#126 Joe Kent - Gold Star Husband and Ex-Special Forces/CIA Operative Now Running for Congress

Joe Kent is an Army Special Forces Veteran with two decades of service. Following the tragic death of his wife, Shannon Kent, who served in intelligence operations combatting ISIS in Syria, Joe's career evolved from Special Operations into Field Operative roles in the CIA. Kent would then focus his career on institutional change, advising President Trump on national security and foreign policy. After his retirement from the military, Kent has committed to a continued life of service as a candidate for office in Washington's 3rd congressional district. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://helixsleep.com/srs https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://drinkhoist.com- USE CODE "SHAWN" https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Joe Kent Links: Campaign - https://joekentforcongress.com X - https://x.com/joekent16jan19 FB - https://www.facebook.com/joekent4congress IG - https://www.instagram.com/joekent16jan19 Book - https://www.harpercollins.com/products/send-me-marty-skovlundjoe-kent 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

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

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 0:04Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:10Speaker 02

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

• 0:14Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:16Speaker 03

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

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:25Speaker 01

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

• 0:35Shawn Ryan?

  Joe Kent, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me, man, I appreciate it. My pleasure, my pleasure. You popped up on my radar and I started digging in on you a little bit and not too much though, because I want to be surprised in the interview, but man, you have such a, such a impressive career and you've been through so much. There's so many things we need to talk about in this, in this podcast, but, but primarily, you know, you and your wife's story and I'm very much looking forward to digging into that and I think there's going to be a lot of wisdom that comes from this and a lot

• 1:19Shawn Ryan?

  of content that's going to help people that are going through very tough chapters in their life. So I just, I just want to say, man, thank you for being here. I appreciate that, man, thanks for having me. It's going to be a heavy interview and, and so, you know, just like we were talking about at breakfast, this is your interview. I want to do, I want to give you the best life story interview you've ever had, best to my ability at least and, and so we'll, we'll do childhood, military career, family life, and then getting into you running for Congress. Sounds great. So, yeah, be a, a very well-rounded interview, but I'm going to go ahead and introduce you real quick, hope you don't mind, bud.

• 2:06Shawn Ryan?

  Joe, you are a 20-year veteran of special forces, Army Special Forces. Then you went on to a field operative job at the Central Intelligence Agency. Your first wife Shannon, who also served, was killed while fighting ISIS in Syria. You're a widower, raising your two young sons in Washington State, and are now remarried to your wife Heather Kaiser. You served as a foreign policy adviser to former President Trump. You also served as a project manager for a tech company before retiring on your military pension in January of 2023 to devote yourself fully to your campaign.

• 2:48Shawn Ryan?

  Your candidacy for US Congress is focused on restoring common sense, Republican values, and defeating the woke extremist Democrat Congresswoman Marie Perez. And you are the author of "Send Me the True Story of a Mother at War."

• 3:07Joe Kent?

  That's awesome. Thank you.

• 3:08Shawn Ryan?

  Am I missing? I'm sure I'm missing a lot.

• 3:10Joe Kent?

  That's great, man.

• 3:11Shawn Ryan?

  But quite the career. So, before we move on, everybody gets a gift. I don't know if you're aware of this.

• 3:20Joe Kent?

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 3:21Shawn Ryan?

  There you go. You got any guesses?

• 3:24Joe Kent?

  I'm hoping it's gummy bears.

• 3:26Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you're hot. You're hot. There they are.

• 3:29Joe Kent?

  That's awesome. I won't come back empty-handed. My kids will be excited.

• 3:32Shawn Ryan?

  Legal in all 50 states, although that doesn't matter because, you know, pretty much everything's legal in Washington.

• 3:38Joe Kent?

  Exactly, yeah. There's no limits there, yeah.

• 3:41Shawn Ryan?

  But, yeah, you can enjoy those on the ride home. I'll give you more for your kids. But anyways, Joe, like I said, we kind of went over the outline of what we're going to talk about. But before we get too heavy in the weeds, I am interested in, why did you decide to run for Congress?

• 4:04Joe Kent?

  Man, the short answer is 2020. I mean, that was right after, about a year after Shannon was killed, and I had transitioned out of, you know, going overseas and getting shot at for a living. And it was probably the first time I had really paid attention to domestic politics. I'd always voted, but I was really focused on foreign policy, just with our last line of work. That's kind of where your head, where your head goes. But coming home to the city and the area that I grew up in, and just seeing what happened during 2020, and then seeing what happened during COVID shocked me. The way that people were just completely accepting of surrendering all their rights to the government, that shocked

• 4:45Joe Kent?

  me. And then the riots. I was living, actually, just to the south of Portland, Oregon, when the riots happened. After my late wife was killed, I moved pretty close to where my parents are, just to get my kids closer to my family, thinking it was still Portland of the 80s and 90s that I grew up in. But watching the riots just ravage downtown Portland, and it wasn't so much the riots, it was the fact that people were going along with it. People who should have known better were saying that, oh, no, this is probably just, you know, this is about civil rights, this is about racism. And I was pretty quick on, I was like, that's not at all what this is about. I mean, because for those of us who've been overseas and been in hostile environments, it has a feeling, and that's very much the way it felt to me. There's this unchecked violence that's taking place right now. Law

• 5:30Joe Kent?

  and order has broken down, and whoever is the most violent and aggressive, and the most organized, and willing to use that violence and aggression, they're going to rise to the top. And that's exactly what I saw for all of 2020. So moved just across the river to a more rural community. And then, obviously, the election went the way that it did. We can kind of get into backstory a little bit, but I'd already kind of met the Trump administration and spoken with President Trump at Dover, after my late wife was killed. And I was planning on going back and working in a second Trump admin, that's a whole separate, separate story we can get into. But then, in the conservative district that I had moved to, just across the river, my congresswoman voted for Trump's impeachment after January 6. And I was mad, everybody was mad, because she was a Republican, but nobody was stepping

• 6:15Joe Kent?

  forward. There was a lot of people who were politically active in the community, who were, who were saying, hey, we're very mad, and we're going to censure her, we're going to write her a letter. And I was just like, okay, well, who's stepping forward to actually primary her? Because that's the mechanism. If you're not happy with your elected official, you should run against them or you should support another candidate, especially in a primary. It's really key. A lot of people skip the primaries, but that's how we enforce discipline within our own ranks as primaring people. And I was pretty disappointed to see that nobody was stepping forward. And then I, you know, had a little bit of self-reflection, based on my background in the military. And if you're looking around to see who's in charge, well, congratulations, it's you. In absence of orders, attack. So I just said, you know what? I'm at least gonna run. I'm at least gonna give her a challenge so that she knows that we, the people, are not happy with her.

• 7:00Joe Kent?

  Ultimately prevailed in the primary, but then general didn't go so, didn't go as planned. But we were really close, less than a percentage point in general. So here I am again, running for Congress, so keeping the, keeping the fight up.

• 7:11Shawn Ryan?

  Why did you, I mean, a lot of people, I'm interested in why you decided to run for, for Congress rather than more, more of a local political spot? Because, you know, I think a lot of people are starting to think that the, the federal government is just, it's, it's, it's lost. It's gone. And people seem to be concentrating more on local elections because that's your immediate sphere of influence. That's what actually probably affects you more than anything.

• 7:46Joe Kent?

  It does.

• 7:46Shawn Ryan?

  And so I'm just, I'm just curious, did you consider running for local at all?

• 7:51Joe Kent?

  I didn't, because I had never really considered running for office until the woman I voted for, my congresswoman, like voted for Trump's impeachment. She had a couple of the bad votes there that kind of put her on my radar. But I assumed that somebody else, especially after she did something that was so against the will of her voters, I assumed that somebody else, maybe that was already in local office, that already kind of had a name for themselves and a political machine built up, that they would step forward. And so just seeing nobody step forward, that's why I went for that position in particular. I think with my experience, though, in the military and in the intelligence community, I think I'm best served at the federal level. Because the way that the federal government has ran off the reins, especially the way they spend so much of our money on foreign aid, foreign wars. And we see this.

• 8:33Joe Kent?

  All the time, you get representatives in the House and the Senate who have no background whatsoever in national security. And regardless of what they say on the campaign trail, or the fact that their constituents, Republican and Democrats alike, want to more restrained foreign policy, they go to DC, they get brought into the skiff at some point in time. And they get told, you know, some really compelling information, I'm sure. And the next thing you know, they're voting in accordance with exactly what, you know, the military industrial complex, the foreign aid machinery wants. Whereas I think if you have more people who are from that world and well versed in it, we can kind of call them on their BS and say like, okay, wait a second. What is this information? What's the plan? How will sending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to Ukraine, for instance, how will that change the actual stated outcome?

• 9:17Joe Kent?

  Ask real hard questions so that we can actually start allocating a lot more resources towards the American people. Because I think in, especially in our lifetime post nine 11, the way that we've focused exterior on the rest of the world's security. That's put the American people last. And I think a lot of that is coming home to roost right now. But I think it's hard for folks who aren't from that world and well versed in the national security state. Just to understand exactly how we, the people are being scammed by our government.

• 9:44Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's a damn good point. I didn't think about the, about the military industrial complex stuff. I mean, I think about it all the time.

• 9:51Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Shawn Ryan?

  You know, but, but to have guys in there that understand it, that makes a hell of a lot of sense. So thank you for clarifying. And we'll get a lot more into the weeds on that towards the, the back end of the interview. But for now, let's keep it about, let's just keep it about your life story. And so let's start a childhood. Where did you grow up?

• 10:13Joe Kent?

  So I was actually born in a cabin, believe it or not, in a little town called Lebanon, Oregon, which is just to the south of Eugene. My dad had gotten a job with the Forest Service. And so my dad was out there working as a forest ranger. So I was the first, first kid they had, and they decided to do it adventurous and have me at home with a midwife in a log cabin. But then after that, we moved right away. My parents both got into law school. So my first couple of years, we were in Eugene. But then by the time I was five, we moved up to Portland. So I really grew up in Portland.

• 10:44Shawn Ryan?

  Right. What were you into?

• 10:46Joe Kent?

  So pretty much anything outdoors, anything that was related to like the military outdoor adventures. I was actually really lucky. Uh, my area had a great Boy Scout community. So I was really heavily involved, uh, in Boy Scouts pretty much until the time I joined the army.

• 11:00Shawn Ryan?

  You know, they just changed the name of the Boy Scouts?

• 11:03Joe Kent?

  Breaks my heart, man.

• 11:04Shawn Ryan?

  Is that real?

• 11:04Joe Kent?

  It's, it's real. Yeah.

• 11:06Shawn Ryan?

  What did they change it to?

• 11:07Joe Kent?

  I think they just dropped, I think it's just Scouts now or something like that.

• 11:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:11Joe Kent?

  I don't know. They've, they've had some, some hard years and like they're not what they used to be, unfortunately.

• 11:17Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 11:18Joe Kent?

  Yeah. It's, uh, it's sad because that was a, an institution where you could send your sons off to and they were gonna be, they're gonna be in an environment where boys can be boys for one, you know, you could go off and that's kind of the way my Boy Scout troop was. Like nowadays, if my Boy Scout troop existed, the Scout Masters would probably like be sent to jail. Cause they basically were like Lord of the Flies. It was like the older boys run the younger boys and, you know, maybe at the end of the weekend, we'll make sure that nobody gets hurt, but you know, you guys just kind of go off in the woods and do your own thing. Which is great because I think little boys need that because you got so much of that energy. Um, but it's sad now that that's just like yet another institution that's been closed off to young men. Where a lot of character could have been formed, a lot of really good life lessons could be taught.

• 12:00Joe Kent?

  You can go and mentor younger kids and now it's become some, now it's become something that is going to basically adhere to the whims of woke culture. You know, and that's what they did. They're a big corporation. They're a bigger organization. They said, hey, but what about girls? But what about LGBT, LMNOP? And now we have a, a name change and they've destroyed yet another great institution.

• 12:22Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's, uh, it's sad. What caught, what caught your interest in the military as a, as a kid? I mean, you had two attorneys as parents?

• 12:30Joe Kent?

  Yeah, no. So I'm not from a military family, but both my grandfathers served in World War II, kind of like everybody else. But not a military family at all. I had an uncle, um, who was in the Marine Corps as logistics guy, but he lived on the East Coast. So I'd, you know, see him once or twice a year, but, uh, not a military community, not a military family. I honestly, as far back as I can remember, like I wanted to be a commando of some sort. I don't know if it was just good programming from the eighties of like G I Joe and A-Team. Yeah, I think God a lot of us, right? Yeah, so I mean, and then as I got older, um, you know, obviously this is pre-internet, but I just read whatever I could get my hands on about the Vietnam era guys, you know, reading Soldier of Fortune. And so I was, I'm pretty committed that, hey, once I, once

• 13:12Joe Kent?

  I can go to the recruiter's office and join, that's exactly what I'm doing.

• 13:16Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Were you in any sports?

• 13:18Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I wrestled and played football.

• 13:20Shawn Ryan?

  Any good?

• 13:21Joe Kent?

  No, I was not good at all.

• 13:22Shawn Ryan?

  How about academics?

• 13:23Joe Kent?

  No, not good at that either. I was, I was like good at being out in the woods. I was good enough at like academics to not get in a lot of trouble. So like I, I learned pretty easily that I could get Cs in the classes that I hated, you know? And then if I liked it like history or whatever, then I'd, you know, I'd do okay. But I was, I mean, they're telling the kids in high school or my peers, you know, hey, you have to study this, that, and the other thing for your SATs and your ASATs. And I'm like, man, I'm joining the army as soon as, as soon as I can get out of here. Cause the whole, you know, you need to go to college thing. I was like, wait, so you want me to go to four more years of school that like I have to pay for? Like that is a horrible deal. The army's gotta be better.

• 14:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Did you, how did you, I mean, how did you come to the army? Like why, out of all the branches?

• 14:07Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Shawn Ryan?

  You went to the army?

• 14:09Joe Kent?

  So I, I did a lot of research and it's weird to say now because we've been at war for so long, but back then in the mid to late nineties, there wasn't a lot of conflicts on the horizon. There had been, you know, Grenada, Panama, Mogadishu. There was these fleeting chances to get to go to combat. And so I, I figured, hey, if I can go be a Green Beret, those guys are always kind of deployed. Maybe not necessarily to a hot war, but they're always somewhere working with indigenous forces. So I was pretty drawn to that. But then in, in 93, when Mogadishu happened, Black Hawk Down incident, I know you've interviewed some of those guys. I was 13 years old and that was the first time, cable news had just kind of come online. And that was the first time I think Americans

• 14:51Joe Kent?

  really had like brutal combat put up in their living room on TV. And so I remember watching that and it's like, man, there's, you know, young guys out here that are in savage combat. And I'm like, man, I'm, I'm 13. Some of those guys there. Probably eighteen, they could have been in high school with me last year. And so I was like, who, who are those guys? Cause I knew you couldn't, at the time, you couldn't go right to special forces. Um, so I was like, oh, that's the Ranger Regiment. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try that first. Um, I did read, I read Rogue Warrior though, when I was in high school. And I was like, oh man, that is, this is badass. Like, I mean, that book is phenomenal. I'm like, man, this is, maybe I should go try to be a SEAL.

• 15:30Joe Kent?

  Cause I was always in the water, I ended up going to dive teams in SF. Um, but when I went and talked to the Navy recruiter, they were just like, yeah, so just join the Navy and you'll get a chance to go to the, go to the SEAL teams. And I'm like, shouldn't it be in writing somewhere? And they're like, so you need to pick another Navy job. And all the Navy jobs, other than being a SEAL, sounded fricking horrible. I was like, I don't know, man, this seems like a bad deal to me. And luckily I had, there was a guy who ended up, uh, working for my dad, who was a lawyer, but he had been in the Army. And he, he gave me the best recruiter advice ever. He was like, look, just know what you want going in there. Whichever branch of service you pick, whichever job, he's like, get it in writing. He's like, do not sign your name on the dotted line unless you're getting exactly what you want. And if they don't give you what you want, walk out.

• 16:11Joe Kent?

  And at least go see one of the other services, like, but, but don't just blanket sign. So that, his, his voice was in my head as the Navy recruiter was just like, yeah, yeah, they'll tell you after boot camp. And I was like, I don't know, man, that's, the Army guy said he'd put the Ranger thing in con, in, in writing. So that's, that's the route I went.

• 16:27Shawn Ryan?

  So you went right after high school?

• 16:28Joe Kent?

  I did, yeah. Yeah. I did the whole delayed entry thing. So I was, I had a ship out date, like my whole senior year of high school. I, I knew exactly when I was leaving for basic training.

• 16:37Shawn Ryan?

  Nice. How did your parents, I mean, receive that? Were they excited for you?

• 16:42Joe Kent?

  I think, well, there was no war going on, so they weren't as worried, I think, as, you know, parents, just a couple of years later would be. But I had talked about it for so long. I think that they, maybe when I was in early high school years, they, they were hoping I was gonna outgrow it. But I think by the time I actually went down to the recruiters, they were like, okay, well, I guess we don't have to worry about paying for your college. So.

• 17:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So you enlisted?

• 17:05Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Shawn Ryan?

  How long after high school did you ship out?

• 17:07Joe Kent?

  It was like two weeks. Yeah.

• 17:09Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man.

• 17:09Joe Kent?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 17:11Shawn Ryan?

  And what was that like?

• 17:13Joe Kent?

  So I loved it, man. I, I was just, cause I had taught, I'd thought about it for so long that like I was the geeky kid that was like, oh, this is super cool. They're giving us camouflage uniforms and like, what day do we get to CNM 16? So I was, I like living the dream. I thought, I thought it was great. I mean, I, you know, there's parts of it that were hard or whatever, but I was just really excited to finally be doing what I had thought about for so long.

• 17:35Shawn Ryan?

  What did you think about the other people that were integrated with you after, I mean, are you 18 at this point?

• 17:42Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I'm 18. Yeah.

• 17:42Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 17:43Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Shawn Ryan?

  You're 18.

• 17:44Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Shawn Ryan?

  You're at boot camp, getting ready to go to Ranger Battalion. I mean, what was your first impression? Was it everything you thought it was gonna be?

• 17:52Joe Kent?

  Yeah. I mean, basic training definitely was like they still at the time, there was still, uh, one station training. So if you were, if you were infantry, you were there for whatever it is, 12, 14 weeks. Um, and they gave you the full, the full treatment, just like you'd see in Full Metal Jacket or whatever, the drill sergeant and all that. And so I was, I thought it was great. And it was, it was really cool getting to meet, I don't know, just like kids that were like-minded, you know? Cause it's, it's, there was only a handful of us. My Boy Scout group actually put a lot of people in the military. Um, but in Portland, there wasn't like a big military culture. Like I joke, but it's like, hey, if you wanted to rebel growing up in Portland, you said that you were gonna enlist in the infantry. Like that's the most rebellious thing that you could do.

• 18:30Joe Kent?

  And so it was cool to be around a bunch of other kids that were my age that like, most of us, I mean, there was a couple of guys here and there that like had no idea how they got in the army. They're just like, you know, the judge told them they had to join the army or, you know, go to jail or whatever. But there was a lot of us that were just like raised on G I Joe and the A team. And we were, you know, finally getting to go play army. So it was neat to be around like-minded people.

• 18:51Shawn Ryan?

  Were a lot of people with you going to Ranger Battalion?

• 18:54Joe Kent?

  Yeah, there was a handful of us that had it in our contracts that we'd try out. But you know, as as time wears on in basic, you start hearing some guys that are like, I don't know if I want to go to Ranger Battalion. Cause like, this already kinda sucks and whatever, whatever's next has to be worse. So I think we weeded out some people even before we ever saw a real Ranger.

• 19:12Shawn Ryan?

  When did you get to Ranger Battalion?

• 19:14Joe Kent?

  I got there in November 98.

• 19:16Shawn Ryan?

  Right after.

• 19:17Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so boot camp, you go to airborne school. And then when you're done with jump school, the Ranger team comes and picks up the guys that have Ranger contracts and takes you off to the the month long, it was RAP, a Ranger indoctrination program. When I went through, it's called, I think Ranger Assessment Selection now.

• 19:32Shawn Ryan?

  How was that?

• 19:34Joe Kent?

  It was great, man. I mean, it was hard. Like, they definitely put you through more challenges than you go through in basic training and and obviously airborne school. So it's a good gut check. We weed out a lot of guys there. I think now because of the wars, they do a lot more emphasis on, they actually teach the guys like how to shoot, move, communicate. When I went, it was just like, we're gonna try and make you guys quit for a month. So there was some land nav here and there, but it was mostly just, you know, time runs, time rucks, a lot of beat down sessions, obstacle course, that type of stuff.

• 20:07Shawn Ryan?

  What was the attrition rate?

• 20:09Joe Kent?

  It's pretty high. I mean, over 50%, I think.

• 20:12Shawn Ryan?

  Over 50%?

• 20:13Joe Kent?

  Yeah, over 50.

• 20:14Shawn Ryan?

  Did you, I mean,

• 20:17Shawn Ryan?

  did you notice a difference in the caliber of men that you were with?

• 20:21Joe Kent?

  Yeah, right away, right away. I mean, cause like you get out of basic training and already they fill your head up with a bunch of, you know, kinda bravado of like, hey, you're in the infantry now. And like the infantry is the backbone of the army and you're the toughest guys in the army. And then you go to airborne school, you know, and you hear like, now you're a paratrooper. And so you did see a lot of guys who were like, okay, maybe I'm good with just being, this is good enough. And so like a lot of those guys were like, well, I don't, I don't want to take the next challenge because I've already achieved this, you know? So why would I go attempt something that's even harder? So it was, it was even cooler to be around guys that were like, yeah, what's next? Like, let's go do the next hard thing. So that was, I always found a lot of inspiration there, especially throughout my career, you know?

• 21:02Shawn Ryan?

  Were you still 18, were you still 18 years old when you showed up to RAP?

• 21:05Joe Kent?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:06Shawn Ryan?

  What was the average age of the? Of the gents that were in that.

• 21:10Joe Kent?

  It's young, yeah, probably eighteen, nineteen.

• 21:11Shawn Ryan?

  Is it eighteen?

• 21:12Joe Kent?

  Yeah, everybody's pretty young.

• 21:13Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 21:14Joe Kent?

  There's an oddball hero there that joined the military later on in life, but.

• 21:16Shawn Ryan?

  So you're still with very inexperienced.

• 21:18Joe Kent?

  Very young.

• 21:19Shawn Ryan?

  Military personnel, just maybe a higher drive.

• 21:22Joe Kent?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:23Shawn Ryan?

  What happens after RIP?

• 21:25Joe Kent?

  So then you go to battalion, you go to your regiment battalion. So I was lucky, the guys in my graduating RIP class, most of them wanted to go to either Savannah, Georgia, or wanted to go stay there at Fort Benning, because there wasn't a lot of us from the West Coast, and so.

• 21:39Shawn Ryan?

  You get to pick.

• 21:40Joe Kent?

  You, you can horse trade, uh, at least, I don't know how it is now. This is, you know, late nineties. So they basically came out and they were like, you guys are all the same to us. So if you get a battalion that you don't want, and there's someone that wants to trade with you, you've got like an hour to wheel and deal. And so.

• 21:55Shawn Ryan?

  An hour?

• 21:56Joe Kent?

  Yeah, it was something like that. They like walked out. They're like, we don't care. You're all the same to us. Like, but you've all been assigned a battalion. If you don't like it and you want to switch for a buddy, tell us now. And we'll, and maybe we'll make it happen. And so luckily, nobody wanted to go to Fort Lewis, which is pretty close to where I lived in Washington. So I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So I switched if a guy right away. I was supposed to go to third battalion, but there was a guy that was from, I think somewhere down south that switched with me.

• 22:19Shawn Ryan?

  What's the difference between the battalions? Why would somebody want to go to one versus the other?

• 22:25Joe Kent?

  I think when you're that young and inexperienced, it's just geography. Um, that was for me, I was just like, I don't want to stay in Fort Benning anymore. I don't want to be down in Georgia. I want to go back up to the, the Pacific Northwest where I'm from. Um, as, I mean, now when, when the wars are running full steam, I mean, I think every battalion was doing basically the same thing. So I don't think there was much of a difference. When the wars first kicked off, though, third battalion being next to seventy fifth regimental headquarters, they got, they did the initial jump into Afghanistan. Um, so they were there closer to the flagpole, you know? So there's a bad that comes of that for them, but then also they, they tended to get the, whatever the, the best mission was, you know, right off the bat.

• 23:04Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. Is there any, is there any cultural differences between battalions?

• 23:08Joe Kent?

  There is, yeah, yeah. The first battalion guys are much more laid back because they're out there on the beach. And then the third battalion guys, I think are probably the most high strung because they're there at like, I mean, they live at the, the home of the infantry, you know? So that's like a lot more, I think spit and polish. And then second battalion's kind of in its own little world. Little more West Coast culture out there, probably a little more laid back.

• 23:29Shawn Ryan?

  I can't imagine a Ranger Battalion being laid back, but.

• 23:32Joe Kent?

  Compared to the other Ranger Battalion, yeah. Second Battalion is still pretty Spartan, yeah.

• 23:36Shawn Ryan?

  So how was it showing up to Ranger Battalion, Second Battalion, correct?

• 23:40Joe Kent?

  Yeah, yeah, it's basically like you started all over again at rep. They kind of treat you like crap for a while. I mean, they treat you like crap for pretty much your first year there because the attrition continues. I mean, because Ranger Battalion is pretty unique and soft, whereas they take people that have regular Army MOSs, regular Army jobs. So if you screw up, they can just kick you literally down the street. Like if you're an infantry guy, which most people in Ranger Battalion are, and they don't like you, they can kick you out and the next thing you know, you're, you know, two blocks down at the 25th Infantry.

• 24:11Shawn Ryan?

  Does that happen a lot?

• 24:12Joe Kent?

  It happens a fair amount, yeah. I'm not sure how. I think probably once the op cycle really kicked up during the war, they probably didn't do it as much. But they made it very clear to me and my peers that like, you could be fired like later on this afternoon if we don't like you.

• 24:29Shawn Ryan?

  So, so as a kid, you remember watching Mogadishu go down?

• 24:35Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Shawn Ryan?

  And so now you're a Ranger Battalion, Second Ranger Battalion, still 18 years old, correct?

• 24:41Joe Kent?

  Yep.

• 24:41Shawn Ryan?

  And do you meet anybody who was in that conflict?

• 24:46Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so we had, there was two guys, they were in a different company, but they were like legends, everybody knew who they were. They were like probably senior in, I guess, E7s, E6s.

• 24:57Joe Kent?

  But they would do a lot of professional development where they talk about the Battle of Mogadishu. In particular, when we were doing like Urban Movement, CQB, they were definitely the subject matter experts. And then we had a handful of guys, like my squad leader had jumped into Panama. So there was, there was a few people, and I think for the, being in the Army in the late 90s, all things considered, we had a lot of combat experience, just in our battalion, yeah.

• 25:20Shawn Ryan?

  What was that like for you, being 18, being surrounded by?

• 25:25Shawn Ryan?

  By men who had already been out doing what you've been fantasizing about doing.

• 25:31Joe Kent?

  Awesome, but intimidating, you know, you definitely like, like those guys, you know, later on in life, after the wars have been going for a while, you know, you run into some, like, oh, this is just, he's just a regular dude, he's a little bit older than me. But at the time, when you're a kid, you're like, oh, my God, this guy's like, this, he's a legend. He's absolutely amazing. So, yeah, it was, it was intimidating to be around those guys. But also, it was like, I'm in the right spot. This is where I want to be. Like, where I'm talking with guys who actually went out and did the real, they actually went to combat, they did the real deal, and they're going to train me how to do it. Because this is our job, this is our profession. Which, at the time, in the late 90s, I think a lot of military units probably didn't have that, because it was kind of like, well, what is our mission? Like, we sort of go train, we shoot blanks at each other, you know, whatever.

• 26:13Joe Kent?

  Whereas Ranger Battalion, just because of what they had been through, in particular, Mogadishu, but, you know, Panama, Grenada, before that, they were just like, hey, the balloon could go up, the call could come, and you could be in combat tomorrow. Like, that was the mentality there.

• 26:30Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of, I mean, what was, what was the daily routine for you when you got there?

• 26:36Joe Kent?

  It's, I mean, basically what you'd expect, elite light infantry. I mean, running and rucking, physical fitness was really big. And then so was marksmanship and small unit tactics. And so, basically, your, your life kind of revolved around that. So, like, group, group PT, you know, whether it was rucking or running was really big. And then we'd go through different blocks, where we'd actually shoot a lot. And again, just perspective, late 90s, like, us and maybe the guys from first special forces group that are also on Fort Lewis, we'd be like the only guys at the ranges. You'd, every now and again, you'd see the regular army out there doing like, their qual, their annual, I don't know, whatever. But they weren't out there at all, that much. But we were out there putting rounds down range, you know, quite a bit, which was, was a luxury, I think, most units just didn't have.

• 27:21Joe Kent?

  And then the small unit tactics piece too, just being tactically proficient at basic patrolling. I mean, even if we weren't out at the range with live ammo, they'd, you know, our squad leaders would literally have us in the back, the back 40, just doing patrolling, you know, so you learn the basics. And then same thing, CQB, CQB obviously became a huge focal point in Iraq and some of the other places that we fought. By the time with the experience from Mogadishu, we were still doing flow drills, really heavy emphasis on urban combat, heavy emphasis on like urban movement. So yeah, those, it was a very serious place to be an 18-year-old, you know, they definitely drill it into your head that hey, this is life and death stuff and we expect you to literally live up to the Ranger creed and be the elite soldier your country needs you to be.

• 28:05Joe Kent?

  How did, how long were you at Ranger Battalion? I was only there for three years. How did SF pop up on your radar? I don't, when I came in, I'd always wanted to go to SF. And this is before 9/11. So I'd been in battalion. If you've been in battalion at that time, it's totally changed now. But if you'd been in battalion at that time for about a year, a year and a half, you had done the full training cycle. You had, you had done like your individual marksmanship block, your individual small unit tactics block, you've done your airfield seizure block, because that was a core mission then. So you'd, you'd spend a couple of months just doing like static line jump after static line jump with all your gear, doing like secure the airhead like they did in Grenada in Panama. And then you'd do a rotary wing evolution where you'd go out and train with the 160th and do fast roping and do air assaults

• 28:50Joe Kent?

  and that type of stuff. And then, but then that block would just kind of rinse, repeat. And so I figured, I was like, okay, I've been here, I've got a solid base in soldiering. I'm gonna take it to the next level and try to go to special forces. Did you have any combat deployments with Ranger Battalion? I did not, nope. I was actually in my first or second day of special forces selection was September 11th.

• 29:14Shawn Ryan?

  So you, so you used Ranger Battalion as kind of a gateway to Special Forces?

• 29:20Joe Kent?

  I did, yeah.

• 29:22Shawn Ryan?

  And was there any animosity from?

• 29:25Joe Kent?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:26Shawn Ryan?

  Was there?

• 29:26Joe Kent?

  Yeah, the only accepted way to leave Ranger Battalion at the time, I don't know if it's different now, it's probably about the same, the only accepted reason to leave Battalion was like you either got picked up for Delta or you died.

• 29:39Joe Kent?

  If you left for any other reason, you were like a horrible traitor, but it's kind of funny because regiment follows essentially the same rank structure and career progression as the infantry does, so really as you move up the ladder, there's less and less ability for people to stay there. So like if you're an E5, you're going to get a fire team, E6, you'll get a squad, but past that, there's only four platoons per company. So if you're going to get promoted, the dirty secret is a lot of Rangers end up going to SF, like it's just not, it's not discussed, it's not talked about, so you still kind of, you know, the leadership still gives you the speech, so I got the speech before I left for Special Forces selection, which basically was if you don't pass, you don't have a job here anymore, so you better pass.

• 30:22Joe Kent?

  That's pretty good motivation.

• 30:23Shawn Ryan?

  That is damn good motivation, right?

• 30:25Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 30:26Shawn Ryan?

  So, so what, so you leave Ranger Battalion and then, and what happens? You show up to selection?

• 30:32Joe Kent?

  Yeah, go to selection, um, standard, you know, you get your first couple of days where you don't do a lot, like you take a PT test there at Fort Bragg, um, and that's where everybody shows up, like, so if you look at Special Forces class numbers, it's like we started out with like 300 or whatever, because they'll kind of let anybody come and take the PT test. This, again, this may have changed, but this is, you know, 2001, um, and so they weed out a bunch of guys on the PT test, and then they take you out to Camp McCall, which is where the majority of selection is, once they weed out that initial crop. And I think we'd only been there for a day or two, and they, they call us all in the classroom and they're like, "America has been attacked." And I'm thinking like, That's weird. Like, is there a scenario? Because, you know, you do training missions and they're like, here's the scenario. The country's been attacked and now we're going to war in this country.

• 31:17Joe Kent?

  And so they start talking to us about like how America just got attacked. And I'm like, man, this can't be actually real. And then they actually bring in some TVs. And then they say, hey, if you're from the Washington DC area or from the New York area, the offices are open, just go grab phones and start calling your loved ones to make sure they're okay.

• 31:35Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 31:37Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I was like, holy crap. Yeah, yeah. So then like the next day, they bring in all the cadre and stuff like a special forces selection, the cadre are famously very stoic. Like they don't say very much to you by design. But after the attacks, they would break rank or break, break character probably like once a day where they would give us newspapers and they're like, hey, you guys are in a bubble here. You got to realize how the country's changing. And so they would bring in newspapers that we could read before we got heavy in the stress phase. So you could kind of understand what was going on.

• 32:07Shawn Ryan?

  So this is right at the very, this is like day two.

• 32:10Joe Kent?

  Yeah, it's like September 12th, 13th.

• 32:13Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, talk about even more motivation.

• 32:15Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Shawn Ryan?

  If that's, I mean, you know, you're going to do

• 32:19Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 32:19Shawn Ryan?

  what you signed up for. Did that, how did that hit? Did that hit you at the time?

• 32:23Joe Kent?

  I was afraid I was going to miss it because like all the other conflicts leading up to September 11th, they had been like, you know, if you were in the right place, the right time, you got to go to war. But if you weren't in, you know, third ranger battalion, you know, in the right company, you missed out on mogadishu, you know? Like same thing with the Gulf War and all that. So I was like, crap, man, am I, am I going to be out here rucking around in the woods trying to get into SF while my range battalion is jumping into combat? Like, and so I, I was like, well, I, I, maybe that's the way it's going to go. Because there was that, it's hard to remember now, but there was that pause right after September 11th, there was initial push into Afghanistan. But it wasn't really until we kicked back up in Iraq again in oh, three, when we invaded Iraq, that we were at war in two different countries.

• 33:08Joe Kent?

  There was that pause there where it's like, okay, are we just going to do a handful of strikes? And then kind of go back to business as usual? Because that, I mean, Bin Laden had already attacked the country twice. I mean, we had, we had the embassies that got hit in Kenya and Tanzania. And we had the coal in Aiden. And so there was a lot of us that were like, and I, I was kind of of this mindset. I was like, I don't think we're going to do anything. I think maybe we're going to like launch some cruise missiles, but are we really going to do it this time?

• 33:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Was there, I mean, was there any hesitation at all about?

• 33:39Shawn Ryan?

  Going to war?

• 33:40Joe Kent?

  No, I was afraid I was gonna miss it. At that point, I was like, man, I'm gonna be one of the because you also, for all the combat that you met in the late 90s, you also met a lot of other guys that had been in the army for a really long time and they had just, you know, dumb luck, they missed out on their shot to get to combat. So I was terrified of being, you know, not those guys' fault, but I was terrified of being one of those guys. I was like, crap, man, am I gonna be wrong place, wrong time for my entire damn career?

• 34:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah. How, so, I mean, that's interesting. So day, day two, September 11th happens, you see it, you realize it's real. How, I mean, how did that affect the attrition rate of that particular class?

• 34:18Joe Kent?

  That's an interesting question. Um, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if there was guys that, that factored that in. Um, I don't really know. I, I, I think there were some guys who are hesitant, who had the same fear that I did, that they were gonna miss their, their chance to go to combat. Um, I think then, though, it was still kinda, I, I think the whole idea of like, everyone's going to combat was kind of abstract. I, I don't think the army, at least where I was serving, I don't think we really wrapped our heads around that until a couple of years later, when it was like, oh, okay, now we, now we're invading Iraq with like, the entire military. Um, this is, this is gonna be something that everybody is more than likely gonna experience.

• 34:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, I mean, just in, in, you know, you're not going right away. I mean, you have to get through selection, then I'm like, I don't know how, I mean, how long would it have been?

• 35:09Joe Kent?

  Keep courses long, yeah.

• 35:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So you're, you're talking years before you get the opportunity

• 35:15Joe Kent?

  Yep.

• 35:16Shawn Ryan?

  to roll out.

• 35:17Joe Kent?

  Yeah. So I guess selection's about a month, and I get back to Ranger Battalion, um, in whatever it was, October, and my, my squad leader had just gone to Delta Selection, and so we're back there with like, all the rear detachment guys, and he's like, hey, We're gonna go, we're gonna go load all the ammo pallets and we're gonna go meet the rest of the battalion in Europe and we might, we might be the ones that jump into Afghanistan. And I was like, this is sweet. I just got selected for SF. We're gonna jump into combat. But then like, of course, a day later, a day later, we see that third battalion jumps in. So I'm like, I guess that, you know, we were supposed to leave in like two days. And so, so that didn't happen. So I was like, well, that's a sign. I should probably just go to the Q course and, you know, hedge my bets with special forces and maybe I'll

• 36:00Joe Kent?

  get to, because at the time, the men on horseback thing had just happened. And I was like, okay, well, those guys were right there at the tip of the spear, like right after this happened. So I'm on the right track.

• 36:10Shawn Ryan?

  Nice, nice. So you went to selection.

• 36:13Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Shawn Ryan?

  What was the most challenging portion for you?

• 36:17Joe Kent?

  Um, selection's interesting because it's probably the only place in the military where you're, you're alone for a lot of it. There's, there's a team portion, but the team portion to me, coming out of battalion, I was pretty familiar with. If you're from a combat arms unit, I think the team phase they have there, it, it should be, if you're from a decent unit, it should be relatively familiar because you're with a group of guys. You're trying to solve a problem. You know, it's hard. You're sleep deprived, all, all that type of stuff. It's definitely hard. It's very physically hard, the, the team events. But the, the isolation and not getting any feedback, in Ranger Battalion, you get feedback all the time. It's usually negative feedback telling you how stupid you are, but at least that's some feedback. And special forces selection, like instructors just say, hey, take all your commands off the whiteboard. You know, your ruck should weigh 50 pounds and we're gonna weigh it, we're gonna check it. And you're gonna move that direction

• 37:02Joe Kent?

  until we tell you to stop moving. And then the land navigation portion, where you're actually having to move through some, some pretty hairy terrain and you're having to make independent decisions on your own. I thought that was, that was pretty challenging coming out of a very team heavy environment. I ended up liking it. Once I got used to it, I was like, actually, this is pretty cool. I'm just out here. It's kind of all on me, whether I succeed or fail. But I think that gets a lot of guys. I think a lot of the attrition in special forces selection is that isolation portion. Where guys are like, I don't mind, I'm not getting any feedback, am I doing this right? You know, can I, I can't ask anybody anything. There's no other teammate I can lean on. It's, it's completely all on you. This is selection or the Q course? This is selection. Okay. How does the Q course differ from selection?

• 37:47Joe Kent?

  The Q course is more academic. There's still cutting guys there. But you have your, your job phase. I was a weapons guy. Cause it was the easiest thing that translated from, from infantry. And I was like, okay, that's weapons and demo or engineers, those are the two shortest ways out of the Q course. Like if you're going to be a medic and go to the 18 delta course and then go to language school, like it's basically a two-year endeavor. And then commo is just a little bit shorter, you know, commo is like a year and a half. You can make the thing of probably about an even year if you're weapons or demo. So I chose weapons. So the weapons portion isn't, it's actually pretty fun. I mean, you're getting to learn, you're getting to learn foreign weapon systems, American weapon systems, how to employ them, how to shoot them, a lot of shooting.

• 38:28Joe Kent?

  And then there's a small unit tactics phase, which there's some, some of that is, you know, they, they pour on the, the challenges for sure. It's kind of like a little mini ranger school, just to kind of get everybody on the same sheet of music with small unit tactics. And so there's some attrition there, but that's not bad. But the majority is your, your MOS phase. And then the unconventional warfare block, it has some challenges, but it's probably the most fun I had had in the military because it's unconventional warfare. You're, you're playing it live. You're actually in a small community in North Carolina. And half of them are the resistance that you're trying to recruit and mobilize and organize to conduct guerrilla warfare against the other half of the town that's the occupying force. And so they actually, the special forces school goes all out. Like they put

• 39:12Joe Kent?

  a lot of resources into that, making that as realistic as possible. So the unconventional warfare portion is really, really fun. But then you have your not so fun stuff, like six months of language school. What was your language? My language was Pashto because we had just invaded Afghanistan. Oh, nice. Did you, did you actually learn it and utilize it? Well, utilize, so of all my combat deployments, I never went to Afghanistan. So I never really utilized it. I actually ended up having to go and switch my language to Arabic because I was around Arabic so much than, and SF guys have to have a language. But I actually ended up going back to language school for Arabic. Are there any similarities? The alphabet's the same. So, but the Arabic alphabet has a lot more special characters. But the Pashtun, because Pashtun's mostly spoken, it's phonetically the same

• 39:56Joe Kent?

  as the Arabic alphabet with a couple of different characters here and there.

• 40:00Shawn Ryan?

  Did you utilize Arabic?

• 40:02Joe Kent?

  So, yeah, when I got to Iraq, I could sound out the words. And so I had like a little bit of leg up. Like at least I at least knew how the words sounded. But language school sucks. So like, it's, it's tough. Like the rest, like when the, when the military picks linguists, they pick people that actually have like a, a natural ability to speak and they have to pass that test, the D lab to say what their ability is. SF is funny. I don't know if this has changed. I don't think it has. Because SF, basically at the end of it, and you're at the tail end of the Q course, you've already been through a lot. They, they pull you into the language school and they're like, hey, we don't care, like, if you can barely write your name in English. You're getting a language based on what group you go to, not your ability to learn a language. And you're either gonna learn it, or you're gonna fail and you're not gonna go to group.

• 40:43Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 40:44Joe Kent?

  So it's like, yeah. So it's like, you better, better figure it out.

• 40:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:48Joe Kent?

  Sink or swim. Yeah.

• 40:51Shawn Ryan?

  So you get through the Q course. What year are we when you get done with Q course?

• 40:54Joe Kent?

  Oh, three. So while I was in language school, we, we launched into Iraq. And I was, then I was convinced. I was like, oh, I totally missed it. Like, it's all over. They're gonna get Saddam tomorrow. They're gonna pull out. They're gonna get Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Like, it's all done, you know? But luckily, when I got to group, summer of oh, three, I mean, the guys from fifth group had just invaded Afghanistan. They had just invaded Iraq. Like, my team sergeant was like, this is not going away anytime soon. As a matter of fact, we're going back in like, two months. So.

• 41:22Shawn Ryan?

  Before we get there, let's talk about Q course graduation. Do they have a big ceremony?

• 41:29Joe Kent?

  They do. It's kind of weird. They, they, when you get out of Robin Sage, the unconventional warfare part, they give you your green beret and you're like a green beret.

• 41:39Joe Kent?

  But you're still technically a student. You have to pass language school. So then the next day after you're riding high and you have your new, new cool green beret to wear, then they take you into the language school and they're like, yeah, we're gonna take it away if you don't learn this language. So, so sort of welcome to the family, but not really. Then when you get done with language and at the time, I think they go to SER at some other portion, but we all went from language to SER school. So basically, we got like liberated out of the POW camp and SER school. And then I think a couple of days later, we had our full on graduation where you get your special forces tab and your orders to your group.

• 42:14Shawn Ryan?

  What did that sense of accomplishment feel like to you? I mean, dreaming about this from before you were 13 years old?

• 42:24Joe Kent?

  Yeah, no, it was definitely surreal, man. It was surreal. It was like, wow, I can't believe this is, I can't believe I did this. I can't believe it's real. Waiting for them to come tell me it's not real. And they, they checked the scores again. They're gonna take it all. They're gonna send me back to the army. Like, but no, it was, you know, a huge sense of accomplishment. And just because the wars had just started, man, I was just really chomping at the bit. It was very much a like, okay, we accomplished something here. Let's, uh, let's do a toast and celebrate it for a day. But then we, I gotta get there before I miss it. Like, I was literally like, how fast can I leave Fort Bragg to get to Fort Campbell? So I don't miss the next, the next thing smoke into combat.

• 43:04Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. What about your parents?

• 43:06Joe Kent?

  I think at that point, it was getting real for them, you know, because they were like, okay.

• 43:12Shawn Ryan?

  Were they happy for you?

• 43:13Joe Kent?

  Were happy. Well, they were happy, but they were like, so the Ballad of the Green Berets, the famous song by Barry Sadler, there's a line in there about like, the back at home, the young wife waits, her green beret has met his fate. There's a whole line in there about the, the Green Beret dying. And like, my parents came to graduation and I had heard the song a million times. But my mom, at the end of it's like crying and she's like, why would they play that song? I'm like, the Ballad of the Green Berets? She's like, it's absolutely horrible. I'm like, it's a badass song. She's like, the guy dies in the end. I'm like, okay, now I see it from your perspective.

• 43:46Shawn Ryan?

  How do you know which group you're going to?

• 43:49Joe Kent?

  They, you can request, you can, you can make a wish list. And then it's based on numbers, which group needs which number of which MOSs. But luckily, pretty much, most guys in my Q course class wanted to go to like Fort Carson, out to Colorado, or back to Fort Lewis, first group, just based on the way the war was heading. And fifth group was like the men on horseback. I was like, man, I just want to go to fifth group, you know? And fifth group also, since their, their area is the middle of the Middle East, they have the worst languages. So because I put fifth, that's why I got Posh to you. So basically, when you're doing your, your wish list of which group you want to go to, everybody knows which languages will put you at which group. So seventh group, South America, you have to learn Spanish. And then you get to go to Columbia, you know? So like, a lot of guys want to go down there.

• 44:33Joe Kent?

  You see fifth group, and it's like, not many guys want to go to Fort Campbell, and even less guys want to learn Arabic, Posh to, or Farsi, you know? So I didn't really have to fight guys to, to get fifth group.

• 44:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So you get to fifth group. How were you received?

• 44:47Joe Kent?

  Completely different than Ranger Battalion. I mean, SF very much, especially at the time, everybody was a seasoned, I mean, I was 23, had been in the Army for like five years. And I was like the juniorest of the juniorest guys, you know? Like, there was a lot of experienced NCOs and officers that were there. Because SF didn't start taking guys off the street until the wars kind of picked up. So I was like the brand new, totally young guy. But it was a very mature, laid back environment. I mean, they had just invaded two countries. So there was a lot of that, I'd say, more calmer professionalism that you see at the, the upper rungs of special operations that you don't see in a more like Spartan environment, like Ranger Battalion,

• 45:30Joe Kent?

  where there's a lot of chest puffing and, you know, guys that are kind of wearing on their sleeves how badass they are. Get to SF and like, nobody's in uniform. Like, everybody's just kind of in civilian clothes. Like Sergeant Major's out, like on the ride along lawnmower, like cutting the grass. And they're like, oh yeah, your team's like kind of down there. And I'm like, man, this is kind of surreal. Like, okay. And then, you know, my team sergeant's like, yeah, welcome to the team. Uh, he basically, my initial counseling was like, hey, this isn't Ranger Battalion. This is big boy rules. Like you're going to be on your own a lot. If you have a question, ask and we'll tell you what you need to know. But we're not going to be here to hold your hand and your stuff can be put in the hallway at any minute because nobody really cares that you finished the Q course because we all did. So it's not a big deal. Um, and by the way, we're going back to combat here in, you

• 46:15Joe Kent?

  know, two months.

• 46:17Shawn Ryan?

  So you report in to fifth group and you're leaving in, did you just two months?

• 46:23Joe Kent?

  Yeah, it's like two months. Got there in June and we were leaving like at the end of August for, for Iraq.

• 46:27Shawn Ryan?

  For Iraq?

• 46:28Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 46:29Shawn Ryan?

  How did that make you feel? Now you're getting what you asked.

• 46:31Joe Kent?

  I was, I was really excited. Yeah. I was pretty stoked.

• 46:34Shawn Ryan?

  Not nervous at all?

• 46:35Joe Kent?

  No, not really. I mean, nervous of like, hey, if I get there, what if I screw something up? You know, that was probably the biggest anxiety that I had going into combat was like, will I not live up to the expectations? But again, it was still like, man, I hope that they, it's, it sounds stupid to say now, but I'm like, man, I hope in this, these couple of months, they don't solve all the problems in Iraq and I get there and there's nothing to do, you know? But luckily we had pretty experienced guys on my first team and they were like, oh yeah, it's an absolute disaster there. Like we're going to be, I don't, I don't know how they had that insight in those early years, in those early months of O3, but they're like, yeah, this is, this is not going to go the way we think it's going to go. We're, we're going to be there for a minute.

• 47:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, two months. I mean, when I showed up to the SEAL team, it was, it was, it was a year and a half before I got the opportunity to deploy. How do they, I mean, how did these guys

• 47:31Shawn Ryan?

  get you up to speed to their standard in two months? What did you guys focus on? So what were those conversations like?

• 47:39Joe Kent?

  Yeah. It was pretty interesting. So, um, fifth group really had been focused. They had the unconventional warfare fight in, in Afghanistan. Um, but prior to that, fifth group, since the end of the Gulf War, had been focused on special reconnaissance against the SCUD missiles. So mounted desert mobility, special reconnaissance. And that's what they did during the ground war. My battalion did the ground war while I was in language school. And then they came back, refit, and basically got a Fraggo to a completely different mission. They're like, hey, you guys are gonna go to the center of Baghdad, and you're either gonna be at a team house, collecting intel and actioning it, or you're gonna be unilateral, direct action, just waiting for targets, and then going after the deck of

• 48:22Joe Kent?

  cards. And the Al Qaeda guys, because Zarqawi had just kind of popped up on the radar. So my team, basically, in that short period of time, had to transition from being focused on desert mobility, special reconnaissance, to direct action. So my team sergeant had just gotten to the team as well, but he came from our direct action company, the in extremis force. And then we found out, I think about halfway through our workup, that the fifth group CIF, the fifth group in extremis force, at the time, the theater commanders controlled those, the group didn't. And so the CENTCOM commander pulled our CIF to Djibouti, to be on alert, because there was, I don't remember exactly what was happening, there was something happening in Africa. So either way, our team got pegged to be unilateral,

• 49:07Joe Kent?

  direct action. So we were gonna go to Baghdad, to the airport, we had air assets, and we were gonna get fed targets and go after them. So, pretty awesome mission. And so I was lucky, because I was familiar with direct action, coming out of Ranger Battalion. So it gave me a little bit more, I think, credibility as a new guy. There was actually something I could contribute, whereas most of these other guys had been focused on a completely different mission set. So, for me, it was overall, I'd say, a positive thing, that we kind of got a brand-new mission. Were you the only new guy there? There was me and one other guy, one of the, two weapons guys. So we both got there at the same time. So yeah, we were the brand-new guys on the team. But everybody else, man,

• 49:47Joe Kent?

  like, just, these guys were incredibly impressive. Like, they had just invaded, invaded Afghanistan, like, they had just done the ground war. Most of them didn't say much, most of them were pretty laid back, but like, they had that confidence of, we've just invaded and toppled two different countries, you know? And most of them had been in the army for a while, too. Like, my team sergeant had been a private in the first Gulf War, you know? Wow. You know, like, so... Some big shoes to fill. Big shoes to fill. Some of them had done the Pifwick mission in Bosnia, where they were going out and snatching up guys, kind of low-vis. So, like, just a lot of, a lot of experience, you know, a high standard to meet. But not a lot of, like, bravado about it, just sort of like, hey, show up and do your job.

• 50:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Well, Joe, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get into your first deployment.

• 50:39Joe Kent?

  Okay.

• 50:42Speaker 00

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

• 50:45Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

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  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

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• 51:47Speaker 00

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

• 51:50Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 51:51Speaker 00

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

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 51:57Speaker 02

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

• 52:01Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 52:03Speaker 03

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

• 52:07Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 52:12Speaker 01

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

• 52:21Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Joe, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive in to your first deployment. Let's start right there.

• 52:29Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so we got orders to go and be the unilateral direct action team. So me and two of the other guys on my team actually volunteered to go over early in the pre-deployment team to start handover with the guys that were already there. So as we're flying, we get delayed, or we do our stop in Spain, we end up having an extra day, and that ends up actually being kind of, kind of critical because the, as we are delayed in Spain, our team, the two teams that we're replacing, they go out and they're prosecuting a Zarqawi target because this is two days after Zarqawi bombed the UN headquarters in Baghdad. They go after the guys who actually bombed the, the compound. They get into a huge gunfight.

• 53:12Joe Kent?

  We lose two Green Berets, Bill Bennett and Kevin Moorhead. Many casualties on that mission. Had the plane not been delayed, we'd have been on that hit with them. So we get there, we get to the team house where we're supposed to start, you know, the replacement procedures and doing left seat, right seat ride, but most of the team's been medevaced out. There's still blood in the Tacomas that were taken over from the team. Their team leader stays. He's been shot. He got shot in the, in the calf, kind of like a through and through. So he's like limping around with a bandage. They still got blood from the night, you know, night or two before on him. And so it's, it's, it's very much real. It's surreal and it's real because we're there. We're living at the Baghdad International Airport, the Rab

• 53:54Joe Kent?

  Haan Palace complex. So we're like living in an old opulent Saddam palace that we've taken over. But there's literally still blood in the trucks and we've got targets to get after like right away.

• 54:05Shawn Ryan?

  What year was this?

• 54:06Joe Kent?

  This is 03.

• 54:07Shawn Ryan?

  03.

• 54:08Joe Kent?

  Wow. Yeah. So very much real, very much up in our, up in our face. The guys that were on security, 10th Mountain guys have been sliced over to, to fifth group. So those guys actually ended up kind of being our continuity because most of the team ends up leaving. So those guys kind of help us get settled in and we immediately start just doing rehearsals for missions that are, that are coming up. The rest of our team gets there, we integrate them and we're, we're right in the mix going after the deck of cards and going after Zarqawi's guys.

• 54:40Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting. I mean, how does, I mean, talk about getting thrown into the mix, right into the, into the middle of it. I mean, how do you feel now that you're there?

• 54:49Joe Kent?

  I feel great. I mean, I, there was like nowhere else I wanted to be. And again, man, it's just surreal because we're living at this palace that has like a pool. And then you step one room over and you got your ready room full of your kit, your trucks out front, just waiting to get a mission for, you know, the next night, or even some daytime hits we were doing.

• 55:09Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's talk about the very first op you did.

• 55:13Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so very first op was probably a couple of days after we initially got there. We go into just the outskirts of Sodder City, and this is summer of oh three. So the IED threat is sort of there, but it's not sophisticated. And most of the military still didn't have up armored vehicles. So we're rolling around in no armored Tacomas. That's what, you know, some of the guys invaded the country in, they just stayed there, we kind of modified them, could put a 240 on them, or you could take the 240 off and you can make it more low profile. But we get a mission to go hit some, hit a house on the outskirts of Sodder City. I think he was a deck of cards guy. I don't remember if he was an Al Qaeda guy or a deck of cards guy. But a pretty nice house, pretty big,

• 55:57Joe Kent?

  you know, gated compound and all that. Excuse me. And literally, our plan is like, we're loading up on the trucks, like, and we're just hauling ass to this target, like SWAT team style. So there I am, on the back of a Tacoma with the beds down, and we're just sitting there on the bed, hauling ass down by, down the Baghdad International Airport road, down Route Irish, you know, going 70 miles per hour. And I'm like, this is pretty cool, but it's really gonna suck if I fall out of the truck on the way to target. So I'm like, death grip on that thing like it matters, you know? But man, we get there, and we do a, we have one of our guys get up on a ladder to kind of clear the courtyard. And then we end up ramming the gate, and then the front door is pretty beefy.

• 56:41Joe Kent?

  So we had already made the decision ahead of time, we were just gonna explicitly breach it. So slap a half block of C4 on it and blow it in. I was the first guy in the, in the house as the, that was my job. So ran in and I, from that target man, I was so focused, like I literally still, when I think of that, I remember seeing like the, the red dot on my Eotech. Cause I'm like, you know, scanning my sector and like, it's just super intense, like trying to clear everything. I, I remember pretty much everything from clearing that house still to this day. Cause it was just so ingrained in my head. You know, so it was, we, we didn't get into like a big gunfight or anything. We got the guy we were after, you know, did the whole sense of site exploitation and tactical questioning and all that.

• 57:24Joe Kent?

  But doing like a real, actually putting an explosive block on, on someone's front door and blowing it in. You know, and then running through the house and like doing my job. I was like, well, this is, this is pretty big. This is like a bigger accomplishment than anything I've done up to this point in the military. Cause this is the first real thing I did.

• 57:39Shawn Ryan?

  How do you feel you performed on your first operation?

• 57:43Joe Kent?

  Well, good. I mean, I felt good because I, you know, ran towards the sound of, of the guns essentially like, you know, you're blowing that breach and it's, it's confusing, right? You know, you don't know what's on the other side of the door. There's all that smoke and confusion. And I wanted to be in that room, getting into a fight if there was one to have. So I felt good about that. But then I look, this on subsequent targets has happened too. I look at like how amped up I am compared to like my team sergeant, you know, who might not even, he probably didn't have like an elevated pulse at the time. And I'm like, all right, I need to kind of be more on his level. Cause he's, he's noticing way more things than I'm noticing. Much later on, we end up going on a hit. And a guy, not in my sector, but I see this kind of out of my periphery.

• 58:26Joe Kent?

  A guy comes up out of the room that we're in and he's got an AK like this. And my team sergeant just like casually reaches over like, like it's a child and grabs the AK and just like punches the dude. And like later on, once we get everything under control, I'm like, Like, why didn't you shoot that guy? And he's like, oh, because I looked, you know, AK, the selector lever was up and his hand was on the buttstock. It wasn't anywhere near the trigger. And I was like, I didn't even think about that. I saw the shape of the gun and had I been close enough, I probably would have put half a magazine in that dude.

• 58:58Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 58:58Joe Kent?

  You know, and I was just like, that's actually pretty cool.

• 59:00Shawn Ryan?

  That's pretty switched on right there.

• 59:02Joe Kent?

  I was like, that's, that's, that's what you want to be at, you know? You want to be the guy that's like assessing everything.

• 59:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 59:07Joe Kent?

  So that was definitely my first takeaway from my first, I don't know, 10 targets.

• 59:11Shawn Ryan?

  That is some serious target ID.

• 59:13Joe Kent?

  Yeah. And so that was my team surgeon. He was really big on that stuff. He was like, hey, anybody can go into these places and just shoot the crap out of it. He's like, if, if that was, if that's what was needed, we could call the regular army and they could just shoot tank rounds at the place. You know, who cares? Whatever. He's like, but they're sending us in here for a reason. We want to get these guys alive. We want to get intel. Um, this is all going to tie into a much bigger piece. It's going to help us take down the remnants of Saddam's, you know, cronies. And then it's also going to help us run down the Al Qaeda guys. So we're, we're here for a very specific mission and we got to do our jobs like professionals.

• 59:47Shawn Ryan?

  Let's rewind back to your first op. How did the team, was there a, were they critiquing you after your first operation?

• 59:54Joe Kent?

  Oh, definitely.

• 59:55Shawn Ryan?

  How was it?

• 59:55Joe Kent?

  For sure.

• 59:56Shawn Ryan?

  What was their impression of you?

• 59:58Joe Kent?

  Um, you know, I, I, I ran aggressively into there. So they're like, hey, his heart's in the right spot. You know, like you might want to amp it down a little bit, like be, be a little bit calmer, assess the situation a little more. Um, we definitely did like a full AR, did rehearsals again the next day, you know, tried to implement what we had learned. Um, definitely developed some pretty good TTPs about, especially because all those compounds in Baghdad, all those houses, almost all of them had like the gate up front. And so, you know, we initially assessed, you know, put a guy up over just to kind of cover the courtyard. But we had some fumbling around with the gate. And so then we started talking about, hey, do we just run up hard and ram the gate to get guys to get a foothold in? Or do we want to start looking at going over the wall?

• 1:00:43Joe Kent?

  And that's something we were debating heavily, but you know, the critiques for me were like, hey, you're, you're at an 11 or a 12 and like maybe dial it down to like a five or, it's like a five or a six. And it, I think it took me quite a while to get there because it was just like, I mean, the mentality then, especially with, uh, with CQB was like, be as aggressive as possible. Was like, get into every room and dominate it and control it. It's kind of funny saying that now what we learned subsequently in the wars is like, that's exactly what the enemy was anticipating that we would do. And so having, having a more. Calm approach and a more methodic approach definitely is is much more beneficial.

• 1:01:16Shawn Ryan?

  It's definitely interesting how to see how much the tactics have changed.

• 1:01:20Joe Kent?

  Big time.

• 1:01:20Shawn Ryan?

  Since the beginning up until all the way up until the end.

• 1:01:24Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Shawn Ryan?

  But let's talk about your first, your first op where you guys went kinetic.

• 1:01:30Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Shawn Ryan?

  Do you remember that?

• 1:01:31Joe Kent?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. So we were really lucky. I think because we're operating in a very bottom up environment, we were able to get a drop on a lot of the bad guys. And also, it was early on in the war. So I don't think the bad guys knew our tactics as well as they would in subsequent wars or in subsequent years of the war. We took some fire here and there, you know, a little bit of returning fire. So there was gunplay kind of on the streets every now and again. But again, it's that sweet spot too. The IED threat wasn't that wasn't that really that big. I think the first time we really got into a scrape, a proper scrape was in Fallujah. So the next year, the next deployment went back and essentially did the same mission.

• 1:02:12Joe Kent?

  We can kind of go back, but we took the Iraqi commandos. We had trained them up later on in that that first deployment that I was on.

• 1:02:19Joe Kent?

  But we took them into into Fallujah and we took the hospital that's on the the western side of the Euphrates right there. So it was actually the first target we took down in Phantom Fury. In the hospital itself, I don't know why we we should have gotten stitched up, but we didn't. There was foreign fighters in there. They had machine guns, they had explosives, but for whatever reason, we got the drop on them. But then when the sun came up, we took a ton of accurate fire, probably the most accurate mortar sniper and RPG fire that I had been under was there because before in Baghdad, I think we were kind of fighting a lot of financiers, a lot of guys who weren't like pros, like the dudes that that hung out in Fallujah that knew we were coming in.

• 1:03:01Joe Kent?

  Like those guys were were ready to fight and they were ready to lay down some.

• 1:03:05Shawn Ryan?

  So you were at you were in the invasion.

• 1:03:08Joe Kent?

  I was in the second Fallujah, November. So we had just rotated home when the first Fallujah happened, but then we came back that summer of 04.

• 1:03:19Joe Kent?

  And we had, so after we got done doing direct action for a couple of months, my team got a more traditional SF mission. They said, hey, we're going to make a new Iraqi military and we want them to have a commando element, a special operations element first. So they gave us a bunch of anti Saddam militias that we demobilized and then created the Iraqi commandos out of. And with that, we started getting a lot of the politically sensitive targets.

• 1:03:43Shawn Ryan?

  So you were on the forefront of that?

• 1:03:45Joe Kent?

  I was, yeah, my team was. So we actually trained up the initial crop of commandos with heavy Kurdish leadership. So, yeah, and then we really, that, that really opened up our aperture being, because we were living in the middle of Baghdad, basically went from living kind of on the airfield, doing a traditional soft mission of you get fed the targets, then you go kick in the doors, to, hey, now you're living in the middle of the city, basically amongst the people, with a bunch of indigenous forces that we just gave guns to, and we just sort of need to train them up and hope that they're not going to turn their guns on us. And then, once we got some reps out of those guys, we realized, number one, that we had access to the population now. So our intel just absolutely was, was on fire, because we had guys that were part of our,

• 1:04:30Joe Kent?

  our commandos that were from all these different neighborhoods. And so we, we dove immediately into running sources, developing our own targets, but then also having the Iraqis, we were able to do a lot of the politically sensitive targets. So we ended up hitting a ton of mosques. We kind of became the go-to for mosques. The first Fallujah, the hospital was used by Zarqawi in Al Jazeera, basically as a propaganda center. So they would broadcast out of the hospital and they'd bring in just mangled people that they were probably, you know, harming. And they were like, look what the Americans are doing in Fallujah. And they just broadcast it non-stop. So going into Fallujah the second time, the, the order was for us to get in there with the Iraqis and have the Iraqi seize the hospital initially. So they couldn't use it as a media hub, but also so we could immediately put an Iraqi

• 1:05:14Joe Kent?

  face on the operation.

• 1:05:17Shawn Ryan?

  Let's, let's go back to standing up this, this, the commandos. I mean, what was?

• 1:05:24Shawn Ryan?

  Had those guys had any experience?

• 1:05:26Joe Kent?

  Well, some of them had, some of the Kurdish ones had, and we were, I'm probably alive today because of those guys. Because basically, this, this wasn't the greatest plan ever, but this is at the same time when Paul Brimmer is saying that we're gonna fire everybody who's part of the Baath Party, and basically fired the entire Iraqi government, but especially the Iraqi military. And so, we got a bunch of the anti-Saddam militias, which was mostly the Kurds, but there was a couple Shia anti militia, anti Saddam militias as well. Unfortunately, those ones were heavily infiltrated by Iran, which we picked up on pretty early. But we had to, to bring these guys together and make them a cohesive fighting force. And we had all kinds of issues because we had interpreters that spoke Arabic, but a

• 1:06:11Joe Kent?

  lot of our Kurds didn't speak Arabic. And then we had Kurds from the PUK and the KDP. And so, there was actually like a dialect difference in Kurdish. So, we had like these three-way translation issues, and this is actually where like I had to really step up my language game, because we really didn't have interpreters initially. We had like one or two. And so, I was, I was literally doing pointy talky. I could read a little bit of the Arabic from, from having Pashtun, but I was just phonetically writing down basic stuff like left, right, stop, go, shoot, weapon on safe, that type of stuff. So, they didn't have, really, as a cohesive fighting unit, they didn't have any combat experience. Some of the Kurds did. We ended up losing the PUK guys, because they all got recalled to go back home and defend

• 1:06:55Joe Kent?

  Solmania and defend their home. But we kept the KDP guys luckily. But we basically took those guys in. Two weeks, we put them through like a basic training, taught them how to shoot, and then right after that, it was go time. We were at, we were living in the middle of Baghdad, trying to build up our own little FOB slash safe house, trying to house the Iraqis, but then also going after targets, going after bad guys, and running a lot of those guys as our, our human eyes and ears.

• 1:07:21Shawn Ryan?

  How did you find out that? There was Iranian influence within?

• 1:07:26Joe Kent?

  Because a lot of the Shia anti Saddam militias, they are from SKIRI, Supreme Council for Islamic Revelation in Iraq. And I had a couple, we had a couple like area study books, because this is, you know, the internet's still pretty primitive at that time. And you could just read the history of these groups, and their armed wing was the Badr Corps. And these are the guys that fought against Saddam. They fought against Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War. That's why they were technically anti Saddam. And so, you know, me being a 23-year-old E5, I'm like, you know, surely somebody knows that these guys are like pro-Iran, which also hates us. There's got to be a reason why they're here. You know, somebody above me must have a master plan, and I'm just going to do my deal, you know. But it wasn't

• 1:08:08Joe Kent?

  until, because before we went, we did Fallujah in November, we went to Najaf in 04. And we damn near had a mutiny. Then, we had all of our Shia guys realize we were down in Najaf. And these guys were completely okay when we were hitting Sunni mosques in Baghdad, or hitting Sunni mosques in Anbar. But they realized pretty quick that we were actually in Najaf to go after the Imam Ali shrine, because Sadr had held up in there. Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia had basically strong pointed the most sacred mosque in all Shia Islam. And we're on the outskirts, and basically our Shia guys figured that out. And they were, they were on the verge of running a coup against us. Probably would have been a fairly significant, you know, green on blue type incident. Luckily, our Kurds that

• 1:08:51Joe Kent?

  were there, because they spoke the language, they were like, this is about ready to go down. And so, we actually had to subtract a lot from our fighting force, because we put a lot of those guys.

• 1:09:01Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, hold on. What, I mean, how many of these guys are there?

• 1:09:06Joe Kent?

  This is probably like 25% of our fighting force. So, per company, we probably had about, you know, 25, 30 of them, or that had some degree of ties. You know, some of them were full-on card-carrying members of Badr Corps, of SKIRI. Other ones were a little more subtle about it, but their loyalty was definitely to Shia Iraqis, and not anybody else.

• 1:09:27Shawn Ryan?

  How did you, I mean, how do you handle that?

• 1:09:31Joe Kent?

  Well, at the time, we just had to get weapons away from those guys. And then, once we got back to Baghdad, we fired quite a bit of them. There was a few of them that said, hey, like, I want to stay working with you guys that hadn't violated that trust that we kept.

• 1:09:45Joe Kent?

  But that was basically, I mean, honestly, it was a test. When we would go after, and this is why the Kurds were the guys we could trust the most, because obviously, we weren't going after any Kurdish targets. But it was always a roll of the dice. Like, if we were going after an Al Qaeda in Iraq target, like, we had to take a look at, you know, who are our Sunni guys? We had to know our guys. We had to say, okay, who are the Sunni dudes here? And how do they feel about Al Qaeda? Or even moreover, more politically sensitive, like, how do these guys feel about the Baath Party? Because we were still, at the time, going after some Baath Party members. And that's where really, the geopolitics kind of hit us in the face, you know? Because I had gone from just being focused on, literally, my sector of fire, you know, when we're doing direct action, to having to know Iraqi politics down to this level. And especially when we started talking to a lot of the Sunni Iraqis, they were just like,

• 1:10:30Joe Kent?

  hey, you guys firing, Bremer firing the entire Baath Party? Like, that's creating an insurgency right now. That's happening. And I know my team leader and us guys at the lower level, we were sending that, you know, back up and saying, hey, this is probably a bad idea. But obviously, fell on deaf ears, and, you know, the rest is kind of history, unfortunately.

• 1:10:50Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. I mean, how would those guys take it when you would secure their weapons?

• 1:10:56Joe Kent?

  We did it hard and fast. We did it really fast.

• 1:11:00Joe Kent?

  And I think a lot of them were eager to not be associated with us anymore. Because that was, that summer there of '04, that's when everything against Sada really kicked up. So whether we were down in Najaf, or whether we were out in Sada City, we were going after some pretty senior-ranking members of the Sada's clergy, but then also just members of the Shia community. And so that switched pretty quickly, like, almost overnight, that we really couldn't trust a lot of those guys.

• 1:11:29Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I don't even...

• 1:11:32Joe Kent?

  And we were living in the Shia neighborhood. We were living in Khatamia, which has the Khatamia shrine, which is a massive Sunni shrine. So we're our little team house, our safe house was in that area. So we were definitely in hostile country. The other side of the river wasn't much better. It was Adamiya, which was one of Saddam's big Sunni strongholds. So we were kind of surrounded in every direction, but we were definitely having to navigate that. That really opened up my aperture to like the human intelligence side of the war. Like the more that you can understand who these people are and the different groups, the different friction points, like the better off and the more productive you'll be, but you'll also be able to stay safe.

• 1:12:13Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. That's a lot of moving parts. Holy. And that's your second deployment?

• 1:12:18Joe Kent?

  Yeah, my first morphed into my second. So we, we left in like spring of oh four, but we were right back in summer of oh four, doing the same, the same mission.

• 1:12:28Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. So just a couple of months off?

• 1:12:30Joe Kent?

  Yeah. Yeah. So no, it was definitely, I went from thinking I was going to miss the war to like, we're doing direct action. We're kicking indoors. We're getting the fast rope. We're getting into little scrapes here and there to, you know, when I was in the unconventional warfare portion of the special forces course, because that's so different than anything I had done in the military. I was like, this is pretty cool, but where am I going to be like, wearing civilian clothes and like leading raids with like indigenous? Is that, does that really happen? And then like I fast forward just a couple of months and I'm like, at a little safe house that's not much bigger than this studio. And we had to do split teams too. So my team got cut in half. We didn't have 12 full guys. We had about eight or nine. So there's four of us living in this location with a company of indigenous forces of different sectarian background that we had just given

• 1:13:13Joe Kent?

  guns to essentially and trained and they were now our force and we're living in downtown Baghdad, collecting our own intel. And I was like, this is pretty sweet, man. Like this, if, if, if it ends here and this is the only combat I ever get to do, this is like, I don't know, a hundred percent more than I ever thought I'd even get a shot at. So I was like a kid in a candy shop, man.

• 1:13:32Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 1:13:35Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into, let's not, let's not go there yet. So this is the oh four, oh five timeframe.

• 1:13:42Joe Kent?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:45Shawn Ryan?

  What happens when you go home from, from this one? You've sent you, it sounds like this deployment was a lot more kinetic than the, than the previous.

• 1:13:53Joe Kent?

  Yeah. Man, I, um, like I said, I was just really happy to be there. Like I love SF and like, basically our, our schedule was we'd go over, we'd go to war and then I wasn't, I wasn't married at the time. I didn't have a family. Most of the guys on the team did. And so basically I could go to whatever school I wanted to go to. Like when we'd get back from deployments, because there wasn't a lot of competition for it. Cause guys were smoked. They were, they were kind of getting burned out. Um, and so there's only a handful of us that were like, hey, we want to go train. We want to go to this school, that school. And so it was like, then you could come home, uh, go party and then you could go to some schools and then you'd go to combat again. And I was like, man, fifth group's like the greatest place in the world. Like this is, this is awesome. I want more, you know?

• 1:14:38Shawn Ryan?

  What schools did you pick?

• 1:14:39Joe Kent?

  So I picked, uh, right after my first deployment, I went to dive school because it was a dive team. I'd already been to, to pre scuba when I was in, in Ranger Battalion. Wanted to go there so I could solidify my place on the team. Cause that's like the, the second check. Like you get your, your green beret, you get assigned to a team. And if you're on a dive team, you got to pass dive school. Otherwise they'll send you to a regular, a regular team. And so I was really wanted to get dive school done. So I could solidify my position on my O D A. Um, so I went to dive school between my first and second deployment. And then between my second and my third, because I had been exposed so much to the human intelligence side of things. And like, that was really kind of where my head was going. Kind of had an epiphany on my, I think second trip. I was like, man, the, the issue with this war isn't can we kill the bad guys?

• 1:15:22Joe Kent?

  Like whenever we put the bad guys in time and space, like we win, you know? Whether it's us with our Iraqi commandos, whether it's, you know, whatever, the Rangers, the SEALs, whoever, the Marines, the Kentucky National Guard, like America wins. The problem is finding these guys. And also there was a massive amount of confusion too, because I just felt like we did not understand Iraq at all, like. All this nonsense we got told about, number one, weapons of mass destruction. But then all the crap we got told about like, oh, be greeted as liberators and, you know, we're going to install this new puppet government, like all that just kept exploding in our faces. And so I was like, man, the, the challenge in this war is number one, locating the enemy, like doing the intel work, running sources, doing surveillance, like that, that's type of stuff

• 1:16:06Joe Kent?

  right there is, you know, premium skill set type of, type of, uh, type of skills that you needed to be successful in that. And my second trip, we had a war, a special forces warrant officer on my team who really made it his, you know, his, his role on that deployment was to map out Jash Almati and to figure out where they were. And he was running a handful of sources and he'd bring me along every now and again on source meetings. Um, and I was just really impressed that like, you know, here, here we were, just a couple of guys, you know, with initiative, a little bit of money, and we were able to map out like where the vast majority of these bad guys were, whether it was Sodder's guys or a lot of the, uh, the folks that Al Qaeda was, was kidnapping at the time. We were able to start running down a lot of those kidnapping cells. And that's because we

• 1:16:51Joe Kent?

  were juiced into the population. So after my second trip, I wanted to go to one of our, our human intelligence courses so I could be qualified to do that. And that, that kind of set the trajectory really for the rest of my, my career in the military.

• 1:17:03Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Did you ever get into the ASOT stuff?

• 1:17:05Joe Kent?

  Yeah, exactly. That's what I, that's what I went to.

• 1:17:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's what that is?

• 1:17:08Joe Kent?

  Yeah, that's what I went to. And then much, much later on, went to the farm.

• 1:17:11Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, that's a pretty, that's a long pipeline.

• 1:17:15Joe Kent?

  It's a long, it's a long course. Yeah.

• 1:17:16Shawn Ryan?

  Can you go through, can you talk about that?

• 1:17:19Joe Kent?

  I can try. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a school that teaches, you know, you how to basically run human sources. Um, there's a, there's a lot of like lines there, what the CIA is authorized to do versus what, you know, soldiers are allowed to do. But, um, yeah, without getting into too many details, I mean, you have to learn basic, you know, uh, agent handling skills. You have to learn how to debrief people, how to, you know, spot whether or not they're lying to you, to the best of your ability. Um, but then also-

• 1:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  How would you do that? What are some of those tactics?

• 1:17:50Joe Kent?

  What's that?

• 1:17:51Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of those things you learned about?

• 1:17:54Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I mean, people get, some people get really into the, the neuro linguistic programming, like how people sit and like, do they look up and left, right and left? Do they rub that like, with a whole different culture, I think that probably applies a lot to police officers in America where you're dealing with your own culture. A lot of, trying to apply a lot of that to a foreign culture, I think is very challenging unless you're deeply steeped in that culture. So for me, it was always like, check the checkables. If somebody's coming to you and they're like saying, hey, I am part of Jash Almati, I'm part of Al Qaeda. I'm like, okay, can you, can you prove to me like, how are you a member of that organization? Just very basic, like, is, is this person who they say they are? Because if they can't

• 1:18:37Joe Kent?

  positively identify themselves to you, or they can't really prove what they have access to, whatever information they're going to tell you, it's either completely made up, or it has an agenda of its own. So I think that's one of the, I think journalists have to do this as well. It's like, you know, what are your actual, you have all these things you want to tell me, but you need to explain to me how you actually have access to it. So I think that's probably the most fundamental. There's a bunch of other stuff that we can do to check in on people. But I think that's probably at the, at the very basic level, what we, what we look for when we're, you know, meeting a new potential asset.

• 1:19:11Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that's, that's a, I find that to be an interesting route for you because you're so into, it sounds like you're so into the kinetic, in your face, action of being a, a SF guy. And then you take this, which is almost, it's, I mean, it's under the radar, kind of behind the scenes. And you're dealing with people.

• 1:19:35Joe Kent?

  Yeah, 100%. Oh, I was surprised too. But when I was over there, number one, just being impatient, I was, especially when we were doing unilateral direct action, we'd get intelligence from like, our intelligence cell. And I was always like, where does this mysterious intelligence come from? You know, like, we get it in the form of like, we think this bad guy's in this house, and this bad guy's important because of X, Y, and Z. And I always had it in my head. I'm like, how'd we know that? You know, like, is this something that's really, really interesting and like sophisticated? You know, but then, you know, you hit enough dry holes, you're like, I don't think this is something that's very sophisticated. I think sometimes they're they're doing the best they can. But then it was really, once we started working with the Iraqis, I was like, OK, the actual cheat code is understanding the culture and understanding the people.

• 1:20:19Joe Kent?

  And the closer that you are to the people, the more that you're going to be able to understand. And the faster you're going to be able to get to target, the faster you're going to be able to produce your own targets. That's one of the unique things about special forces, about a special forces ODA is that organically, we can do our own human intelligence. And then we can analyze our intelligence and then we can train up a force or we can prosecute the target ourselves. So we can basically do cradle to grave targeting. And that was what I noticed was different from us. Once we branched out and we started doing especially the commando mission, I was like, OK, I can see our unique role here. Because you had everybody else, you had the Rangers, the SEALs, you had the Marine Corps Det One guys, the Marsoc guy, the the initial Marsoc guys.

• 1:21:02Joe Kent?

  Everybody was kind of competing for the same DA kinetic mission. They are competing for assets, they are competing for for the targets, you know. And so it was like, now I see what our niche is here. We can get, we can do that, sure. But our niche is is being down here with the local population, mapping out the human terrain. But then also, at the same time, being able to take our our indigenous forces out there and prosecute the target at the same time. So I really liked that autonomy. And it put us much, it put me much more in the driver's seat, being a part of the the intel side. Because like, now I'm now I'm driving operations because I'm the guy collecting the intelligence.

• 1:21:39Shawn Ryan?

  Totally. I mean, it's a you're self sufficient.

• 1:21:44Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  At that point.

• 1:21:46Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Shawn Ryan?

  So did you, was there any regret into kind of taking that route versus staying in a more?

• 1:21:54Joe Kent?

  Not really, man. I really liked it because especially as the wars went on, it just seemed like we were screwing up the, like we, the US government, like we were screwing up the intel piece. Like, we, again, we were pretty good at hunting, like, once we got the bad guys in our, in our crosshairs, like, they were gonna get dead, or they were gonna get a set of flex cuffs. Like, that was just it. But could we find them? That was a big thing. Also, on my 2004 trip, that's when Zarqawi was doing a lot of the kidnapping and putting the beheading videos up.

• 1:22:22Joe Kent?

  We had really good intel from one of our, our sources who basically was like, I know who the guy standing by Zarqawi is, and we know where he is. But he's in this area where, like, you guys really can't get into. Because we had the, we had been training up a low-visibility snatch team with our Iraqis. We were able to go get in garb and blend in and snatch this guy who was part of this kidnapping cell out of his apartment. Probably the coolest mission I've ever been on in my life. But basically, the big army wouldn't go into the area because it was in Abu Ghraib, just on the other side of where the prison is. They wouldn't go in there because they were just like, every time we go in there, we get stitched up by IEDs. Like, we're not gonna do it. We had moved so fast that basically we were

• 1:23:05Joe Kent?

  just to the outskirts of the city by the time we even, like, called it back in. Because this is before people had constant connectivity in the team houses. So by the time we called in that we were going out there, back to our headquarters, they were like, well, this is, this pertains to hostage rescue, so we think that, like, one of the JSOC units should do it. And basically, like, my team leadership was like, yeah, we're less than a mile away. We're just gonna go ahead and do this. Like, we'll let you know when it's done. And I was like, wow, we're, because we're juiced into the, the human terrain, because we're running our own intel, we're actually beating the guys who, in theory, are supposed to be handling this, the guys who are supposed to be one rung up from us, we're actually beating them to target, you know? And that didn't happen every time. Obviously, they were doing great things. But that was a big eye-opener for me, especially coming out of Ranger Battalion.

• 1:23:48Joe Kent?

  I was like, because we're down here, because we're dealing with the populace, we're running our own intel, we're beating people to target, you know? And we're, and we're coming up with unconventional solutions. We're not getting on a helicopter every time and waiting for us to have a cord on force, you know? We're, we're sneaking into these places in whatever vehicles we can acquire off target. You know, we were doing a lot of stuff. We were jumping out of bread trucks as well, broad daylight. You know, just places where the big army wouldn't go. And even a lot of the other units couldn't get into, but that's because we were living downtown amongst the populace. Let's talk about that operation. Yeah. From start to finish. Yeah. Yeah. So we were at our, at our team house. And one of our sister teams calls us up and says, hey,

• 1:24:32Joe Kent?

  this, this team, our sister dive team was living in a different part of Baghdad. They didn't have an assault force. They didn't have Iraqis they were training up. They were doing, doing basically unilateral intelligence operations. And they said, hey, we, we've got a guy that knows where these American contractors and British contractors are being held because he was in the video. And he's, he's, he's identified one of the guys that was in the video. And he knows where he is. And so basically he knew, this source knew where one of the members of the beheading cell was. And he was in Abu Ghraib. So they, they briefed up the source and they said, what we need from you guys is we just need a handful of people that can blend. They knew that we had been out doing a lot of reconnaissance in the area because we recon all of our targets before we hit them in indigenous clothing.

• 1:25:17Joe Kent?

  We had grabbed a couple of guys here and there off the street. Like if you were doing a recon and you can make positive ID, you know, why wait for that night? Why not just grab them now? So we had done a little bit of that. But so our sister team knew that we had that capability. So we loaded up a handful of, of our Iraqis and then four of us Americans that had been out and about the city a lot. We went out there, we got the brief from them, from that team. And then we went to the local American FOB where the, the big army, the closest big army unit was just to tell them, hey, we're going to go into this area. And you know, what's your radio frequency? Can we call you if we get into a, get into heavy contact and any of that type of stuff? And that's when, that's when that, that regular army unit was like, you guys can go in there if you want,

• 1:26:01Joe Kent?

  but we don't go in there. You know that, right? And we were like, yeah, we're aware. We're like, what, what are the threats? So like, yeah, we just get stitched up every time we go in there. RPGs, IEDs, like these guys aren't playing around. Like, all right, well, we're taking an Opel in a, in a Scooby van, so. So I think we're gonna blend in. And we, I mean, it was night, but it wasn't super late. It was like eight or nine o'clock at night, because we needed traffic to blend in with. So if we would have waited till the typical two or three in the morning, like we usually do, there wouldn't have been anybody on the road. So we, we leave in our, our, one Opel in the lead, and then a, a van trailing much further behind. I'm in the lead vehicle with one other American

• 1:26:42Joe Kent?

  and other Iraqis. And so we, we get there to the friends and apartment complex that we're going into. And we're, we're looking for apartment number seven, I think it was. And so we get into where the apartment is, and there's a bunch of guys just out there malingering, hanging out, just young, military age guys, you know, it's, it's winter time, too. So they've got, it looks like they, they're potentially armed. But we want to get in and get out as quietly as we possibly can, because our overall goal is to snatch this member of the beheading cell, so that he can't, we can snatch him, we can get information on where the hostages are being held. So we don't, if, if we end up having to go loud, and we end up like killing the guy or whatever,

• 1:27:23Joe Kent?

  then the hostages get moved and we got nothing. So our whole goal is to get in there as quietly as possible. So before we left, we basically said like, no English on target. And so we're all dressed up. I had a dish dash on with my M4 underneath it, had one of those like breakaway dish dashes, light skinned body armor underneath it, and then a kaffiyah covering my face. And that's basically how all the Americans are dressed. Iraqis are dressed similar. Luckily, our Iraqis went up first, made contact to talk to the guys that were out front. They said something to the effect of, we're with one of the other groups, I think Ansar Al-Suuna, like, we're with this group. Don't, don't say shit. Just stand here. Like, if you know it's good for you, just

• 1:28:02Joe Kent?

  stand here. And so we kind of file past, we go, we know the guy's name, one of our Iraqis knocks on the door, the dude's mom like cracks the door. You know, and I'm pulling security in the hallway, um, just trying to make sure that nobody comes up the hall. And she cracks the door and our Iraqi says, hey, is, I think the guy's name was Ziyad or Jabbar or something like that. Is Ziyad here? And she's like, no, he's sleeping. And he, he said, okay, well, I really need to talk to him. He kind of got her to crack the door open a little bit more, just enough for him to get his foot in. Right when he got his foot in, like, we, we silently flow in there. One of the Iraqis puts the hands over the mom's mouth. We come in and like, literally, her son,

• 1:28:43Joe Kent?

  this kid, is just asleep on a sleeping mat, like a bed, AK by him and a phone by him.

• 1:28:49Shawn Ryan?

  He's a kid?

• 1:28:50Joe Kent?

  He's, I don't know, teenager, maybe. Um, maybe he was in his twenties, but young enough, young enough that he's still, uh, not married and living with his, his parents.

• 1:29:00Shawn Ryan?

  It always, it always interests me how young some of these leaders are.

• 1:29:03Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:03Shawn Ryan?

  You know, on the opposing side.

• 1:29:05Joe Kent?

  Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I was 24 at the time, and so he probably, probably he looked like he was younger than me. But they're asleep. So we got him. We keep his mom gagged. Um, grab him, and now we have to get out. And so our Iraqis kind of walked ahead. They made sure the hallway was clear. And so his mom's freaked out.

• 1:29:26Shawn Ryan?

  Was he combative at all?

• 1:29:27Joe Kent?

  No, because we basically got him. Like, he got, he got woken up with a bunch of guys of Kaffiyah's covering their faces in his face, saying, just give us your hands. And he, he looked around, and he was, you know, he had a hand over his mouth. Flex cuffed him, put a, another Kaffiyah shirt over his cuff, so people couldn't see that he was cuffed. That's what, we didn't cuff him in the back. We cuffed him in the front, so he could kind of walk out like this. And so we walked him and his mom out, had the van come around, throw them in the van, hop in the car, and we get off target that way. Um, had to drive them all the way back. At, at the time, we didn't know this, unbeknownst to us, there's a big fight going on between, uh, the unit that's charged with getting hostages and in our command. So we get off target, and this is before, you know, we had very

• 1:30:12Joe Kent?

  good radios. So somebody just calls my buddy on his little crappy Iraqi cellphone, and is like, you guys got to take him to the airfield right now. So we took the prisoners and dropped them off with, you know, the guys that were going after the hostages. Right away. Unfortunately, we were, I don't know what happened there. But unfortunately, we didn't get those hostages. Zarqawi ended up beheading them a couple of days later. I'm not sure if we, there was an argument like, should we keep them and tactically interrogate them ourselves? Because this is before the big, like, this is before there was a lot of restrictions on us interrogating people. And so we definitely, our team wanted to keep them and interrogate them because we knew the target set. We had kind of been all over this. We felt that we could move faster.

• 1:30:55Joe Kent?

  Above my pay grade, we lost that food fight and we ended up having to hand the detainees back over to the guys at the airfield and it kind of went from there.

• 1:31:03Shawn Ryan?

  Who was at the airfield? Was it?

• 1:31:04Joe Kent?

  It was JSOC.

• 1:31:05Shawn Ryan?

  It was JSOC?

• 1:31:06Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I don't remember if it was, you know, if it was the army guys, the Navy guys, whoever it was. It was JSOC Command that our, that our command was fighting with. This is, this is like oh four, so this is before everybody was fully integrated. You know, years later, there was just the SOTF and I think there was a lot more connectivity. But there was still a ton of rivalry and there was not flat communication. I don't think our efforts were very synchronized in those, those years.

• 1:31:31Shawn Ryan?

  How long after was it that the hostages were beheaded?

• 1:31:36Joe Kent?

  It was a couple of days later.

• 1:31:37Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:31:38Joe Kent?

  Yeah, it was a couple of days later. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that whole summer, summer and into fall of oh four, that was probably a lot of the, that was some of the biggest work that we did. We were doing a little bit against the Shia militias, but Zarqawi kept grabbing Americans and Brits and beheading them. And so we were trying to run down Zarqawi's Baghdad-based kidnapping operations. And that was probably the hairiest mission that we did. We had quite a few other ones. We were, we were out broad daylight, hypha street, places where the army had like literally still smoldering Bradley fighting vehicles that had gotten lit up. And we're out there in our little like opals, dressed up like Iraqis, trying to, trying to find guys.

• 1:32:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, I gotta be honest, it's pretty heads up, you know, it's, it's been a long time since I've been in a, in a mission planning session, but, but to pick up on the traffic patterns like that, that early, did we even have a curfew in place at that time? You know, to pick up on those traffic patterns? I mean, that's. Not going too late to blend in with the traffic. I mean, did you, were your guys' commandos advising you on how to dress and how to blend in?

• 1:32:40Joe Kent?

  Yeah. So really early on-

• 1:32:41Shawn Ryan?

  And that's an art in itself.

• 1:32:43Joe Kent?

  Oh, big time, man, big time. So we got tasked to just stand up commandos and there was a guy on my team who'd been around for friggin' ever, legendary guy. And he was really big on reconnaissance and he was really big on like unconventional solutions. That was his whole thing. He was like, there's a bunch of other people in SOF who get paid to kick indoors and shoot dudes in the face. Like, he's like, we can do that. He's like, but if some other unit can do it, then it's probably not what we need to be doing. He's like, but we, we know languages, we know cultures, we know unconventional warfare. This is our lane. So early on, he had a vision of grabbing some of our Iraqis that had like a little more aptitude, putting them through a more reconnaissance oriented selection process. And then also picking them based on what part of the city they were from and then like broader

• 1:33:25Joe Kent?

  picture, what part of the country they were from, really developed a good initial pool of sources. But those guys, like right off the bat were a godsend to us because they were the ones that were teaching us like, you know, how to dress, traffic patterns, like what do, what do IPs, what do the Iraqi police notice on a vehicle that's going to get you burned? Because this is before Iraq really had like a vehicle registration system. It got much more complicated. I know you guys probably dealt with this in GRS. It got much more complicated later on with the whole like license plate thing, but things were still much more Wild West back then. But just basically, how do you move through the sea that is, you know, Baghdad or Greater Iraq without getting detected? And so those guys really helped us. And for me, it really opened up my aperture because

• 1:34:07Joe Kent?

  it's like, I'm like a six foot two white guy. And like, I, I don't think I could, I didn't at the time, I didn't think I could blend in. But then once you learn, hey, it's all about your demeanor, it's all about how you dress, it's all about your vehicle, you know, it's about how big your signature is, you know, and the lower signature you have, the less gringos that you have in any location, chances are you're probably going to get away with it. Chances are you're probably going to blend in. And so that's, that was kind of the, the direction that, that we, we took that reconnaissance element. And that was really beneficial for us in terms of gathering intel. But then also just being able to, hey, there's a whole bunch of tools, the government, that our government had when it came to time to interdict targets. And we could offer an alternative solution usually, a lot, a lot more low visibility.

• 1:34:54Shawn Ryan?

  How motivated were the, were the commandos, the Iraqi commandos that you guys were training? The, my experience with them was not great.

• 1:35:05Joe Kent?

  Yeah, yeah, we, we were lucky, I think, because we kind of had the initial crop. And so we fired a lot of guys initially.

• 1:35:15Joe Kent?

  But luckily, we had some former Iraqi special operations guys, like from Saddam's side, that we vetted to see if they were like war criminals or whatever. But like Saddam, I mean, they fought a horrible war against Iran. So they had, Saddam actually had a decent amount of combat experience in his own military. And so we brought in some of those guys and the path party was like secular. Like, so these dudes like hated the Islamists. They hated the Iranians and they had a lot of combat experience. So some of them were a big help. The Kurds were also a really big help too, because the Kurds basically were like, hey, most of Iraq hates us and would, would kill us all. So we're, we're down here to partner up with the Americans to get a little payback. And then also to make ourselves very valuable to the Americans, which they did.

• 1:35:59Joe Kent?

  But yeah, it was, as, as the years went on, later on, I worked with some, some other like regular Iraqi army and they were not, I mean, and they performed as such too. When ISIS came across the berm, you know, 2014, 2015, that, that $2 trillion military that we trained up, threw their guns in the dirt, you know? With the exception of the commandos, the Iraqi special operations forces, they actually, even when they, even when the whole government of Iraq abandoned them when America had already left, like they fought in Ambar against ISIS. They got left for dead. So like one of the only, one of the only things I think, one of the only successes from Iraq that we can claim, I think, is standing up the Iraqi special forces. Other than that, I think a lot of it was unfortunately a failure.

• 1:36:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, what, what is the, so there's a standard that you're not just taking Iraqis in and it's like, all right, you're here. That's it. What would constitute somebody getting ejected from the program?

• 1:36:54Joe Kent?

  Your typical soldier stuff was there, like if they just refused to at least even try. Cause I mean, Iraqis have a different culture than we do. So like, we definitely tried the whole American style selection. And like, that doesn't really work with that culture. Like there, you know, you yell at them and tell them to run or do pushups or whatever. They're just gonna kind of look at you like, why?

• 1:37:15Joe Kent?

  Like it just, you know, so you do a little bit of that. You want to get the guys that, that aren't going to quit, you know? But also we were looking for aptitude and, you know, could we trust them too? So really getting to know the guys and know where they're from. Making them provide us with documentation that we could at least get some degree of vetting on. So we knew who they were, because I mean, Iraq was in shambles. We took out the government and so it was like, what is a valid ID card here? You know, like, so people could give you an ID card and like, we didn't really know if it was legit or not. We didn't really know who these guys were and biometrics didn't come into play until years later. So a lot of it was like having a relationship with the guys. And then making sure that we, you know, there was always two of us in a location.

• 1:37:58Joe Kent?

  Or if there couldn't be two of us in a location, because that happened quite a bit. We did make sure that we had some of the Kurdish guys with us. And so really having the Kurds there.

• 1:38:06Shawn Ryan?

  So they were your most trusted?

• 1:38:07Joe Kent?

  Most trusted and they were our eyes and ears too. I mean, there were some of them that were so Kurdish, they didn't speak Arabic. But most of them spoke Arabic and Kurdish. And so they definitely had their ear to the ground for us. And they had been briefed by their leadership that like, keeping us safe was like in their national security interest. Like they needed to make sure that Americans felt safe around Kurds. So it was, those guys definitely kept us alive in terms of like, making sure that we didn't get killed in our sleep, essentially.

• 1:38:35Shawn Ryan?

  How would you recruit them?

• 1:38:38Joe Kent?

  So the Kurds came to us basically from the KDP, from the Kurdish Democratic Party. They gave us a lot of their, their peshmerga, their paramilitaries. And so those guys came ready, ready to fight because they were already. Part of like an organic Peshmerga unit and they they came to us. And so we would use those guys kind of as force multipliers. We'd break them up, make them squad leaders, make them team leaders, uh, platoon leaders, that type of thing. Um, but the the initial recruiting came from like those anti Saddam groups that we essentially just inherited either from the CIA because the CIA had had contact with a lot of the the anti Saddam groups, but they didn't vet them. It was just like, hey, these guys are part of the Islamic Council that hates Saddam and they're going to bring you 50 fighters. It's like, it's, I mean,

• 1:39:22Joe Kent?

  like literally when we first got the crop of Iraqi commandos, some of these guys thought they were joining like the new Iraqi soccer team, like no joke, like they had tracksuits and like soccer balls. And we're like, what do you think you're here to do? And they're like, this is going to be the new Iraqi national soccer team, right?

• 1:39:36Shawn Ryan?

  You gotta be, are you serious? I thought that was, uh, wow.

• 1:39:40Joe Kent?

  No, that happened. Yeah. I mean, most of them, most of them knew, but we did have, I don't know how many it was. It was like 10 or so. They were just like, we're not here for the soccer team. It's like, all right, thanks for coming, guys. We'll, we'll, we'll see you later. That's down the street.

• 1:39:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Wow. How about the, I mean, I'm really interested in Saddam's former guys.

• 1:39:59Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:59Shawn Ryan?

  Excuse me. Saddam's former guys. I mean, how does, how do you trust that?

• 1:40:07Joe Kent?

  It's tough. Um, luckily we had guys on my team and, uh, some of the leadership in fifth group that had really, like, these guys have been studying Iraq since 1991. And so there was a lot of them that were really skeptical initially on, um, the narrative that the Baath Party were, you know, in League of Al Qaeda. Cause if you studied the Baath Party at all, like they were secular, they were really against any kind of radical Islam. Um, and so these guys actually had done their homework. And so they saw potential in some of the former Saddam guys and some, and some of the former Saddam, uh, special forces, some of the former Saddam intel guys. And the base, the little compound that we

• 1:40:49Joe Kent?

  ended up occupying in, in Katamia had been one of Saddam's, uh, intel services headquarters. So we were able to like find old documents. And we were able to start reaching out to people and through some of the Iraqis we had saying, "Hey, like, we're open-minded. Like, if these guys are willing to work with us, we're willing to work with them." And so there was a lot of vetting that had to take place there, obviously, before trust was given. But there was a lot of them that, you know, sit down and talk to them and they would explain like, "Hey, I didn't like Saddam, but I love my country." They were like, "I didn't support him, but we were at war if Iran," you know? "We were also going after and making sure that al-Qaeda didn't get a foothold here before you guys showed up," you know? So we did find some people there that we could really work with

• 1:41:34Joe Kent?

  and that actually had proper soldier experience, soldiering experience and then proper intel experience, too.

• 1:41:43Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's, uh, that's gotta be tough, sifting through all that.

• 1:41:47Joe Kent?

  It was.

• 1:41:48Shawn Ryan?

  Did you get a lot of, um, were you, later on, were you turned over the same guys over and over and over?

• 1:41:55Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so for two deployments in a row, I worked with basically the same crop of, uh, of commandos and then, uh, subsequent years went back and worked the exact same, same program. I mean, some of the guys quit, some guys got killed here and there. Um, so there was some turnover there. But even up until the time we left, left Iraq the first time in 2011, I was working with some of the same, same Iraqis that I had worked with, like, back in '03.

• 1:42:19Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:42:19Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:20Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. You know, it sounds like maybe you don't think we should have been in Iraq.

• 1:42:27Joe Kent?

  I don't.

• 1:42:28Shawn Ryan?

  Why is that?

• 1:42:29Joe Kent?

  No, I mean, I think the whole narrative that, you know, number one, Saddam had WMD, like, that was completely and totally found to be inaccurate. And then to base the war off of that, but then also that Saddam has ties to al-Qaeda is just preposterous. I mean, Saddam was not a good guy. He was a very bad guy, killed a lot of his own people. But he was threatened by radical Islam. And so he was actually, his intelligence service was pretty brutal against radical Islam. Um, I, I just think we were lied to, lock, stock and barrel. I think our government, you know, squandered the will of the American people after 9/11. After 9/11, the American people were like, "Yeah, let's get it on, let's go to war, let's defend our country." We took down the Taliban and Al Qaeda pretty quick in Afghanistan. Bin Laden escapes to Pakistan.

• 1:43:14Joe Kent?

  And all of a sudden, it's like, don't worry about that. We're going to build a new government here in Afghanistan. Oh, and by the way, now we need to go to Iraq. And now stepping back and looking at it, it's like Afghanistan, especially the counter terrorist, the counterterrorism mission done by SOF, done by the CIA. Nobody got rich off that. That didn't cost the government very much money at all. You need a good, proper invasion and occupation to really, you know, fill the coffers of the military industrial complex. And you look at a country like Iraq, if you're going to invade that, man, you can bring everybody. I mean, you can have armored divisions there and, you know, your, your air package, combined arms warfare with the military have been practicing for so long. I mean, it's just right there.

• 1:43:56Joe Kent?

  It's way too tempting for them not to do it, you know, which is, I think tragic. It was, it was a big wake up call for me. I was like, man, because after my first like year or so, I, I was a little confused. I was like, why are we bringing more? It seemed like we were always building new bases and bringing more people in. And I was like, why are we doing that? Do we really plan on? I thought we were only going to be here for like another six months because even in oh three, we were talking about handing over the Iraqi government like in oh four. And we caught Saddam or Delta caught Saddam in December of oh three. And after that, I was kind of like, well, I mean, now what are we doing? You know, aren't we leaving? But it never seemed like we were leaving.

• 1:44:32Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think we were there?

• 1:44:33Joe Kent?

  I mean, I, I really think we were there because the military industrial complex saw an opportunity. They saw, hey, the American, America got attacked and we have a bunch of will from the American people. We have permission from the American people right now to go to war as long as we can tie it to terrorism. And so I think they took that and they lied about the intelligence. And then the next thing you know, we're in Iraq. I think there might've been some, I think at the, the mid levels, I think there were some idealistic people there who thought that we could spread democracy through the barrel of a gun, who, who really believe in that neo con nonsense that says like, if we go over here and we install a government and we let people have elections finally, that, you know, deep buried within the soul of every single Iraqi and Afghani, there's,

• 1:45:16Joe Kent?

  there's a young Thomas Jefferson who just wants to spread liberty. I think there's some people who believe that because that was definitely the propaganda. But I do think at the end of the day, it was a math problem. It was like, hey, we have this massive military that takes up nearly $1 trillion of our, of our budget. We need to justify that. We didn't really get to use that in Afghanistan because that was just a bunch of dudes on horseback. And the air force that got that done, let's have a proper war. Let's use our actual military. And then, once you get the proper war going, like the occupation, that's where the money is. Because even going in and toppling Saddam, not really going to get, people aren't going to get rich on that. That's not a reoccurring investment. Nation building is a reoccurring investment. Propping up these governments, building these governments, security forces, training and all that stuff. That's, that is something that never ends.

• 1:46:01Joe Kent?

  That can go on forever.

• 1:46:03Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you think the big push came from?

• 1:46:06Joe Kent?

  I mean, I think it just came from the moneyed interests in, in Washington DC. I mean, at the time, you had the Cheney family deeply invested in Halliburton, you know?

• 1:46:15Shawn Ryan?

  That's kind of what I'm getting. That's not kind of what I'm getting at. That's what I'm getting at.

• 1:46:19Joe Kent?

  And then they, they put everybody who is part of polite DC society, everybody who's part of the establishment. They get a, they get a taste of that, too. They get a taste in terms of, you know, where the contributions are going on the political side. But then they're also building out jobs. They're making people very, very wealthy. They're putting up new, uh, production facilities and different congressmen and senators districts. And so it's, it's good for business. It's good for everybody. And I think I, an unfortunate thing, I, I think our generation, the GWAT generation deserves a lot of credit for being like the all volunteer, the first all volunteer force that fought our longest wars. The longest period of time our country's been at war, global war on terror. But we never stood up the draft. It was all fought by volunteers.

• 1:47:03Joe Kent?

  And I think we deserve credit for that, but I also think overall that was a bad thing for the country. Because you could send the country off to war for 20 plus years. You could make a small group of people very, very wealthy based off that war. But only a very small fraction of the population is going to feel any effects whatsoever of the war. It's like less than what 1% serve in the military. And then who knows that less than 1%? You're talking about now two, maybe 3% of the American population? So it's like, this is kind of a money-making scheme, uh, done on the backs of those who are, you know, true believers like us that volunteer to go over time and time again.

• 1:47:39Shawn Ryan?

  How red up are you on, uh, Cheney's involvement with Halliburton?

• 1:47:43Joe Kent?

  Fairly red up, I think, yeah.

• 1:47:45Shawn Ryan?

  I would love to dive into this.

• 1:47:47Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Shawn Ryan?

  So Cheney, for the audience.

• 1:47:50Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:51Shawn Ryan?

  Vice, Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, was the former CEO of Halliburton.

• 1:47:56Joe Kent?

  Yep.

• 1:47:57Shawn Ryan?

  Halliburton ran.

• 1:48:01Shawn Ryan?

  I believe all logistics for both wars.

• 1:48:05Joe Kent?

  Yes.

• 1:48:06Shawn Ryan?

  Correct?

• 1:48:07Joe Kent?

  And that's what I'm talking about, where the money is in the occupation. The money is in the nation building.

• 1:48:12Shawn Ryan?

  So anybody that doesn't, anybody that was there that still isn't tracking all of the KBR, because KBR was a subsidiary company to Halliburton, the big logistics company. Everything that you saw that had KBR on it, the shitters, the chow halls, the construction, the fuel, every, every, every piece of logistics in that war belonged to Halliburton.

• 1:48:38Joe Kent?

  Yep.

• 1:48:39Shawn Ryan?

  Whose former CEO is Dick Cheney, who is now the Vice President of the United States, who probably made the big argument on why we need to go in there.

• 1:48:49Joe Kent?

  Yeah, Cheney and all, all the guys that Cheney brought in to the Bush administration, all the neo, all the Wolfowitzes, Douglas Fife, all those guys who made the case. And these guys have been talking about taking out Saddam for years before Bush was even elected. I mean, since 91, that had been the big neocon dream. But when you, when you read a lot of what they are writing at the time before 9/11, they always said, "We didn't have the national will." And then bam, 9/11 happened, and they're immediately talking about Iraq. I mean, right away, I mean, the Taliban are, you know, a country, one country over, they're, they're in a very different country. They flee to Pakistan, a country we're still giving billions of dollars to, yet everybody is chattering about Iraq, you know? And I personally think had Iraq not gone so disastrously, I, I, I think we would have gone into more countries.

• 1:49:34Joe Kent?

  I mean, we, we, we did, in a way, later on went into Syria and Libya and Yemen and all that, but I think we would have gone in with a much heavier hand had things gotten, hadn't gotten so stalled in Iraq.

• 1:49:47Shawn Ryan?

  Can you go deeper? You know, when, when did you find out? When, I mean, I didn't look into this until way after my career.

• 1:49:54Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Shawn Ryan?

  That's when it hit me. It sounds like you were on to this immediately.

• 1:50:02Joe Kent?

  I wasn't on to it immediately. I was like legitimately, um, I was legitimately believing that there was a bigger plan somewhere. I mean, when the order came down to like fire all the Bath Party guys, for instance, that was the first time I saw like a major discrepancy between where I was in the ground truth and what was getting put out from higher. Cause before that, I really hadn't thought that much of it. It was just like, hey, let's go, let's go get some bad guys. Um, but then I was like, this is kind of weird. Like everybody at my level sees this. I know that my team leader and the guys who are writing the reports to go up higher, I know they're saying things about this. This is common knowledge down here on the ground. What's going on? Why are they going to fire all the Bath Party guys and create an insurgency overnight? Like it's pretty evident to us. And then I, you

• 1:50:45Joe Kent?

  know, I still had a lot of faith in the system. And I was like, no, maybe they, maybe there's a bigger plan here that I just don't see. And then, you know, as the deployments wore on, I was like, okay, there's definitely not a bigger plan that I don't see. So here's the question, are they incompetent at the top levels? Or do they just not care? And they're all making money here. And that was the last conclusion that I wanted to come to. Like, cause morally, that was hard for me, you know? It was like me and all my friends are over here and not everybody comes back from every trip. Like we're over here making big sacrifices. We believe in this. It's, it'd be one thing if the, the top level folks just weren't getting all the information and they just didn't understand the ground truth. But after a while, I was like, they just don't care. They don't give a shit about

• 1:51:28Joe Kent?

  the ground truth. What they care about is pumping more, more, more into Iraq. They want more bases. They want more troops and they want us to stay into perpetuity. They want us to stay here forever. With a very, very lofty idea of turning this place into a Jeffersonian democracy. Like, and that to me, I was just like, no one actually believes that. No one believes that someday this place is going to be like Geneva. There's no possible way they could believe that. But the current status quo of us basing thousands, hundreds of thousands of troops here, that is really good for business. And that really started to make me furious after a while, but we still had all these different problems that we had to deal with because by us being there, we are creating

• 1:52:09Joe Kent?

  more problems like we fire the entire Baath party, we radicalize all the Sunnis, we heavily empower the Shias. Well, that's how you get ISIS. And so, but now we have to go deal with ISIS because we kind of created that. Like, we ended up right on Iran's border. The Iranians have been at war with us since 1979. Now we're dealing with EFPs. Now we're dealing with the Iranians. Like, it's just like this never-ending self-licking ice cream cone of perpetual war. And again, like, there's a small percentage of the population that's shouldering the burdens. And there's another smaller, more elite percentage of the population that's making a ton of money off this. But then, the majority of Americans, they just have no idea. But, you know, fast forward 20 years, and we lost somewhere between six to nine trillion in those wars, you know? And what have we gotten for it?

• 1:52:54Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing.

• 1:52:55Joe Kent?

  Nothing. Yeah. We're far worse off.

• 1:52:57Shawn Ryan?

  A veteran suicide epidemic?

• 1:52:59Joe Kent?

  Veteran suicide epidemic. We've got a fiscal crisis because we, we still are addicted to perpetual wars. Maybe it's not a kinetic hot war, but we still want to send foreign aid to every single place. We still want to be the security guarantors of all of Europe, of the high seas. That's still the American mentality. Meanwhile, like, we can't even secure our own border.

• 1:53:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Joe Kent?

  You know, it's like, the last priority is always America.

• 1:53:21Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think it's important to talk about this because not many people do talk about it. Not many people understand it, even when you bring it up.

• 1:53:30Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:30Shawn Ryan?

  They can't, they can't wrap their head around the fact that their vice president sent us to war to, for the betterment of himself and for Halliburton.

• 1:53:40Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Shawn Ryan?

  KBR. And here we are on the verge of

• 1:53:48Shawn Ryan?

  three wars. I guess not on the verge, two are already happening.

• 1:53:51Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:52Shawn Ryan?

  The conflict in Israel, obviously, Ukraine, and then China's about to take Taiwan.

• 1:53:57Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:57Shawn Ryan?

  And who, who the hell knows what else is going to kick off? But, you know, it makes...

• 1:54:04Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like Americans need to be more educated now than ever because

• 1:54:08Joe Kent?

  100%.

• 1:54:09Shawn Ryan?

  Because the fact that the, I mean, it's...

• 1:54:17Shawn Ryan?

  There's no if, ands, or buts about it. The government has been lying to us for a very long time. They're gonna continue to lie to us. You can't ask questions.

• 1:54:27Joe Kent?

  Right. If you do, you'll immediately be labeled, you know, either a far-right conspiracy theorist, or, you know, a neo-Nazi, a Putin supporter, or whatever. But that's the scam. And if you look at the rhetoric that's being used right now, in particular with the Ukraine war, it's the exact same rhetoric they used in the lead-up to the Iraq war. There is a handful of courageous Republicans and Democrats out there who eventually were almost ostracized from their party, who were against the Iraq war. And those guys were called like, "Do you want the terrorists to win? Do you hate America?" Like, the surrender Republicans, the traitor Democrats, like that. They were called all the exact same thing. Man, like, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I know pattern recognition. And like, those guys were right. They were ultimately vindicated, after they were basically politically destroyed.

• 1:55:10Joe Kent?

  So, not being able to see those patterns now, it's very alarming to me, that we're falling for all the exact same tricks. And unfortunately, as disastrous as the war on terror was for our country, what's happening now, in particular with Ukraine, that could be much worse. Because now, we're potentially getting into a nuclear exchange with Russia. Potentially a World War III type of scenario. And there's a lot of people right now who are saying, "Oh, that'll never happen, that'll never happen." It's like, well, we are bragging about the fact that we're supplying the Ukrainians, we're bragging about the fact that we're providing intelligence that's being used to kill Russian military members. We have members of our political class that are saying that they want regime change in Russia. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just the other day, said, "Yeah, we might be getting

• 1:55:54Joe Kent?

  to a point pretty soon here, where we could put advisors, American advisors, into Ukraine." It's like, well, how did Vietnam start? You know, like, how did all these little periphery wars? I've been an advisor before. I was an advisor in Yemen. Like, we were at war. Like, that's exactly how we get into a kinetic war. It's like, so we're gonna risk a nuclear war right now? Because the war propaganda is so compelling? Like, it's absolute insanity. And like, people have to realize how big of a business, how big of a racket, war truly is. And I'm not like a, you know, peacenik that's gonna say that we should never go to war for any reason, like, quite the contrary, I just don't want us getting involved in any more stupid wars. But stupid wars are big business in DC, and all that machinery in DC is built around

• 1:56:38Joe Kent?

  foreign aid and foreign wars, and the American people, they hardly realize it. But that's the reason why... The priority is always sending money overseas, but the second you say, hey, I want to repair a bridge in my district. Hey, I want to do something about all the people that are addicted to fentanyl, living on the streets in my district. That's why they get table scraps. Because the only time that Congress will buckle down and actually work in a bipartisan fashion and like, I don't know, work really hard, work overnight, is to send a hundred billion dollars overseas. We just saw it a couple of weeks ago. We're working all night. We're going to send a hundred billion dollars to, you name the country, we're probably sending the money. Don't worry about our border. It's still wide open.

• 1:57:12Shawn Ryan?

  I can't even, I can't even keep track of the, I, I look at the news cycle, but not very often, but, uh, but you know, I, I see it through social or people talking or what. I don't watch the media anymore, but it's, it's a hundred billion package, just like you said, we sent another hundred billion over there. And it's like, is that the, is that the same one that we were talking about two days ago? Or is this another one that happened already? And I, I can't.

• 1:57:38Joe Kent?

  They probably don't even know.

• 1:57:39Shawn Ryan?

  I can't keep track of it.

• 1:57:40Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:41Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, you know, I mean, I just, I think it's important for people to hear this stuff because your sons and daughters are going to go to war again.

• 1:57:49Joe Kent?

  100%.

• 1:57:50Shawn Ryan?

  And it's going to probably be for some bullshit reason to make the elites richer.

• 1:57:55Joe Kent?

  100, and I mean, look at the recruiting crisis that we're having right now. We can, we can get into why that's happening. We have a recruiting crisis right now. That's out in front. Everybody, everybody's seeing that right now. That's in the news. But we're also provoking a war on multiple fronts. So just because we've, we haven't had a draft in any of our lifetimes, like, that doesn't mean people still don't register for selective service. People still register for selective service. Like, people will say, hey, he's crazy. He's fear mongering. I'm just saying, look at the facts. Look at how many conflicts we have brewing, plus our recruiting crisis here at home. Easily the law of unintended consequences. Like, we could get into a shooting war in one of these theaters pretty easily. I mean, our, Biden thought it'd be a great idea to go build a pier off the port of Gaza, and they've already taken rocket fire there with American soldiers, like, getting in between the Israelis and the Palestinians. About the dumbest thing. You can do all kinds

• 1:58:40Joe Kent?

  of dumb stuff in the Middle East, and we've done most of it, but this has got to be the dumbest thing that we've done, is trying to get in between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their conflict. And we're doing it. And so there's all these different pressure points where if one thing happens that we're not anticipating, or somewhat of a black swan event, we could easily be in a war, and you've got a depleted military. And so you're completely right when you say it could be your sons and daughters because there's people who are like, oh, my kids aren't going to join the military. Like, no, they're still registering for the draft, aren't they? Like, that's, that's the logical conclusion to the direction that we're heading in right now, unless we make some serious changes.

• 1:59:13Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's already, it's, I've already heard rumors that Fifth Group is going to be sending guys to Iraq because of the escalated situation with Iran now.

• 1:59:25Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I mean, most Americans aren't aware of it. We've, our troops in Iraq and Syria have been attacked 150-plus times by Iranian proxies. And when we say Iranian proxies, we've got to be clear on what that is. That's the Iraqi government that we pay. Because after the Iraqi military, we spent $2 trillion on, surrendered to ISIS. We had to go back in there in very short order and stand a military back up again. And guess who filled the breach? The Shia militias controlled by Iran did. And the Iraqi government's controlled by Iran. So these Iranian proxies that are attacking our troops are 100% funded by the United States of America. We're funding the guys that are attacking our troops. And so it's like, well, then why do we leave our troops there? And that's always been my question. I think we should have had them out a long time ago. We can get into it, we're talking about my late wife, but she should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there.

• 2:00:10Joe Kent?

  And then you have the administrative state dragging their heels and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts. And it's the exact same thing we see now. We've got troops that are out there, vulnerable, under fire. And Washington DC refuses to withdraw them, either because they're ignorant and scared or because they're like, well, worst-case scenario, if some troops get killed, then we got to double down. We'll send in more troops, build some more bases. That's all the more justification to stay. We beat ISIS, but now we can't leave. Now we got to fight these Iranian proxies.

• 2:00:40Shawn Ryan?

  Infuriating.

• 2:00:41Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:42Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about your wife. When did you guys meet?

• 2:00:46Joe Kent?

  So the first time we met briefly, met for 10 minutes, was in 2007. I actually met her at the Baghdad Ville, the area where the, all the different intelligence agencies are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you probably know it.

• 2:00:59Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:00Joe Kent?

  Yeah. I attended a targeting briefing that she was giving, actually on an Iranian militant that we were trying to track down. So met her there like for five, 10 minutes and chatted with her and had every intention of coming back and chatting her up some more, but the war moved fast and she moved on to a different location and I didn't see her again for, for several years. I didn't run back into her until 2013.

• 2:01:21Shawn Ryan?

  Who was she working for?

• 2:01:22Joe Kent?

  So she was working at the time, she was on an individual augment. So she joined the military right after nine 11, had a knack for languages, went to DLI for Arabic, really excelled. And then they sent her to Fort Gordon, just to, you know, translate stuff. And she was like, this is not what I joined for. I want to go to war. And they were like, you want to go to war? We got, boy, boy, do we have a war for you. And so they, they put her on the plane to do an individual augment. She ends up at Siege of Sotef. So working for, for special operations. And then she gets put down from Balad to Baghdad to work in the inter-agency, inter-intel agency environment there in the Ville, doing targeting.

• 2:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  And her name?

• 2:02:03Joe Kent?

  Shannon Kent. Yeah.

• 2:02:05Shawn Ryan?

  Shannon Kent.

• 2:02:06Joe Kent?

  Shannon Smith at the time.

• 2:02:07Shawn Ryan?

  Shannon Smith.

• 2:02:08Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:10Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll just pick up right where we're at.

• 2:02:15Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

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• 2:03:28Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we're back from the break. We just got introduced to Shannon. Let's talk about her.

• 2:03:35Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so, um, native New Yorker. She was inspired to join because of 9/11. So her dad and her uncle were both ground zero first responders.

• 2:03:44Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 2:03:45Joe Kent?

  Yeah, her dad's a career, uh, New York State trooper. Uh, and then her uncle was a New York City firefighter. So the attacks happened. She had just started college, um, and her father and uncle were both down there at ground zero, uh, trying to dig people out of the rubble for the first three or four days.

• 2:04:01Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:04:02Joe Kent?

  Yeah. So after that, her and her brothers, you're younger than her, both do what a lot of Americans did at the time, and they went and found a recruiter, said they wanted to serve. So she knew she could learn languages pretty easily. That was like her passion. She taught herself Spanish and French and just had that mind that automatically gravitates toward the languages. So she went to all the different recruiters and said, hey, I know I can learn Arabic, like, put me in. And so the Navy was the first one that said, hey, well, we'll send you to DLI. If you can pass the test, we'll, we'll send you there. And so she, you know, smoked her, whatever it's called, uh, D-Lab, um, scored really high, great aptitude, so signed Navy contract, went to DLI, Defense Language Institute in

• 2:04:42Joe Kent?

  Monterey for, say, a year and a half to learn Arabic, say, 18, 18 months, I think, the initial Arabic training. So came out of that, she scored really well, um, but she never liked doing the easy thing. She had a passion for like specifically like the Iraqi dialect, because, you know, like there's standard Arabic and then there's like Iraqi, like all the different dialects. Uh, so the Iraqi dialect's pretty challenging because it's so different than your traditional modern standard Arabic. So she latched onto that pretty quick and then volunteered for a deployment right away. Um, and then her, basically just going from being an individual augmentee to working at Siege of Sodif, to working down there at the Ville, uh, she just kept kind of shining and, and, you know, making herself value added, that she eventually ended up on that

• 2:05:27Joe Kent?

  same deployment. She ended up getting brought right down to Biop Airfield to work with the NSW Task Force that was down there, because they wanted to bring in more intel people. Closer to them because they had the same frustrations that that I had like hey, we're we're not getting intel fast enough. So they started home growing some of their own intel capability. They brought her down there. And then on that deployment, she got an invite to go try out for the special reconnaissance teams for NSW because they had just opened that up to non SEALs and then and to women as well. So she was in one of the first classes for the special reconnaissance troop.

• 2:06:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:06:00Joe Kent?

  That that let women in.

• 2:06:02Shawn Ryan?

  What year is this?

• 2:06:03Joe Kent?

  So that would be

• 2:06:06Joe Kent?

  oh, seven or oh, eight. Yeah.

• 2:06:09Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting.

• 2:06:10Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:11Shawn Ryan?

  And so you guys met in oh, seven.

• 2:06:13Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13Shawn Ryan?

  And then reconnected at what point?

• 2:06:16Joe Kent?

  2013, we both ended up going to selection for and getting invited to the the year long training course to be in a pretty unique special operations unit combines intelligence folks with special operators. Still one of the few units that not a lot's known about. So I'll be a little bit cagey and not talk too much about that unit.

• 2:06:36Joe Kent?

  It's kind of funny because when you're when you go and you do the for the book, you do like the publication review stuff.

• 2:06:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:43Joe Kent?

  And like the CIA is pretty cut and dry. Like, hey, you can say what you did at the CIA, you know, like they gave me like one or two things I couldn't say. And then like DOD is like, you know, pages of like, don't say this, don't say that. So, yeah, but we both ended up there at that unit. And so we both recognized each other right away.

• 2:06:58Shawn Ryan?

  But we can I ask questions about that unit?

• 2:07:01Joe Kent?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:01Shawn Ryan?

  Just how did you get recruited into that?

• 2:07:05Joe Kent?

  So I was fortunate that on one of my deployments, I ended up working with them. So I kind of got exposed to what they were, what they were doing. And I already kind of gravitated towards that intel world. And so that's kind of where my head was. And I wanted at some point, I kind of set my sights on going to the agency next. Again, because I was interested in the intel side. But also, I kind of wanted to be like a voice of reason, I guess, the way you could put it, like somebody who had been there on the ground to actually like, give real information to decision makers so that we didn't ever get involved in a disaster like Iraq again. That was kind of like my, my long term goal. But I had an opportunity to work with some guys from that unit. And they had a pretty

• 2:07:45Joe Kent?

  Pretty unique mission at the time. They were part of one of the task forces that was specifically going after just the foreign fighters that were coming across the Syrian border. My team was on the Syrian border, so we were working on that oh five oh six timeframe. And a couple of guys came out and they had a lot looser rules than we did and they had a lot more money than we did. And they were like, yeah, but we're in the army. And I'm like, wait a second, like, so who are you? Cause I was like, man, I thought I knew everybody. Like, who are you guys? And they, they wouldn't even tell me, you know? And they were like, hey, email, email this guy when you get home and we'll, we'll, we'll talk to you later.

• 2:08:16Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 2:08:17Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:17Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't know what that unit was until way after I was out.

• 2:08:21Joe Kent?

  Yeah, it's not, um, it, we don't really advertise. I mean, the unit doesn't advertise that much. They kind of find who they want. I think we've, we've done some more like blanket emailing of like the whole special forces community or the whole NSW community now. To kind of get more guys, because you know, it's cool to have a super secret unit, but you still need people that like know to come to try out for it. So I think they're a little bit more upfront nowadays about getting guys to come try out for selection. But I didn't hear much about it at all. So that was my first exposure.

• 2:08:52Joe Kent?

  But really I didn't plan on going to the unit until we pulled out of Iraq the second time. Cause I had, I'd always just wanted to stay on an ODA, loved it. I went from weapons to intel and then I became a warrant officer. And so as we were leaving Iraq, I was like, crap man, like what now? Is this, are we going to enter the peacetime army now? I was like, am I gonna have to go send a staff somewhere that now that I'm a warrant officer? And luckily that, that unit takes warrant officers, like you can go try out. So I was like, you know what? I wanna, I wanna stay in the game. I'm gonna go try out for this unit now. And so luckily Shannon had done three Iraq deployments and she had just done an Afghanistan deployment too. And so she, and she had tried out for the unit. So we ended up in the same, uh, the same class.

• 2:09:33Shawn Ryan?

  So would you guys have been doing, or maybe were doing the, the same job description?

• 2:09:38Joe Kent?

  Well, her job was a little more technical than mine because she had the SIGINT qualification. She had the language skills and then Shannon was also a qualified humanter. So she, she was proficient in all three of those.

• 2:09:50Shawn Ryan?

  Can you talk about, can you go into a little more detail on human and SIGINT?

• 2:09:54Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:54Shawn Ryan?

  For the audience.

• 2:09:55Joe Kent?

  Yeah. So she was a, like, if you look at her, her Navy job, it's a cryptolingualist technician. And then interpretive, which means her, her entire job is cryptology. So intercepting signals, radio signals, cell phones, cyber, there's a cyber aspect to it as well. So she was trained in that, but then she had the interpretive, she had the language skills as well. So she specifically targeted the Middle East, Iraq, you know, those types of Arabic speaking countries. That was her target language.

• 2:10:24Shawn Ryan?

  So SIGINT, for those listening that don't know what that is, that's signal intelligence.

• 2:10:29Joe Kent?

  Yeah, signals intelligence, exactly. Yep. So that was supposed to be her main job. When she was over in Iraq, because of basically demand, she ended up just kind of fumbling her way into source operations. Because she understood the Iraqi dialect so well, that a lot of the guys down there at the NSW Task Force that she was working with, so the intel enablers and some of the SEALs that were ASOG guys, they realized their TERPs sucked. Cause we had, we had TERPs from other parts of the Middle East. They're having a really hard time. And so they were constantly having Shannon check those TERPs work. And so she ended up getting in on the HUMIT aspect really early on. And then at the, this is around the same time, I think, where as a fighting force, we were having an epiphany that there was a whole other side of the population that we weren't talking to.

• 2:11:12Joe Kent?

  Because the Middle East is just so segregated between men and women. We were missing the entire, like, literally female perspective. And women in that culture aren't really regarded as anything, but at the same time, they're everywhere, you know? So like, you have women that are in the room with all the same bad guys we're going after. And so Shannon started working with a lot of the women sources, because the women sources wouldn't come in and they wouldn't talk to men.

• 2:11:35Shawn Ryan?

  So HUMIT, for those that don't know.

• 2:11:37Joe Kent?

  Yeah, HUMIT Intelligence.

• 2:11:38Shawn Ryan?

  HUMIT Intelligence.

• 2:11:39Joe Kent?

  Yeah. So that's how she sort of, she found her way into that. And then between one of her deployments, ended up going to one of the HUMIT courses to be, you know, officially certified and blessed off on to, to run source operations.

• 2:11:51Shawn Ryan?

  So you guys are at selection for a special mission, special missions unit. I can't say the name, I won't say the name, but, I mean.

• 2:12:03Shawn Ryan?

  From a, from a, I mean, you, dude, you saw her again.

• 2:12:09Joe Kent?

  I did.

• 2:12:09Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so what?

• 2:12:11Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:11Shawn Ryan?

  What's your pick up line?

• 2:12:12Joe Kent?

  It was pretty, it was pretty wild. Well, she helped me. She, um, were, everything with the unit is very cryptic. And so you go through like a 40 day selection process, which is pretty wild onto itself. Um, and then you go back to your unit and you get orders to come to the year long training. And they basically give you like this super random email that's just like, show up at this parking lot at this time, wearing business casual or something like that. So you're like, okay, you show up and you're hanging out in this parking lot. And there's a couple of guys I recognize from my selection class that are there. And there's some other people who maybe were in a class before us or behind us that are there. Um, and then Shannon pulls up and we make, I make, it's like out of a movie, we make eye contact. We both like, kind of, I think we recognize each other and she's looking at me and she backs into this other car.

• 2:12:55Joe Kent?

  She like, she like taps the fender of her car and another car. And she's like, ah, and so I just go over there and I'm like, hey, the, I, I saw that, that car jumped out and bit your bumper. Like that was my, that was my pick up line there, you know? And then we both realized we were who we thought we were like, you know, and we're kind of, we were both still in training. So we had a lot going on for that, that first year, but you know, from that moment on, we were pretty much inseparable.

• 2:13:19Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to talk about, can you talk about the selection at all?

• 2:13:24Joe Kent?

  Not really. Um, there's all the typical stuff that you'll, you'll have in a, in a, in a RUC based selection. So they, they also kind of fall the same pattern that like SFAS or Delta selection follows.

• 2:13:35Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:36Joe Kent?

  Um, where they're seeing how you perform individually. Uh, I'd say this one, you're even more isolated then because they're recruiting for, they're recruiting from a population of soft guys that have already kind of been tested. You've already kind of have to be, have a decent reputation in your community to get the invite. So they know that you can kind of perform well in a typical team environment. And so they take you and they're, they're going to isolate you and they're going to have you do a lot of the typical land nav stuff. But then there's a ton of other challenges that even with like some of the best intel going into it, like you just don't anticipate. And I don't want to ruin for anybody, but I was, I had, by the time I went, I had been in the army for like 12. Years been to combat and been around pretty much every unit here and there. And there was stuff in that selection process that I was like, I did not see that coming like that.

• 2:14:20Joe Kent?

  That was really surprising and very well done too. So a lot of resources go into it.

• 2:14:26Joe Kent?

  They challenge you in a bunch of different environments and it's it's 40 plus days and you don't really know when they give you a really. They give you like a week timeframe and when it'll be done. They'll be like, yeah, you can tell your unit you'll be back, you know, between this day and that day.

• 2:14:37Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:14:38Joe Kent?

  So, yeah.

• 2:14:39Shawn Ryan?

  What's the attrition rate like?

• 2:14:41Joe Kent?

  It's pretty big. It's pretty big. There's, there's classes where there's like one or two guys, you know, that make it. My class wasn't that way. We, I think we had 10 of us that made it through. There's, it's kind of like a, a scale, a scaled thing. You go to a standard military base initially and that's where you do all your PT tests. Psych eval and that's one of the first places where they're, they're actually going to put you like, they're going to polygraph you as well. Cause anybody that's in the unit has to have a T S S E I. And so there's a lot of guys that the psych eval and the poly are gone, you know? And then they take you off to a much more isolated place. And then they take you to another isolated place. By the time you're all done with it. It's kind of interesting. You, you don't know how many guys make it through your selection class.

• 2:15:24Joe Kent?

  Because of the way they end selection, there's like a final event you do, and then you go before a board. And then you just kind of get put on an airplane. And so you don't really know.

• 2:15:33Shawn Ryan?

  They shuffle you from the board to the airplane.

• 2:15:35Joe Kent?

  Basically, yeah. So you know, like there's one other guy, maybe that you're in the van with. And they also, you also don't really introduce who you are fully.

• 2:15:45Shawn Ryan?

  This sounds like the place I always wanted to go.

• 2:15:48Joe Kent?

  That's what I said.

• 2:15:49Shawn Ryan?

  I've been looking for this place forever.

• 2:15:52Joe Kent?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a very unique place. It takes a long time to get into it, but it's a, it's a really cool place.

• 2:15:58Shawn Ryan?

  How long does it take to get into it?

• 2:16:00Joe Kent?

  Well, selection process is 40 days and then it's about a year of, of O T C.

• 2:16:07Shawn Ryan?

  What's the, what's the attrition rate once you get into the OTC portion?

• 2:16:12Joe Kent?

  It's still fairly high. Um, well, at, at that point, they, they know you pretty well. Based on your past reputation and based on your performance and selection, but you still lose about half your class. Typically in that and, you know, cause I mean, they, the double edged sword, I think of recruiting from a, an experienced. Pool is you get a lot of people who wake up one day and they're just like, wait a second, I'm already a Green Beret, I'm already a Ranger, I'm already a SEAL, I'm already a, you know, Marsoc, like, I don't need this shit. I can go back to my other unit and be just fine. And so there, there's a lot of guys who self-select. Uh, in, in the, cause it's a year long. I mean, you know, you're staring down 12 months of being a student in a, in a fairly high stress environment. Yeah.

• 2:16:55Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. Can I ask you what the, what the job, if, what is the job description?

• 2:17:05Joe Kent?

  So the job description, it's basically special reconnaissance, but a broad aperture of special reconnaissance. So basically. Anything that, um. Requires providing decision makers with a wide variety of options. So you're, you're kind of getting a way ahead of where. The current Department of Defense might be, and you're looking at a lot of potential threats out in the horizon. Uh, and you're saying like, hey, we're going to go get fidelity on these things. Like we're going to track down these, these future bad guys, or maybe bad guys that we're technically not at war with, but they're doing bad things against the country. And we are going to be able to provide a target packet to decision makers and say, this is who this human is, this is who this person is.

• 2:17:48Joe Kent?

  This is his network and here's the following ways that we can get rid of them. Like there's a kinetic option, you can drop bomb on them, you can send in one of the other units to come kill the guy. Or, you know, we have a wide variety of other options, or here's how we can continue to collect on the threat they pose to the country. So it's a broad spectrum of, of special reconnaissance. There's also a more traditional, um, role too, of, of being the reconnaissance element, uh, ahead of the other special missions units that kick indoors and. And do hostage rescue. A lot of them have kind of grown their own indigenous reconnaissance capability within their units, their own organic capability.

• 2:18:29Joe Kent?

  So I would say the unit probably is much more strategic in the types of targets that they're looking at. But it's also. You kind of are working really for the Secretary of Defense and the National Command Authority. So anywhere there's a gap, a lot of times in intel that will get thrown right in the unit's lap and they'll say, you know, kind of figure it out.

• 2:18:52Shawn Ryan?

  Is the, I mean, this is a very individual.

• 2:18:57Joe Kent?

  Very.

• 2:18:58Shawn Ryan?

  This isn't a team environment.

• 2:19:00Joe Kent?

  Sometimes it is, but when we're talking team, three, four guys, maybe. But a lot of, a lot of individual stuff where you're, you're augmenting maybe another unit and another task force or working for, you know, the agency, one of the other intel agencies, or you're kind of on your own. The whole, I'd say the foundation of like our selection process and our training process is you're, you're on your own. It's, it's just you, you and your wits and very little guidance.

• 2:19:29Shawn Ryan?

  And so you and Shannon both, you both, I mean, you did the whole year long course together?

• 2:19:35Joe Kent?

  We both ended up there. So we were in a little bit different pipelines because hers is more intel related. There was some stuff that we would do together and then the operations side, ours is probably a little more, I'd say like hands on.

• 2:19:47Joe Kent?

  So yeah, but we were there together. So a lot of the combined exercises and stuff we did together.

• 2:19:51Shawn Ryan?

  So how did your relationship develop?

• 2:19:54Joe Kent?

  Fast, uh, cause I mean, we were busy, um, with the course. So it wasn't like your typical, let's go out and have coffee and then we'll go out and have dinner later on. And then, you know what I mean? There wasn't like that real gradual. It was, we, we have a little bit of time, you know, you get in, in the course of the year, there are portions of the, of the course where you're living somewhat of a classroom, like regular schedule. So, you know, go out for dinner or whatever. But, uh, I mean, I think we fell in love pretty quick. I mean, so we, we both realized we had found who we wanted to be with pretty fast. So it was, a lot of it was like, hey, when we, when we get out of this and we can actually have a life, like where do we want to live? What do we want that life to look like? So a lot of future planning.

• 2:20:38Joe Kent?

  But yeah, it definitely wasn't your typical courting, courting, courting cycle.

• 2:20:43Shawn Ryan?

  What, uh, what is the, I'm just curious what life's like between a married couple that is.

• 2:20:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's in a unit like that. You know, I mean, what's the deployment schedule like? I would imagine that's not even a, is it even a schedule?

• 2:21:01Joe Kent?

  Not really at the time. We tried to get, that's a, even as I was leaving the unit, they were attempting to get some sort of a normal cycle, but it's just hard with the nature of that work. Um, so it's, it's pretty, it's pretty intense. I mean, both Shannon and I found it, I think, pretty refreshing. We could be honest with each other. I mean, cause it's, it's hard enough being in a relationship when you're in the military and the other person's not in the military. But then when you take it into like this, you know, murky intel world where like you really can't talk about a lot of what you're doing and you most certainly can't communicate a lot of the times. I think both of us found it much easier that, you know, we could just be upright and forthright with each other about what we were doing. We both had all the clearances. We were both read on the stuff. So it was

• 2:21:42Joe Kent?

  like, okay, you know, you're going here, I'm going there. Um, so it was much, much more cut and dry. But I mean, there was a lot of, you know, exterior demands on both of us. It's definitely a high stress unit. I mean, at the time to me, it just felt normal. And I think it felt normal to her. Cause that's what we were, I mean, by the time, by the time I met her, she had been to war four times, you know, all special operations. Um, she had seen some, seen some shit herself. Um, but we were both pretty committed to what we, what we were doing. So.

• 2:22:10Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of shit?

• 2:22:11Joe Kent?

  So she was, um, she was really deep in the intel world. So she had ran, you know, like a lot of sources. Um, she'd been on a lot of targets too. So she was actually out there going on targets with the SEAL platoons. Um, and then also other elements of the task force. Pretty early on, um, before, before the whole female engagement thing, she was one of the females they'd bring out on target to bring in to, to question the women. So there was, there's a scene in the book where literally the, you know, the guys just shot up a whole, whole bunch of dudes and there's a bunch of screaming women and they're just like, hey, Shannon, get in here. Tell them to calm down and then figure out where our next target is.

• 2:22:49Shawn Ryan?

  How'd she handle that stuff?

• 2:22:51Joe Kent?

  Shannon could compartmentalize things very, very well, very business focused, you know? She realized it was a job and for her, I mean, she really just wanted to be in the fight and providing as much support as she could. Like she really felt like, hey, our entire country is engaged right now. Um, you know, her dad and her uncle were there at ground zero. And so she was always, I think like a lot of us, wanted just to do her fair share, you know, for her, it was never like, I need to be here because I'm a woman and you guys should accept women. It was like, hey, I can speak Arabic, like, and if you guys need me to come on target to speak Arabic, if you need me to sit here with some headphones to intercept signal, like, whatever, I'll do

• 2:23:34Joe Kent?

  what you guys need. Um, but I wanna, I know I can contribute. So put me in a position where I can contribute the most.

• 2:23:43Shawn Ryan?

  What was it about her that drew you to her?

• 2:23:45Joe Kent?

  Man, um, you know, when you find your person, you find your person. I think, I think that's, that's a lot of it too. A lot of it's that what you just can't explain. You look at someone in the eye and you're like, oh, okay, this is, this is it. Um, but really it was that understanding. It was the understanding of like, we have a mission and our role here is to go to war for our country. Um, cause you know, I, by the time I met Shannon, I was in my thirties. So I'd been in other relationships and stuff and I just had a hard time, like a lot of women, and rightfully so, just didn't understand that. They're like, what's wrong with you? Like, how many times do you need to go over? Like, are you a crazy person?

• 2:24:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:21Joe Kent?

  Yes, I mean,

• 2:24:22Shawn Ryan?

  I am.

• 2:24:23Joe Kent?

  I don't think I am, but apparently, yeah. So, I mean, it was refreshing to meet somebody who basically had the same ideology that I did, where she was just like, no, this is what we're, until this is over, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna serve and we're gonna, we're gonna go and fight. Um, and then her also, I think, just really having a fascination with like the intel side of understanding Iraqi culture, uh, in particular Iraq, we really initially bonded over Iraq, cause I spent a lot of time there. She spent a lot of time there. So it was just a place where we had both spent a ton of time. Um, so it was very much part of who we were. But I think just that commitment, I think the way that we were both just kind of synced up on those, those values, I think really made us compatible for each other.

• 2:25:04Shawn Ryan?

  How long was it before you guys got married?

• 2:25:06Joe Kent?

  A little over a year.

• 2:25:08Shawn Ryan?

  You got married after a year?

• 2:25:09Joe Kent?

  We got married after about a year, yeah. Yeah, so we um.

• 2:25:13Shawn Ryan?

  So basically you did the the course together.

• 2:25:16Joe Kent?

  Basically the course, got married, yeah.

• 2:25:17Shawn Ryan?

  And then you got married right after.

• 2:25:18Joe Kent?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:20Shawn Ryan?

  And so in a unit like that, is everybody? Is everybody in one centralized location? Are they all over the place?

• 2:25:27Joe Kent?

  All over the place, man, all over the place. It's a, the unit's a funny place. Like, I've ran into guys who were there and we were there at the same time. And like, maybe we have some mutual friends, we can play that game. But like, if you didn't go to the course of somebody or you didn't do a deployment of somebody, it's completely conceivable that you, you two would just never see each other, just because of compartmentalization or just the op tempo.

• 2:25:48Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:25:49Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so we, we both worked in different locations.

• 2:25:52Shawn Ryan?

  You both worked in different locations?

• 2:25:54Joe Kent?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:55Shawn Ryan?

  Well, then how does that work with married life?

• 2:25:58Joe Kent?

  Well, we, she, um, she was up at Fort Meade and I was kind of in the, the DC metro area. So we initially lived in, in downtown DC before we had kids, which was fun. It was kind of before DC, the bottom fell out, so it was, it was neat living there. Um, but then once kids came along, we, we got a place just outside of Annapolis, um, to be closer to her work, because I was, I was gone more than she was.

• 2:26:21Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:22Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:22Shawn Ryan?

  Was she gone when you were at home?

• 2:26:25Joe Kent?

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 2:26:26Shawn Ryan?

  How was that? How was it being? I mean, I just, I, I mean, how, what's it like being? Being the spouse that's home? And your wife's overseas?

• 2:26:39Joe Kent?

  Yeah, no, that's weird. That's different, you know? If we were both deployed or whatever, like, it didn't, you know, it's just what we were doing. Um, but she didn't, she didn't deploy once we had kids until she went to Syria, uh, in 20, late 2018. Um, so for the most part, for most of our married life when we had kids, it was her at home and, and I was deploying. She was still working at the NSA. So she was still doing pretty vital stuff for the, for the country. Um, but she was the one staying at home up until her, her final deployment.

• 2:27:09Shawn Ryan?

  How much time were you guys getting together?

• 2:27:12Joe Kent?

  Now that I. Now that I've been a normal person, um, not very much. Now, now that I have that perspective. At the time, I, it's just like, it's your world, you know? And like, and we knew a bunch of other couples that were, you know, either in the intelligence community or, or in the unit as well. And so it was just like normal, you know? But not, not a lot. No, not a lot at all. I mean, if we got, you know, two weeks for both of us to be home, that'd be like a big deal, you know?

• 2:27:38Shawn Ryan?

  How many years did this go on?

• 2:27:40Joe Kent?

  Three or four years.

• 2:27:42Shawn Ryan?

  Three or four years.

• 2:27:42Joe Kent?

  Three or four years. Yeah. And that was just a, just a schedule, you know?

• 2:27:46Shawn Ryan?

  What's a deployment like? Do you even call it a deployment at that unit? Or is it just quick trips?

• 2:27:52Joe Kent?

  Call it a deployment. Yeah. I mean, I, I basically, for the most part, I was doing traditional warfare stuff or traditional war zone stuff. So I went back to Iraq when the ISIS thing kicked back off again, went back to Yemen. So yeah, still deployments and.

• 2:28:07Shawn Ryan?

  Went back to Yemen.

• 2:28:08Joe Kent?

  I did. I went back to Yemen and.

• 2:28:10Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on. When did you go to Yemen the first time?

• 2:28:12Joe Kent?

  First time I went to Yemen was 2010 to 2011. Not the whole year, but for about like seven months.

• 2:28:16Shawn Ryan?

  In SF?

• 2:28:17Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:18Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't even know SF was there.

• 2:28:20Joe Kent?

  Yeah, we actually had a really cool mission. I mean, this was when we were attempting to prop up the, the Sala regime. And so they had basically, CENTCOM was like, boy, those Iraqi commandos sure work good. Like, let's stand up some Yemeni commandos, which is a whole nother, a whole nother story there. So we, we were working with Sala's special forces, but we were also, you know, doing basically atmospheric collecting intelligence. It's interesting now with everything that's happening with the Houthis, because at the time, we were trying to get Sala to focus on Al Qaeda. And Sala was like, the Houthis are the real SOBs. You guys need to be worried about the Houthis. And we were like, no, the Houthis aren't that big of a deal. Now it's

• 2:29:00Joe Kent?

  like, yeah. But I, I really enjoyed my time in Yemen because we had basically a lot of autonomy. I mean, we were living in the middle of the city, in a house, like there was still, you knew you were there. There's still good freedom of movement. It was still dangerous. So it was kind of exciting. There was definitely bad guys there.

• 2:29:17Shawn Ryan?

  I love, all the places I worked, I loved working in Yemen.

• 2:29:21Joe Kent?

  Same here. I think Sanaa is a beautiful city and you can go like wander around the old city, like all the history there. And Yemeni is really, at the time, were really friendly. I think that's probably changed with the war.

• 2:29:31Shawn Ryan?

  It was such an interesting dynamic there for me because, and maybe this was happening in other places, but, but Yemen was just different, but.

• 2:29:42Shawn Ryan?

  You had the regular operations that were going on everywhere, but then also you had, you had all the other foreign intel agencies that we're not friends with that are all there and everybody spying on each other and you're trying to do, you're trying to do the regular mission and you're also doing all this other stuff. You know, you get the Chinese there, you got the Russians there, you got the Iranians there, you get, everybody is in Yemen.

• 2:30:06Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:07Shawn Ryan?

  But it's all under the radar.

• 2:30:09Joe Kent?

  Yep.

• 2:30:11Shawn Ryan?

  But everybody knows and it's, it makes it really, uh,

• 2:30:14Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:15Shawn Ryan?

  It just makes it, it makes life very interesting.

• 2:30:19Joe Kent?

  Yeah, it was a very, it was a really exciting place to be, I thought, especially living in Sinan, you go move around the city and, you know, we're looking for bad guys, but like you said, like, the Russians were there looking at us, the Chinese were there.

• 2:30:30Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody, I mean, did you ever eat at that sushi restaurant?

• 2:30:34Joe Kent?

  I know, yeah.

• 2:30:35Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 2:30:36Joe Kent?

  Yeah, there could only be one, I'm sure.

• 2:30:38Shawn Ryan?

  And the guy that, the owner got killed outside of his own stab to death, right?

• 2:30:42Joe Kent?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:44Shawn Ryan?

  I wonder if we ran, I wonder if we crossed paths over there, probably not, but, but, um, yeah, those were good times.

• 2:30:52Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:53Shawn Ryan?

  In Yemen.

• 2:30:53Joe Kent?

  Really good times.

• 2:30:55Shawn Ryan?

  So what were you doing there?

• 2:30:57Joe Kent?

  So we were training the Yemeni Special Operations Forces and then also we were working, um, just collecting intel on the Al Qaeda, looking for AQ and AP. So because I was Yemeni qualified, that was like my, my night job was to augment that. And so the guys at station or whatever would give us requirements. And we had really good, again, we had really good access to the population because we were working with the Yemeni Special Forces. Like I was hanging out with Sala's nephew, with the president's nephew. Um, and they, they knew that we were there to try and track down some of those guys. And there were some cat and mouse games being played with the Sala regime because they were trying to basically, uh, like Sala said, dance on the heads of snakes, like keep all the different militias happy. So he was trying to feed us low value AQ targets to keep us happy

• 2:31:42Joe Kent?

  because we were funding his entire government. But at the same time, he had like the back and forth going on with the Houthis and he was trying to bribe off different tribes to not join the Houthis. So we were trying to map out all those. Dynamics, which was super interesting, I thought, especially just the the role that the tribes play there and how much power the tribes have inside Yemen. It was like, I mean, we I had done a little bit of that in in Ambar in Iraq and those tribes out there were powerful and had influence. But like the the tribal dynamic in in Yemen and how Sala patched all that together, I thought was pretty, pretty amazing. So just trying to navigate all those dynamics and map them out was was really cool.

• 2:32:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Back to back to DC with Shannon.

• 2:32:23Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:23Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, with both of you guys in a unit like that, how how does the discussion of kids get approached?

• 2:32:32Joe Kent?

  Oh, it just happened.

• 2:32:35Joe Kent?

  Well, I mean, it's kind of funny because I just living the life I lived, I was just like, I'm probably never gonna have kids. And I that was just like, for me, I was like, okay, well, it's fine. I'll just go to war for my entire life. That was my my dumb mentality. Then I met Shannon and Shannon was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Like, we're gonna have kids. And I was like, actually, that does make a lot more sense.

• 2:32:56Joe Kent?

  You're probably right, you know. And so we we got pregnant really pretty early on, like right after Shannon, right after we were married. Our first son was on the way. And then, you know, right after that, we had started right when we first started talking about having a second kid, Shannon's like, I'm pregnant. It's just like, you know, because, I mean, I'm three years older than she was. So we knew we were kind of on a tight timeline to have have kids.

• 2:33:25Shawn Ryan?

  And you guys plan to on staying staying in with with kids?

• 2:33:30Joe Kent?

  We did. We did. I mean, that was definitely if we if we had any friction point in our marriage, I mean, that was that was definitely it. I mean, Shannon really understood who I was. And as I was approaching retirement, I mean, I had I had my next career mapped out. I knew I was gonna go go work in ground branch, work at the CIA, because I'd already worked with those guys and I'd already been to the farm. And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna just basically cross deck right over there, get my military pension retirement, start a second career. The way I sold it to Shannon was that I'd only do ground branch for a little bit and then I'd go do traditional case officer stuff. And she had worked around the agency a bunch and you can have a decent life because there's a lot of married couples in the agency that make that work. So that was my, my sales pitch. But, you know, Shannon was like, at some point, we're

• 2:34:14Joe Kent?

  gonna have to say that we've done enough, you know, like, I think when we hit the 20 year mark, I think we should, we should call it good. And I was like, I'm, I'm not good after 20 years. Like, I want to keep going. Like, there's more. And so that was definitely our, our, our one, you know, piece of marital friction there was when I said, hey, I'm gonna retire on a Friday and swear at the CIA on a Monday. Wow. Yeah. Wow. She was, she was supportive. I mean, she was like, I get it. This is who you are. But you've really gotta, you gotta figure out who you are past all this. And to me, that was like white noise. Anytime people talked about like, transitioning out of the military, or, you know, not deploying for a living, getting shot at, I was just like, yeah, you must be talking about

• 2:34:56Joe Kent?

  somebody else, because I'm not gonna do that. So, that was, yeah, that was, that was our plan. That was my plan, anyway. Shannon was, you know, much more realistic. And after we had kids, she was like, I don't want to deploy. I don't want to go overseas and deploy and be away from my kids. But I still want to serve. On her last deployment to Afghanistan with NSW, she was part of the team where Commander Joe Price killed himself in Afghanistan. And she, because Shannon was always kind of a forward thinker, she was like, it doesn't make sense that this guy killed himself. Like, he's well respected, like, big, strong Navy SEAL. Like, why did he kill himself? And so she really went down the rabbit hole of like, the

• 2:35:37Joe Kent?

  mental health crisis. And she was talking about the mental health crisis, like, before I had ever heard anybody talk about it. And she was like, I want to do something about that. And so she got her bachelor's and her master's in psychology. She had gotten accepted into a Navy program to get a PhD and to become an actual therapist. And she wanted to work on the mental health crisis that we're having right now. But, catch 22, the, when the Navy picks up people for those programs, it's a commissioning program. So they hold you to accession standards, as if you just came off the street, as opposed to retention standards. Retention standards have some flexibility in the medical side, because like, if you're fit and if you have a record of good service, like, they'll keep you in the military. If

• 2:36:20Joe Kent?

  you're a kid just coming off the street, they want to make sure they're gonna get their money's worth. So the medical standards are actually a little bit higher. Shannon had had cancer when I was in Iraq on, uh, when I was in Iraq the last time, she had thyroid cancer. She had it cut out, returned to duty. She didn't even tell me about it till after it was cut out. Um, yeah, she's like, sent me a text of like this stitch across her throat. And she's like, I had a little bit of cancer cut out. I'm like, what? Like, do I need to come home? Like, what's wrong? She's like, nah, I took that, it's fine. Cancer-free, returned to duty, you know, she's back to working out and then, and leading her, her sailors up there at the NSA. And she applies to this program. They're like, well, you previously had cancer. So you're, and even though she was accepted academically to the program, they, they shot her down and they wouldn't

• 2:37:04Joe Kent?

  let her commission and go to the psych, uh, the psych program. So she ends up, that's how she ended up going on her, her fifth and final deployment. So she was looking responsibly and looking for an off-ramp from the, the deployment lifestyle.

• 2:37:21Shawn Ryan?

  Before we move into her deployment, I wanna, wanna talk to you about moving from the unit that you were in. You retired from that.

• 2:37:28Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:31Shawn Ryan?

  Cross-deck over to CIA as a ground branch, PMCO.

• 2:37:38Shawn Ryan?

  What was your impression of the agency after coming from that, from the previous unit?

• 2:37:44Joe Kent?

  I think I had a pretty good picture because I'd worked around the agency so much, just doing the things I did in special forces and then in the unit. And I had, I'd been to the farm already. So I had been deeply immersed in the, in the agency while I was there. Um, you know, I, I, I have a lot of, like, the CIA treats its people really well. Like, the military are kind of a number, uh, almost all the time. But the agency, they, they treat their people, I think. Uh, I think they realize they're gonna invest a lot in folks and they have a lot of talented people and they, they do treat them very, very well. Uh, obviously, the agency's, it's a little bit softer than the military, a little more touchy feely, a little bit more corporate HR. Uh, so, you know, in processing at, at the big agency, it's sort of like, I don't know, dealing with the big army, the big navy,

• 2:38:29Joe Kent?

  you're kind of like, all right, well, you know, this is sort of bureaucratic and a little bit more touchy feely. Uh, but I had worked enough with ground branch to know that that was exactly where I wanted to be. Cause that's, you know, those are the guys that do covert action. Like, those are the dudes that are actually doing the most dangerous things that, uh, that the agency does. And so I knew that's where I wanted to be. And so Ground Branch is tiny within the agency, but you go there and it's like, this is where every legendary dude goes to continue their career after they already had a legendary career. So like, I go in there and you know, there's, there's guys that were, you know, fighting back in the eighties and the nineties and covert dirty wars, you know, there's still some old Vietnam veterans running around

• 2:39:14Joe Kent?

  that are still there doing something at some capacity. Guy that ran our, you know, shooting package, which was part of the, the selection was a Mogadishu guy. I mean, like, it, it's just, you walk in there and it's just like, holy crap, man. Like, I've made it and I'm around absolute legends.

• 2:39:29Shawn Ryan?

  You were more impressed with Ground Branch at CIA than you were with the previous unit?

• 2:39:35Joe Kent?

  Um, it's hard to say. In, in terms of, uh, like, intelligence and aptitude, the previous unit that I was coming from, that unit recruits from such a small pool of special operators and they're looking for such, such a unique thing that you get some really, really smart people there and, and just really unique. And then Ground Branch is bringing in, they're bringing in a lot of the, the smart guys as well. Um, and a lot of people that gravitate more towards the intel side. But because Ground Branch's mission had been so kinetic, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, they had brought in a ton of just hard men who loved to fight. Like, guys who literally, like, these are the dudes who didn't get enough

• 2:40:20Joe Kent?

  action in Delta, SEAL Team Six, the rest of the, the flavor of, of special operations, probably had a full career there, or they left because they weren't getting enough action and they wanted to go to a place where they could literally do nothing else but focus, especially on the contractor side. The guys that are, were going to be contractors, I mean, they were there specifically to, to run indigenous forces and to get into gunfights and to kill bad dudes. So it was, it wasn't as specialized as what I had in my, in my previous unit. But to me, it was just like, this is where the guys, the guys who were 100% going to run towards the sound of the guns, you know, everywhere I'd been in the military, guys would run towards the sound of the guns. But here you had guys that had already had a full career somewhere else that were like, yeah, I know I'm in my, my

• 2:41:04Joe Kent?

  mid forties, but I'm still here to get it on, you know, up until they're 60 or so.

• 2:41:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Interesting. All right.

• 2:41:13Shawn Ryan?

  Back to Shannon.

• 2:41:14Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:15Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go into her deployment.

• 2:41:17Joe Kent?

  Yeah, her, her, uh, her last one?

• 2:41:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:41:19Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so when this, the psych thing, um, when we find out that's not going to work out, because we thought that was kind of our off ramp, um, I was going to go to Ground Branch and continue on with my career and she was going to be a psych, stay at home with the kids, getting much more stable. We kind of had to adjust really quick because she knew that a deployment was coming up for her, for her element that she was a part of, um, and she hadn't deployed for a couple of years because like, because we were having kids. So, you know, she was like, well, it's not exactly what I wanted, but my number came up and, you know, we had a lot of spirited conversations about this because I was just like, I was torn because I was like, yeah, I get it. I mean, this is your job, but at the same time, now you're a mom and I don't, I don't want you to go overseas. And I, I

• 2:42:04Joe Kent?

  knew she didn't want to either. And she was like, oh, I don't, I don't want to go either. But this is what I do for a living. I'm not going to just get out of the deployment. She's like, how much, she's like, you've deployed three times as a dad. She's like, every time I've deployed, half the guys have been fathers. You know, she knew women that had deployed as mothers. She's like, well, I'm not, I'm not special. I'm here to do my job like everybody else. They need me to go, I'm going to go. And when she put it that way, as much as I didn't want to hear it, I was like, okay, yeah, that's, that's who we are. So she ended up deploying in, um, just after Thanksgiving in 2018, November 2018. So she goes to Iraq initially and then she gets pushed into Syria. Shortly after

• 2:42:48Joe Kent?

  that, her, the task force that she's a part of, like, they take away, they, they take out and they liberate the last village that ISIS controlled. So now in Syria and Iraq, ISIS controls no more ground. And so it looks like it's more or less over. You know, we're two and a half years into the Trump administration and Trump gives the announcement, says, we're getting out of Syria now. Like, this is what I ran on. We're going to pull our troops out of Syria. And I had already noticed something that really bothered me. I was an early on, you know, Trump supporter, going back to 2016, when he went after Jeb Bush on the debate stage about how Iraq was a big mistake. I was just blown, I was blown away by the common sense. I was like, yeah, he's, he's saying what

• 2:43:32Joe Kent?

  we've been seeing for two decades. And once he got in, what I noticed was initially, because Obama had screwed things up so bad with ISIS, the way that ISIS had taken over multiple countries, and Trump said, like, we're not going to tolerate that. We're going to go crush these dudes. The military and the intelligence apparatus initially liked Trump because he took the gloves off and he let us actually do our job. The second Trump said, I want to start pulling troops out, it was like a night and day shift. I mean, I was seeing, because I had just, you know, in process over at the agency, and there's the mid-level people there that are like, yeah, we're not going to do that. Like, that's not going to happen. It's like, I'm like, whoa, stop. I'm confused. I came in the army under Bill Clinton in 1998, served for every other president. The oath I took says that

• 2:44:15Joe Kent?

  we obey that guy unless what he's saying is unconstitutional. And all he's doing is saying, we're going to pull troops out like I ran on. And also, for me, I was just like, when, when do you say this is over? Like, because if we keep doing this whole, like, move the goalposts on when we've, you know, reached our objective, then we'll be here forever. And that's what we're seeing now. But I had a sick feeling. I was like, man, something's not right. Like, they're going to leave these guys there. And sure enough, Shannon was like, yeah, because we could communicate openly on, on systems, because we were both, you know, had clearances and all that. So I could go into work and we could talk on chat. And she was like, yeah, we're supposed to be out here Christmas Eve, 2018, we're supposed to pull out. And then I'm reading the message traffic, you know,

• 2:44:59Joe Kent?

  from her task force and seeing everything else. And it's like, no, these guys are trying to justify their existence. Because Mattis resigns, McGurk resigns, there's a bunch of confusion at the senior level. So then there's even more confusion downstream. And there's a bunch of people saying, well, now we need to justify our reason for staying here. And so, that's horrible guidance to give to people, to give to commanders, because then you're going to put out, you're going to put people out in harm's way. I found a real clear-cut objective. They were still trying to run down the location of where Baghdadi was. That was the, the big target they were chasing. But They should have been out of there Christmas Eve of 2018. The president shouldn't have been disobeyed. So I was really frustrated watching that. And I'm talking back and forth with Shannon during this entire time, you know?

• 2:45:44Joe Kent?

  And in one of the last conversations we had, I was like, don't be the last person to die in a conflict, in a war that our entire country's already forgotten about, you know? So it was, I was surprised when she got killed, but at the same time, it was kind of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. It was like, once, once that order to withdraw was given, and there was all that downstream confusion in the mid to senior levels, that's when I knew something, this, this wasn't going to turn out good. This was, this was going to be a chaotic end.

• 2:46:19Shawn Ryan?

  Where were you when she was killed?

• 2:46:21Joe Kent?

  So I actually was on my first deployment with the agency. So I was in a, in a, in a war zone, somewhere in the Middle East.

• 2:46:32Joe Kent?

  So I, I had selfishly decided that I was going to do a quick trip while I was, while Shannon was deployed. So my parents came and watched the kids and I was eager to go be a paramilitary operations officer. And so I did my, my first deployment. And so I was, I was downrange when, when she was killed. Shit. Yeah.

• 2:46:56Shawn Ryan?

  How did you find out?

• 2:46:58Joe Kent?

  I, I had a very atypical notification. There was no like knock on the door or anything. I, I had been out doing an operation myself, nothing kinetic or anything, but I was out in harm's way, kind of like Shannon was when she got killed. I got back to, back to the base and my immediate supervisor, my boss over there was a guy I was on a, on a team with for years, had known this guy for 15 plus years. And I get back in the office and he asks everybody to leave, leave the room so that me and him can talk. And I'm like, crap, did I screw something up already? And he was just like, hey, man, I'm, I'm, I'm going to tell you everything I know and we don't know everything right now. He's like, but there's been a suicide bombing in Mambidge, four Americans dead, two of them are females. Do you know where Shannon is?

• 2:47:44Joe Kent?

  And I knew exactly where she was. I knew she was in Mambidge. So I was like, fuck, she's, she's there, she's in Mambidge. There's not a lot of women in our profession. There's a couple, not a lot. And so I already knew then that the odds weren't good. So we spent the next hour trying to get a hold of the task force there in Syria to get confirmation. And we got confirmation within within an hour or so. And then I had to make the decision because I knew, I knew what was taking place back at home. I, I, I knew that they were gonna have to notify Shan's parents. I knew they were probably looking for me too. Um, so I had to call her command back at home and say, hey, I've, I've been notified. Don't bother going to my house because there's, there's nobody there. Um, but I made the decision that I wanted to be the person to tell Shan's

• 2:48:29Joe Kent?

  parents as opposed to just somebody randomly knocking on the door. So I called from the Middle East and I called Shan's dad. I couldn't get a hold of him. And then I called Shan's mom and had to tell her that, that Shan was killed. Man. Yeah. Yeah. Worst, worst phone call I've ever had to make.

• 2:48:51Joe Kent?

  How did your kids find out? When I came home, I told them. Um, they were one and three when she was killed. So really, you know, I, I, I don't know if they ever fully wrapped their heads around it. I actually went and talked to a child psychologist, uh, pretty early on, like, what do I do? Like, how do you explain this to a one and a three year old, you know? So they gave me some, some, I think it, I think it was helpful guidance, you know, on just kind of how to handle it. Um, but it's, yeah, it, it's something that we still, still talk about. I mean, I think my, my kids have had

• 2:49:31Joe Kent?

  unfortunately more exposure to like, to death and reality than, than most, most adults have. What did the psychologist tell you? So it was interesting that the psychologist said to be as blunt and forthright as you could. Like, they said, definitely, I'm a Christian, faith is strong, you know, they said it's okay to say, you know, mama's in heaven, it's okay to say that. But they said, if you start dancing around the topic of death, it's really confusing for kids. So they, they explained to me, and this was actually really helpful because it's part of like our vernacular. When you, when you talk about death with adults, you say passed away or not, no longer with us. And that's really

• 2:50:15Joe Kent?

  confusing for kids to hear because what is passed, passed away, what does that even mean? And no longer with us, does that mean they just walked out of the room? You know, there's this innuendo that they're gonna come back. So that was what the psychologist said, like, he's like, as painful as it is, and it was, it still is to talk to my kids about it. Cause it's like, you have to just say that she's dead, you know? And as they get older, you can explain to them how she died. But they said, if you're, if there's any ambiguity in it, it really can confuse the kids.

• 2:50:46Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:50:48Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Do you want to talk about how she was killed?

• 2:50:54Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so she was, she was killed by a suicide bomber. She was in Manbij, doing an intelligence operation, kind of piggybacking with a special forces team that was out there. So they were at a, I think a fairly well-known portion of Manbij. I'd never been to Manbij myself, but a fairly well-known area in the city center. And it's one of those things where you gotta be lucky every time you roll the dice, and the American must be lucky once. I mean, I think that ISIS had suicide bombers in that area because they knew Americans were in that area. And so her and Scott Wertz, former SEAL, and John Farmer, and Gudur Ta,

• 2:51:37Joe Kent?

  the Syrian-American linguist, were kind of standing in an area right before they got in their vehicles. And it's on the streets, there's, you know, people walking around and, and all that. So it's sort of permissive, but not fully permissive environment. And a suicide bomber came up to them and detonated himself, killed the four of them, and wounded quite a few more.

• 2:52:00Shawn Ryan?

  Scotty was a, uh, Scotty was a good friend of mine.

• 2:52:04Joe Kent?

  Was he really?

• 2:52:05Shawn Ryan?

  He was.

• 2:52:06Joe Kent?

  Oh, wow. Man. Shannon really, really had a lot of respect for him. Yeah.

• 2:52:12Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sorry, man.

• 2:52:13Joe Kent?

  Yeah, thanks, man.

• 2:52:17Shawn Ryan?

  How do you recover?

• 2:52:20Shawn Ryan?

  From that?

• 2:52:21Joe Kent?

  I mean, it's an ongoing process, you know? I, um, for me, if I wouldn't have had kids, I, I, I think things could have gotten pretty bad. But having kids, uh, I, I view that as, that's gotta be your primary mission, regardless of how you, you feel like. So for me, I, right after Shannon was killed, I'm, I'm in a foreign country. I had been outside the wire that day. Like,

• 2:52:50Joe Kent?

  the enemy could have really gotten lucky that day and made my kids orphans. So I, I, I felt very guilty being over there. I was like, this is pretty selfish of me to, to be doing this, um, and leaving my kids at home while my wife was deployed. Whatever sense of duty and nobility I had was kinda like, kinda was a little disgusted with myself for feeling that way. And I was like, I, I need to focus on my kids. I need to not be here anymore. I need to get home and, and be there for them. And so since she was killed, that's kinda been my, my mentality. Like, you gotta put them first, cause it's, it's hard. I mean, it, it's one of those things, I think, especially having a, I guess, a problem solver type of mind. You always wanna look for the solution.

• 2:53:36Joe Kent?

  And with death, there isn't one. You, you can't do anything about that. That person's dead and you, you can't bring them back. All you can do is honor them, honor their legacy, and, and try and move forward. But it's been hard, man. I mean, I'm, I'm really lucky that I have a supportive family. I mean, my, my folks have been great. Shannon's parents, Shannon's sister, um, been great. So it, it's a... It's really a matter of just putting them first and trying to live the best life for them. You know, just talking to, reading a lot about how kids process grief, especially that young. Like, it's traumatic for them, but they're young enough that if you keep their environment steady and stable, like, it's not as catastrophic as it could be for kids that are a little bit

• 2:54:20Joe Kent?

  older, based on everything I read. So that was my goal, was to make things as normal and stable for them as I possibly could. And I think that helped me kind of compartmentalize a lot of my own grief and my own guilt to move forward.

• 2:54:41Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any advice for somebody that's, that's, that's lost a mother to their kids?

• 2:54:51Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard. It never gets any, I mean, it never gets any easier, it's just different. I mean, there's a lot of, a lot of people have a lot of different sayings about grief. Like, you know, it gets easier of time. I don't know if any of that's true. I think it's a really deeply personal thing. Cause I've talked to a lot of Gold Star, you know, spouses, Gold Star kids, and it's almost a little bit different for everybody. But I do really believe that if you have kids, like, your, your job now is you've kind of got to do the responsibilities of two parents in one and provide that stable environment for your kids, because that's what your, your deceased spouse, well, that's what your, your late wife would want. She would want the best for the kids.

• 2:55:35Joe Kent?

  She would want them to be in a stable and loving environment. So I think making that your main mission, and then honoring them, you know, like, talk about, talk about their mother, talk about, you know, everything that she did. We do that with Shannon, we have her, her pictures are up in the house and, you know, we celebrate her birthday and, you know, talk about what her favorite foods were, that type of stuff, and, you know, memories that we had, just to make it, you know, part of our everyday rituals to, to keep our memory and spirit alive.

• 2:56:06Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a break.

• 2:56:11Shawn 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, crimes on

• 2:56:55Shawn Ryan?

  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, all the firearm stuff, pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there.

• 2:57:40Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:58:06Shawn 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.

• 2:58:28Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Joe, we're back from the break and man, that's some heavy stuff. And so I want to talk about now what life, I mean, everything has just been flipped upside down.

• 2:58:44Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:44Shawn Ryan?

  Love of your life is is gone. You've got two kids. Obviously, you can't deploy anymore.

• 2:58:50Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:51Shawn Ryan?

  You left the agency.

• 2:58:52Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:56Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how do you even, I mean, where do you go?

• 2:59:02Joe Kent?

  Yeah, so I knew I needed to fully resign and then just leave that environment. The agency was really good to me. I mean, they said, hey, if you want to have an admin desk job here, just tell us what you want to do and we'll do it. And so they gave me a bunch of different options. Very generous of them, gave me a lot of time and I was honest enough with myself at that point. And I was like, no, if I if I keep a foot in the door, I'll find a way. Six months, a year from now, I'll find a reason why I can go do, you know, one trip here, one trip there. So I knew I needed to completely remove myself from that and just kind of get out of, we were living in the DC area. In the DC area, I think if you're a workaholic, like that's where you go get your fix. You know, that's like the Las Vegas of workaholics.

• 2:59:46Joe Kent?

  So I wanted to get out of that environment and get my kids closer to my family back home. So that was my my initial like 50 meter target. So let's get out, let's resign fully from the agency. To get the kids back home, closer to my parents, and I'll figure it out from there. And that was kind of the kind of the general plan. And so that's what we did, moved back. I bought a house just kind of down the street from where my folks lived in Portland initially, just to have that stability. And then, like we talked about before, 2020 kind of happens. I'm really, really blessed, though, I mean, to have my my parents really step in like that. They were supporting me my entire time in the military and then to have them

• 3:00:31Joe Kent?

  just down the street, providing that love and care for the boys. And then a year after we lost Shannon, I met my wife, Heather. And she really just stepped in there. I mean, really, God really put her, you know, in our life and, you know, she stepped up as a mom to the kids and really helped me, you know, heal. And so that was, that was the first year, year and a half. Obviously, the country kind of fell apart as we were rebuilding our family, which, you know, kind of gave me a new mission. But, uh, but yeah, it's really just one step, one step at a time. And I always said to myself, hey, as long as the kids are adjusted and happy and healthy and thriving, then I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

• 3:01:14Shawn Ryan?

  How are the kids doing today?

• 3:01:15Joe Kent?

  They're doing really good, man. They're doing really good. I mean, Heather stepped in really early on as their mom. We moved, you know, years ago, we moved way out of Portland. We're kind of out in the, out in the middle of nowhere, very, very small town on five acres. Uh, great community, great church we go to. We're homeschooling. Um, so my wife teaches them three days a week and then they go to homeschool, uh, basically a homeschool, uh, commune type of thing. And so my wife will teach the older kids and another mom will teach the younger kids. So we've got them in a, in a great, stable community and they're, they're really thriving.

• 3:01:50Shawn Ryan?

  Good for them, man. I'm happy to hear that. Yeah. I'm happy to hear that.

• 3:01:55Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:56Shawn Ryan?

  Do they ask a lot of questions about Shannon?

• 3:02:00Joe Kent?

  Initially, they did. Um, not as much now. Um, and I, I think some of that will kind of change as they get older. I think kids will ask them more questions, like his kids just ask questions. Um, initially, they, their questions would really catch me off guard. I mean, there's times where, you know, we'd be talking about something completely different and my oldest son Colt, when he was, you know, four or five would, you know, talk about like, well, can mama see us from heaven? And like, You know, just, you know, I had a dream about mama last night and then just, you know, random, random things like that that really, you know, you can't be prepared for. Um, but I was always, the, the advice I got from the child psychologist was good.

• 3:02:43Joe Kent?

  I mean, be upfront and honest and, you know, they, they at least understand generally what happened. I mean, they, they haven't asked any details yet about like how she was killed, but they know that she was killed fighting, you know, bad guys overseas. Um, so they know that much. And so that's a big reason why I wanted to write the book was so as they get older, they can have something that they can, they can read on their own. Cause at this point, I think they've heard my stories about their mom and it's important to keep telling those stories, but I, I think at some point they're going to want to have their own source of information. So I want the book, I wanted to write the book so they have an opportunity to get to know their mom. Um, and so they can kind of understand who she was and they can consume that independently of, of having to ask me or, or listen to stories from, from relatives.

• 3:03:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Thanks a lot of sense. Yeah. I'm sure, uh, that's going to mean a lot to them.

• 3:03:34Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:35Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, how did you, I mean, how, how did you get through all this? Was there any time for you?

• 3:03:44Joe Kent?

  Um.

• 3:03:45Shawn Ryan?

  To grieve, to get to, to process?

• 3:03:49Joe Kent?

  Yeah. Having my family really close by really, really, really helped. And then, you know, being grounded in faith. Um, it, it's hard because sometimes I felt like it's different for everybody, but I, I never wanted to be somebody who dwelled. Cause I've seen a lot of people just dwell in the pain and it's easy to do. I mean, I think there's a part of us that wants to dwell and there's a fine line between, I think dwelling in the pain and maybe moving forward too quick and pretending that it doesn't exist and, and just compartmentalizing it, which I think our type of people, like we're pretty good at doing that.

• 3:04:21Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:04:22Joe Kent?

  Um, so it was hard to find that balance, uh, for me, you know? There are definitely a lot of days where, I'll still have bad days too, where it's just like, man, I do feel really, really guilty and like, why did she get killed and I didn't get killed? You know, there's, there's questions that have no answers. Um, but I would always try and really just focus on, on the kids and saying, hey, like you don't, you can't, you can't dwell in this because this is, this is bigger than you. This is the kids. And also at the end of the day, what would Shannon want me to do? I mean, she would not want me. To be a mourning train wreck, you know, perpetually dwelling in the sorrow. She would want us to move forward. She would want the kids to be happy and to be healthy.

• 3:05:07Joe Kent?

  But that's hard. I mean, that's easier said than done. I, I think, and even before, you know, before Shannon had lost other friends. And it's like, I know in my logical brain that they would want me to move forward, live the best life possible. But there still is that, that guilt that's with you all the time, you know, of why them and not me? What, you know, what, what does it all, what does it all mean? So, yeah, I really just try and focus on the kids and stay grounded in faith.

• 3:05:35Shawn Ryan?

  How's your faith helped?

• 3:05:37Joe Kent?

  Man, without it, you'd be, without it, I'd be lost. I mean, cause without it, everything is just like a bunch of random chaos. And there is no reason and it's almost sick and cruel. But I think being grounded in faith and understanding that God has a plan for everything. I think that's really important and understanding that there's, there's evil out there. And that's why she got killed and we're constantly at war with evil here on this world. But understanding that the last time I saw Shannon won't be the last time I'll see Shannon or anybody that we've lost. I think that's, I think that's pretty key. Without that, I don't know, I don't know where I'd be. I, I think that, I feel sorry for the people that don't have faith.

• 3:06:21Joe Kent?

  Because to the world to them, it's just, it's just chaotic, you know? But having the, having the foundation of that faith is, is essential.

• 3:06:29Shawn Ryan?

  Have you always had that or did that come after?

• 3:06:32Joe Kent?

  That, you know, I was born into it, I think. My family pretty consistently created, very, very solid Christian family. And so I was raised with it. And so I've never strayed too far from it. I mean, I definitely have had times in my life where I probably wasn't the best Christian, especially, you know, younger team days or whatever. But I always, it was always a framework for me, you know? Like that was the truth, you know? That's what I believed to be the truth. So it's always been there with me. But I had to get a lot more reflective and a lot more serious about it, I think. Once, once Shannon was gone. It, it just seemed to be something that was much more anchoring.

• 3:07:16Joe Kent?

  Once, once we lost Shannon than it had been before.

• 3:07:22Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's um, let's move on. So now you've got a career in politics.

• 3:07:29Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:30Shawn Ryan?

  Hopefully.

• 3:07:30Joe Kent?

  Hopefully.

• 3:07:31Shawn Ryan?

  For you.

• 3:07:32Joe Kent?

  Working on it, yeah.

• 3:07:33Shawn Ryan?

  How did that come on your radar? I mean, what motivated you

• 3:07:37Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:38Shawn Ryan?

  to subject yourself to that kind of scrutiny? To that, I mean,

• 3:07:43Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:44Shawn Ryan?

  That's a whole nother animal.

• 3:07:46Joe Kent?

  It's ugly. And I don't know, I like to think I still would have jumped into it the way I did if I would have known how ugly it gets. But sometimes it's like, it's probably not best to analyze the ramp of the airplane you're jumping off of. It's better just to jump into it. I really got into speaking out publicly after Shannon was killed, because I mean, I explained to you the lead up to her getting killed and watching what happened within the Trump administration. So I got an opportunity to meet President Trump at Dover when I was waiting to receive Shannon's remains. And I personally, I thought that Trump was just gonna come and shake our hands and say he was sorry and, you know, kind of check the box.

• 3:08:28Joe Kent?

  But I actually got to spend 10, 15 minutes, just me and him in a room like this, talking. And I, you know, basically told him what we talked about before. I was just like, hey, your gut instincts are correct. Like, you don't know who I am. At the time, I had like hair down on my shoulders and a crazy beard, and so I probably looked like a crazy person, but I was like, I'm one of your CIA guys. I think initially, I actually messed up and he asked me what I did and it just rolled off my tongue. I was like, I work for the State Department. Even Trump was like, you don't look like a guy who works for the State Department. So, but I wanted to tell him, I was like, look, I've been doing this really since this thing started and like, your instincts are right. You're just being thwarted at the mid to senior levels. You know, in a way that I find rather alarming.

• 3:09:13Joe Kent?

  And, you know, he had just lost his secretary, Secretary of Defense had just resigned. So I personally didn't think I was telling him anything that he didn't already know. I kind of thought he was just humoring me, which I appreciated. I also appreciated that he met with us all individually. There was four families there and Trump spent 10, 15 minutes with each family. And it wasn't scripted.

• 3:09:34Joe Kent?

  The Secret Service didn't even really screen me. Like, I was in a room and next thing you know, Trump walks around the corner. And it was just us together for 10, 15 minutes. And, you know, he, um, he gets portrayed a certain way in the media as being, you know, crass and kind of cold-blooded. But with Trump and the questions he was asking me and just the reaction that he was having to being there at Dover, I, I really felt like he's a guy who did not like the fact that people died under his watch. Like, he felt responsible. Cause I, you know, you've probably been around a lot of leaders too in combat and there's kind of one or two routes they can go. They can stay connected with, with, with the feelings, the fact that we're losing people.

• 3:10:14Joe Kent?

  Or they can kind of become, you know, very cold-blooded about it and make, wall themselves off in a way that it doesn't even affect them. Like, maybe they'll think, oh, does this affect my, you know, my, my politics? Does this affect my evaluation report? But with Trump, I saw somebody who legitimately, he did not like the fact that we were losing people, you know, in Syria. And so I, I thought that interaction was that and that'd be the end of it. But a couple of weeks later, I actually got a call from, you know, some guys on his team. And they said, hey, we don't know what you said to the boss, but he wants to hear more of what you had to say. Will you come out and chat with us? So got to go back out to DC, met with Jared Kushner and a couple of other folks there.

• 3:10:57Joe Kent?

  You know, wrote a couple like, what, like, they're like, what are your recommendations? And so I wrote like a white paper essentially on, you know, what I thought essentially about the, the status of the war on terror at the time. Like, we need to be getting the heck out of here. Like, Trump's instincts are right. Like, don't, don't listen to all the so-called experts. So kind of established that relationship with them. And then the, the 2020 campaign was ramping up. So I did some stuff for the Trump 2020 campaign. And then I got another call, went back out to DC and they were like, hey, Kushner and his team were like, hey, if we offer you a job in the second Trump administration, would you come work here? And I was like, Did not expect that, you know, because usually the guys that go and work at the White House or whatever, you're talking colonels and generals and, you know, that cast of people.

• 3:11:40Joe Kent?

  And but I have a mentality, hey, if you can serve your country and your country calls, like, if you can do it, you should do it. And so I said, yeah, if you guys want to hear what I have to say, let me help. I'd be honored to. So I was gonna go work somewhere, you know, maybe back in the IC or maybe at the NSC. Then the election went the way that it did. But I was already, you know, pretty vocal and speaking out. And that's right after that. That's when my Congresswoman decided to vote for Trump's impeachment. So to me, it just felt like, and it still feels this way to me. I mean, it really feels like we're losing the country.

• 3:12:09Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think it's just you, man.

• 3:12:12Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I think it's a lot of us. And as much as I would like to just focus on me and just focus on the kids and kind of live my life, I just really fear, I fear a future where our kids are young adults and they look at us like, what the hell were you guys doing when the country was burning down? Like, you know, if there's still history books, if we get to that point, these guys are gonna, you know, our kids are gonna look at us and be like, this country was once great. That's why you guys went and fought, right? But now look at it, you know, and now it's barely, and you know, if this, if we keep going this trajectory, our kids are gonna be like, this isn't worth fighting for. Like, we have to scrap the entire thing. So I think we've got a small window right now where we've

• 3:12:53Joe Kent?

  got to put our aspirations and desires individually kind of on hold and go fight for the country because the political class that's been driving the decisions has gotten us to this point. And we've got to change that.

• 3:13:09Shawn Ryan?

  We had some conversations at breakfast about some of the stuff that was going on in your hometown.

• 3:13:15Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:17Shawn Ryan?

  Portland.

• 3:13:18Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:19Shawn Ryan?

  Around the 2020 timeframe. Would you like to, would you like to go into any of that?

• 3:13:23Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I mean, the media covered, they covered the assaults on the courthouse, which were pretty dramatic. But what they didn't cover was how long those riots went on for. I mean, the rioting in Portland went all throughout the summer in 2020, basically right up to the election. Like, when it started getting, when the weather started getting, you know, rainy and gloomy, like, the media stopped covering. But the riots continued. I mean, that courthouse down there was under siege. Antifa was moving into a lot of the residential neighborhoods and just, you know, harassing people, assaulting people.

• 3:13:57Joe Kent?

  Vandalizing property, but it was very much, to me, the way I interpreted all of it was it was a power play. I mean, because if you're going to continue to dominate terrain and you're going to expand your area of influence and you're going to basically get up in the face of law enforcement and make them retreat, that's not just random protest, that's not just random violence, like that actually has a strategy behind it, like you're trying to hold ground. To me, it felt very much like what we saw in the early phases of the Iraq War, when there was no central authority, because we had taken out Saddam, and there was essentially all these different competing sects and gangs and, you know, groups of individuals that were bandied together and competing for power. And to me, Antifa, Black

• 3:14:39Joe Kent?

  Bloc, whatever you want to call it, like they, they were the power brokers. And with this last round of Hamas protests, like they reared their head again, they took over the campus of Portland State University, they burned down and, you know, conducted explosives attacks against Portland police officers' cars. And so like, it hasn't gone away. It's one of those things, we know it all too well, if you don't confront this, it's not just going to go away on its own. It might go into a more nascent phase for a little bit, but it's going to pop back up. And that's what we're seeing here. And to me, that was a big wake up call. I was like, man, the country's really changed. Because I was just so focused on the war for most of my adult life, that I hadn't really followed a ton

• 3:15:20Joe Kent?

  of like domestic politics. But just seeing that erosion of law and order, it was a huge wake up call to me. I mean, it's still bad over there. It's still bad, yes. 2020 really drove a lot of the business out of Portland, which is a tragedy on to itself, because Portland was experiencing a pretty big boom, because a lot of the tech bubble that was leaving, you know, Silicon Valley was finding its way up to Portland. And there's a lot of great companies that were headquartered there, but the riots drove a ton of them out. I mean, like Nike, REI, Columbia Sportswear, a bunch of them just quietly leaving. And they had like their flagship stores down there. And then there's a bunch of other smaller businesses too that are leaving. And so, you know, that

• 3:16:03Joe Kent?

  void gets filled by the homelessness, and that homeless element now is, you know, heavily addicted to fentanyl. And then these last Hamas riots, they've taken over ground, they've had their little autonomous zones, they've kicked the police out of. So it's still ongoing. And what I think people should really be concerned with, it's the economic downturn, it's the money leaving the town. Because then you're going to have essentially just a shell of a city that people don't want to invest in. And they're not going to want to invest in it until law and order is restored. But you've got this weird culture in Portland and a lot of blue cities where nobody wants to say, hey, we need to restore law and order. Like, we can't have nightly riots. We can't have vagrants on the street that are high on fentanyl, you know, swinging machetes and chanting.

• 3:16:47Shawn Ryan?

  Why don't they want to say it? They just leave?

• 3:16:51Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I mean, I think at the, at the, the top levels, I think that they wield power, and they can influence people that if you speak up and you say you're against this, they'll automatically turn that, that, that media apparatus against you to say that you're like a horrible hateful bigot, you know, whatever, etc., etc. And then I do think there is a lot of people who've just been, for lack of a better term, indoctrinated in the education system that think like, no, this is compassion. It's compassionate and right for us to let the homeless people just do whatever they want on the streets because they're homeless. We have to let them. And I'm a compassionate person. Who am I to say you can't do this here? And the same thing, like Antifa, and mainly Antifa,

• 3:17:32Joe Kent?

  they use the rhetoric of social justice. So if you're against Antifa, what are you, pro fascist? You know, and I think that as dumb as that sounds to us, because we've seen propaganda before, that does neutralize a lot of people. That, that makes it so a lot of people just won't speak up. Because like, oh, wait, no, no, I'm, I'm against the fascists. The fascists are the really bad. Well, of course, the fascists are the bad people. Like, you're playing their game if you're going to let them dominate language. But they've been able to dominate language for so long through the media, that they can essentially suppress the, the desire to have any kind of law and order with their narrative. And that's, that's really what I saw happen in Portland. It's happened in Seattle as well. And there's probably other cities that are like that, that are essentially committing suicide in slow motion. Because nobody wants to say like, hey, this is poison

• 3:18:17Joe Kent?

  and it's destroying our city. Because they don't want to be called a hateful, mean bigot. They don't, they don't want to be aligned with someone who's far right, you know, who says we should have law and order.

• 3:18:27Joe Kent?

  I'd like to think some of the tide is changing. I mean, Portland just had a primary election where a, I think, normal Democrat DA beat out the Soros DA, who was one of the main architects of just letting the lawlessness take place. Because it's hard enough for police officers to arrest people in Portland, but the few arrests they could make, like the DA would turn them all loose. I mean, like, if you talk to Portland police officers, most of them would tell you, like, they know who the Antifa guys are, they know who the leaders are, they know how they communicate. They've got the entire network mapped out like we would downrange, but what's it matter? You go and you arrest these guys and they get right back out because of the DA. So maybe the change in the DA leadership will start to slowly change some of that. I just, I think with how much business is left the

• 3:19:12Joe Kent?

  city, I think it might be a little bit too late.

• 3:19:16Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I just, I can't wrap my head around how this can continue to go on and, I mean, who the hell is for this shit that lives there?

• 3:19:32Joe Kent?

  I think you-

• 3:19:32Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody?

• 3:19:33Joe Kent?

  There are some very-

• 3:19:34Shawn Ryan?

  Is it everybody? It keeps, it's been going for, how long?

• 3:19:37Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:37Shawn Ryan?

  Four years now?

• 3:19:38Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:39Shawn Ryan?

  And they're just, what, keep, they keep putting the same shit back in?

• 3:19:43Joe Kent?

  Yeah. Very affluent people that aren't affected by this, that their businesses don't depend on there being basic law and order, that can live in a gated community and send their kids to private school, they're the ones that are all for this. You know, just like our tech overlords, like, their kids don't have screens, but they're okay with giving our kids digital, you know, poison.

• 3:20:02Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how do they keep these people out of the, out of the gated communities?

• 3:20:06Joe Kent?

  Private security.

• 3:20:08Shawn Ryan?

  Private, cops can't do anything but private security can?

• 3:20:11Joe Kent?

  Yeah, the private security business in Portland and Seattle, it's booming right now. Because anybody who wants to stay in the city and has access to, and can afford it, they're hiring private security to basically do, to do what the cops used to do, based on the, but they've, they've tied the police officers' hands behind their backs based on the way they vote. So now they just hire private security. They can still virtue signal, maybe they make their money that's somewhere not directly tied to there being law and order in the city. And because of the money and the influence, these guys are able to basically control the politics of the, of the city. And I think that's, that's true in Portland, it's true in Seattle, in a lot of major cities right now.

• 3:20:52Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 3:20:54Joe Kent?

  I think, I, I hope with that, that DA election, that was, I was surprised to see DA Schmidt got, got tossed out. So hopefully this next guy, I mean, the bar is pretty low. All this guy has to do is basically prosecute some criminals and that'll send a message. But I, I, I personally think just because of all the money that's left there, it's going to be a while before they get those cities back on track. Cause who's going to want to invest in a city that's been ravaged, you know, by lawlessness for four plus years?

• 3:21:20Shawn Ryan?

  What does it look like walking through Portland now? Is the entire city like this?

• 3:21:25Joe Kent?

  They'll clean up pockets every now and again, um, to make them look decent, which means they'll kind of move the homeless people from one area to another. But it's kind of zombie land. I mean, Portland used to be a, a great, I mean, going out and, and doing a restaurant brewery type of tour. It was a, it was a dining, dining out and a, and a drinking town, you know? So there, there used to be a lot of great restaurants and bars and those types of things to go to. And there used to be a really vibrant culture down there. But if you go out at like prime happy hour, dinnertime nowadays and like the pearl district of, of Portland, like it's, it's fentanyl zombie land, you know? There's a, there's a, there's a shell there of what used to be Portland where some of the restaurants and, you know, Powell's Books is still there. Um, but it's just not, not

• 3:22:09Joe Kent?

  at all what it used to be. And then right on the other side of the river where I live now, Vancouver is kind of Portland's sister city on the Washington side. And, and the whole Portland saying used to be keep Portland weird. Vancouver saying was always keep Vancouver normal. Um, but we're getting, we're getting a lot of bleed over from Van, from, from Portland into Vancouver. And now we've got Democrats like the woman I'm running against that are trying to put light rail on the bridge that connects Oregon to Washington. So basically taking light rail and putting all of Portland's problems on a light rail car and jetting it across into downtown Vancouver. Um, so it's, it's not contained to Portland. It spreads, spreads up and down the I-5 corridor everywhere.

• 3:22:46Shawn Ryan?

  What's the, what's the pulse of the, the people in Vancouver when it comes to that railway?

• 3:22:51Joe Kent?

  Every time it's been on the ballot, it's gotten shot down. So the citizens of Clark County, Vancouver have rejected it three different times for obvious reasons. So what the Democrats have done is they basically attached federal grant money to it. And so now in order to get some basic safety repairs to the bridge, which, which the bridge needs, we actually need another bridge because of the, the population growth. But they've attached federal grant money. And so now the federal grant money has a stipulation of light rail on it.

• 3:23:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, maybe you should just knock the bridge down.

• 3:23:18Joe Kent?

  So they're just shot, I mean, they're just shotgunning it through. And they're also talking about putting tolls. It's a whole different story, but they're putting tolls on there. And there's a lot of folks, because Washington doesn't have an income tax. For a while, a lot of people who lived in Washington, they worked in Portland. And so if Oregon puts tolls on there, it disproportionately targets Washingtonians. Between that and the light rail, it's like, so we're going to get all of Portland's problems. But in order to go have people work in Portland, we're going to have to pay tolls. Like, it's insane. And again, you've got us fighting over table scraps to get basic repairs to the bridge or to get a new bridge, you know? And our representatives will come back and be like, look, we got a couple of million dollars here and there for it. But we can't fix the bridge, but maybe you'll get light rail. But then meanwhile, they'll send a hundred billion dollars overseas. And so we don't have enough money to fix our bridge.

• 3:24:02Joe Kent?

  Like, it's just, where are the priorities?

• 3:24:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What are some of your other priorities running for Congress?

• 3:24:08Joe Kent?

  The border's massive, man. We feel it, especially even though geographically we're far away from the border. But we're right at the I-5 corridor. I've been down to the border twice. I went to Yuma in 2021, right when the invasion first started, right after Biden opened the border up. I thought that was bad. I just went to San Diego about two months ago, went out there by Yakub Hot Springs, San Yarosidro area. And that was insanity. Because if you go out to where the wall stops, you will just witness a sea of humanity come across the border. And the vast majority of these people are not Hispanic. They are not our neighbors. Mostly Chinese nationals, a ton of folks from the Middle East coming across the border. And then talking to law enforcement in my district and down there, the amount of fentanyl

• 3:24:51Joe Kent?

  that's getting pumped through, like, pretty much every event I go to, like, I do a lot of town halls. And every town hall I do in the district, I'll have somebody come up to me and tell me about how they've lost a loved one to fentanyl. And these are not career drug addicts. These aren't people who, like, you know, got addicted to this drug or that drug, and that was the path that they were on. These are people who didn't know they were taking fentanyl, in many cases. A big issue we have is the black market Percocets and OxyContin. So people will get an injury, their healthcare will put them on Percocet or OxyContin for a while, but then after a while, they cut them off. And so there's an entire market for black market OxyContin and Perksad. And fentanyl is getting introduced into that because fentanyl is highly addictive.

• 3:25:34Joe Kent?

  And so the dealers are putting it in these somewhat seemingly benign drugs. And people are falling over dead because all the consistencies of fentanyl are different. No batch of fentanyl is the same. You know, what one day will get you hooked for life, the next day will kill you dead. So that's, that's a major issue in the district. The immigration angle, of course, because people are worried about who we've led into our country and rightfully so. But the fentanyl, I'd say is probably the biggest issue.

• 3:25:59Shawn Ryan?

  And I don't even know how you stop this, especially at a place like Oregon. We were, were, I mean, if, correct me if I'm wrong, but there are no narcotics in Oregon now, correct?

• 3:26:13Joe Kent?

  I think, yeah, drugs are legal in Oregon and then Washington, where I'm at, the drugs are, drugs were legal, but they've just gotten now gone back to enforcing intended distribute amounts. So you can still basically have enough to consume on your own on you and that's not illegal. But in Washington, the last year, we've gone back to going after drug dealers, which is, which is a good thing. Kind of a little bit, little.

• 3:26:36Shawn Ryan?

  Which is a good thing. Believe it or not.

• 3:26:39Joe Kent?

  Believe it or not, this is, this is me, far right wing guy with my far right wing take of like, maybe we should go after the drug dealers.

• 3:26:45Shawn Ryan?

  This is actually a good thing.

• 3:26:47Joe Kent?

  This is super frenchie stuff I'm talking about here. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's where we're at where it's like, you have to explain to people, no, it's actually good to go after the drug dealers. I mean, but I mean, two years ago, they were calling the Washington state Democrats, they're, they're in the legislature, were calling to defund the police. You know, taking away the police officer's ability to actually pursue criminals, taking away any kind of drug control measures. So of course, a California and Oregon are very similar. So the entire West Coast has just become the fentanyl superhighway. Cause why not? If you're the Mexican drug cartel, you can make a ton of money off of it.

• 3:27:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:20Joe Kent?

  Low risk.

• 3:27:21Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what, do you have any idea what the, how many people have left Oregon and Washington?

• 3:27:28Joe Kent?

  I don't know, but a lot, but a lot, a lot of, a lot of people.

• 3:27:32Shawn Ryan?

  I see a ton of Oregon and Washington plates here in Tennessee.

• 3:27:35Joe Kent?

  I know a lot of folks who moved to Tennessee saying, yeah, I mean, between Idaho, Texas, Florida.

• 3:27:40Shawn Ryan?

  Every time I see a plate.

• 3:27:42Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:42Shawn Ryan?

  From Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, New York.

• 3:27:46Joe Kent?

  You gotta ask him, Mike, do you remember why you moved?

• 3:27:49Shawn Ryan?

  Here's what they say, we're the good ones. We're the good ones. I'm sorry. What the fuck does that mean? You're the good ones.

• 3:27:56Joe Kent?

  How are you gonna vote? That's the question. That's all that matters.

• 3:27:58Shawn Ryan?

  Why don't you quit using this code shit and just fucking tell us like, who the fuck are you? And why did you move here?

• 3:28:04Joe Kent?

  Are you a registered Republican?

• 3:28:07Shawn Ryan?

  I get goosebumps, man. Like, I get so fucking angry.

• 3:28:12Joe Kent?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's everywhere. I.

• 3:28:14Shawn Ryan?

  You made that shit. You fucking clean it up.

• 3:28:17Joe Kent?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:28:18Shawn Ryan?

  Don't come here.

• 3:28:19Joe Kent?

  Don't just flee.

• 3:28:20Shawn Ryan?

  Shit where I fucking live.

• 3:28:22Joe Kent?

  Exactly. Yeah, I'd be pissed too if I lived in this state, man, because you guys are, you guys have good taxes and, you know, you guys handled COVID much better than most places. So you and Florida and Idaho and Texas have become quite the magnet. But if you look at like what's happening in Texas, like with the way that the cities are in Texas now, I mean, that's a direct bleed over from people coming there for a certain reason, but then not remembering like how their voting screwed up the last place they were, they were living. So, yeah, it's, it's a big issue, man. I, I personally think people gotta fight where they're at. I mean, like, right now, if you're trying to run from, trying to run from this, I, I just think the way the country's going, it's coming everywhere. It's, it's obviously bad in major urban centers. Um, that's why I won't live in a city, but like,

• 3:29:04Joe Kent?

  every state's got its, its urban hub that, that's been taken over by, you know, the Soros DAs or just, you know, far left wing laws being enacted.

• 3:29:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, look, we're, we're already seeing it here too. I got friends that are cops and all the different surrounding areas around Nashville and in, in Nashville, and they're all complaining about the same thing. We're not allowed to arrest illegals. We're, they're, they're letting criminals back on the streets and it's just like, fuck, man. I'm just gonna move farther out into the, I already live out in the woods. Now I'm gonna move farther. But, uh, more land farther. It's, it's.

• 3:29:42Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I just don't want to be around it at all.

• 3:29:45Joe Kent?

  No, I, I for a long time really enjoyed living like in cities. Like I'm, I'm glad I lived in DC before the bottom fell out. But now I have, especially having kids.

• 3:29:54Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have a, a nice apartment on Black Lives Matter Boulevard?

• 3:29:57Joe Kent?

  No, no, we couldn't afford that. That was too expensive. We were on military, military pay at the time. But you know, exactly. Yeah. So when, and that was like right behind the White House, man.

• 3:30:07Shawn Ryan?

  I know. I, I, I mean, I, I go to DC quite a bit and like I'd always heard about that, that they renamed the street, but I was like, ah, yeah, they probably just painted something. It's there.

• 3:30:19Joe Kent?

  It's there.

• 3:30:20Shawn Ryan?

  It's there.

• 3:30:21Joe Kent?

  Yep. It's BLM Boulevard, right behind the White House. I mean, still it's absolutely insanity. And the crazy thing, I mean, in the last couple of years where I've been going, going back to DC, like just seeing the homelessness, like on the National Mall or like Union Station. It's like, come on, man. Like even when I was in Yemen, Sala kept the area around the Royal Palace pretty clean.

• 3:30:41Shawn Ryan?

  I know.

• 3:30:41Joe Kent?

  Can we figure that shit out?

• 3:30:44Shawn Ryan?

  Poorest country in the Middle East and you see more people shitting on the side of the road in California than you will in fucking Yemen.

• 3:30:50Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:50Shawn Ryan?

  It's insane.

• 3:30:51Joe Kent?

  100%.

• 3:30:51Shawn Ryan?

  It's insane.

• 3:30:52Joe Kent?

  They wouldn't tolerate that crap. Maybe on the sticks, but not, not in the nation, not in the nation's capital. They wouldn't tolerate it.

• 3:30:59Joe Kent?

  Yeah. So I think that, that's probably the, the Fentanyl, the border, law and order. Obviously inflation's right there because that's, that's hurting so many people. But, uh, I mean, the crazy thing is when you, when you listen to Biden and a lot of these talking heads discuss these issues, they make it seem like it just sort of happened like as a, as a course of nature and like, boy, gosh, we're, we're really trying to solve this. It's like, we could solve the border crisis pretty easily. We, we have a military that is deployed throughout the entire world. I'm pretty sure we could grab about a, like, I don't know, a fraction of those dudes and have them secure the border and lock it down pretty quick. And we still got an internal illegal immigration issue and that's going to be more challenging. But don't tell me we can't secure that border.

• 3:31:37Shawn Ryan?

  At least stop the bleed.

• 3:31:38Joe Kent?

  At least, exactly. At least stop the bleed. And the thing is with the, the Fentanyl, there's some Fentanyl that comes through the ports of entries where they smuggle it and all that. But we catch a lot of that with the radar systems and stuff that we have. And there's some that's getting smuggled in, in, in cargo jets, but the majority of it's coming across the border. Because the wave of humanity, the illegals overwhelmed the border patrol because they all want to claim asylum. They all know how to do that. They all know that's their ticket into America. Border Patrol is overwhelmed and then you get the people who don't want to make contact with the border patrol. They've got a wide open border.

• 3:32:07Shawn Ryan?

  They don't want to shut the border. I mean, they don't want to.

• 3:32:10Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:10Shawn Ryan?

  And are you aware of the CBP CB, what is it CBP one app?

• 3:32:16Joe Kent?

  Yeah, I am.

• 3:32:17Shawn Ryan?

  You are?

• 3:32:18Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:18Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to explain it?

• 3:32:20Joe Kent?

  I mean, it's basically an Uber service for illegal immigrants. And it's the simplest way to put it. It's an app that illegals can can download and they can basically make travel arrangements into the country. Now, some of them qualify immediately for immediate parole and that's going to get them the hotel room. That's going to get them the government stipend and a plane ticket or a train ticket or a bus ticket into the city of their choice. And then other ones, it's just going to kind of make their entry a little bit more smoother.

• 3:32:47Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I don't know if you know this, but this came from a source inside Border Patrol. And then a sheriff, you know, Sheriff Mark Lamb actually confirmed it for me. So it's from two different sources. We'll actually fly down and get you from another country. We will send a jet to come down and I mean, not not individuals, but I think they told me that and this is this is several months ago now at this point, but they told me that over 50,000 people we have gone and gotten, sent jets and loaded the jet up, fly it back to the US. Here you go.

• 3:33:27Joe Kent?

  And those don't even get counted in the overall numbers of people coming across the border. And the crazy thing, I mean, this is what what Trump solved, even though he couldn't get the wall built. He solved through executive order was saying that like the famous remain in Mexico. It was it was more deep than that. It was basically if you want to claim asylum, you can't just come to America. You need to go to the first safe country, first safe third country. And that's where you can file asylum claim for. You can't come right here unless you're Cuban, Canadian or Mexican and claim asylum. Those are the only only our neighbors can do that. Biden got rid of that. And when he did that, he basically made it possible for you to come right to America and claim asylum. And once you made an asylum claim, we can't deport you. And so then you're given a status of being paroled into the country. And so right

• 3:34:11Joe Kent?

  now, you're hearing like AOC and a bunch of the other crazy, really active people on the left say, well, it's not illegal to claim asylum. So technically, these people aren't illegal. They all have a legal status. And they're right because of what Biden did. So when we say, yeah, there's been 12 million plus illegals brought into the country, the Biden administration and these guys are like, well, no, no, actually, technically, they're not illegal. They all have a legal status. So if we don't secure the border and close that amnesty loophole, we're still going to have some degree of this problem because there's still a major incentive to come here and claim asylum.

• 3:34:42Shawn Ryan?

  I got a question for you. Do you think this is actually, do you, do you, do you think we can turn this around?

• 3:34:52Joe Kent?

  It's gonna be hard. I don't think like, if 2024 election works out and like, Trump gets elected and I go to Congress and we win the House in a big way in the Senate, that doesn't automatically turn around. I think that the administrative state, the elected bureaucrats are going to fight Trump twice as hard as they did in the first term. And it's gonna be, it's gonna be a bloodbath. I mean, they're gonna do everything they can to impeach him, to jam up any kind of legislation that's gonna stop the flow of illegal immigrants, because that's what the Democrats want. They want a flow of humanity coming into the country so they can skew the census numbers, so that they can get more seats in the US House of Representatives and more Electoral College power. Because

• 3:35:35Joe Kent?

  that's, Trump also tried to make it so that when we do a census, we only count US citizens when we allocate US House of Representatives seats or Electoral College votes. Basically, what Biden did was he got rid of that requirement. And now we're just basing House of Representatives seats and Electoral College votes based off population. So the more people you pump into the country, the more electoral power you have, even if those people never vote, because they're counted and there's seats that are allocated for them. So that's all the Democrats want. That's all they care about. They view the fentanyl as collateral damage. So that's all that they want, and they'll do anything to retain that power. Because even if we win in 2024, if they continue with that plan, they're eventually going to be able to get full control and full power. And the funny thing is, if

• 3:36:17Joe Kent?

  you say that, they'll be like, oh, that's a conspiracy theory. Two weeks ago, the Republicans in the House put forward legislation that said, we want the citizenship question back on the census, and we only want American citizens counted to distribute House of Representatives seats and Electoral College votes. Every Democrat voted against it. So every Democrat just out and open voted to let illegals be counted when it comes time to have actual legislative power and potentially presidential power, which is absolute, it's saying the quiet part out loud, and it's absolute insanity. But we have to get a leader in there who's willing to make hard decisions. Like, we have to get somebody in there who doesn't, and this is why, another reason why I'm for Trump, because he won't be running again. He can really go in there and be like, hey, we're going all out. I don't care about getting

• 3:37:00Joe Kent?

  reelected. This is my last hurrah. Because we need someone who's going to say, like, we will deport all these people. We will start going after the businesses that are employing illegals, so that we can focus our law enforcement resources on hunting down the bad actors who don't leave when there's no more economic opportunity. And that's not going to be pretty. I mean, like, how do you just get 12 million plus people out of the country? Like, that's really hard to do. And then legislatively, we're going to need to make some really heavy lifts of, like, ending birth rates, citizenship, the ability for someone just to come here and have a kid, and now the kid's a citizen, can't deport the parents. Like, that's the whole, that's one of the big draws for a lot of the illegals to stay in the country. So legislatively, we're going to have a lot of hard work to do as well. And it's going to be ugly. It's not going to be easy.

• 3:37:45Shawn Ryan?

  Why did you choose Congress? Why not the Senate?

• 3:37:49Joe Kent?

  Well, I live in Washington State, and I don't think a Republican has a chance in hell right now at a Senate seat.

• 3:37:55Shawn Ryan?

  Fair enough.

• 3:37:56Joe Kent?

  Just to say, my district's still pretty conservative. I also, I like the role of Congressman. It's the biggest legislative body, but you are the closest to the people, as opposed to representing a massive state. Like, you have a district, you're representing 750 to 800,000 American citizens. And then the House of Representatives has a ton of power when it comes to, like, our budget, which, you know, inflation is a major issue. But then also, war and peace. I mean, figuring out where we spend our money, and technically... Only the Congress can send us off to war. Now, we've thrown that out the window in the last 20-plus years and let the president take us off to war unilaterally, but it's supposed to be the Congress that does that. So I like that, that angle of how we're the ones calling the shots when it comes to, do we go to war?

• 3:38:41Joe Kent?

  But we're also the closest ones to the people. I think that's a pretty unique position to be in.

• 3:38:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Man, you know, I just... I'm gonna keep fighting, but, you know, and I've...

• 3:38:59Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's just, I just...

• 3:39:03Shawn Ryan?

  There's so many things that need to be turned around that it, it, it's just overwhelming to think about and then, and then to think that we're putting a guy in there that does only have four years. I mean, this is what we're doing. We're just batting this shit back and forth over and over and over again. We're not getting anywhere. Our enemies are getting stronger.

• 3:39:22Joe Kent?

  Yep.

• 3:39:22Shawn Ryan?

  The world is changing. We're getting weaker by the day.

• 3:39:26Joe Kent?

  Yep.

• 3:39:27Shawn Ryan?

  And you're gonna have your work cut out for you, that's for damn sure.

• 3:39:32Joe Kent?

  We definitely are. I mean, we, we've gotta take a long war approach. That, that's how the country got destroyed. The, the other side, the leftists, they really took a long war approach and they infiltrated basically every institution. I mean, we talked about Boy Scouts at the beginning. I mean, all the way from like civic institutions, all the way up to all the different levers of power, to include every single inch of the federal bureaucracy they took over slowly over time. We've gotta do the exact same thing and we've got, we've gotta have the discipline and the long vision to do it on our own. That's why I think it's really important for guys with our background and veterans, like you don't have to run for office, but just to get civically engaged in your community because I think we just have a different mentality.

• 3:40:10Shawn Ryan?

  We do, man, but even, I hate to be a pessimist here, but even a lot of the guys that we have in there now that were veterans, I mean...

• 3:40:16Joe Kent?

  No, I know.

• 3:40:17Shawn Ryan?

  What a fucking disappointment. You know, not all of them...

• 3:40:20Joe Kent?

  Not all of them.

• 3:40:20Shawn Ryan?

  But a lot of them. It's like, man...

• 3:40:22Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:23Shawn Ryan?

  You really could've done something here.

• 3:40:25Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:25Shawn Ryan?

  But you're just a... You're just a money hungry fucking chump.

• 3:40:29Joe Kent?

  Yep.

• 3:40:30Shawn Ryan?

  Just like everybody else.

• 3:40:31Joe Kent?

  Just like everybody else, yeah. I mean, you can't go there and think, if you're a veteran, you can't go there and think like, well, now I'm a team player and this is just my new chain of command and I'm gonna be a good soldier and salute and move out. I mean, that made you successful to a degree in the military, but Congress is completely different. Like, you were elected by the same amount of people that elected everybody else there. So like, you, you don't need to do anything but be responsive to the people who elected you. That's it. Like the, the, the party leadership and all that, yeah. If it benefits the people in your district, you play ball. But if it doesn't, like, it's incumbent upon you, like, it's in your, your oath. That's why you were hired, is to stand up for what you actually ran on. And, and you're right, there's a lot of vets that just have not done that. I think you get a lot of guys, maybe who had their military career cut short, that like,

• 3:41:15Joe Kent?

  now they want to go into politics and like climb up the ladder. Uh, I think that's appealing for some people. Uh, but I do think there is another crop that's coming up of, of veterans that, that don't view it that way. I mean, like Eli Crane, I know you, you had him on the show a couple of times. Eli's done everything he said he was gonna do on the campaign trail and like he's, he stayed really true.

• 3:41:35Shawn Ryan?

  That guy's just doing what the fuck he should be doing.

• 3:41:37Joe Kent?

  Absolutely.

• 3:41:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, he came on here and told me that he changed his vote. He thought, he believed at a certain, I can't even remember what the hell they were voting on.

• 3:41:47Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:48Shawn Ryan?

  But he's, he, he got wind that his district, his voters did not align with that. Sent an emergency email or some type of message back to his, his, his people and had an email, go out to all of his, everybody in his district and, uh, reversed his decision and, uh, voted the way they wanted him to vote. And I mean, you know, that's all you can ask for.

• 3:42:14Joe Kent?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:42:14Shawn Ryan?

  It's all you can ask for.

• 3:42:15Joe Kent?

  And that probably pissed off a lot of people with a lot of money in DC.

• 3:42:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:19Joe Kent?

  But his people in his district who voted for him saw that he was representing their will. And I think he'll be rewarded when it comes time for reelection for that. So, yeah, he's, he's awesome, man. Corey Mills is another vet. Ana Paulina Luna is another vet. So there's, there's a crop of freshmen right now, I think, that are kinda cutting a new path for veterans in Congress. That's, that's much more populist and like, hey, we're actually gonna listen to our people and we're not here just to become corporate shills. We're here to fight for what's right.

• 3:42:44Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I hope you're one of those.

• 3:42:48Joe Kent?

  If not, come after me. That's it. If I sell out, man. That's what I always tell people. I'm like, hey, because people always ask, because people have been betrayed so many times. They'll be like, well, how do I know you're not going to be just like them? And I'm like, number one, look at the money. Look at where I get my money from. I get my money from small dollar donors. But number two, don't take my word for it. Watch my votes. If I start voting like a DC chump that doesn't care about you, then fricking get me out of there. You know, we still, while we, while for now, we still have a representative democracy. We still have a republic and we can choose our leaders. The problem is people get lazy and they, this is why incumbents have like a 90% reelection rate. Because people just don't participate in the primaries. And so we kind of get the government that we unfortunately deserve. So we got to get people much more active in that process.

• 3:43:32Shawn Ryan?

  I almost, I almost said that exact same thing. There was a, somebody has a famous quote that says, you get the government that you voted in.

• 3:43:39Joe Kent?

  It's unfortunate.

• 3:43:40Shawn Ryan?

  You deserve the government that you voted in. And then, um, yeah, yeah, it's, and, and, and it is, you know, you hear everybody. And, uh, you know, I'm a lot more center right than, than, than a lot of folks that I speak with, I think. But, you know, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're talking to. It is.

• 3:44:04Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know anybody that's happy with the way the government's running.

• 3:44:07Joe Kent?

  No.

• 3:44:08Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and everybody bitches about Congress and they all bitch about the Senate and the president. And they bitch about everything. And they bitch about Congress and Congress has what a 90% real reelection rate?

• 3:44:20Joe Kent?

  Incumbents are reelected, yeah.

• 3:44:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:22Joe Kent?

  90%.

• 3:44:23Shawn Ryan?

  90%.

• 3:44:24Joe Kent?

  90%, 90%. And there's a lot of-

• 3:44:26Shawn Ryan?

  And it's like a, and it's like a 10% approval rating.

• 3:44:29Joe Kent?

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And everybody's mad at Congress, but then they, they turn around and they either don't participate in the primaries or they just blindly check that, oh, I know that name right there. Without saying like, what's this guy's voting record? Like, he's got an R by his name, but does he vote that way? Like, what issues do I care about? How, how is he voting? I mean, a lot of, a lot of what's happening right now with the political parties, it's a lot of pro wrestling. Like, there's one party in Washington DC and you always hear it, like, the mainstream media be like, oh, there was bipartisan- Consensus, like there's the bipartisan bipartisan problem solvers. They they move forward the Ukraine deal. It's like anytime it comes time for us to send billions of dollars overseas, suddenly like there's bipartisan bipartisan harmony.

• 3:45:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:09Joe Kent?

  You know, but like when it's time to do like real things like secure our border and stop the fentanyl, take care of the American people. The only folks you hear fighting for that consistently are branded as like far right nut jobs. You know, like the Freedom Caucus, Eli Crane and those guys, when they were negotiating the rules for the Speaker of the House and they were saying, hey, it's absolutely crazy that we're still doing omnibus bills that were jamming together multiple bills together that no one reads and passing them at a massive deficit and putting more on our national debt. We can't keep doing that. We need to do the bills individually and we need to actually have fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget. They called those guys every name in the book. And like literally, they requested the most reasonable, like even keeled set of policy, you know, proposals out there. And everybody else is like, no, we want to keep spending money into oblivion.

• 3:45:54Joe Kent?

  And we're just going to call these guys crazy Nazis, you know? And it's just like, that's the, unfortunately, that's the way it works. I I just hope people wake up and see the game.

• 3:46:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, me too, man. It's just, I just don't.

• 3:46:11Shawn Ryan?

  I just don't get it. You know, even with the with the with the LGBTQ stuff and you know, I don't, I don't care, man. Like, if that's what you want to do, great, go do it.

• 3:46:23Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:24Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, you know, we shouldn't be cutting eight year olds dicks off.

• 3:46:29Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:30Shawn Ryan?

  Sorry, I said it.

• 3:46:31Joe Kent?

  I can't believe we have to talk about it.

• 3:46:32Shawn Ryan?

  You shouldn't be dismembering an eight year old's penis.

• 3:46:35Joe Kent?

  Right.

• 3:46:38Shawn Ryan?

  Like, what, how can you, how can you, how can you vote for that? How can you do it?

• 3:46:44Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:44Shawn Ryan?

  How can you morally vote for that?

• 3:46:47Joe Kent?

  And yet people do. I mean, my my Democrat opponent basically voted to put biological men into little girls bathrooms and let them compete against them in athletics. So it's crazy. And this is stuff, I talk about this all the time. I'm like, 10, 15 years ago, these wouldn't have been Republican or Democrat issues. If you said that you wanted to protect children, you didn't want to let men into the little girl's room, that wouldn't be like a radical far right thing to say. As a matter of fact, I think even most Democrats, like old school Bill Clinton Democrats, like would have been like, yeah, of course, that's, that's absolute insanity. Or, hey, should a six, eight, 10, 15 year old, should they be allowed to mutilate themselves? Like, or chemically castrate themselves? Most people would have been like, what the hell are you talking about? What's wrong with you?

• 3:47:30Joe Kent?

  But here we are, and we're in a place where even so-called moderate Democrat elected officials, they will not vote against that stuff.

• 3:47:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I know.

• 3:47:37Joe Kent?

  It is part of their doctrine. They won't go against it. Even the ones that won't talk about it that much, my opponent won't talk about it that much, but if it's put on the bill, if it's put on the floor, she will vote with the radical Democrats every single time.

• 3:47:47Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:47:48Joe Kent?

  You know, because I think that there's some really powerful corporate interests. There's a lot of money to be made off of these so-called gender-affirming surgeries, the mutilation. But then also, it's just old school communist doctrine to separate parents from their kids, break up the nuclear family. I mean, Mao did it, Al Qaeda wants to do it, like every single bad ideology out there. Yeah, they go after the government, they go after power, but the real center of power is the nuclear family. And if you can break that up, man, you've got all kinds of power. If you can break that up while you control language at the same time, and say like, a boy's not a girl, a girl's not a boy, like, that's, that's kind of in-game in, in terms of power. And I think a lot of people don't see that. They think it's like a kooky social issue. They still think that we're talking about like gay marriage or something, you know,

• 3:48:32Joe Kent?

  like stuff that most people are like, yeah, because I think most of us feel, like you just said, like, I don't care what you do. If you're a consenting, if you're a consenting adult, I don't give a shit what you cut off, you know, and I don't care who you marry, I, I'm not going to pass laws about that. I don't care. But when we're talking about protecting kids, and there's a, there's one side that is diabolically focused, and they're focused like a laser on going after kids and breaking up the family, that's not just a goofy social issue.

• 3:48:55Shawn Ryan?

  What about the, I mean, it, you can't even protect kids anymore from, from, from pedophiles.

• 3:49:03Joe Kent?

  Right.

• 3:49:04Shawn Ryan?

  The MAPS thing. I mean, that, that was a conspiracy, what, a year ago?

• 3:49:07Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:08Shawn Ryan?

  And now here it is. Minor attractive persons been talking about it on here for over a year.

• 3:49:13Joe Kent?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:16Shawn Ryan?

  Here we are. Now we have people that are that are voting for the for the the normalization and rights of pedophiles.

• 3:49:25Joe Kent?

  Yeah. I mean, if you're allowed to discuss sex and sexuality with kids of every single age as a teacher, I can see how they have now moved it and said like, well, you know, maybe some of these teachers are attractive. Like, it's not a big deal. Like, you can see how this this incrementally goes. Like, the slippery slope thing is 100% right. And now here we are. And again, I just go back to, yeah, a lot of this is a bunch of sick perverts that are inserting themselves in here because they're predators. But why is the apparatus moving in this direction? Like, they are at war with the nuclear family. Break up the nuclear family, that's the last line. If they take away family autonomy, that's the last line. That's complete control right there. Because then you just have all these programmable human beings that you can control and you can move around like they're just

• 3:50:10Joe Kent?

  like little mindless widgets, you know? So that's that's what I think is some of the darker forces that are at play.

• 3:50:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think you're right, man. Well, is there anything we haven't covered that you want to cover?

• 3:50:25Joe Kent?

  Man, we covered everything. I think we covered a lot, yeah.

• 3:50:28Shawn Ryan?

  We did. We covered a lot of material, but yeah. Well, Joe, I really appreciate you coming here and telling your story. And I know that's that's got to be tough. And man, I just I just wish you the best of luck and

• 3:50:45Joe Kent?

  Thank you.

• 3:50:46Shawn Ryan?

  And if you ever need anything, reach out.

• 3:50:49Joe Kent?

  Absolutely, man. Thank you so much.

• 3:50:50Shawn Ryan?

  All right, brother.

• 3:50:51Joe Kent?

  Yeah, appreciate it.