmm, and I could be wrong.

• 5:28:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:28:57Speaker 06

  You know?

• 5:28:57Shawn Ryan?

  Or you could wake up one day because you, somebody pissed you off and flip the switch and go the complete opposite direction. You know?

• 5:29:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:29:06Shawn Ryan?

  And the people today are gonna follow you in whatever direction you decide. It's your beliefs and your values that you need to be standing up for, not anybody else's. You know?

• 5:29:19Speaker 06

  That's the.

• 5:29:19Shawn Ryan?

  Different perspectives are fine, but. Now, people are just being led around by the fucking nose. I don't even realize.

• 5:29:26Speaker 06

  Everybody's an influencer. Everybody's a social media. I cannot stand that word, dude. Influencer. I don't, what am I influencing? Or what are you influencing?

• 5:29:35Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 5:29:36Speaker 06

  Nothing. I mean, there's a few out there, but your average, just because our Instagram models, like, what is, what are you contributing to society? I don't, that's where we're at, man. That's where we're at. We've become, yeah, we've lost our own morals, man, and our own beliefs. No matter what it is you believe in, you follow whatever's trending. Yeah, we're trending people. We follow what's trending.

• 5:29:59Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I, I do wanna say, I wanna, I wanna wrap this up.

• 5:30:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:30:04Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, you know, I heard, I watched a clip of you, and I, I, it was somebody that asked you, was it worth it over there?

• 5:30:13Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:30:13Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think we've made a difference?

• 5:30:15Speaker 06

  No. I don't. For every one number one guy that was killed, there's another number one guy today. No matter how many of them we killed, there's always, and I think we've done, dude, I don't care. We, we've, I think we destroyed generations, and all we did was just piss people off more. Like, if I killed your dad, that son's gonna grow up with just as much hate, if not more hate, towards me than his dad did. And we're gonna keep that cycle going. For what? You know? I don't, and I've questioned who we were, who we were really killing overseas.

• 5:30:56Speaker 06

  Like, I don't know if these guys were just farmers protecting their land. I don't know. No. Yeah, uh, we never went to Saudi Arabia after 9/11. You know, we didn't go there. They controlled too much oil, regardless if most of the hijackers were from Saudi. We didn't touch them. We flew the Bin Laden family out in the beginning after 9/11 happened. We put them on planes and flew them to safety. We flew Saudis out to safety. But we went to Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't, and from my experience in Afghanistan, I just don't, some dudes in caves did all that. They were not that great when I fought them. They were good, but...

• 5:31:38Speaker 06

  Not pulling off one of the greatest heists of all times of our terrorist attacks of flying. I don't know.

• 5:31:45Shawn Ryan?

  I think those people, enemy or not,

• 5:31:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:31:49Shawn Ryan?

  friend or foe, I think some of those people are the most.

• 5:31:53Speaker 06

  Resilient.

• 5:31:54Shawn Ryan?

  They resilient. It's not where I was going, but they stand by what they believe in and they are willing to die for what they believe in. And I think that's something that Westerners could.

• 5:32:09Speaker 06

  Big time.

• 5:32:10Shawn Ryan?

  Could could learn from. I do want to leave you with this, though, because do I think we should have been over there? No. Do I think there's a lot of?

• 5:32:20Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think, I know there's a lot of fucking corruption.

• 5:32:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:32:25Shawn Ryan?

  But I do think that we made an impact. And it may not be the impact that we hope to make, but, you know, I will say, especially in Afghanistan, you know.

• 5:32:40Shawn Ryan?

  The Taliban is a very controlling, oppressing outfit. And since we were over there, yes, there was a lot of death and destruction. I do think we killed a lot of innocent farmers and people that were just protecting what they have.

• 5:32:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:33:00Shawn Ryan?

  But women were able to go to universities. A lot of freedoms, they got a taste.

• 5:33:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:33:08Shawn Ryan?

  A small taste

• 5:33:12Shawn Ryan?

  of what freedom tastes like. And I think that brought a lot of them hope and and and they want that. And there's a resistance over there and they're still fighting to do that. One of the resistance fighters is actually coming on this Thursday.

• 5:33:30Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 5:33:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, he's flying in.

• 5:33:32Speaker 06

  Keep that guy safe, man.

• 5:33:34Shawn Ryan?

  What's that?

• 5:33:34Speaker 06

  I hope, keep that guy safe.

• 5:33:36Shawn Ryan?

  His face won't be on camera, but but he's going to talk about what's happening over there. And and and and I've talked to him several times and he is very happy that we went over there. He's obviously not happy how we pulled out, but you know, we.

• 5:33:56Shawn Ryan?

  In a weird, roundabout way, you know, we showed those people what life could look like, you know, if they aren't so oppressed.

• 5:34:05Speaker 06

  I never thought of that.

• 5:34:05Shawn Ryan?

  By outfits like the Taliban. And so, we did some good.

• 5:34:11Speaker 06

  Well, I'll take that piece with me, man. Yeah, definitely.

• 5:34:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:34:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. Wow. Yeah, now we have to worry about our own government overstepping boundaries and taking away some of our freedoms and liberties and our pursuit of happiness as well. Now we're at that crossroads.

• 5:34:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:34:31Speaker 06

  Maybe we've been fighting the wrong, I don't know. Forgot to look here.

• 5:34:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 5:34:38Speaker 06

  I hope not.

• 5:34:39Shawn Ryan?

  I know what you're getting at.

• 5:34:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:34:41Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Nick, man, that was a hell of an interview, brother.

• 5:34:45Speaker 06

  Loved it, man. Loved it.

• 5:34:47Shawn Ryan?

  And it's one of my favorite ones.

• 5:34:49Speaker 06

  I really appreciate it, man, for real.

• 5:34:52Shawn Ryan?

  Great life story. I'm glad to see how well you're doing now. And I truly mean this, man. It was an honor to have you here, and I hope to see you again.

• 5:35:03Speaker 06

  Oh, anytime, man. Hey, dude, before I go, it's great to see you where you're at today. And the light that you shine on others who may have not had that opportunity, dude, keep doing your thing, bro. It's great to see you. Great to see you. Yeah.

• 5:35:21Shawn Ryan?

  I will. Definitely. Much love, brother.

• 5:35:24Speaker 06

  You too.

• 5:35:25Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 5:35:25Speaker 06

  Much love.