Hellacious Combat w/ the Army Rangers & Rescuing Marcus Luttrell | David Waterhouse | Ep. 314

Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Dave served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the 75th Ranger Regiment. He did 6 deployments in 4 years. Check out Dave's documentary “Ranger” on amazon prime:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Ranger-David-Waterhouse/dp/B0B8T6YBZV? dplnkId=1bb426a0-6b5f-4850-a8c0-4cbc8d93dec7&nodl=1 Dave’s non profit helping veterans ⬇️ https://furtherfasterharder.org https://www.instagram.com/furtherfasterharder_foundation?igsh=MXI0NnkwbGR5aDY2Mg== ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors: Mando ⬇️ https://shopmando.com Promo code "TEAMHOUSE" for 40% off your starter pack. GhostBed ⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! ____________________________________ Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [email protected] 0:00 start #75thrangerregiment Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast, if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support The Team House channel and podcast, if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com/the team house.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Special operations.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Coburn Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 2:32Jack Murphy?

  Hey everyone, this is episode 314 of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave. And our guest on tonight's show is David Waterhouse. He previously served in 2nd Ranger Battalion in Iraq and Afghanistan, took part of many, and in some cases, some fairly prominent, well-known operations. And he is also a participant in a documentary called Ranger. Where can people find that documentary, by the way?

• 2:57Speaker 05

  It is available on Amazon Prime for rent and purchase.

• 3:00Jack Murphy?

  They just go to Amazon Prime and look for Ranger.

• 3:02Speaker 05

  Ranger, yes, sir.

• 3:03Jack Murphy?

  Okay, awesome. Before we jump into the interview, I just want to do a shout out to our sponsor for tonight's show, which is Mando. They make whole-body deodorant that's safe to use anywhere on your body. So that's right, pits, balls, thigh folds, belly buttons, butt cracks, and feet. Created by a doctor who saw firsthand how normal BO is being misdiagnosed and mistreated. And it's clinically proven to block odor all day and control odor for up to 72 hours. Mando Deodorant product options include the solid deodorant stick, formulated and powered by mandelic acid to stop odor before it starts, and spray deodorant, aluminum-free and ideal for hard-to-reach places. All products are baking soda-free and paraben-free.

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• 4:29Jack Murphy?

  So, without further ado, welcome to the show, David. Thanks for coming in, man.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Thank you guys very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 4:37Jack Murphy?

  Yes, so Dave and I just finished watching your documentary like a few hours before you guys came in. It's super cool, and it's one of those rare sorts of moments for people to get a little taste of... What is kind of like a, it's a subculture, you know, it was something that like the American public wasn't really aware of or didn't really understand on a human level. And I think through the course of your documentary, you kind of tell like the Ranger story, like what's it like to be in a Ranger platoon in war?

• 5:11Speaker 05

  Sure, yeah, I mean, and that was our goal setting out was to make it consumable and people to be able to digest it best that they can. I mean, it's real hard to explain in words sometimes, like what it's like and you know, what the actual, you know, difficulties and struggles that we deal with, not only over there, but when we come home. And we tried to just make it that it could be digested by anyone that could pick it up and watch it and be like, you know, oh, here are these guys that do all this stuff. But what do you really know what we're doing, you know? And that was, that was our goal was to to kind of target not only the the community, but also, you know, families and just normal everyday civilians who are curious about it.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  And it's very, it tells both sides of the story too, right? It's not just, you know, here we are beating our chests because there is that. I mean, in any special operations unit, like you're good at what you do and your, your job is killing people. So there's, there's going to be a certain amount of that. But it's also about the realities of it. And, you know, the victories and the losses, and then the personal sacrifices that, that go on long after the war ends, or long after you leave.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  Absolutely. You know, I'm very fortunate to have a wonderful wife and great kids that are as accepting as they can be of the way that I, you know, I've been kind of shaped by those experiences. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's one of those things that, you know, that once you're in it, like it kind of never stops. There's always going to be part of you that's still kind of living in that moment. And it's just trying to find that healthy divide between, you know, remembering and being proud of what you did and also trying to move forward and, you know, not be a burden to your families and, you know, have that be the, the overwhelming sense that...

• 6:52Speaker 06

  Yeah. And also, I think one of the challenges is, is, you know, where does that, where does that part, where do you put that part? Because it doesn't go away. You also don't want to be, you know, like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite and, you know, if I only would have once, you know, if we would have once stayed, like, you know, kind of living in the past. But you also, you know, but you also... Can't deny, you know, this very formative period of your life and try to pretend that it never happened, just so everybody else around you is comfortable.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  Sure, and I think that was one of the biggest things in this documentary helped a lot was, okay, it's all out there now. So you can judge away, but I don't have anything to hide, so I'm comfortable in my own skin. Right. You know, up till that point, it'd been like, well, I don't want to say this, I don't want to say this, I don't want to make, like you said.

• 7:45Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  Anyone uncomfortable.

• 7:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  When really, it's, they're uncomfortable with what I'm telling them because they don't have the ability to consume it, not that it's uncomfortable for me to say.

• 7:54Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  And unfortunately, that has a reverse effect because it makes you clam up, you know, trying to make them comfortable, which makes you uncomfortable.

• 8:01Speaker 06

  100%.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  So it's, it was, that was one of the things that was really fortunate to come out of this was like, okay, well, it's all out there. I got, I got nothing to hide, so pick it apart, and I feel fine about it moving forward.

• 8:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, we've talked about this on the show a few times in the sense of, especially when you come from the, first off, you have to learn how to deal with civilians again, you know, how to talk in polite company, that, you know, shooting people in the face isn't, isn't a topic of conversation that they accept. The humor is very different, and that, you know, there, there's this, there's this idea, like when we talked about, like, speaking with therapists sometimes, and, you know, and you say, well, okay, I did this, and then they go, well, and how did you deal with it? And you're like, well, I didn't really have, like, I didn't feel bad about doing what I did.

• 8:53Speaker 06

  And then, so a lot of times, it's not how you feel, and it's not necessarily how they feel, but it's, it's that, all of a sudden, they're reflecting this thing, that you're like, am I supposed to feel bad about this? Am I, like, am I supposed to, like, is there something wrong with me that I'm not feeling the way they think I should feel about this?

• 9:13Speaker 05

  I think that's a perfect point, and I, I forget what movie it comes out of, but there's a line that says that the distance grows bigger between us by all the things that weren't said.

• 9:23Speaker 06

  Right.

• 9:24Speaker 05

  And that, that kind of gets lost in that vacuum where it's like it. How do you start your climb out of that? I mean, because obviously, everybody that's been over there that's seen certain things, you're gonna come home, you're gonna be a little different. I mean, than someone that is doing what you would consider a normal, everyday civilian activity. To come home and be like, well, let me tell you about this time we did, you know, this crazy activity, or this crazy mission, or this happened, and they just, there's nothing tangible for them to relate it to. Maybe even on a roller coaster or something, but that's different than diving out of a plane, you know, loaded down with kit and walking 20 clicks to get to where you need to be.

• 9:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 05

  You know, it's like, oh, we go hiking for fun. Like, why the hell would you ever do something like that?

• 10:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 10:00Speaker 05

  When you're forced to do it.

• 10:02Speaker 06

  Right.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  You know, it's like, guys would come back, and they'd be like, hey, you wanna go hike Mount Rainier? I was like, dude, we just hiked the Himalayas. What the hell are you talking about?

• 10:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:08Speaker 05

  Go ahead, I'll be at the house.

• 10:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  You know, like, no, I'm good.

• 10:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:11Jack Murphy?

  Let's, let's jump into your story.

• 10:13Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 10:13Jack Murphy?

  Tell us a little bit about, you know, what your path was, you know, growing up as a kid that took you towards military service.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  Sure, yeah, I, I grew up playing competitive sports. I was baseball, soccer, and, and golf in high school. And I was a pretty good baseball player. I had a scholarship opportunity for University of Vermont that I was too busy having fun in high school, and blew that opportunity. So, all my friends went away to good schools, and I was kinda in community college banging around, barely going to class, you know, just partying and being an 18, 19-year-old kid. And then 9/11 happened. And I was floating through the world. I wasn't, I had no direction or anything like that. And then 9/11 happened, and I just, I mean, I remember, we were just down at the memorial today, walking through it for the first time.

• 11:02Speaker 05

  And I remember, I was talking to my brother, and I'm like, I remember videotaping the news when those events were going down. Like, it was so impact, those images just seared into your brain. And that, when that day happened, I remember, it was a couple days into the war in Afghanistan. And I saw this kid on a ridgeline, and a rocket went right over the top of his head. And I was living in Myrtle Beach at the time with a couple of my buddies that didn't go to college either. And I remember sitting there, and I couldn't shake the image of this, and I'm like, well, why am I here, seemingly hiding behind privilege, and that kid's over there? And I, I felt like, again, I was hiding behind privilege, and I was like, no, I'm, I wanna go do that, even if it... Even if it kills me, to me at that point, it was bigger than me. It was about doing something

• 11:47Speaker 05

  outside of my comfort zone. And I had hoped that having, you know, all those sports growing up would help give me a little bit of an edge going through the physical process of it. But like you guys know, the physical part is a fraction. It's all upstairs.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Now, had you ever thought about the military before? Did you have any family members that had been military?

• 12:06Speaker 05

  My grandfather was in the Merchant Marines in the Korean War.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  But that was, for our family, that was it. I mean, but I always grew up watching war movies.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  Playing war in the, you know, in the woods when I was a kid growing up, but I don't think I ever actually really gave it serious consideration.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  Right. The idea of enlisting wasn't.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  No, I didn't. I mean, I was like, oh, that'd be cool, or, you know, that'd be an awesome job to have, but

• 12:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  No serious consideration until after that day.

• 12:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 05

  And I sat on it for about a year.

• 12:33Speaker 06

  So when you, when you were sitting there in Myrtle Beach and thinking about this,

• 12:39Speaker 06

  did you know about the Rangers? Did you know about special operations? Like, was the military just one big sort of?

• 12:45Speaker 05

  I'll say I knew, I won't say I knew what special operations were. I knew Rangers were

• 12:52Speaker 05

  a form of, kind of more of an elite soldier. I didn't understand the hierarchy with, you know, with Delta guys or, you know, DevGru guys. I didn't quite understand that hierarchy at that point, but I knew that it was, it was a specialized thing. And if I was gonna go, I was gonna at least try to do that. And if that didn't work, then, you know, I'd go do what was asked of me. But, I mean, that was really kind of, I had read a few books. I don't remember the names of them. And all the movies that came out, you know, were, were kind of crummy, that depicted, even as a civilian, I'm like, that doesn't look like that, that's how that would really play out.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  And so that was kind of what I wanted to do, kind of initially, right off the bat. I really didn't give much consideration to any of the other branches. It was, my dad, I grew up in a shipyard. He has an environmental company out of Boston. And when I told him what I was gonna do, he's like, you're gonna go be a SEAL. And I was like, absolutely not. I've been working around boats since I was a kid. I hate boats, man. Like, I'd rather be on the land.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  And so that, that kind of, between those two. Two options and then that's why I ended up going with the with the Ranger route.

• 13:56Speaker 06

  So so when you walked into the Army recruiter, like you had Ranger on the brain.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  They actually tried to blow me off.

• 14:02Speaker 06

  Really?

• 14:02Speaker 05

  Um, when I went into the Meps Department in South Boston, I walked in and he was like, well, what do you want to do? And I was like, I, you know, I want to be in Ranger Battalion. And he goes, oh, it's not looking good, you know? What do you want to do in Ranger Battalion? I was like, I want to be in the infantry. He goes, ah, there's no slots for the infantry.

• 14:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 14:21Speaker 05

  You work in the motor pool.

• 14:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Or something like that. And I'm like, look, man, if I'm working in a in a shop, my buddy owns a shop like five minutes from here, I can go work for him. I'm not going to join the military to do that. And he points to a picture behind his desk and it's his kid. He goes, my kid's in Ranger Battalion right now. So I see why he was kind of guarding the scroll, if you will, to an extent. But I was like, okay, when he didn't give me what I wanted, I was like, I'm thank you for your time. I'm sorry to waste it. And I stood up and shook his hand. He was like, sit down. So I think it was like that first test of how bad do you really want this? Or are you just in love with the idea of doing it?

• 14:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 05

  Kind of, kind of garden it a little bit.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  He was probably also like trying to fill numbers and other.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  Uh, he made up this story. Let me call, let me call the Pentagon.

• 15:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Slots.

• 15:01Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  I'm like, I'm sure you have a direct line.

• 15:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 05

  The guy at the Pentagon in charge of recruiting.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, let me get Obama on the line and see if if he'll write you a waiver.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  Yes, I didn't buy that for a second. So I basically called his bluff and he was like, all right, well, I'll I'll get you in for, you know, one station unit training, which is basic and infantry combined. And then you go to airborne school and then you'll get an opportunity to go to Ranger indoctrination at the time. It's RASP now, but it was RIT back then. And then, you know, it gave me an opportunity. Got my foot in the door to try, which is all I could ask for.

• 15:32Speaker 06

  And so what year was this?

• 15:33Speaker 05

  This would have been two thousand two when I enlisted and I ended up leaving about four months later in January of two thousand three.

• 15:40Speaker 06

  Okay. And so you, uh, go to, uh, Benning, you do your infantry, your airborne, and then you're on DEP because there are no RIT slots?

• 15:51Speaker 05

  No, there was a RIT slot, but we ended up in RIT holdover.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 15:54Speaker 05

  And after each RIT class, there's like a mandatory one week break before the next class starts. And you have to be in RIT holder for two weeks before. Or you can start RIP and we got there with one week left in the class. So we had that and then we had the one week where they were on break and then three more weeks of RIP hold over while the class in front of us went. One week of hold over while they cadre got a break and then we went to RIP finally. So I was in the RIP pipeline, be it in RIP hold over or RIP for like 10 weeks.

• 16:25Speaker 06

  Wow, okay.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  So people like, oh, it's a three week course. I was like, not for me. We were there for a minute.

• 16:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So then you finished RIP and did you choose second battalion because you know it was the best or?

• 16:40Speaker 05

  Uh, actually I didn't. I was an east coast guy. So first range battalion and third range battalion being in Georgia and my, my mother lived in South Carolina. So I was like, well, that's, you know, that makes sense.

• 16:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  And they gave us our little pecking order, their little list. And I had one, three and two was my last choice. And the RIP cadre takes it and you know, we've already shaved our tambourades. We're getting ready for graduation. And he's like, great. You know, the 15 of you infantry guys are all going to two seven. I don't know why he had us fill the paperwork out. He was sending us there anyways, you know, it's like, and then there were two other guys that went to regiment, basically.

• 17:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 05

  It was, that was it. And I was off to two seven five. And the funny part about getting there was mister, there's no slots. There were only five guys in my squad when I got to two seven five. So there was more than enough slots.

• 17:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  And I, I ended up in a God squad right when I got there. So that was tough. Everyone was tabbed. I was the only private. So that was a fun, a fun entrance into, into battalion. It was like, congratulations. You're solely responsible. For cleaning the, the platoon A which you're assigned to. Other guys had like three, four privates, just me.

• 17:46Speaker 06

  That is exciting.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was awesome.

• 17:50Speaker 06

  Um, so by the time you got there, where had these guys already been?

• 17:55Speaker 05

  The, they had been, they had just gotten back like a week before from a six month rotation in Afghanistan.

• 18:01Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 18:02Speaker 05

  The reason they were on that six monther is because of the invasion of Iraq. So they were deployed to Afghanistan and then actually, I guess it's the equivalent of SOF getting stopped lost. And they had to keep a couple of, a company in Afghanistan while the entire rest of regiment invaded Iraq. So that was known as a six monther for our guys. So. That was the main one. I think they had done one like real short stint right after nine eleven like maybe October of twenty eleven.

• 18:29Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  Um, and then the six monther and then I came in, which would have been the platoon's third deployment, but most of the guys were had only done the one by the time I got there.

• 18:38Speaker 06

  And what company did you go to?

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Charlie Company.

• 18:40Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 18:41Speaker 05

  First platoon Charlie Company. I loved it. I I it was I wouldn't have been any other way.

• 18:46Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, so what was their training? When you got there, like, so what? You're a, you know, non-tab, like, you're private.

• 18:55Speaker 05

  PV two private.

• 18:56Speaker 06

  You're a private, uh, in a God squad. What? Do they smoke you or is it just straight to training? Like, are they? What is going on?

• 19:04Speaker 05

  The smoke show.

• 19:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  I mean, you you you graduate from RAMP, you put that little, you know, you get your scroll pinned on and you're like, oh, man, I'm on top of the world. Then you get to battalion, you're like, I am an ant in this place. Like, I have no experience. Uh, very humbling to walk in those halls. And, uh, yeah, a lot of smoke, but honestly, a lot of training too. I mean, obviously, this is the very beginning in the GWAT. Um, we we basically lived on RF one the whole time we were there. So, um, we were busy. We did a lot of range time. We did, you know, most first time you get on a helicopter, um, you know, you jump in doing airfield seizures and stuff like that. Uh, so a lot of training and then that led up to in in that first first November in twenty, excuse me, my first deployment in twenty oh three

• 19:49Speaker 05

  was, uh, Afghanistan in November. So I'd only been in regiment when I deployed for like three months.

• 19:54Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  So, um, that was.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  So these guys were doing a pretty quick turnaround.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  It was a pretty quick turnaround.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  For them, yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 05

  Cause usually we're about three and a half on, five and a half off.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 05

  And this was basically six on, two and a half off, and then back over.

• 20:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  Um, so they were, they were, uh,

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Not the happiest people about it. They needed their break.

• 20:18Speaker 06

  But they're maintaining two fronts right now. They've got Iraq.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  Iraq had just, yeah, it was, would we invade in March, I think, right? So I mean, you're only looking at, what, seven, eight months. We've been there. And they actually deployed the entire regiment to Afghanistan on my first deployment. So it was all hands on deck. We were only there for about a month. But I don't think we could have made it a month and a week. I mean, we were, we were in pretty bad spots with health. Honestly, we're real malnourished and walking up in the Hindu Kush and humping a ton of weight and bartering with the villagers to let them sleep in their barn and giving away anything we could.

• 20:52Speaker 06

  Was this a winter strike?

• 20:53Speaker 05

  Yes, this was winter strike. Yeah, and that was, they called, it was, it was a surge. They thought they had a hit on the big man.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  And they, they mobilized all three battalions to go in there.

• 21:04Speaker 06

  So can you, can you kind of walk us through winter strike?

• 21:06Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it was, that was obviously the name of the operation. We all got into Bagram Air Force Base and like I said, they had a, what they thought was a hit on the big guy at the time. And so everyone's, you know, pretty excited or whatever. But once we found out what the mission was, it was like, hey, you guys are going to get inserted into the mountains at about 10:05. And you're just going to patrol and walk these valleys going house to house and looking for intel, seeing if, you know, anything leads to anything.

• 21:35Speaker 06

  Comb the mountains.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  We got, yes, comb the desert. Yes, it was comb the mountains. And so they just kicked us off. First, first battalion was in charge of driving us up to elevation in like high luxes and dropping us off. And then, I mean, we got off and it was zero out and we were not prepared for that kind of weather. At that elevation.

• 21:57Speaker 06

  Not only that type of weather, but, but I imagine that even the, even with a trip to Afghanistan, you know, Afghanistan is a bunch of different climates and a bunch of different elevations. Like each part of Afghanistan is very different. And Sitting in Bagram and doing DAs, you know, with 160th is a very different mission than humping the hills.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 22:25Speaker 06

  And so I imagine that you guys, like your kit shakeout and things like that, like you're probably carrying too much weight.

• 22:33Speaker 05

  I weighed 168 pounds when I got there. And when I, we stepped on the scale to weigh rucks with the Skedco, I came in at like 106 was my ruck.

• 22:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 05

  So I was almost carrying, I was carrying more than half my body.

• 22:47Speaker 06

  Which, which anybody who has been up through the mountains knows, you're not lasting very long with that kind of weight.

• 22:52Speaker 05

  No, I mean, you, plus you're packing mortar rounds for the guys. I mean, it's had to be equally distributed out and it was, you know, one MRE a day, basically. And then we were bartering for like rice and beans and stuff. And yeah, it was, I remember as, as we were kind of going through this, I had a lieutenant or no, he was a, a major. I think he was a battalion XO and he had come up to our level OP. And there was an element of us walking him back down. And he was like, you know, we had kit on, so he couldn't see rank or anything. We were just his little PSD element to move him back down the mountain. And he's like, hey, have you been to mountains yet? I mean, mountain phase or Ranger school? And I'm like, no, sir. He's like, it won't be shit after this, bro. Like Delana is going to be nothing after, if you're able to make it through this.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  So when I was in mountains, and I'm fast forwarding a long way, that always cycled through my head. I was like, hey, if I can make it through winter strike, man, this is nothing.

• 23:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  What do you mean I get pancakes every morning?

• 23:43Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 23:45Speaker 05

  So yeah, it was, we were out there for 15 days. And then they, they picked us up, exfilled us back to Bagram. We were supposed to have clothes to change into, but the plane carrying our sea bags got shot down. So we showed back up to Bagram after two weeks of no shower and had none of our clothes with us. So, I mean, we had fleas all over the inside of our pants. I mean, blood spots everywhere from mashing fleas down. And um, we had to put the same, take a shower and put the same nasty uniform back on. I mean, they were standing up by themselves at that point. And uh, we went into the chow hall and I remember this like sergeant major like screaming at us because we were dirty and smelled like shit and, you know, he was, he had probably never left the base since he'd been there, you know, it's like, hey man, we're just hungry dude. We haven't hardly eaten in two weeks.

• 24:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  And he was more concerned about our appearance than what's about actually putting food in our belly, you know?

• 24:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  He was a non, non soft guy, but still, I mean, it's like, come on, man, like.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 05

  Look, does it look like we just walked from our huge chair, like, you know, I mean? Um, so we came back, we were supposed to have like a week and they were gonna send us back out, so we do everything, PCIs, get everything ready, and then people started bedding down. And we weren't, I bet we weren't asleep for more than an hour or two and someone knocked on the door and they're like, hey, um, Dev Group uh, has a target package and they wanna go and fill tonight. And we'd only been there for like six hours. Gotten like one meal in and a shower and they were like, get packed up, got loaded up, went to the clamshell hangar, birds landed, picked us up, re-infilled us for another fifteen days up in the Hindu Kush. So, I, we were there for thirty-one ish days, thirty plus days, not many, no, maybe thirty-one.

• 25:23Speaker 06

  That's brutal.

• 25:24Speaker 05

  And I lost twenty-seven pounds, twenty-five pounds, something like that. It was double, it was double twenties.

• 25:28Speaker 06

  Were, were, were you guys getting uh, like speedballs dropped or where it was in?

• 25:32Speaker 05

  We had donkey trains.

• 25:33Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 25:34Speaker 05

  That would, we'd have to go, they'd set up a, a little element every day, uh, a group of dudes, whoever, and they rotated through. And we would walk down probably about fifteen hundred, two thousand feet in elevation down to what we called the hotel, which is kinda where the head shed was. And we'd have to load up donkeys and walk with the MREs up there. And that would be our day or two's rations and what we weren't eating MREs, we were eating the, the villagers were cooking us food.

• 26:02Speaker 06

  And so you guys are just going village to village?

• 26:07Speaker 05

  House to house.

• 26:08Speaker 06

  House to house, looking for number one?

• 26:10Speaker 05

  Yep. Or anything that was gonna point us in that direction, the number one.

• 26:14Speaker 06

  Were you taking any enemy contact, was there?

• 26:17Speaker 05

  Not initially, and we actually intercepted some, some calls, uh, some cellphone calls. And it was, uh, them chatting about us. I mean, they were watching us for sure. And that's one of the things that I don't think unless you've been to a place like Afghanistan, and I didn't even feel the same way when I was in Iraq. There's, you always feel like that set of eyes is on you. Like every step you take, you're like, someone is watching us right now. And the, you know, the land being so spread out and so sparse, it's like, dude, they could be 500 meters away behind a rock. You're never gonna see them. And, um, so that was, uh, I always just, I've never felt that paranoid in my entire life.

• 26:53Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, they, they could be in the, you know, you're going through a village. They'd be sitting in their window in a hut, talking on their phone. And what, what are you gonna, you can't just shoot somebody because they're talking on a phone.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 27:03Speaker 06

  And, you know.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  And one of those, those messages that was intercepted was, don't shoot at the guys with the black Velcro. They fight back too hard. So they're being very selective about picking out hard and soft targets.

• 27:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  So we did not get engaged for the first three and a half weeks. And it was so damn cold that we were like, hey, we got, they were gonna, we started a fire. And we're on one side of the valley. I was on guard duty with, uh, with another one of the, of the guys there. And we're just sitting there, kinda leaning up, backs on the hill, just staring across this big, wide open valley. And I just remember hearing, boom, and then looking out and being like, what is that giant orange chow bow? And this RPG came in from across the valley, landed about, uh, no more than 10 meters away from the fire that was going. And, uh, I mean, one in a million shot with an RPG from that distance. You're talking hundreds and hundreds of meters. Landed it right on top of us, threw rocks all over everybody. And we had been humping all that ammo for so long.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  Everybody jumped up and just went spandex on the side of that mountain, dude. And like, I was trying to direct people. I'm like, yeah, it was that cut over there by that, Rick tried saying that over. Twenty dudes shooting, you know, our first sergeant picked up the first weapon that was next to him, which was a sawgunner's saw. He's emptying the saw out, the sawgunner's running around, "Has anyone seen my weapon?" First sergeant's like, "Your round's out," chucks it at him. Like, it was just a spendex.

• 28:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  And then, I mean, we even heard dudes that were from Irekiaoma down in the valley firing two oh firing two oh threes from like three thousand meters out. It was like boom, boom, and it's like they're way down here.

• 28:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 05

  Everybody.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  Dudes are partly just trying to shed weight.

• 28:36Speaker 05

  Shed weight, that was all it was at that point.

• 28:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 05

  Shed weight, and that was the only contact we took, but for that, for that month.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  That's funny.

• 28:43Speaker 05

  But yeah, I, that was my, my first.

• 28:45Speaker 06

  Mortars are like getting it on.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, everybody, the whole valley erupted. And I actually work with a guy now who was in BCO. And he's like, "Oh, we heard you guys, we were way down the mountain, but we heard what sounded like a hellacious gunfight." And I was like, "Yeah, it was one RPG, dude."

• 28:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  It's one RPG and just a bunch of wasted ammo, basically.

• 29:03Speaker 06

  If I remember the chronology correctly from the documentary, so this happened, and did you go back to Afghanistan again for Red Wings?

• 29:10Speaker 05

  Uh, yes, but that was actually my fourth deployment.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Okay, okay.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Um, so we finished up winter strike early December, and we came home, and I mean, they, they were gonna send me to Ranger School, when I got back from, from winter strike, and they're like, "You're in God Squad, dude, just go get your tab." And you obviously can make it. And I, I think I did like twenty-four pushups or something like that on the PT test, because I just had my, no muscle mass left. And when we walked in, the CQ guy had gotten there while we were gone, so he had never been. And he's sitting at the CQ desk watching all of us come in, and he goes, "The whole downstairs smelled like urine from that ammonia, from our bodies eating our muscles for fuel." And this was after a week or three day, four days of being pulled out and the whole trip back through Germany and everything, and we were still deteriorating.

• 29:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  And like I said, I did twenty-four, twenty-five pushups, and they were like, "Yeah." I was like, "I'm sorry, man, this is the only thing I can do." No one thought any less of me of it, and they were just like, you know, "If you can pass a PT test, might as well go and get it over with."

• 30:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 05

  So after that, we ended up doing a training cycle for a little while, and then we got spun up for a surge again in early, uh, April of two thousand and four.

• 30:16Speaker 06

  So how many months was that, roughly?

• 30:18Speaker 05

  That would have been through some December to probably right around the first week of April, so about four months, three and a half months, maybe.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Uh, that's a fast turn. Um, real quick, uh, let me say, uh, let me say thanks to our second sponsor tonight. Um, if you sleep hot at night. So if you're not on winter's strike, um, you know just how disruptive it can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of the night, or all the above, that's where Ghostbed can help. As the makers of the coolest beds in the world, Ghostbed is your go-to for cooling mattresses, cooling pillows, and even cooling bedding. From their signature Ghost Ice fabric to patented technology that adjusts with your body temperature, every Ghostbed mattress is designed with cooling in mind. So whether you want a plusher mattress that cushions your shoulders and hips,

• 31:06Speaker 06

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• 31:46Speaker 06

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• 32:14Speaker 05

  It's, I, I'm like, uh, sometimes I'm freezing cold and I think there's a circulation problem. I have some nerve damage from the lower back and, um, and so sometimes I'm, my, my feet are so cold, they're like sensitive to the touch and the other time I, if I could peel my skin off, I still could still be too hot.

• 32:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  So it's, it's a, it's a constant battle back and forth between hot, cold, you know, kicking a, kicking a leg outside the blanket, keeping the rest in.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  Um, that's actually, sounds pretty cool. I'm probably gonna look into that.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, and I got to the point where I'd have to put my pillows like out on the porch to dry. You know, the one, cause I just like, yeah, just wake up soaking wet. Um, but anyway, um, so you guys turn around for this pop in April.

• 32:54Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm, and it was another surge.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  To Afghanistan or?

• 32:56Speaker 05

  To Afghanistan again. And, uh, after, after the first one, everyone was like, hey, you're surging again. And it was like, you gotta be fucking kidding me. Sorry about language. We were like, dude, we were still recovering from the last one.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, you can say whatever you want on the show, uh, but also, you know, you, you're like, you're in the Scott squad. Did any more private show up while you guys were gone?

• 33:16Speaker 05

  Not in my squad.

• 33:17Speaker 06

  But have, have you, now that you've been through this suck fest with these guys, have you sort of earned your way?

• 33:21Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, big time. If you, if, there, there were only three of us that went to CCO for my RIP class, but I think five went to BCO, five went to ACO, and three of us went to CCO. And all three of us went to the same platoon. And that's how under strength one Charlie was at the time. Like, hey, here's three dudes. And it was like, oh shit, we got three more guys? Like, what do we do with these guys, you know?

• 33:44Speaker 05

  So we, we go through the training cycle, we get geared up and ready to go back. And, you know, we're obviously a little about it, but you definitely were accepted after that one.

• 33:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  Coming into the second one. It wasn't like, okay, you're a cherry. It's like, dude, that broke everyone off.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're right.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? So it's like, hey, if you can hang with that, you know, the rest of it. And guys coming off the six monther were like, dude, we didn't do anything like that on the six monther.

• 34:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  And they were in like, uh, kind of the southern part of Afghanistan. And that, to, to speak to a point you brought up earlier about the different types of terrain. People, when I first thought, they're like, oh, it's just mountains. Or some people thought, oh, it's just desert. And I'm like, no, no, no, it's like,

• 34:20Speaker 06

  Forested.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  It's everything. It's, it's, like, why do these wars have to be in crazy places? Like, can we have a war in like San Diego or something? I mean, not really, but a temperate place like that that's moderated.

• 34:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  But yeah, that was one of the, the big eye opening things was looking down on it and being like, dude, there's, it's desert, there's forest, there's mountains, there's, I mean, you name it.

• 34:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  One stop shop for, pick your terrain.

• 34:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 05

  And so, yes, I was, I was accepted in. I mean, I was still private. I still had to do my, my AOs and stuff.

• 34:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  And do all that and run everywhere and, you know, but I definitely, as far as like man to man, yeah. So when we got spun up for this one, actually, it was our turn to go to Iraq because we had missed out on the invasion. So like, oh yeah, Seaco's got first dibs on Iraq, but one platoon from Seaco has to go back to Afghanistan and it was us. So the whole rest of the company, second, third platoon and headquarters went to Iraq. And us and one alpha were the only two platoons that deployed back to Afghanistan. We were like, did we do something wrong?

• 35:22Speaker 06

  Right.

• 35:23Speaker 05

  Can we go play in the street, not the mountains? And the first two weeks of that deployment was the same thing as winter strike.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  We, we were mounted for a little while, driving through some of the canyons. It was a little bit more in the spring. So guys were a little, you know, enemy fighters were a little bit more aggressive as fighting season.

• 35:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 05

  Um, and, uh, but we, we kind of spent the first week and a half mounted and then ACO came and they took our Humvees. I'm not sure how that, I think they just outranked us. I think they had their first sergeant with them and we had a platoon sergeant and that was our highest guy. And so they were like, hey, we're taking your Humvees. You guys are dismounted now. So we ended up walking up and like setting up this OP on the Paki border for a while. And we'd just go sit up there and just rotate guys out and watch the Hatfields and McCoys fight themselves in Pakistan. They would wake up every day, pray and just lob mortars and rockets at each other all day and pray and then break for nighttime and wake up and do it all over again. So we just sat on the border, just watching these two towns, villages, who knows how long this has been going on. Destroy the shit out of each other.

• 36:24Speaker 06

  Hundreds of years. Like those, those blood feuds would last forever. And it, it's funny because they'd always try to suck Americans into them by like reporting the other villages Taliban and stuff. And it's like, they, they, they didn't care.

• 36:38Speaker 05

  Oh, no. Human life means it's, they don't take it as.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  The same way that we do.

• 36:44Speaker 06

  No, there's a price on there. There's a blood price that either they're willing to pay or they're not. And if they're not, then they fight and that's just how it goes.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  That's just the deal. So we did that and um and I don't remember how, but we ended up getting the Humvees back and then we drove from like wherever we were like through Khyber Pass, through Gardes and ended up in a at a forward operating base that the Italians had set up earlier in the war and it was named Fob Salerno. And so we ended up pulling into there and we it was all day, all night gaff from where we were. And so we get there, everything's just dusty as hell. So we clean all the weapons up, you know, dust all our shit off, make sure everybody's plussed up and finally like, okay, we can bed down. They had GP medium tents and some cots in there, which hey, you know what? I'll take it.

• 37:37Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  And so we all get in there. It's, you know, dark kinda early, so we start bedding down. Then we couldn't have been asleep for long and all of a sudden we're like, hey, get up. One Alpha's in contact. And one Alpha had come behind us after we had left. They were probably like four or five hours behind us, maybe, maybe not even that much. And we had come through the same route and when we came through it, the canyon walls were so steep. I mean, you couldn't super elevate a big gun to hit anything. So you could have just dropped a hangar name, leaned back and we couldn't engage.

• 38:09Speaker 06

  Right.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  And I looked, I was driving and I looked at my TC, who's my squad leader, and I was like, this is a bad spot, dude. And it was broad daylight. We were rolling through it and the mirrors were almost scraping the canyon walls. It was so tight. We all made it through, got to Salerno and then one Alpha's in contact, coming right through the same spot that we identified earlier as a bad place to be. And that was unfortunately when um. Tillman was killed. And so we were, they got us up, they got us staged at the, at the front gate of the FOB for, you know, QRF. And we sat there, Humvees running, ready to roll for about 10 minutes. And then we got the call to stand down and be prepared to receive casualties.

• 38:50Speaker 05

  And so we didn't, you know, we didn't have a number of how many Eagles were down or whatever. We just knew there'd been an engagement of some sort. And so we download all of our stuff and one Alpha comes in and, you know, they're, you know, getting guys off the litters and, you know, docs are taking them, they're doing what they can, blah, blah, blah. And I just, and I say this in the documentary, but I mean, I, I still can hear the words, you know, don't tell him he doesn't know yet. And I had not known Pat, I, I knew he had a NFL player that was in the battalion, but in all honesty, and I think down to the man, you can ask anybody that was there, like, he never gave a shit about that. He was just, he was a Ranger out there doing the same as us. He didn't, he didn't want special treatment. He didn't, he was just, hey, I'm here with you guys. So that was what I've heard. I never, like I said, I did not know him.

• 39:34Speaker 05

  But he ended up obviously being, being killed by friendly fire, but at the time we, we didn't know that. And where the chow hall was, was on the, the big side of the base at Salerno. We were in the little tiny soft compound, but that's where chow was, that's where the MWR was and stuff. And as this story was breaking, we would be walking over to the MRR and get MWR to play pool or make a call or whatever, if the sad phones were, you know, someone was on them. And SportsCenter would be on, and on SportsCenter, they're all the role in his Pat Tillman stuff. On a loop and some of the other, it, it made it so bad that they were looking at us like they knew that we were part of that element. So we couldn't even leave our compound because people were googly eyed like, oh, are those, you guys were the ones with Tillman?

• 40:18Speaker 05

  It was like, dude, I'm just trying to get a chow, dude.

• 40:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  I, I'm not trying to get engaged in a conversation with you about this. And so like, that was real strange, but we, we were busy. Um, we were out every night and, and we took down a ton of targets in that area. And, uh, so we actually had a more exciting, as far as operational tempo concerned than the guys that went to Iraq did on that trip.

• 40:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:40Jack Murphy?

  What, just jog my memory, what, what timeframe was this? What month?

• 40:44Speaker 05

  This would have been April of oh four.

• 40:46Jack Murphy?

  April of oh four, okay, so.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  I am, I'm fuzzy on the actual date.

• 40:50Jack Murphy?

  I must, I must have gotten a Salerno in.

• 40:55Jack Murphy?

  It was, it must have been the fall, like September, October of oh four.

• 40:58Speaker 05

  Cause we left mid to late May. Cause that was, cause it was surge, we were only there for like six weeks, seven weeks.

• 41:05Jack Murphy?

  Okay, yeah, cause I was only there, did a normal three month deployment. Christmas goes by and we left early oh five.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:13Jack Murphy?

  Um, but that, that was a strange time. And I mean, we've had, um, a couple of different people on talking about Pat Tillman. Uh, including, um, was the officer's name, uh, slip in my mind for a moment who just wrote a book about it.

• 41:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:27Jack Murphy?

  Um. Blaber? Pete Blaber. Um, uh, there, there was, I mean, I do remember there is being a lot of controversy and a lot of, even internally in, in the regiment, a lot of like political pressure, it felt like. And I, I remember, I distinctly remember this moment where they brought us all together and I was in ACO three, seven, five. Had nothing to do with any of the things you're describing, but they, somebody up at regiment felt so adamant. They actually brought us in and like the company commander gave us a little like pep talk, like, you know, the regiment did nothing wrong. I have total confidence in the Colonel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, and like you said, it's a little weird. It's like, what's going on here?

• 42:11Jack Murphy?

  I'm just a E three or whatever.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was, I had just gotten my PFC in, after the winter strike trip. And I'm like, yeah, I'm an E three. I'm no longer, you know, mosquito wings or whatever.

• 42:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 05

  So, I mean, you know, as far as I was concerned, we, and, and the whole platoon, everyone, I mean, we just assumed it was, he was just KIA.

• 42:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  You know, I mean, he's got, you know, hit by standard enemy fight. He got, he dismounted and started, you know, he actually asked at one point if he could drop his kit so he could move faster up the hill. And, uh, they were like, no, but feel free to go pursue, but you know, you gotta keep your kit on. And, uh, and then the engagement happened, but we, we weren't privy to any of those details.

• 42:47Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  You know, so it wasn't until later that we found out that it ended up, like all those whispers.

• 42:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 05

  Ended up being true.

• 42:54Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 42:55Speaker 05

  And I mean, to me, to, to speak to your point about having a battalion commander call a brief to say something, that's not normal.

• 43:01Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 43:02Speaker 05

  Like what do you, what do you know that I don't know? Cause something isn't, you know, stirring the Kool-Aid here right now, you know? But yeah, that was, that was, uh, that was tough. That, you know, the toughest part of that, and a lot of people don't know, is that Kevin was there.

• 43:16Jack Murphy?

  His brother.

• 43:16Speaker 05

  His brother was there. And the next day, they were putting Pat onto a C-17. Uh, well, they couldn't land a C-17 there. I think they were putting him on a, on a bird and flying him, and then he'd get on a C-17 home. And our guys were on funeral detail. And they had us and Ako lined up on the side of where the hooch was, the hooches were on this dirt trail that led out to the airfield. And we're all standing there with our M4s, position of attention, as the Hilux goes by with Pat's casket in it. And Kevin was walking about ten steps behind it, just not having a great day, as you can imagine. And I, that was the moment.

• 43:56Speaker 05

  And, and that was the moment when I realized how real this was. I mean, that hit home. I don't think I, I was ever gonna be the same after watching that. Like, what if that was me?

• 44:04Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  What if my brother was, you know, watching me, or what if I was watching my brother? Like, how, that changed me.

• 44:11Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  Seeing, seeing that, such a person. I mean, it's all personal. One of our guys gets hit, let's be honest, but that's a different level.

• 44:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  And I just remember just being like, um, this isn't for public consumption, man. And it was just a bunch of dudes that were doing the same thing. It wasn't like an outsider was looking in, but I still felt like I was violating the privacy. Even though he's one of our guys, it was just, it was just really hard to watch.

• 44:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 05

  I just, I still to this day feel, you know, Kevin's just an incredibly strong dude. I don't, I don't know how he was able to do it.

• 44:39Jack Murphy?

  It sounds like, you know, as a young man, like, the finality of death, like, hit you in that moment.

• 44:44Speaker 05

  That was, I mean, oh, she's cool, we got shot at in, in Afghanistan last time, but no one got hurt.

• 44:48Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 44:49Speaker 05

  Got, you know, got some dust and debris, you know, hey, whatever. You know, that's, that's what I signed up for, was, you know, some of this, right? But then, then that was the first time I'd actually seen someone get killed.

• 44:58Jack Murphy?

  Well, and, and seeing, you know, i- i- it's also, obviously...

• 45:07Speaker 06

  You know, different guys have different friendships in battalion, right? And so, you know, you you lose, or in any unit, and you lose people who you know of, or you lose people who you're cool with, or you lose somebody you're close with. But I think there is a significant difference between any of that and seeing the effects of losing a family member.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  That, you know, that you don't normally experience until you go back home and then go to their funeral in Arlington and, you know, and see their family and and how it is. And here you have family there and you're experiencing that loss with them.

• 45:48Speaker 05

  It was, it was, I will never be the same after that moment.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  Because I have four siblings.

• 45:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 05

  Uh, my parents were divorced when I was young, both remarried. I was the only child from the first marriage. Each had a boy and a girl. I'm almost 10 years older than the next closest sibling. So I was like the automatic built-in babysitter, right? And, um, all I could see when I was watching that was my brother and sister.

• 46:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? Like, I couldn't, you can't help but like slip there when you know. And and they were so much younger. I mean, I was only 20. At that point, I was coming up on my 22nd birthday.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 05

  They were, they were 12.

• 46:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  11, 10, you know, coming down through age. And I was just like, God, I mean, what if they have to go like bury me? Like, what's that gonna do to a prepubescent teenager? Or a group of them, you know, like? Not to mention your parents are gonna be devastated, but your siblings. I mean, sibling bond and and stuff. We didn't have rivalry. I was so much older, I was like, shut up.

• 46:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 05

  There was no quarreling or anything.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  Um, but yeah, that that was, yeah, that was a moment. I'll say, I'll leave it at that.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  But like so many other times during this war, for many, many units, you lose somebody and the job.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  We were back out the next night.

• 47:01Speaker 06

  The job goes on, right?

• 47:02Speaker 05

  We were all back out.

• 47:03Speaker 06

  Nobody, you don't get a break. You don't get time to process. You don't, you're, you're, it's, the job's there.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  As soon as, and I'm sure you could speak to this too, as soon as families are notified, you're back out. So, next night?

• 47:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 05

  So you're like, oh dude, that happened yesterday. That sucks. All right, here's the op order for tonight. We're hitting, you know, this area, this house. Here's the, you know, here's the package.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 05

  And there's no time to grieve. You don't get to slow down.

• 47:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 05

  So your foot's on the gas the whole time.

• 47:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 05

  And I think that's one of the problems that I had, and I think probably I'm not alone in this.

• 47:37Speaker 05

  You never get a chance to unload any of that. You get out with it.

• 47:40Jack Murphy?

  Right, yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  Now I'm like by myself trying to deal with all this stuff.

• 47:44Jack Murphy?

  You're moving so fast that you're not processing what that experience actually was. And yeah, it's not till you, a lot of times people get out of the military and now you're sitting there and now you have the time to process it.

• 47:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:55Jack Murphy?

  Not just that one thing, but all this other stuff.

• 47:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's big soup of stuff, but and also, you know, sending guys back out to prosecute targets that are responsible, whether directly responsible or indirectly, like in in Pat's case.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  I could tell you this, when we went back out, everyone was fucking responsible.

• 48:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 05

  We didn't know, right?

• 48:17Speaker 06

  You're getting some, you're getting some.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  We were pissed.

• 48:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  We were very effective.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  But I mean, we were barking at the wrong tree on that one. But if that's if that's what galvanizes the dudes and helps complete the mission, I don't know. I'm not a big liar, man, so I'd rather just know the truth and we can move forward. But I think everybody felt a little slighted by not, okay, you trust us to do all this other shit, but you can't trust us to tell us the truth.

• 48:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 48:42Speaker 05

  Hey, we effed up.

• 48:42Speaker 06

  Do you?

• 48:43Speaker 05

  You know, like, it happens, dude, it's war.

• 48:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 05

  Bad people, you know, bad things happen to people. It sucks, especially a polarizing figure like that that gave up so much.

• 48:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  To be there, he didn't have to be there, but then you look at it, none of us did.

• 48:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  You know, he wasn't any different. He just maybe got a higher paying job on the outside than the rest of us did. That was it.

• 49:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. Do you think any part of that was the command's uncertainty as to what actually happened? Or do you think that, do you think it was a cover up from the from the get go?

• 49:11Speaker 05

  I can speculate. I would say probably a mixture of both. I'd say

• 49:18Speaker 05

  I'd say once the fog of war kind of wore off.

• 49:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  And they were able to put some pieces together that I think it turned from a, well, we're not really sure to, let's not admit to

• 49:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 49:30Speaker 05

  the world that we killed Pat Tillman on this objective.

• 49:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  Would it have been, I mean, and this has nothing to do with Pat. Would it have been a bigger deal if it was me?

• 49:41Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  Probably not.

• 49:42Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  You know what I'm saying?

• 49:43Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 49:43Speaker 05

  It was because of who he was.

• 49:45Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 49:45Speaker 05

  That they were like, whoa, and all the media attention and the circus that came with that.

• 49:49Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 49:49Speaker 05

  And like I said, he always just wanted to be looked at as a regular guy. He was.

• 49:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Speaker 05

  From all accountants, from everyone I talked to that knew him. And he didn't want special treatment. And then the media, you know, took it and ran with it. But I think there was a lot of CYA that was going on there, for sure.

• 50:04Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:05Speaker 05

  I mean, looking back on it all these years later.

• 50:08Jack Murphy?

  So after you return home, you're getting into this whole like deployment cycle now that happened in the war on terror. What's it like going back home from that and then spinning up for the next one?

• 50:19Speaker 05

  So we got back about the third week of May. So that was about a month and a half rotation. Got back from the surge, got back third week of May. Had like a quick leave, quick five day leave or two week leave or whatever. Came back, had Ranger Bowl. And then left for Iraq on July 1. For our regularly scheduled deployment.

• 50:40Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 50:40Speaker 05

  So we were back in third week of May and right back out the door five weeks later for another three and a half months to Iraq. And that was my first trip to that theater. So no turnaround time.

• 50:52Jack Murphy?

  Where, uh, where did you land in Iraq?

• 50:55Speaker 05

  Either Biop or Balad, uh, when we initially came in and then we got on Chinooks and they flew us out. And we ended up, um, at the MSS that was in Baghdad.

• 51:03Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  In the green zone.

• 51:04Jack Murphy?

  That, that was your AO for that deployment?

• 51:05Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah. We, we launched out of there.

• 51:07Jack Murphy?

  And that, that was one of my favorite parts of your documentary. And actually also, I don't know where you guys have it or found it, but all that footage of Rangers hitting targets. I was like, I've never seen any of this before.

• 51:21Speaker 05

  It was, um, a lot of it was from the shared drive of things that, I mean, we all know what happened with a lot of that stuff.

• 51:29Jack Murphy?

  The I drive?

• 51:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, so a lot of it came from that, just a compilation of stuff, but. You know, I guess it doesn't really matter now. It's kind of cat's eye the bag, but like they were like, no cameras, no pictures. We were like, whatever dude.

• 51:42Jack Murphy?

  Everybody got a GoPro.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  So we all went.

• 51:46Jack Murphy?

  No, there's no GoPros.

• 51:47Speaker 05

  No, we had, I mean, I remember going to the PX in the green zone and getting this little silver green digital camera. I'd put it in my kit every night and whenever I could.

• 51:56Jack Murphy?

  But, but some of, some of the footage is similar to like GoPro type footage, you know, and I was surprised to see it. I was like, whoa shit.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  That was from back in the day.

• 52:03Jack Murphy?

  That's cool.

• 52:04Speaker 05

  Before we, I mean, I don't even think some tier one units were using GoPros back then, to be honest with you.

• 52:09Jack Murphy?

  I don't, I don't.

• 52:09Speaker 05

  Just started.

• 52:10Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I don't think they were, they may not even have been out yet.

• 52:14Jack Murphy?

  So tell us a little bit about that deployment and getting into like, now you're doing urban combat, making that shift from Afghanistan, going after time sensitive targets.

• 52:23Speaker 05

  The first thing I will tell you about landing Iraq in the middle of the summer was, we got off the burden. It was about 128 degrees and it went to cloud in sight for like three months. And we got to the MSS and talking to one of the, we're ripping with 175. And this private's down there. I'm still, I'm still a PFCS. I still haven't been to school at this point. We're right back out. And he's, he's like doing his AO for the, for the little MSS and he's sweeping the, the little, under the driveway area. And I was like, bro. I'm like, how long does it take to get used to this heat? He doesn't even break brush. He's just still, he goes, you don't. And just keep sweeping, right? So that was huge. Getting used to that just holy cow, like the absolute. I mean, you get down to like 110 at night and you're like,

• 53:05Speaker 05

  it's 110, but I'm like chilly. I need to put it smoking. No, it's freezing out because of that temperature drop. But as far as operationally, I had blast. I mean, we were running around with the, with the tier one element the whole time we were there. Daytime hits, probably half the time, nighttime almost every night. I mean, we were busy, but it was a fun kind of busy. It wasn't humping through the mountains of Afghanistan busy. It was get on Blackhawks, go hit this target, land in the front yard. Quick SSC, roll some dudes up, get back in the Blackhawks, we're eating chow in forty-five minutes from the time we leave.

• 53:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  You spend more time prepping and flying there and back than you do actually on target.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  And so that, like, off tempo was, that was like what I pictured.

• 53:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 05

  When I was like, oh, I'm gonna go be a Army Ranger infantry dude, like, door kicking and this and that, and we, we kicked doors in Afghanistan, but it's a lot different.

• 53:58Speaker 06

  This, this was like that period of time where, you know, you guys are sitting around wearing Ranger panties and a brown t-shirt.

• 54:03Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 06

  Playing Halo.

• 54:04Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  You get the call, hit pause.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 06

  Go into a combat mission, come back.

• 54:10Speaker 05

  Console hasn't even shut off yet, right? It hadn't even been long enough for the console to shut off, and you're back down in your PTs. And we had a pool in our backyard there, too. And so water sports became, we play water polo, we built a diving board out of like plywood and crap that, and we had a sand volleyball court in the backyard. And if we weren't on a hit, we were playing Halo, or playing volleyball, or going to the gym, that we had a little gym in our house, too. So everything was very contained, this, this one, kind of, I don't wanna call it, it wouldn't even seem like a fob, but I mean, I guess technically it was, but, uh...

• 54:42Speaker 06

  It was the male utopia.

• 54:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was, it was, it was the who's who of units in, in theater at that time.

• 54:48Speaker 06

  You know, it's, it's funny, cause you mentioned that heat, and one of the things I'll always say is, man, I, like, watching Army mechanics, like, work on vehicles during the day in that heat.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 54:58Speaker 06

  I was like, yeah, I, exactly, their tool, like, every, I was like, I will never look at any other, like, any non infantry or operator, operator role as a POG or a REMF or anything, like, those dudes were working their asses off.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And I tell people all the time, and, and you get a lot of, especially since the documentaries come out, some people have seen it, and you get a lot of, well, I didn't do what you did. And I'm like, shut the hell up, bro. I was like, dude, you were pulling... Gate guarded for six months. Who the fuck wants to do that? Like, at least I was getting out and going and doing stuff. Like, you're stuck here. Like, that sucks. That's a shitty job that someone's got to do, and you did it. You should be proud. There's no... This isn't a competition. Every part needs to work in order for the thing to work.

• 55:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. You mentioned, uh, like 1-7, right?

• 55:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was the first 1-7 cab. They were in Abrams at that point, and they had, uh, they had Bradley's too.

• 55:58Speaker 06

  And Bradley's. And then, you know, and then I think that there were other units, like, a lot of those units were at, like, just... They were going Winchester and Sodder City. Like, they were just getting it on.

• 56:08Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. And holding the rest of the city back when we went on hits, right? Because, I mean, we all learned from Mogadishu, like, you can't just go... Can't go in with 50 guys, man. I mean, not with a city like that. If they decide they want to play, that city collapses on you. And we all know the results of what happens when that happens. And you're looking at the best operators in the world.

• 56:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 05

  So, like, without them, we aren't capable of doing our job without getting slaughtered. So, I mean, like I said, when I, when I hear these guys come up and like, "I didn't do as much as you did." I'm like, "Dude, stop selling yourself short like that. It's not... That's not what it is." I don't know anyone that feels that way.

• 56:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I don't. I don't either.

• 56:42Speaker 05

  Like, from my personal experience.

• 56:43Speaker 06

  Even in Afghanistan, you know, we've had guys, conventional guys on, that, you know, were, uh, you know, were either in, like, Fallujah, or they were in those little tiny ass cops out in the middle of nowhere with no support, getting hit every day. And it's like, that, that's a war that a lot of the soft didn't see.

• 57:01Speaker 05

  Absolutely not. And, uh, like I said, that's, that's something I would want to do for... I mean, those guys are there for a year, and then some of them are getting stop-losses for another year.

• 57:09Speaker 06

  16, yeah, 16, 18 months. Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 05

  At least I have a pretty good idea on target date of when I'm leaving. You could be here until, like, two birthdays from now, for all you know.

• 57:19Speaker 06

  So you guys are out there prosecuting targets every night. Like, where do these targets come from? I mean, are there just that many bad guys?

• 57:26Speaker 05

  At that time, it was, it was, uh...

• 57:29Speaker 06

  Target-rich environment.

• 57:30Speaker 05

  That's a perfect way to describe it. It was a very target-rich environment. I mean, it was, it was like fishing with hand grenades, no pun intended. I mean, honestly, it was like, "Hey, go to that house. You'll find someone." "Oh, that guy told us to go to this house."

• 57:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 05

  And one of the things that, you know, worked in our benefit, being in the soft community, was we got time with our detainees. I think we had, like...

• 57:52Speaker 05

  24 to 48 hours before we had to hand him over to like the Abu G thing or whatever. We didn't do any of that nonsense, but um, but we had like a little bit of time with them to kind of wear him down a little bit. And so we got a lot of intel from, from just the Tanyi reporting and stuff like that.

• 58:07Speaker 06

  And your tech guys are doing all the exploitation.

• 58:09Speaker 05

  All that stuff, yep, yep.

• 58:10Speaker 06

  So, I mean, a lot of times you guys are probably resetting that night, like hitting.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  Oh, we had follow-ons sometimes.

• 58:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, just based off of what you gather on one target.

• 58:18Speaker 05

  This is the intel we collected on this target. Okay, let's put this together. You get a quick fraggo over the radio, basically.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 05

  Or maybe at the back of a vehicle.

• 58:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 05

  Command would jump in and it'd be like, hey, we're rolling here. And it's like, oh shit, we're gonna be out for a minute tonight.

• 58:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  Um, sometimes multiple follow-on objectives and sometimes it'd just be that one and, and that it was all depends.

• 58:35Speaker 06

  Any, uh, any significant operations from that one that stand out in your mind?

• 58:40Speaker 05

  Not the, the mainstream meteor or anything like that would know.

• 58:44Speaker 06

  Well, I'm not asking for what they would know. I'm asking what you know.

• 58:49Speaker 05

  There was, there was one that was pretty outside the norm. We came in, we came in on Blackhawks. It was us in a tier one element. And, um, we came in on Hawks and we were flying and, and this is a pretty big target. It was one single house, but I mean, it was a monster house, kind of outskirts, you know, outset of Baghdad, not in the city, a little bit of a field, kind of rural feel to it. And we could see the target. We're coming in and probably like 30 seconds out and all of a sudden the entire rooftop lights up, just gunfire everywhere. We're like, oh shit, target's burnt. We're done. Well, it turns out it was

• 59:30Speaker 05

  a wedding. And so we had no idea, right? We just knew there were bad dudes there. So like, we got the target package and here we go, we're out. And then 30 seconds, not even like birds were flaring. It was probably less than 30. And all the celebratory fire turned to, why are there six Blackhawks over there? And they all just shift fire and started engaging the Hawks. And one of the birds got clipped by an RPG, clipped one of the rotor blades and it.

• 59:57Speaker 05

  Had a hard landing in a field. It was basically like a crash landing.

• 1:00:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  No one was injured. I mean, I'm sure people soar the next day, but um bird didn't go down, but. So that immediately changes everything.

• 1:00:09Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:00:09Speaker 05

  When you get a downed aircraft, right? Now you gotta kick out perimeter security. You gotta make sure the dudes are good. They were good. They were that part of the tier one element. They got out, assaulted the house. It was like, there were like eighty people there and there were like six, six hawks worth of us, so maybe forty guys.

• 1:00:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  Rolling up against and so many canaries, so many women and children on that objective, probably twenty, twenty-five uh crows.

• 1:00:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  And I think there was one, one uh delta guy that got, got messed up on that one. He uh rolled somebody over and he died on a frag.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 05

  And um.

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  He got medevac'd out and then they were like, okay, so they, they grabbed everybody that they needed. Took off with the main element and left. I was kicked out of security for the bird. And they're like, hey, don't worry, QRF's inbound. And we're like, okay, cool. So I'm not even like laying in the sand, sand fleas everywhere. I'm like, I'm, I'll stand. I don't care if I'm silhouetted. Like, I have enough. There's enough distance between any sort of structure that I, I, I'm not gonna get picked, right? So I'm standing up. Chinook comes in and I'm like, okay, cool. Chinook full of friggin dudes and like six dudes ran off the back of it, carrying a rotor blade for the Blackhawk. That's it. It's like mechanics or something. Bird lands, they all run off the ramp with the rotor blade. Bird takes off, they get up like nuts and bolts and shit, like taking the other rotor apart, put the other one on.

• 1:01:31Speaker 06

  Is this a tail rotor that they're doing?

• 1:01:32Speaker 05

  No, it was the main rotor.

• 1:01:33Speaker 06

  The main rotor, no shit.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  And uh they put the, the new rotor blade back on. The Chinook lands again, six guys grab the broken rotor blade, run onto the back and the Chinook takes off and we're just sitting there in the field like. Were we supposed to be on that? Like, no communication was getting like, you know, disseminated at that point. And I was in charge of always grabbing the turp before we left. And you'll remember if, as you're headed, oh, actually I think you were the one that was MSS or both of you. As you head down that road towards the end where the range is, that house on the right-hand side was where the terps all used to bed down. And uh so I would always go down to their house and be like, hey, you got ten minutes, get your shit on, we're about to roll. And so I got to know the terp obviously by like going and getting him every day. His name was Nick.

• 1:02:15Speaker 05

  And I go down to get, you know, Nick comes over to me as I'm standing there pulling security and he's like, he's like, hey, Dave. I'm like, what's up, Nick? He's like. Is probably the most honest question I've ever been asked in that situation. He goes, he hated helicopters. He'd never been on a plane in his life. The first thing he's ever been on is a helo in country, right? Hated them. And he nudges me, he's like, hey, Dave, he's like, we're not getting on that broken piece of shit, are we? And I'm just like, no, Nick, they're not gonna put us on that. They'll fly other birds in, they'll fly that one back on a skeleton crew. And I shit you not, this is what he said. He goes, I'm not getting on that broken piece of shit. I have friend, he lived 15 miles outside Baghdad. I call, he come pick us up. I was like, that's never gonna happen, bro.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  And he's like, and then, so sure enough, the birds, the Blackhawks that we came in on got reallocated to another tier one element. So they sent in little birds, about six little birds to pick up the 12 of us that were still on the ground. He sees the little birds coming in and all I remember hearing him say is not the little ones. And I turn around and he is in a dead sprint away from the HLZ. So me and another dude have to run him down and he's just wearing like just plate carriers. He's got no kit with him, right? And so he's cooking and we're in full kit, dragged down through the sand trying to, we had to tackle him and drag him back. Throw him into the, the inside of the little bird and then snap onto the skid so he can't get out.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  And we're like, you know, thumbs up to the, to the, on each side and off we go. And we get about, and you could see the Blackhawk is laboring. It's like the lead vehicle, right? Or the lead aircraft and you can see it, it's fluctuating in, in elevation. We're like, this thing might go down again, you know? And it starts going down and it comes to land in this field. So we all land, boom, freaking, everybody kicks out, security, little birds take off. You know, they start doing whatever mechanic crap. And they didn't tell us that they were spinning ordinance on the house. So we're probably about maybe two, three clicks away from the house. And they dropped like a couple of thousand pounders on it. And I mean, the ground like threw me off my feet. I mean, I didn't fall, but I mean, it threw me forward just from the impact of it.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  And we thought we were getting mortared or rocketed. I mean, that's how like up in your face it was. No, no, no, they just shacked that house. I'm like, well, I hope they got all the women and kids out before they did that. I'm sure they did. Maybe we would have heard about something that crazy. But yeah, they, they shacked it and then they finally got the Hawk working. By that time, the other element had finished their mission. So they showed back up with Hawks. And that was the only time in my entire life where I sat in the door of a Blackhawk by myself. Had the whole door to myself. And we start coming in. And as we swing a hard left to circle into the HLZ, friggin RPG comes from across the river and goes right by the open door, just right over the top and hit us. We landed safely.

• 1:05:04Speaker 05

  Everything was fine, but I remember walking away and we're walking up from where the helipad was or where the airstrip was right there back to our house. And another one of the guys that was sitting on the same side of the aircraft I was on a different bird was like, "Did you fucking see that?" And I was like, "Hell yeah, I saw that." It's like, "We're gonna go through all that. We're literally about to touchdown and we're gonna get knocked out of the sky by another RPG." But nah, nothing hit us, but we were fortunate on that one.

• 1:05:29Speaker 06

  It was a challenging time too, because I think a lot of, like, a lot of the, I don't know if it was then or like more around 2005, 2006, but a lot of the bad guys started getting savvy to, to like the room clearing, to the tactics. You started seeing more barricades inside, more guys on the floor, like a lot of like wild shit where, you know, they just started becoming a lot more savvy.

• 1:05:56Speaker 05

  I used to, people would always ask me, and it's because, you know, we obviously come from a first world country and they're like, "Oh, those savages, they don't know anything, they're ignorant." And I'm like, "Really? Well, if they're so ignorant, why don't they find new ways to kill the most advanced military in the history of mankind?"

• 1:06:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  They're not what you think they are.

• 1:06:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 05

  They may be not what your standard is used to as to far how they live or the way they treat people, but don't for one second think these people aren't smart.

• 1:06:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 05

  They may not go to Harvard, but they can make an IED. I bet you can't.

• 1:06:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 05

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:06:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  So, people, that's a, that's a common misconception.

• 1:06:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a, there's a certain, like, a lack of logic, but with that, again, and like ingenuity. I remember in Afghanistan, seeing they had built some sort of mill or generator, I guess it was, using a car engine and a river, like, you know, using, I, I still have no idea what it was, you know, but, but there's an ingenuity.

• 1:06:56Speaker 05

  They find ways to take those kinds of things and do things that you would never in a million years think of.

• 1:07:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 05

  We were, I don't know where they got this. This is actually to backtrack on winter strike, we walked into this one village and they had a rotor blade, just a single rotor blade from one of our helicopters, and they used it to dry their clothes on. It was like a clothesline. It was like that like powers a multi god knows how much million dollar aircraft and you use them to dry your dry your you know clothes and shit.

• 1:07:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Speaker 05

  They'll find ways to use anything.

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  You know, if you need water, let's slap a belt on that, put a few pulleys on it and bam, we got running water.

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Jack Murphy?

  So after Baghdad, you're turning around now heading over back to Afghanistan.

• 1:07:35Speaker 05

  We go back from Baghdad, we get back, uh, first week of October. Uh, I was home for a week and then I went to pre ranger and then to ranger school.

• 1:07:43Speaker 06

  So you did get to you.

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  After my third deployment, I I I finally was strong enough.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 05

  You know, went to school, went straight through, uh, winter class, graduated in January. Um, came back in January, back to I got like a 10 days of leave or something.

• 1:07:58Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:07:59Speaker 05

  And, uh, drove across the country with my truck from Boston to Seattle, 3,000 miles of I or I 90 the whole way. It was brutal in the winter, get there.

• 1:08:11Speaker 05

  And about mid-January sometime, third week of January, and then went straight into training cycle and then we left. We left, uh, May, June, first of April.

• 1:08:22Speaker 06

  Back to Afghanistan.

• 1:08:23Speaker 05

  Afghanistan.

• 1:08:23Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:08:24Speaker 05

  And, uh, we were actually, it was us and three Charlie were stationed at Bagram airfield and we were, uh, their platoon was JSF, which was Joint Strike Force. And our platoon was QRF and halfway through the rotation, we switched and they were JSF or we were JSF and they were QRF.

• 1:08:40Jack Murphy?

  JSF is like the guys on standby for Bin Laden.

• 1:08:42Speaker 05

  Cross border to go get Bin Laden, yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 05

  And, uh, we didn't do anything. We went on one mission in three months. And, um, we just sat at Bagram and went to the gym and ate and it was, it was like platoon exevals for three months in Afghanistan. And after what we had been doing, we were just bored to tears.

• 1:09:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Jack Murphy?

  That was the problem with those deployments and thank God I I dodged that bullet, but from talking to the guys that because there was like, maybe they throw them one mission throughout the whole deployment, you know, so guys can go and get their shit. But that, uh, you know, every company commander was like trying to set the training standard for a Bagram deployment. And so you had like, those dudes were getting like three, four hours of sleep sometimes because they were like, like you said, platoon exevals for months on end.

• 1:09:29Speaker 05

  We almost had T-shirts made. That said, uh, what is it, JRX or joint training, something, Afghan, Bagram, Afghanistan, 2005.

• 1:09:39Speaker 06

  So for people who are listening, uh, the, the squad evals and platoon evals are, are just massive suck fest that happen, um, you know, uh, at battalion or in regiment. And it's not, it's not something that you expect to see or experience when you're in a deployed environment.

• 1:10:01Jack Murphy?

  You train for combat, you don't train in combat.

• 1:10:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:06Speaker 05

  I mean, we were at East River Range, which is right outside of, out of, uh, East Gate in Bagram. We'd be there three times a week, four times a week. I mean, it was either that, we were teaching, guys were getting taught medical stuff, guys were, you know, getting in bite suits and working with dogs and, you know, doing all, anything we could do to pass the time.

• 1:10:24Speaker 06

  Yeah. But then if you guys were only getting like four hours of sleep, like, like that-

• 1:10:28Jack Murphy?

  Maybe not your-

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  No, actually, we-

• 1:10:30Jack Murphy?

  Oh, we were saying you guys, some of, not, some of the guys I worked with were-

• 1:10:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Speaker 05

  I was well rested.

• 1:10:36Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:10:37Speaker 05

  I was in E5 at that point, so I was like-

• 1:10:38Speaker 06

  So it was good for you guys then?

• 1:10:40Speaker 05

  Yes and no.

• 1:10:41Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:10:42Speaker 05

  It's after coming off of everything we'd come off before, for me, I think it was probably the worst thing that could have happened because then you had time to actually start, start to process some of this stuff.

• 1:10:51Speaker 06

  Right, right, right.

• 1:10:52Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, still Xbox, you know, was, was live and everybody was balling out on that and, and everyone was swole, everyone was going to the gym twice a day.

• 1:11:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Speaker 05

  Eating three, four times a day with midrats too.

• 1:11:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Speaker 05

  And then all that changed on June 28th.

• 1:11:05Speaker 06

  So you had at Bagram as part of the task force, you had, you had, I assume Rangers and whatever tier one units that were prosecuting, that were doing the DAs that were coming down. But then you had guys who were set aside specifically for QRF, uh, Quick Reaction Force, for those of you who don't know, and then for the Joint Strike Force, which was number one, if he popped.

• 1:11:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Speaker 06

  And, and those guys were not going on the DAs.

• 1:11:34Speaker 05

  We went on one mission in three months. One.

• 1:11:39Speaker 05

  It was the longest ninety days you can imagine. I mean, it, there was nothing hard about it.

• 1:11:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  It was just, how do I fill this time?

• 1:11:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:48Speaker 05

  It's only so many times you can eat and go to the gym.

• 1:11:50Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:50Speaker 05

  So many times you can watch the same eight movies.

• 1:11:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:52Jack Murphy?

  And that, that compound in Bagram is like Quonset huts and then like guard towers around it. And it's always gray and bleak and like, I'm sorry for the comparison, but like, it kinda looks like Auschwitz or something from Schindler's List.

• 1:12:07Speaker 05

  It's got that gray hue to it. It does. Like the grayish blue hue.

• 1:12:10Jack Murphy?

  It's depressing.

• 1:12:11Speaker 05

  It is ve- and then every once in a while, like the spark will be like a coyote steps on a landmine that three Russians left of some shit and the whole base goes on alert, right?

• 1:12:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 05

  Uh, I mean, either that or, you know, like, oh, we gotta take an incoming for like five seconds.

• 1:12:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  You know, it landed like three miles away on the other side of the base and everyone's running for their lives. Uh, there's Burger King there, like the PX was sitting in the bomb. It was like very commercialized at that point.

• 1:12:35Speaker 06

  And so this is like around two thousand four, two thousand five?

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  This is mid two thousand five.

• 1:12:40Speaker 06

  So by this time Bagram is built up.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  First sergeants are in full effect, safety belts, right?

• 1:12:47Speaker 05

  Not for us.

• 1:12:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Speaker 05

  But if we left the compound, we fell under, yes, we fell under big army rules.

• 1:12:54Speaker 06

  Speeding tickets for gators going over five miles an hour.

• 1:12:57Jack Murphy?

  God help you, you go to Chow wearing your belt, black fleece.

• 1:13:00Speaker 05

  Or if you, cause we didn't, we didn't wear headgear inside the soft compound.

• 1:13:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 05

  So, or salute.

• 1:13:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  But as soon as you cross those HESCOs into, to conventional forces land, I remember like a butter bar walking by, like four or five of us on the way to PX. He's like, he stopped us. He's like, two things. One, where's your PC? And two, why didn't you salute me? I was like, we're in a combat zone.

• 1:13:24Speaker 06

  That?

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  Like, don't get, dude, you graduated from like infantry school like fifteen minutes ago. Like, just, just go. Don't, don't, let's not make a thing of this. I'm gonna report you to your commander. Go ahead. He's gonna tell us to. Just let it go, wear a hat next time, like.

• 1:13:40Speaker 06

  I, I remember on Bagram, I remember the first time I saw an officer chewing somebody out for not saluting. And I was just walking by and laughing. And he's like, oh, you guys, and I'm like, I'm a civilian, like, leave me the fuck alone. And I was like, do you know what a sniper check is? Here, I'll salute you. Sniper check. He's like, don't do that. I'm like, sniper check. Oh, sniper check. And he's like, don't do that. I'm like, that's what you're asking for, idiot.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  You're literally yelling at me because I'm not doing that to you. So pretend like that's not what you're asking for.

• 1:14:07Speaker 06

  You're asking for a sniper check.

• 1:14:08Jack Murphy?

  So what was, what happened June 28th?

• 1:14:12Speaker 05

  June 28th was any other day. Um, and we were, I was actually, I might say this in the doc too, it's such a specific thing because I remember every, every second of it. Uh, me and a couple of my buddies, the fellow team leaders were in our hooch playing Tiger Woods Dream 18. On a PlayStation 2, I think. And, um, we were talking about, hey, you know, everybody's like out of dip or whatever. When we finish this game, we'll hit the PX, you know, grab a high look stripe down there, you know, grab a, grab some food, grab some dip, you know, some beef jerky, you know, whatever, plus up on shit.

• 1:14:44Speaker 05

  And, uh, we're still in the middle of the game and the door gets kicked open and it was my, uh, squad leader at the time, or another squad leader. Uh, first platoon squad leader. Brooks, Tony Brooks is squad leader, Chris Masters. He's now the new RSM. Uh, strangely enough, uh, he used to be, uh, my squad leader on that, on that trip too, but,

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  we, uh, he kicks the door open. He's like, hey, get your shit on. Uh, Bird just got shot down outside of side of bed.

• 1:15:09Speaker 05

  Okay. So everybody kits up, everybody like piles out the back real quick. We're like standing, kind of like where our vehicles are and like, you know, it's like the gravel lot, basically, if you will. And immediately they're like, you know, we're still not even getting very much intel about what the hell happened. They just say, get your shit on. And then they start making cuts because of the altitude that we were going in at. And so it became a weight issue. So we lost like a lot of dude, like, it was ba- basically NCOs, TAPs, P4s and like some machine gunners and stuff.

• 1:15:37Jack Murphy?

  You can usually fit a whole platoon on a Chinook.

• 1:15:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Jack Murphy?

  In this case, like half of that maybe.

• 1:15:42Speaker 05

  16 to 18 guys. Uh, and that was just for elevation. And so a lot of the dudes and I, I honestly, I feel bad for them to this day. I mean, I don't because they don't have the same.

• 1:15:52Speaker 06

  Visual.

• 1:15:53Speaker 05

  But I couldn't imagine what it would be like back there knowing that. A little over half of your platoon and all of your leadership is out there. And you're sitting in the hooch, just like you were yesterday, like nothing happened.

• 1:16:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  And that was one of the things I was very thankful for throughout all six of my deployments was. I was scrubbed from one mission on the, on my second deployment, the Tillman trip. And the mission got kanked. I remember they were like, how's, you're out on this one? And I walked around that GP medium just pissed for like forty-five minutes and all of a sudden the flap opens up and everyone piles in. I'm like, that was quick. And they're like, mission got kanked. And I was like, I've never been so happy for a mission. Cause what if something went wrong and I wasn't there?

• 1:16:34Jack Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:34Speaker 05

  That was the only mission I was cut from and the mission got kanked. So I was always thankful for that. But I always did think about those guys that didn't. And you know, like, yeah, you missed out on that, but I'm glad you missed out, you know, and it's.

• 1:16:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, because you know, looking back on it, you know, like you're glad that those guys were spared some of, you know, the, the grisly details of what you guys experienced.

• 1:16:54Speaker 05

  There was nothing pleasant about it.

• 1:16:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 05

  And so we all, what's the, the, the force that's gonna go and, and conduct this? We get on a Chinooks right on the airfield in, at BAF and we take off and we fly to Jalalabad. And we were sitting there, it was just kinda waiting for it to get dark, honestly. We were waiting for that cycle of darkness. And I was sitting up on a roof with, with another team leader, same one that was playing Tiger Woods with me. And we had quit smoking at that point. We were just dipping. And we had bummed a cigarette from like an Afghan National Army guy or something at the, at the gate. And we're sitting up on this, this building on the balcony in, in Jabad. And I, we're passing it back and forth, just, I look at him and he looks at me, I'm like, you know, we're gonna fucking die tonight, right?

• 1:17:41Speaker 05

  Like, we're going into a crash site where a Chinook got shot down on a Chinook and they know we're coming. And he passed a cigarette, or he said that to me, we kinda back and forth. And I was like, I dropped a cigarette on the, on the cement, squished it out and I was like, fuck it, let's go get it over with. Going, going one way or the other. So if we're gonna go, let's just go.

• 1:18:01Jack Murphy?

  At this point, you guys must have known you had one, you had one, one bird down and four guys MI.

• 1:18:07Speaker 05

  When we got to J bad is when we got the full brief on the, the compromise SEAL element that initiated the QRF, which in turn was the bird that got shot down. And that one was the one that had the eight man SEAL element that was gonna go provide on ground QRF. And then eight guys from the 160th that were part of the crew. And so we sat in J bad, waited for it to get dark. And as it got dark, we, you know, turbines kick on on the birds and everybody knows that sound. You're like, all right, let's go to work. And we get on and we fly, we all the way there. We're at the 32nd mark. And I mean, everybody's even already up on a knee, ready to unsnap and you know, you already got your gloves on. You know, we're roping because the terrain was.

• 1:18:52Speaker 05

  And all of a sudden the birds turned around. It was, it was too foggy, a mountain rainstorm had blown through. You couldn't see shit. You really couldn't. And so they flew us back to Jalalabad and we had to sit there for a day and wait. Just sitting there knowing. And there was actually one of the, the guys that was on the 160th guy, used to be a medic in 375. Marcus Morales. And, and our medic actually was from 375 too, and him and Marcus were friends. So he's got a dude he personally work with. And we all have a soft guys out there, but now our medic has the, the flight medic that's down. And, you know, we don't know if they're alive or dead and we're watching them on imagery or whatever.

• 1:19:33Speaker 05

  Fires are still burning and even when we got there the next day, fires are still burning. That was probably the longest day of my life waiting. Cause it's like just staring at a car accident and you just can't get out of the way of it, you know? Like, how do I occupy 24 hours knowing that this is still waiting for me? And but, you know, time passed and I remember us all laying down on the tarmac the, the night of the, that would have been the night of the 29th. So about a day and change after the initial incident had happened. And we're laying on the tarmac and I, I would be lying to you if I told you there was a part of me that hoped that it didn't get kanked again. And the other part of me just wanted to get it over with. It was like 50 50 like dude, we're like flying in this certain doom here.

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  And it was about midnight, one o'clock, and those turbines on that forty-seven kicked on. It was like, fuck, here we go. Same thing, load up, fly all the way back. So now they've heard us fly there, fly back. Very next night, fly there. And it was still so foggy. When we stood up to rope, the crew chiefs normally would kick the ropes off either side. They would identify the cams laying on the ground so they know that the rope's laying flat and it's not suspended in the air. Look at each other, thumbs up. Rope master in front of you, step up, hey, they checked the ropes, good to go, follow me, rope out. All happens in about five seconds, right?

• 1:20:56Speaker 05

  The crew chiefs on the back, kick the ropes, grab the rope, they're looking over. Too much time's taken, right? I'm like, what? I'm, I'm the second guy on the left side of the aircraft, right facing the back. And um, my squad leader's in front of me and the other squad leader's in front of him, team leader, team leader, I'm team leader. And I'm looking at the crew chief and they're looking at each other and they're like giving each other the shoulder shrug like, I can't see the cam.

• 1:21:22Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:21:23Speaker 05

  And then they're like, go, go, and they start waving us, go, go, go. And like, that's totally out of order of how the command is executed.

• 1:21:33Jack Murphy?

  To, to try to place this a little bit with some of the previous interviews we've done, were, were you on the same bird as Tony Brooks?

• 1:21:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:21:39Jack Murphy?

  Okay. And then there's another dude, Nick Moore.

• 1:21:42Speaker 05

  Nick Moore, good friend of mine. He was on, he was with third platoon, they were on the other bird.

• 1:21:45Jack Murphy?

  The other bird that came in.

• 1:21:46Speaker 05

  So there were two Chinooks that came in.

• 1:21:48Speaker 06

  And, and for, I, I think probably most of our audience is following this, but when you're fast roping, what he's saying is like the rope masters, like they, they're watching to make sure that those ropes are on the ground, especially when you're in uneven terrain, right? But maybe it gets caught up in a tree, maybe you're, the bird's not low enough, all these different things, but they, because of the density, because of the fog and, and everything, they can't see these ropes. So these guys don't know if they're roping off into oblivion, basically.

• 1:22:20Jack Murphy?

  You gotta think of how crazy that is too, that the rotor blades of a, of a MH forty-seven is not blowing away enough of the fog.

• 1:22:26Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:22:27Jack Murphy?

  You're still not able.

• 1:22:28Speaker 05

  Couldn't see anything.

• 1:22:29Jack Murphy?

  That's crazy.

• 1:22:30Speaker 05

  All I could see was that little sliver on the, the lowest knot on the top of the rope, the little green, the little blue cam taped on either side, just to know where to grab below it, so you don't hit that knot, right? And the crew chiefs are like, go, go, go. And like our rope masters, squad leaders step up, they grab the rope and they look down. And then look at each other and then look down again. And I'm standing, watching all this right in front of me. And they look and they look at each other and they look back down and I can see, I can see a mouth. I can't fucking see it. And anyone that's spent enough time on a helicopter, you become somewhat of a lip reader at some point because you can't hear much, right?

• 1:23:13Speaker 05

  So I, even in the, at night, I can see, see it. And then one of them goes, fuck it. And swings out on the rope. And I was like, I remember grabbing.

• 1:23:23Speaker 06

  Leap of faith right there.

• 1:23:24Speaker 05

  Below that chem light and swinging out and being like, fuck it. We got on this rope because of fuck it. Most ropes, forty feet, forty-five feet, tops.

• 1:23:34Speaker 06

  And you're watching that rope disappear into the fire.

• 1:23:35Speaker 05

  Can't see it.

• 1:23:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Speaker 05

  And so you swing out to clear your gear from the ramp.

• 1:23:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 05

  And I was on, most of the time you're on, you know, top to bottom. Get on the ground. I mean, obviously the landing is the safest place. Anything you're doing from the sky is going to be inherently more dangerous, right? Optimally, we'd all like to land on the X, not rope into a rooftop or something. I was on that rope for so damn long, I had time to think about shit. Like question my life choices. Like I was on that rope for a long time. The rope was a ninety footer and we hit, I hit the bottom of the rope when I landed.

• 1:24:06Speaker 06

  That's so, and the other thing that people should be aware of is the longer you're on that, you're wearing like really thick gloves.

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  We're like wearing the leathers.

• 1:24:14Speaker 06

  You're wearing really, yeah, you're wearing thick gloves specifically for that rope. But the longer you're on that rope, the more friction you're building up, the hotter it gets while you're going down it.

• 1:24:25Speaker 05

  And one of the things that inherently, your, your, your reaction is to squeeze with your hands harder because you're, you're, you're descending too fast. When in actuality, it needs to be your feet.

• 1:24:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Speaker 05

  Because you got the cushions of your boots that, you know, aren't, are going to absorb some of that friction. In that moment with all that weight.

• 1:24:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 05

  You're just holding on for dear life.

• 1:24:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47Speaker 05

  And so, I mean, people, I came down, I had blisters on my fingers that were that big, you know, that I just had to stick a knife in and squeeze the pus out of and move fuck on. I mean, there was, I don't think.

• 1:24:58Speaker 05

  I, I don't know about the other bird that Nick was on. I don't think anyone from our bird had like mechanics gloves or like light skin gloves on, which you can usually get away with on like a thirty footer.

• 1:25:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:07Speaker 05

  Twenty-five footer, no problem. But you get in anywhere over that forty-five, fifty foot range. I mean, we were in those thick cowhide leather ones.

• 1:25:14Jack Murphy?

  You're having to double glove it at that point.

• 1:25:16Speaker 05

  Oh, I wish I could. I mean, it was, I almost felt, cause I had double gloves on. I felt like I didn't have enough dexterity with leathers and I might fall off the rope if I had both. So I was like, well, I'm just gonna go with the leathers and even with, even with those, I still.

• 1:25:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's terrifying, cause it, the rope is so thick.

• 1:25:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:31Speaker 06

  And especially if your hands are cold, where you can't really feel anything, then you're like.

• 1:25:35Speaker 05

  Then you're, am I squeezing too tight? Am I about to come out of this glove? So like. I, I didn't, this other guy's got some worse blisters than I did for sure. I, I was kinda lucky, but I was only carrying an M4.

• 1:25:46Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:25:46Speaker 05

  You know, I'd, and basic load of ammo. I mean, I didn't weigh ten pounds. We didn't have like rucksacks or anything that we were going with. It was just what we had.

• 1:25:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:53Speaker 05

  When we left, they told us we were only gonna be gone for six hours. We were there for thirteen days.

• 1:25:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:58Speaker 05

  So we hadn't like a bottle of water per, no one had any dipper. And I know that sounds irrelevant to, to those, some of the viewers. Dip's a huge thing in the military, like.

• 1:26:07Speaker 06

  Especially in Ranger Battalion.

• 1:26:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, everybody's got cans of dip and we had none. Then one dude had like half a can. And he was like, hey, I got a little dip. And everyone's like digging their mitts in. He's like, this is for me. It's like. So everybody's detoxing from nicotine while we're out there at the same time, right?

• 1:26:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Speaker 05

  And, uh, yeah, so I'm like, I, I remember thinking in my head and I'm like, one of two things is about to happen. I'm either gonna hit the bottom of this rope or I'm about to fucking fall and this is it.

• 1:26:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 05

  And so I spread my legs. And I spread my legs and within a second or two, I'm like, boom, and I hit the ground and I'm like, no. Fucking way and I take one step and my mark forty six gunner comes down the road behind me is a little boy from Georgia named Spence roar or so that's how he talks. He comes down like a missile with that forty six hits the ground and just chop blocks the back of my legs and I start going ass over tea kettle down the hill. Now, I mean, we don't have, I don't have, my nods are up, right? Like, I can't see anything. I'm to doom to doom down this, I don't know, am I about to go off the side of the list now?

• 1:27:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Speaker 05

  I tumbled for I don't know how far and I eventually stopped or whatever, but like I said, the grade was just, just really, just really, really steep. And um, then the, the, the, the rest of the guys got off and I remember they cut the rope.

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  And so you got to, for, for the audience, he's like Dave was saying, these ropes aren't like ropes you buy at Lowe's, they're, they're a good two handful, you know, from ninety feet up that rope and lay hit the head of a couple of our dudes on the ground when they cut the ropes loose from the bird. And I remember one guy yo and, you know, yells at the top of his lungs like fuck. And one guy goes, shh. And the reaction to that was, I think they fucking know we're here, Mike, like, I don't think shush is the appropriate response. Like, hey, are you good? That rope just hit your head from nine stories up?

• 1:28:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Speaker 05

  No, shh.

• 1:28:05Speaker 06

  And it's like, we just had these massive birds overhead.

• 1:28:08Speaker 05

  Two Chinooks that were here last night too, just came back again. And uh,

• 1:28:12Speaker 06

  Us being here is no surprise.

• 1:28:14Speaker 05

  Right? I would be surprised if they're surprised, obviously. And uh, but what had happened, and we didn't know, I thought I had rope burns and they had dropped us unknowingly, of course, into stinging nettle, which I didn't even know was a thing. I, I'd never even heard of it until this night. And I'm zooming my nods in, my sleeves are rolled up and I'm like, thinking I got rope burned because we were just on it for so long. Adrenaline, you know, I didn't feel it until it started to calm down. Talking like, dude, I am burning. And he's like, I'm burning too. And of course, the sweat opens your pores up and it's just, apparently, I mean, it did go away untreated, but for a good hour, everyone was on fire. And um, we linked up with the third platoon, they were, they were on the same kind of ridge we were and we started our movement.

• 1:29:00Speaker 05

  And we walked all damn night. And it was, as we first started walking, my buddy, uh, Z was on point. And I was right behind him, the squad leader behind me and so on. And we're walking up this ridge and he stopped and I, this is under nods, he stopped and I bumped into the back of him. And I was like, whoa dude, I couldn't see you. And he goes, dude, I cannot see. I could walk off the side of a cliff right now, I can't see anything.

• 1:29:23Speaker 06

  Just no illumination whatsoever?

• 1:29:25Speaker 05

  None whatsoever. And he's like, you walk next to me. I'm like, dude, yeah. So we walked point together, which is not really a common thing, right? And we walked side by side together and we.

• 1:29:34Speaker 06

  Did you guys turn on your, did you have to turn on your, like, your, your light, your floods, your irons?

• 1:29:38Speaker 05

  You could still, it was almost worse.

• 1:29:40Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:29:41Speaker 05

  It was the.

• 1:29:42Speaker 06

  Oh, because of the fog, all the reflection? Oh, yeah, reflection of the fog, that's, I forgot about that.

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  The flood actually did make it worse.

• 1:29:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:29:50Speaker 05

  It was just straight, no loom, nods with the fog.

• 1:29:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Speaker 05

  And, um, we walked all night long and we finally got to like this. And you could see like, probably the only thing you could see was the only light source in the valley, which was the, the fire that was still burning from the actual bird. And so we get to the edge of, and just as day is breaking, it's just like dawn. You can, you can finally see. And my platoon sergeant, he kinda drops his kit and walks over to the edge and kinda looks at the damage briefly and he turned around and came back and gave us a quick little brief and was like, this is, this is bad. Like, this, this is gonna, this day is gonna change your life, like, without question. Even after everything we've done, this is, this is different.

• 1:30:35Speaker 05

  And so we kicked out perimeter security and we had roving patrols and then about twelve, twelve of us, there were about ten, twelve guys that were from our platoon. And then there were some PJs down there that were with us. And everyone else pulled perimeter and we just started excavating the bodies.

• 1:30:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Speaker 05

  And, um. That took all day. I mean, they were, they were literally scattered. Uh, the seals that um were on that bird had unsnapped. They, the bird had flared and they had leveled.

• 1:31:05Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:31:05Speaker 05

  Ropes were kicked and they were, they were unsnapped. So when the RPG came in and hit the inside and the bird, the centrifugal force of it spinning around basically launched those guys out the open ramp in the back.

• 1:31:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:16Speaker 05

  So they were kinda scattered uh all over the side of this mountain, all over. And, but all the, all the one sixtieth guys were still strapped in and that when the bird inverted and slammed, they all that, I mean, that was a

• 1:31:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:30Speaker 05

  They were, they were riding it in. And uh, that was one of the, to, not that this whole event isn't tragic as shit, but Marcus Morales, the ranger medic was supposed to be going home uh like the next day. He wasn't even supposed, he was like off mission at this point. Pack your bags, you're going home. Just had a kid. The, the, the flight medic that had taken over for him or was ripping with him and got sick. And Marcus, being Marcus was like, hey, don't worry about it, man. I got you. I'll go.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  Never made it home.

• 1:31:59Jack Murphy?

  Jesus.

• 1:31:59Speaker 05

  It's rough. So I actually found Marcus and we were, we were policing up the bodies and uh, only reason I know is because there were only about three dudes out of all sixteen of those guys who were wearing dog tags around their neck. Dog tags don't burn.

• 1:32:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 05

  Which I found out. I, um, so when I found him, um, he still has dog tags around his neck and I knew at that point, you know, who he was. And I kinda walked up on what was left of him and, you know, I'm like, oh, fuck.

• 1:32:26Jack Murphy?

  It's uh, you know, I think I told Tony the same thing. I mean, I understand that this, what you're describing, like, it really doesn't get any worse than that. And that was probably the worst day of everyone's life who was out there that day.

• 1:32:39Speaker 05

  I can, I would say it was, I won't speak for any, but that was definitely the most graphic worst day of my life.

• 1:32:43Jack Murphy?

  And, but, but you know, I, I hope that everyone who was out there also knows that, like, you guys were really doing the honorable thing to go out there and, and recover those guys.

• 1:32:51Speaker 05

  I would want someone to come get me.

• 1:32:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 05

  And that's all I kept thinking in my head. If that was me, I don't wanna be left on the side of a mountain in Afghanistan. Like, come get me.

• 1:33:00Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 05

  At the same time, is that selfish of me? Cause you know other people's lives are put at risk to come get me. And and I'll tell you that fog was so bad, the next day, that next morning and through the day while we were policing up the bodies, our roving patrols and security elements were getting engaged because we had walked through all these ambushes that they had set up for us from where we infilled to where we dropped our kit to go down and police the crash. But it was so damn foggy, they couldn't see us. We walked right by them. We couldn't see them under nods. So they didn't stand a chance of seeing us. And we walked right through all these ambushes they had set up. So we got attacked basically from the rear. Um, I'll like third platoon, next platoon, and um, those guys were providing those, those, I

• 1:33:44Speaker 05

  don't want to call them presence patrols, but those patrols and and

• 1:33:47Speaker 06

  Security patrols.

• 1:33:48Speaker 05

  Security. And so like they were, they were getting, you know, some engagements and stuff from, from behind. We'd walk right through, had no idea.

• 1:33:54Speaker 06

  Was, was ISR able at all to penetrate that?

• 1:33:59Speaker 05

  We had uh, sixteen's flying. Uh, we had a, a JTAC uh, on the ground um, with us uh, that was coordinating air and stuff like that. Um, there were, there were definitely some bad dudes out there. Make no mistake about it. Uh, I mean, I never personally engaged one or saw one, to be honest. Um, our unfortunate job of that was mostly just cleaning up what was left.

• 1:34:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 05

  For me. Uh, I can't speak to what went on on the other side.

• 1:34:23Speaker 06

  And so, you know, you guys were set down uh, in an offset. You patrolled to the crash site. You recovered bodies. How, how were you managing pickup?

• 1:34:35Speaker 05

  We had deployed with, we'd, so when the PJs came with us and got attached to us, they put all of their like, the, the, the, help me guys with the, the saw, like the jaws of life, all that shit. We didn't know.

• 1:34:51Speaker 06

  The sawzall?

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, and everything that they, so they, they had the sawzall, like the, the circular like mounted to the, the Alice pack frame or whatever. And, and um, and then a lot of the stuff they were dragging in Skedco on in that terrain, which was

• 1:35:04Speaker 06

  Brutal.

• 1:35:05Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't, I don't think, I can't tell you another ba- better way to do it. I don't think carrying a ridge of litter would have made a difference, but they were dragging a Skedco with a bunch of their, you know, emergency, you know, crash X type stuff.

• 1:35:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Speaker 05

  Uh, jaws of life in there. But uh, yeah, so we

• 1:35:23Speaker 05

  I don't know how we were not loud enough moving through that to get engaged at some point.

• 1:35:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:35:27Speaker 05

  We weren't quiet. There was no way to be quiet.

• 1:35:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:35:30Speaker 05

  Dudes were falling all the time. Our uh, RTO, which is a radio guy, he actually on the infill, he slipped off the rope towards the bottom and landed and went to go roll out of the way and the guy behind him came down and landed directly on his forearm and snapped his forearm in half. He ain't getting medevac, dude.

• 1:35:48Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:35:48Speaker 05

  He had to tough it out.

• 1:35:50Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 1:35:50Speaker 05

  And I remember once he fell while we were walking from infill to the crash site. And Zee and I were quite a bit up ahead and he, we just hear this blood's cartling scream.

• 1:36:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:36:00Speaker 05

  Bird fell.

• 1:36:03Speaker 06

  It it's, I mean, it's so fortunate that you guys roping in an environment that hostile and that like non-permissive, just the environment, not the bad guys. If you would have had one or two broken legs, that would have been, it would have been, and you can't cancel the mission, you can't.

• 1:36:21Speaker 05

  There was no way to get us out.

• 1:36:22Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:36:23Speaker 05

  It was, it was literally like.

• 1:36:25Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:36:26Speaker 05

  You at least gotta get to the crash site. We had to blow an HLZ at the top of the hill.

• 1:36:30Speaker 06

  And that's what.

• 1:36:30Speaker 05

  Bodies out.

• 1:36:31Speaker 06

  That's what I was gonna ask, is it, so, so how did you guys create a, an HLZ or at least a pickup zone?

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  Dead cord around a bunch of little tiny trees and after we got the, the last of the bodies up, we waited for night. And we had cleared enough space at that point, blowing up enough trees, first starting how to blast while we're doing that, he's wrapping dead cord around everything. Burning, bow! And we're like, okay, now definitely know we're here, like.

• 1:36:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56Speaker 05

  Um, cleared off enough of an HLZ, bird landed, loaded the bags on and um, they took off with the, we ended up.

• 1:37:07Speaker 05

  Excuse me.

• 1:37:10Speaker 05

  They took off with fifteen body bags and an MRE box. We couldn't, uh, there wasn't enough, enough of the sixteenth guy to put, put in a body bag. And, um, we found the first, and we didn't have names for him, honestly, Morales was the only one that we knew because of the Ranger connection. Um, so we just had numbers. It was very impersonal. It had to be.

• 1:37:35Speaker 06

  It, it, absolutely.

• 1:37:37Speaker 05

  And, um, so we, we were like, okay, we got thirteen, okay, we got fourteen. And then we couldn't find two. And we, we had hands across America this, like, so many times. And, uh, me and my platoon sergeant, we're coming uphill and, uh, we were right by where the fuselage was. And as we're coming up the hill, we kinda got a clearing and both of us at the same time were like, I got a boot. We could see boots sticking out. And we're like, hey, and then we kinda ducked down and looked and we're like, we got fifteen. And it was one of the pilots and the cockpit was like resting up against this tree. Everything's charred and wires everywhere and just twisted metal. I mean, you can probably envision. And, um, I looked at my platoon sergeant, he's like six-four, six-five, and he's, he's a pretty tall dude.

• 1:38:23Speaker 05

  I'm six even, I'm not a short guy, but standing next to him, I look, I look short. I'm like, I'll go, I'm smaller. So I climb under the fuselage. Everything at this point has stopped smoldering, um, for the most part. So I climb under there and I try to like grab him by the front of his kit, just see, see what I can do to get him out. Well, uh, let me back up actually. We tried to pull him out by his legs first.

• 1:38:47Speaker 05

  That's an image that is seared into my brain as well. Um, we grabbed him like kinda like mid calf, just tried to jerk him out of the, out of, from under there and his skin just right to the top of his boot, just all the way down to the bone, like in our hand, like. I, I, I left my gloves at the crash, we'll just leave it at that. I mean, they were covered. So like, once we realized that, man, we ain't getting him out that way and he's down to just bone on his legs, right? I'm like, dude, I'll just go. That's when I'm like, hey, I'll go, I'm smaller. So I climb under the, under the fuselage where the cockpit is. I go to grab him and I can't, I can't unfree him. And as I'm kinda feeling around the back of him. I'm like, this dude's kit is melted to the base of this tree. Like, the Kevlar had melted him to the tree.

• 1:39:30Speaker 05

  So I had to wrap my arms completely around him. So like, his head is here. And jar him, un-melt him from this tree. And once I get him separated, the only way for uh, my platoon sergeant to get out was to grab me by the boots and pull both of us out.

• 1:39:53Jack Murphy?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:39:54Speaker 05

  So the guy that I'm, the pilot is on the ground. I have my arms wrapped around his entire upper torso. And I'm getting slid out on top of him as I hold him and get pulled out by my feet. So I had just remains just all over me. And then it was on the hunt. We got him packaged and then it was on the hunt for 16.

• 1:40:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:15Speaker 05

  It was right about dusk and we stumbled upon a pile of bones. They were clearly human and that was all that was left. Everything else had melted. And all we had left was an MRE box, so we put him in that. And that's what left. And we stayed for another 12 days.

• 1:40:38Jack Murphy?

  You want a seltzer?

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  I just, yeah, I'm sorry. Can we just pause this for a second? I gotta pee.

• 1:40:42Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, go for it.

• 1:40:43Speaker 06

  We're not gonna pause because we're live, but you go pee and Jack and I will fill the VR.

• 1:40:46Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, just give me two seconds. Let me.

• 1:40:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, no worries at all.

• 1:40:50Speaker 06

  No worries at all.

• 1:40:51Speaker 05

  I'm not trying to cough up a whole interview.

• 1:40:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. I will tell folks about We Defy the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History. I have this book coming out December 9th. And it covers, as the title suggests, aspects of Special Forces history that haven't been written about previously. There's a chapter about Blue Light, America's first counterterrorism team. Detachment A, the guys who were undercover in Berlin. Detachment K, the liaisons in Korea. Green Light, the, you know, guys who jumped in with backpack nukes during the Cold War. And then there's a chapter on the CIF, the Commander's in Extremist Force, and sort of the history of the various direct action courses on Fort Bragg,

• 1:41:37Jack Murphy?

  Sephalic, Sephardic, SOT. And so, this book is available for preorder right now. The digital and the paperback version of this book will come out on December 9th. So, just a couple of days away. Please check it out. I think you guys will enjoy it.

• 1:41:59Jack Murphy?

  And so-

• 1:42:00Speaker 06

  We're doing an interview on the 9th.

• 1:42:02Jack Murphy?

  On the 9th.

• 1:42:04Speaker 06

  About the book.

• 1:42:05Jack Murphy?

  Yep, yep. So, we'll be talking about it then, yeah. So, the stream on the 9th. If you guys have questions about the book or anything in it, like, feel free to get back to us with it and we'll discuss that on the show.

• 1:42:19Speaker 05

  Sorry, I'm back. I want to apologize to those listening.

• 1:42:21Jack Murphy?

  Not at all.

• 1:42:22Speaker 05

  I had a little coughing attack there. I apologize.

• 1:42:26Jack Murphy?

  So, you establish at HLZ, you start evacuating these, you know, the remains and these body bags.

• 1:42:36Jack Murphy?

  What was the rest of the duration of that trip for you?

• 1:42:39Speaker 05

  It was about 11 or 12 days of looking for, and Nick Moore's platoon was actually, he did more of this than I did. There was another kind of area that we got sent to. There was a little further on down the mountain that I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go into detail about, but we just kind of split the force in half and they stayed back and started looking for that original SEAL element. And I know they were able to find two of them. And then that's when they started to detect the beacon coming from Luttrell's kit. And then they made their way down with a SF team and ODA team into that village and rescued Marcus. And, but that was, the remainder of those, that week and a half,

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  was actually just trying to find the initial SEAL element that got compromised. So, Nick and his guys were able to get, you know, two of them and then Marcus. So, and then it was the needle in the haystack looking for the last one.

• 1:43:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:35Speaker 05

  And actually, they exfilled us before we found the fourth one. And-

• 1:43:43Speaker 05

  It was our time to leave and third range of battalion had come in. So they went immediately, like landed on the ground in Afghanistan and immediately got sent by helo out to the, to Thresher to continue the search as we exfilled our guys. I want to say it was within like a day or two and they just probably just fresh eyes at that point. You know, I mean, like after you comb the same ground over and over again, like just having a fresh set of eyes probably, probably worked in their favor. But I mean, at the end of the day, like 375 found that last guy and we were able to get everybody home. And then obviously Marcus, you know, being the lone survivor of the, out of the 20, the 19 of them that went down is a, is part of Operation Red Wings and Red Wings Recovery.

• 1:44:24Speaker 06

  I, I, I was just gonna ask, during that time, were you guys making a lot of contact?

• 1:44:31Speaker 05

  Uh-uh. I never got shot at once. Never got shot at once. Um, the JTAC had a good time.

• 1:44:38Speaker 06

  Oh, I bet.

• 1:44:39Speaker 05

  Uh, I mean, like I said, there were people all over the place. They just weren't engaging us with small arms fire or anything. Um, but one of the, one of the days in particular, it was like close to, it was like the second or third of July or something like that. And A10s and F16s or F15s, you know, dropped out of the sky and just annihilated this, this top ridge line of this hill. And it was, it was kind of cool. It was like, not celebrating people dying, but it was like, wow, that's about the coolest 4th of July fireworks I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:45:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10Speaker 05

  And, um, and then we exfilled and two days later we were home.

• 1:45:16Speaker 05

  Which was...

• 1:45:19Speaker 06

  Probably not.

• 1:45:19Speaker 05

  I don't think anyone was ready to come home. There needed to be a little bit more decompression time, I think, before an event like that. And then all of a sudden, it's like, hey, we're back in Washington State. Like, don't go hell on the city of Seattle tonight, boys. Have a good one.

• 1:45:32Jack Murphy?

  It's, it's very jarring, isn't it, to come back from such, uh, you know, both a combat zone, but also an area that's so austere. And then to come back home and I, you know, walking around a Walmart and just like feeling completely overwhelmed.

• 1:45:46Speaker 06

  Or, or going, or going out to a nightclub and dealing with, with college dudes who...

• 1:45:54Speaker 06

  Just think that.

• 1:45:58Speaker 05

  They're college kids.

• 1:45:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:00Speaker 05

  I think to speak to both of your points, I think that was probably the hardest come home for me.

• 1:46:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:08Speaker 05

  Even after all the other deployments already leading up to that. Because I remember going to do simple things, like you said, like Walmart. Or I'd go to the PX or something and I'd be walking around and I'm looking at these people going about their daily lives. Like nothing ever happened.

• 1:46:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Speaker 05

  And I'm like, do you guys have any idea what I was doing like five days, four days ago?

• 1:46:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Speaker 05

  And you're just. And but you know what? That's the way it's supposed to be, right? They're supposed to be that way.

• 1:46:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:46:35Speaker 05

  But at the same time, like we talked about earlier, that makes you feel a little ostracized because you're like, I can't just come out and tell this dude at Walmart like, look, man. I've had a bad week, you know, like go easy on you.

• 1:46:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:45Speaker 05

  And then I think in a lot of ways that come to manifest itself in my opinion in two ways, either you fight.

• 1:46:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:50Speaker 05

  Or you shut the hell up about it and clam up and go about your way.

• 1:46:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Speaker 05

  And um.

• 1:46:55Speaker 06

  And and even though I think. Even though a mature, a mature soldier. Will will recognize that this is the way it's supposed to be.

• 1:47:11Speaker 06

  There's still a level of resentment that can't be controlled, that that can't be logic away. That it's not, you know, it's not like you demand more respect because of which. But any amount of respect that any human being, I think that's the thing. That like used to really get me was the lack of respect, not for me as, you know, a combatant. Just have more respect for fucking people because you don't know what.

• 1:47:41Speaker 05

  What I did yesterday.

• 1:47:42Speaker 06

  What I did yesterday.

• 1:47:43Speaker 05

  And and that goes both ways.

• 1:47:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:45Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't know, that dude might have got out in prison yesterday for all I know, he'd been in there for 25 years or something. I don't know.

• 1:47:50Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:47:51Speaker 05

  What that did to me personally, and I'll only speak for myself, is it made me clam up.

• 1:47:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56Speaker 05

  To family, to loved ones, to my girlfriends, to everyone. It was like, I don't want you to know what I, what these eyes have seen, what I've experienced.

• 1:48:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:48:04Speaker 05

  I'm like trying to protect you from this. So I. Instead of going the aggressive, like I went more of the like homebody. I don't want to leave the house.

• 1:48:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13Speaker 05

  Like I'm safe here. And I still struggle with that to this day. I'm like, if I don't leave my house, the odds of shit happening to me are pretty low.

• 1:48:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21Speaker 05

  You know, every time I go out on, you know, to the, anywhere, you know, and it's not even so much anymore. I mean, there's always gonna be that little paranoia, like I don't like my back, you know, facing an open area. I don't like to be around huge crowds.

• 1:48:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:32Speaker 05

  But even now, more so as I'm older, I'm like, I'm content to be at the house.

• 1:48:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:37Speaker 05

  I don't know any of my dudes that I came with that are like, dude, I was out at the bar last night till three going crazy. I'm like, I was in bed at ten thirty.

• 1:48:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:46Speaker 05

  And like, I'm gonna garden tomorrow. It's gonna be awesome. Like, you know, my, I have a buddy of mine that was on that crash site that paints now, you know, Tony Brooks wrote a book. Everybody kinda went in to their own little, whatever, you know, their zone, their comfort zone, or what makes them happy, or what takes their mind off of it.

• 1:49:04Speaker 05

  But at the end of the day, no matter what you do, it can't take a, it doesn't remove that, but we all shared in that together. It's like, everyone is trying to find their own way to comprehend and deal with it.

• 1:49:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:17Speaker 05

  And I think it's been long enough at this point that,

• 1:49:21Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm able to sit here and talk about, there was a long time where I couldn't, I, I just, who the hell wants to hear this? I mean, and this is not pleasant, right? And then with the doc and like finally telling it and being more comfortable telling it, more comfortable in my own skin. I mean, I'm not gonna tell the checkout dude at the grocery store about this shit, right? But like, I mean, if there's a safe environment like this environment, I feel very comfortable sitting here having this conversation, especially with your guys' background, knowing all this.

• 1:49:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 05

  Um, I feel much more comfortable in my own skin than I did. And it took a long time, a long time to get there. And I still, it's a work in, work in progress on a daily basis, you know what I mean? I got a wife and three kids. I guarantee you could ask all them, oh, he's a good dude. He could be better.

• 1:50:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, it's just being self-reflective and honest. Like, yeah, I could do a better job. I do a good job.

• 1:50:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:09Speaker 05

  Like, I always try to be better tomorrow than today. And some days I fail.

• 1:50:13Speaker 06

  Uh, that's, that's, that's every, that's every human.

• 1:50:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I'm okay with that, you know? And that's the thing. Like, before I felt like I couldn't fail anything, or I couldn't have a bad day, or I had a bad day, I'm gonna isolate myself. Not gonna talk to anyone.

• 1:50:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Speaker 05

  And now, my wife is, we've been together for eleven years, and now I'm just like, uh-uh. Not today. I did not sleep well last night. I was restless. I had some dreams. She don't even ask what the dreams are about anymore. She's just like, I had some dreams. Just let me chill on the porch. Let me smoke a few cigarettes. Stare at nature and like, I'll come back in when I'm like capable of having civilized conversation with you.

• 1:50:50Speaker 06

  So you met your wife, you're...

• 1:50:51Speaker 05

  Oh, way after.

• 1:50:52Speaker 06

  Way after.

• 1:50:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, I was divorced once.

• 1:50:56Speaker 06

  That's actually impressive on her part because I think it's, I think it's one thing if a wife, even if you don't tell them everything, but if a spouse is there during and has a sense, then they sort of get it. It takes a special type of woman to adapt after the fact to, to that.

• 1:51:23Speaker 05

  And that was one of the lessons I learned. The, the woman that I dated, the whole time I was in, she was with me from the time I was in RIP, all the way through post, all the deployments and getting out. I never told her anything.

• 1:51:40Speaker 05

  And I don't want to skip ahead too much, but it was like I was trying to protect that person. And my relationship after that went deteriorated solely, that was on me. I wasn't prepared to deal with this shit, right? And she suffered for that. Our relationship suffered. I take a hundred percent ownership for that.

• 1:51:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Speaker 05

  I didn't give her a chance, but I did learn something from it. So when I met my ex-wife, I told her everything. Cause I was like, well, I'm not going to make that mistake.

• 1:52:06Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:52:07Speaker 05

  I'm at least going to let you in. And that's probably one of the hardest things for, for guys in our line of work to do is to let those barriers down, let those shields down and like let someone else. That's not one of your boys that you can call at three in the morning if you're having a bad night and talk it through. It's like, I can actually talk to this other person that I'm with on a daily basis that I share my life with. Letting those barriers down was probably the hardest thing I've ever done. Once I did, I feel like I may have told her too much.

• 1:52:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 1:52:37Speaker 05

  And so it's like, you know, I'm waffling back and forth between not enough and too much. And then, you know, whatever happened between us happened. And we cordially went our separate ways. And then I met my wife, Tracy. And she's just, she's just amazing. She, she just, she looks out for me. She doesn't even have to, we don't have to have a conversation. She could just look at me and see my face and be like, that's one of those days. I'm just gonna leave him alone. Let him watch a movie. He'll be fine in a couple hours or something.

• 1:53:03Jack Murphy?

  I want to definitely get into your, you know, post-service life and also leading up to this documentary. There's one war deployment, two more.

• 1:53:11Speaker 05

  Two more.

• 1:53:12Jack Murphy?

  Take us through that.

• 1:53:13Speaker 05

  Okay, so we get back from the crash. That was in, we got back mid-July, July 14th of 05. Full training cycle for the first time ever in my career. So we were back home for five and a half months. And then in, I went Advon to Ramadi. I left, but they gave us Christmas. So I left on like the 27th of December. So right after Christmas, me and weapon squad leader flew over as the two Advon guys to go make, to go rip with the, you know, get the lay of the land from the 175 guys. And as we landed, we got to, and right before we left, they deemed Ramadi to be the most dangerous city in the world,

• 1:53:56Speaker 05

  the insurgency activity. I mean, it was outdoing Fallujah at that point. Ramadi was, I mean, it was real bad at that, in that stage. So coming off the crash, everybody's still recovering from that. And then they're like, oh, we're gonna chuck you into the worst city in the world. And it was like, okay, what could go wrong here? And so, so we go Advon, and the day we got there, or the evening we got there, we flew into, there was a FOB called Shark Base. And it was right on the, right on the river. And we landed in in our Chinook and got off and went and linked up with the guys. And they're like, hey, you know, for chill out or whatever, we'll come get you in the morning. We'll go give you a lay of the land, take you down to like where the big, uh, big army bases down there.

• 1:54:40Speaker 05

  I think it was Johnson City or something like that is what they called it. And we'll take you down there and show you everything in the morning. We're like, cool. So we bed down, get up in the morning, link up with the one, seven, five guys. And they're taking us out of our FOB down to the big base. And they're like, okay, this is, you know, sniper alley or RPG alley. Like be careful going down these roads. And we had heard huge explosion like 30 minutes before we left, but it was, it seemed far away. Obviously didn't land in our compound. Well, as we're driving down this road, all of a sudden we start hearing all these honk, you know, horns honking at us. Just like, it sounds like New York, not to, I mean, it literally does. Boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo. And we turn and look and here come all these Hiluxes passes and there's just body parts in the back of them.

• 1:55:24Speaker 05

  Just, I don't think I saw one whole human, just legs, arms. I mean, blood was dripping out, you know, like when it rains in the back of your tailgate. Yeah. And it, blood was running out as these cars, it was when they bombed the glass factory. And the glass factory was in Ramadi and it was an Iraqi army Iraqi police recruiting depot. And they had this big pouring out of people that wanted to, to, to do IAIP. And it was recruiting and, and so they were like, you know, our guys were there, like military officers were there. I think there was like a major, like some higher ranking, higher ranking dudes. And some guy walked in and suicide bomb, boom, like killed like a shitload of people. And that was, and I were like, dude, what is all this?

• 1:56:07Speaker 05

  And the one, seven, five guy, again, common theme, he goes, welcome to Ramadi, man. And like, didn't even bat an eye at it. And, uh, so that was the first day we were on the ground in Ramadi. And they, it killed like 90 something people in that, in that factory. Mostly Iraqis, but there were, there was some US military personnel killed too. And so, yeah, that was, that was just like, welcome to Ramadi, man. And it was just foot on the gas, go soon as the main body got there. I mean, we didn't stop. It was just, you know, talk about following objectives. There were following objectives for following objectives for following objectives. We'd leave at eleven, twelve, and we wouldn't come back till daylight pretty much every night.

• 1:56:46Speaker 06

  So, so for you guys, was there, was there like an actual ground offensive in Ramadi like there was?

• 1:56:55Speaker 05

  It was very similar, but similar but different, I guess.

• 1:57:01Speaker 06

  And you guys weren't really part of that, but you were prosecuting targets?

• 1:57:06Speaker 05

  We were putting together the packages to go hit those targets that night. And basically, we would coordinate. I know the Marines had a big chunk of that as well. And then I want to say there was some Army element, maybe in the eighty second. I'm a little fuzzy.

• 1:57:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:19Speaker 05

  It's been nineteen years.

• 1:57:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Speaker 05

  But there was another Army element. And our big thing, and this kind of was the standard for wherever we would go on any deployment was, you know, once you're operating inside these guys' AO, you basically alert them, hey, we're going to be hitting a target.

• 1:57:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:57:34Speaker 05

  Between X and Y hours of the night. You know, we need, A, we need QRF stood up. And B, you know, blocking positions if that was what was required for that particular mission. So, I remember, you know, talking to some Marines that were there afterwards that absolutely hated us. Because we'd be out, you know, all night long, every night. And like, if we're out, they're out.

• 1:57:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:57:56Speaker 05

  Except for we're moving and they're standing at the corner of a road trying to keep the city, you know what I mean? So, once again, everyone matters and everyone had a job to do. And, but that, yeah, Ramadi was crazy.

• 1:58:12Speaker 06

  And so what was?

• 1:58:13Speaker 05

  It was like Iraq O4 on steroids.

• 1:58:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so what was that like for you guys in terms of, I mean, was there, was there contact on most of your targets? Was there, was the surrounding neighborhood responding to a lot of your hits, things like that?

• 1:58:29Speaker 05

  We took a ton of IDF, indirect fire, mortars and rockets and things like that. A lot of the stuff then, they were, one of our biggest fears is they were starting IED bridges and things like that. And I remember going through, like when we were on ground and rolling through those, I remember. I would always crack the hatch. I wouldn't open it all the way. I always crack the hatch because you hear about these guys doing rollovers and drowning. And it's like, I'd still think we're gonna drown in this river if we get blown off this bridge, but at least the hatch is open and we stand a sliver of a chance.

• 1:59:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:59:02Speaker 05

  And I mean, that was the best you had sometimes. It's like, we might stand a toothpick of a chance if the hatch is open.

• 1:59:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:59:09Speaker 05

  We're still driving across a fucking bridge.

• 1:59:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:59:10Speaker 05

  So like, you're just hoping it doesn't go off.

• 1:59:12Speaker 06

  Were you guys in Humvees or the MRPs?

• 1:59:13Speaker 05

  Uh, strikers at that point, with the big RPG cages around them. Not really the smallest vehicles, about 50,000 pounds roughly.

• 1:59:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:59:21Speaker 05

  That was our, for ground, that was what we were using at that point. Um, we, we used the Humvees honestly for just like driving around the base and stuff. They were like, that and Hiluxes. We didn't take them out on patrols at that point.

• 1:59:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:59:33Speaker 05

  So, yeah, mostly strikers and we did a mixture between ground, you know, ground and air.

• 1:59:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then, so with this, with this ground offensive that I, the Marines and probably some conventional armor.

• 1:59:45Speaker 05

  Battle of Lusus, basically. I think that's what it's referred to as, man.

• 1:59:48Speaker 06

  How were, how were you guys?

• 1:59:55Speaker 06

  How was the interoperability? Were you moving forward of their lines? Were you moving within their lines?

• 2:00:00Speaker 05

  Mostly within.

• 2:00:01Speaker 06

  Mostly, mostly within?

• 2:00:02Speaker 05

  Um, mostly within. I mean, there were a few that were

• 2:00:08Speaker 05

  outside of the city, I would say, where you get into like more of your rural stuff, like I was talking about that wedding in Baghdad. Kind of like, when you kind of get outside the city, you don't need nearly as much court on protection or anything. I do remember we hit this house that was rural. We came in on two Blackhawks. There were like 14 of us or something. And we roll into this house, we clear the house, you know, as business as usual. And there were like, like 20 males, military age males in this house, right? And it's like three women, a handful of kids and like all these dudes. And we're like, dude, we can take like three or four dudes with us. That's it. So we had to call QRF. Not because we were in contact.

• 2:00:44Speaker 05

  We have detainees that need to get picked up. So we picked our, you know, pick of the litter, if you will.

• 2:00:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:00:49Speaker 05

  They're coming with us and then the rest of them. So we had to call QRF, which was Marine Force that was coming up. And so like the majority of our dudes are in the house and my platoon starts like, hey, House, go sit out on the, on the, in the front and just wait for these guys to show up. And another dude standing right next to me, another team leader is like, yeah, I'll come out with you and keep you company. I'm like, cool. We haven't taken any contact or anything, right? We just, just a lot of dudes in this house. There's more of them than there are of us dudes, which is rare, right? We get out to the front and I look over to my right and I see headlights. And I'm talking, these headlights are like miles away. And I'm like, we are in the middle of nowhere. What? Fifty vehicle, it looked like a highway coming towards us and it just all white light. At like two

• 2:01:34Speaker 05

  in the morning. I'm like, no, this cannot be our QRF dude. But they didn't have nods. They didn't have PEC twos. They didn't have anything. They had iron sights on M16s and 12 gauge shotguns.

• 2:01:46Speaker 06

  And this is 2006?

• 2:01:47Speaker 05

  2006.

• 2:01:48Speaker 06

  It's insane.

• 2:01:49Speaker 05

  And they rolled up with like a 50 vehicle convoy of Marines that got dispatched for QRF to come get 12 detainees.

• 2:01:57Jack Murphy?

  Maybe like one set of nods per squad.

• 2:01:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, the drivers didn't have nods.

• 2:02:01Speaker 06

  There's no, I mean, honestly, by 2006, there was no excuse for that. There's no excuse.

• 2:02:06Speaker 05

  They had white light and they're rolling by us, just weapons out the window, just flagging the shit out of us. Cause it's, it's not their fault. They don't, they're not, you know? And I'm not going to shit on them for it at all. And I was like, we have different jobs, but like, you know, we're like, hey, man, you mind lowering that, not pointing it directly at my, you know, center mass please? And yeah, there had to have been 50 vehicles in that convoy to come get 16 guys. It's like, you could have sent like five gun trucks and a deuce and a half. That would have been more than enough.

• 2:02:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:35Speaker 05

  They sent everybody out.

• 2:02:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:37Speaker 05

  And I just remember looking at them and looking at us and they're like, damn, man, you guys like special forces or something? It was like, yeah, something like that, man. The guys are inside, the Blackhawks are five minutes out. So we're waiting. And then they're sitting there and they're loading these detainees up. Here come the Hawks. They land in. We all run out, grab our dudes, chuck them on, we're off. See you later. And they're just like, fuck those dudes, man. That sucks. And we're stuck here with all this and these guys are doing cool guy shit, you know?

• 2:03:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:03:06Speaker 05

  Again, it comes back to everybody has their, their unique role in this.

• 2:03:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:03:10Speaker 05

  I mean, we couldn't take 20 dudes.

• 2:03:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:03:12Speaker 05

  Those 16 dudes may have given up more information than the four we took.

• 2:03:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:03:15Speaker 05

  You know, we just never see the end game really unless it's, you know.

• 2:03:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:03:20Jack Murphy?

  Was the pump house story?

• 2:03:22Speaker 05

  That was Ramadi two.

• 2:03:23Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:03:24Speaker 05

  That was my last mission.

• 2:03:25Jack Murphy?

  So before we wrap up Ramadi one, any other ops that stand out in mind that you'd like to talk about?

• 2:03:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, we had a bad day, uh, close to the end of deployment, March 18th, uh, 2006. It was a hit, objective Miami. I still remember. I still, still see the GRG, uh, in my head. And, uh, a GRG is a grid reference guide. Um, I would wear it like, you know how quarterbacks wear like the, the play sheet? I'd, I'd slip in the GRG, have it folded over so I could see within a couple hundred meter grid square. There's target house and this and that. I'd wear it like, you know, Tom Brady wears his, sorry, I gotta bring up Brady. I'm from Boston. Kill me later, kill me later. And, uh, you know, I've got that thing and that's, I still, still have it to this day. And, um, so it was objective Miami and objective Miami two.

• 2:04:13Speaker 05

  The main force was going on objective Miami one, which was a house, no different than any normal house that we'd hit. That's a special about it. It wasn't part of some overly, you know, elaborate compounding thing. And so I was sitting, I was, it was me, a couple of team leaders and a gentleman Dale Brim. We're sitting in, in the, in the hooch in Ramadi and we hadn't seen Dale in like a while, probably been like a year. And, uh, one of the other guys had gone through Ranger school with him. So they were buddies from that too. He was an ACO guy. Dale was. And, uh, so we're sitting there chilling with them and it was like business as usual. You know, we're sitting there fucking joking around. It was like, all right, bro. He's like, hey, we're rolling on Miami. I was like, all right, bro. We're on QRF for Miami two. Miami one was the main hit. Miami two was if this hit happened.

• 2:05:00Speaker 05

  The most liable pla- or the most likely place that they're gonna go is to jump into the river and swim it across to another safe house on the other side of the river to distance themselves. If they do that, our little ten-man element is gonna launch on Miami too. So we're, later Bram, hey bro, catch you at midrats, right? Like, middle, you know, middle, you chicken wings and, you know, you pig out after a mission. Alright, bro, catch you in twenty, thirty minutes, man. Like, these missions weren't taking that long at that point. And, um, I remember, you know, fist bumping them out the door and they left. And the other guy, one of the dude, one of our team leaders left with them. They all were on the main hit. And then me and the team leader,

• 2:05:42Speaker 05

  that was my squad, we stayed with our squad leader and a couple of our nugs. And we went down by the airfield to be ready. They had a Blackhawk sitting right there. And we were all just standing there, birds off, flight medics just chilling.

• 2:05:53Speaker 06

  So, you guys, you guys were not gonna fly?

• 2:05:57Speaker 05

  Unless they squirted.

• 2:05:58Speaker 06

  Unless they squirted.

• 2:05:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:06:00Speaker 06

  Maneuvered.

• 2:06:00Speaker 05

  Yep. So, yeah, sorry. Maneuvered. Um, and so we are sitting down by the airfield and the flight medic had like, kinda, you know, gotten up and walked up to the talk. And we're kinda, maybe like five, ten minutes goes by. And all of a sudden we hear the turbines and the rotors start spinning. And we're like, oh shit, we have people maneuvering. And so we're like, getting up, putting helmets on, making sure, hey, my comms good, do you have radio check, blah, blah, blah. And the flight medic comes running down from where the talk was. There are only four houses on our little, on our little area. Comes running down this sand dirt path, jumps in the, in the Blackhawk and just takes off. And I remember

• 2:06:42Speaker 05

  looking at the fellow team leader and my squad leader, I was like, we supposed, we supposed to be on that? Cause they just left, eight of us sitting here. So like, a minute or two goes by and we're like, I'm coming back, dude. So like, me, the team, other team leader and squad leader walk up to the talk. And as we walk in, they have all the monitors up and everything. And we come in and we can see, cause the objective is only like, four minutes out from where the base was, right? So by the time we walk up the hill, they're coming in to focus on the, on the, all the monitors.

• 2:07:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:07:10Speaker 05

  We see the medevac bird coming in. And the medevac bird lands and what had ended up happening was Dale Brem and another Ranger, his squad leader Ricardo Barraza, had made entry into the house, were going through the first floor clearing rooms and hit this one room on the first floor and as they came in, one dug left, one dug right, and there was a guy behind a stack of mattresses in the middle of the floor with an AK. And it's not like, you know, how we have AKs here in America, these are full auto, so I mean, it's not semi-automatic, so. The guy was just hid behind the mattresses, threw the AK up over the top and just let

• 2:07:53Speaker 05

  a burst go, right at the door, I mean, fatal funnel, right? Yeah. And as they turn, one digging left, one digging right, they both got hit about right there from the side. And both went down, sawgunner came in, finished them off. The enemy combatant, let me be clear, finished the enemy combatant off and then immediately went into the medical process of it. And the last radio call they got, I don't remember who it was from, I want to say it was from Ricardo, but I don't want to misspeak, was, "I'm hit and I can't move." And then no other radio communications from them. They medevac them and they're reading off, as they're medevac them, they're reading off battle roster numbers, because we don't say names over the net, so it's a code that identifies who it is. Call signs.

• 2:08:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, like first initial, last name, company, last four, but you know, you have the manifest in front of you as they're reading it off in the talk and like, we're like, "It's Barraza, it's fucking Brem," and we were just talking to Dale like 15 minutes ago. And so like, they medevac them to the cache at the Maine Army Hospital and me and the other, the team leader and squad leader, we're like, we jump into Hilux and drive down there with like, there were a couple, a couple of guys went down with us. And we were kind of sitting there and surgeon came out and he called it and he was like, "Hey guys, they're expired." Yeah. And obviously, no one wants to hear that shit, right?

• 2:09:17Speaker 05

  And like, this is, this is how crazy war is. That this was almost an acceptable answer to our bereavement was, "Jensen could have got shot on this operating table and there's nothing I could have done." The bullet just tears through too much stuff going through on that trajectory that, you know, through that part of the body.

• 2:09:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:09:37Speaker 05

  And so like, that's the consolation prize you get. Like, you couldn't have done anything to save him. They could have got shot right here, I couldn't have saved their lives. Consolation prize, that sucks.

• 2:09:45Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:09:45Speaker 05

  You know, but at least the medics did their job.

• 2:09:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:09:49Speaker 05

  That have acted their job.

• 2:09:50Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:09:51Speaker 05

  They give them the best chance they could to live. It's just, it's one of those wounds. Getting shot in the face is not a preventable cause of death on the battlefield.

• 2:09:57Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:09:58Speaker 05

  Neither is getting shot through all that shit.

• 2:09:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:10:00Speaker 05

  And we didn't have side plates. They actually, them getting killed two weeks before we were going home, was what introduced side plates into the SOF community.

• 2:10:09Speaker 06

  Really?

• 2:10:09Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. Which I-

• 2:10:11Speaker 06

  I guess they took shots laterally like that.

• 2:10:14Speaker 05

  Cause before that, we didn't have side plates. At least we didn't. And then the next deployment, they had the cummerbund thing that came out with those side plates that crush your diaphragm in and it feels like you can't breathe. But that was, it happened right after they died. So I don't know that that's 100% true, but normally two plus two is four. It didn't happen before that, and right after that, we had side plates.

• 2:10:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. They were definitely looking at, you know, how can we stop assaulters from dying on target armor? Remember the little thing that comes down over your balls?

• 2:10:41Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:10:41Speaker 06

  That was a thing that was introduced at one point, um, because guys would take rounds through like the pelvis and the femoral.

• 2:10:48Speaker 05

  Dick plate, or whatever they called it back then, yeah.

• 2:10:50Speaker 06

  The, the, the problem is, the, the more stuff they want to add, like, the less guys want to wear it. Because, you know, when you're going over walls, or when you're like doing stuff, like, all that stuff gets in the way, it inhibits movement. It's like, you could wrap a guy in, in, in, you know, cast iron and, and protect him, but he-

• 2:11:10Speaker 05

  He's got no mobility.

• 2:11:11Speaker 06

  He's got no mobility. And so it comes down to, how do you, cause it took a long time to get guys to even wear chicken plates.

• 2:11:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:19Speaker 06

  Right?

• 2:11:20Speaker 05

  They wanted to wear molly or racks or Rhodesians or something. It's like, "I can move faster this way, but you have no-" So it's, it's always a healthy, or a constant battle between speed and security.

• 2:11:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and the mission changes so rapidly, because you'll have guys, you know, you start going in those hills on like, on a pursuit. Dudes will be dumping their plates.

• 2:11:41Speaker 05

  Like telling, he wanted, "Hey, can I drop my plates?"

• 2:11:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:11:43Speaker 05

  Speed versus security. I mean, again, getting shot in the face.

• 2:11:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:11:47Speaker 05

  But, yeah, I want to be able to move, but I also need to have some protection, so it's a healthy balance. And it's interesting, you bring up wall teams, the entire deployment.

• 2:11:57Speaker 05

  Myself, Z, and Chris Masters, the new RSM, were on the wall team in Ramadi, so every night, on every hit.

• 2:12:05Speaker 06

  Up on those ladders?

• 2:12:06Speaker 05

  Three of us. We'd lay one, Pope ladders, I don't know if they had the real lightweight. They weigh like five pounds, right? They'd lay one on one side. Chris would go up, Chris Masters would go up, hand him the other ladder, he'd lay it down the other side. He'd go over, whichever order, didn't matter, it was just like whoever's turning was, whoever's standing there, and then me and Z would go over.

• 2:12:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:27Speaker 05

  The whole rest of the platoon would be on the street behind the cinder block wall this day.

• 2:12:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:30Speaker 05

  And it'd be the three of us. Masters would go up in the gate, and me and Zaring would lock down the whole house, just the two of us, every night.

• 2:12:40Speaker 05

  And I remember being like, "Can we switch for a night? Maybe be the roof team or SSE for a night?" And they were like, "Nah, you guys are pretty good at the wall." It was like, you realize every night, it's just three of us versus this entire objective until we open that gate.

• 2:12:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:55Speaker 05

  If that doesn't grind your nerves after three and a half months of doing that shit every night, multiple times.

• 2:13:00Speaker 06

  Well, and you know.

• 2:13:01Speaker 05

  You're talking about going over the wall with too much gear.

• 2:13:02Speaker 06

  And you got, yeah.

• 2:13:03Speaker 05

  You're making noise.

• 2:13:04Speaker 06

  You're making noise?

• 2:13:05Speaker 05

  There's 12, 15 windows to cover.

• 2:13:06Speaker 06

  You're getting hung up on the wall, you know, with, with whatever you're wearing.

• 2:13:11Speaker 06

  Dogs in the compound, all of a sudden, like, you're not doing anything sneaky, you know? You're trying, but.

• 2:13:17Speaker 05

  Trying your best, but kit makes noise.

• 2:13:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Jack Murphy?

  So start taking us through Ramadi 2.

• 2:13:22Speaker 05

  Ramadi 2 was my sixth and final. I, um, I was supposed to be getting out, this was, we left in.

• 2:13:34Speaker 05

  Early, I think it was October again.

• 2:13:37Speaker 05

  And I was supposed to be getting out on terminal leave on the 21st of December. So I wouldn't even have made the full rotation. After Ramadi won, we had an absolute mass exodus of every team leader in the platoon. One dude went to Rekki, a couple of guys got out, one dude was going to green to gold, one dude was going to snipers. And then this was my, I'm done after this, right? And so everyone else was gone and platoon sergeant looked at me and was like, I'm, we got all new. We had six new team leaders. I didn't even have a job. I didn't have a call sign. He was like, I'm putting you in charge of weapon squad. I was like, I'm an E5.

• 2:14:20Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm the senior E5 in the platoon, but I'm E5. You got three E6s on the line platoons, which usually weapon squad leader is a senior E6.

• 2:14:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:14:28Speaker 05

  PSG goes down, you're in charge dude from an NCO standpoint, right? So there was a little bit of ruffled feathers when I got bypassed everybody to go be weapon squad leader because our weapon squad leader left too. So someone had to fill it and I'd had the most experience in weapon squad throughout, you know, the course of it. And I had good rapport with the dudes. So it's like, it was easy. It was an easy fit. I had great team leaders, great gun team leaders and we, we had an unbelievable weapon squad. And I remember coming up before we got our new weapon squad leader and, and I, we didn't get along. I'm not going to bad mouth him, but we did not get along at all. I was getting out and I, I had trained up some great dudes and he came in and tried to make his mark by disheveling probably, in my opinion, and not only my opinion,

• 2:15:14Speaker 05

  arguably the best weapon squad in, in, in the battalion for sure. Cause we went out to Yakima and did a competition and we did really well. And he came in, tried to change everything. And the guys hated it. I hated it. Not him. His method, the way he went about it.

• 2:15:32Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:15:33Speaker 05

  Like, why are you gonna mess this up? These guys are, they know, everyone knows what they're doing. Everyone knows their job. And so, right before we left, my battune sergeant was like, well, he's senior E6 even over the E16 leaders, or squad leaders, so we're gonna put him in front of weapons, or in charge of weapons, but we're gonna put you in the same hooch with him. And I was like, that's terrible, I did. Just raffled the bat, that's terrible, I did. And I was already in checked out Ranger mode. And so, my battune sergeant's like, I need you to come with me. I was like, dude, I get out of the Army in like, two and a half months. I said, I, it, literally, I'm not even gonna be there for full deployment. And he was like, I, I don't know what to do with these guys, they're all new. I need, squad leaders are good, all the team leaders.

• 2:16:14Jack Murphy?

  This is like the most Ranger Battalion story ever, like, oh, you have five days left in, in the Army? You're coming with us?

• 2:16:21Speaker 05

  So, I end up going, and I'm, I am, I used to wear a shirt in, and I'm, I'm an asshole for doing this, but I was pissed at this point. I found this shirt at Target that said, "I'm really happy to be here." And I would wear it, take it home and wash it every night, and wear it every day of the week into the, into the squad leader meetings, and they'd all be in PTs, and I'd show up late in civilian clothes, wearing "I'm really happy to be here" t-shirt, and just stare at everyone, just pissed that I was actually still having to do all this bullshit. Yeah, right. Way past the point of caring about anything that anyone cared, did not care, and no one said anything.

• 2:16:58Jack Murphy?

  Retired on active duty.

• 2:16:59Speaker 05

  No one said anything to me, because they were just like, just let it be, just let it be. And so, you know, I find out I'm going, and I'm just like, I'm like, where are we going? Are we going to like, to Crit? Are we going to, you know, Mizzou? And he's like, we're going back to Ramadi. I was like, of course we're going back to Ramadi, right? Because they only tell you like, three days before you leave where you're actually going. And I'm like, okay, cool, back to Ramadi. So, we end up there. I didn't have a call sign, because all the call signs were used up. So, they were like, hey, uh, my nickname was House. Waterhouse takes a long time to say, team House. Hey, House. So, the first couple hits we go on, I got a radio, I got everything.

• 2:17:38Jack Murphy?

  But you were House Actual.

• 2:17:39Speaker 05

  I'm a House Actual.

• 2:17:39Jack Murphy?

  You're House Actual, so that works.

• 2:17:41Speaker 05

  So, like, the Delta guys are sitting there, that are in the talk, and they're listening to the shit, and then like, after, we're in one of the hot washes, and like, okay, moment of clarification, there is someone that keeps saying "House" on the radio. Are you guys, what is House? Who are you talking to? Are you talking about a physical house? Like, what, or what? And I was like, I'm House, and they were like... Your name is House? I was like, well, actually it's Waterhouse. It just takes too long to say. And he was like, thank you. That clears up more shit than I can even sell you because on their end, they're like, what is the, it wasn't like Lehman, or like, hey, 14, 17, it was House.

• 2:18:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:18:14Speaker 05

  So they had no clues, but I didn't have a job. So like, I would just float around with the platoon sergeant and the medic and I'd be like, hey, I'm gonna go do SSE tonight, or I'm gonna go do roof security, or I'm gonna do interrogation or whatever. So it's like, so honestly, I did whatever I wanted and no one was gonna say anything to me. I'm getting out.

• 2:18:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:18:31Speaker 05

  I'd already put my time in. And so I was just, I floated. And um, yeah, the pump house, to get to your point. So it is.

• 2:18:41Speaker 06

  I love this story, by the way.

• 2:18:43Speaker 05

  It's, it's about December. I'm leaving, supposed to be leaving country on the 12th. I'm still there. And it's like, the 9th.

• 2:18:52Speaker 06

  We got it up for you, though.

• 2:18:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, last mission. And I, I get out on the 21st on Terminal. I leave country on the 12th. At the, by the time the end of the story is over.

• 2:19:02Speaker 06

  First off, nobody should ever tell you, it should never be your known last mission.

• 2:19:07Speaker 05

  Oh, I, everyone's, dude, I, we were running out of calendar days, man.

• 2:19:11Speaker 06

  But you know what I'm saying? It's like, like that, that, I mean, why don't you just write a letter to your, to your, you know, your.

• 2:19:19Speaker 05

  I told my platoon sergeant, he was like, House, I need to come on this one last mission. And I was like, dude, I saw this movie. At this point, I'm not using rank. We are on a first-name basis. I'm like, bro, I saw this movie. I get whacked on my last mission. I was like, I'll tell you what, though. I love you to pieces. You know, I'll come. I'll always go. But if I get fucking killed, it's on you. He goes, I got you. You know, you know that voice? I got you. And I'm like, alright, Sergeant, let's go. And he knows who I'm talking about. And um, and so we roll, we infill by boat. And um, I mean, we're fully weighed down.

• 2:19:56Speaker 06

  Is it German?

• 2:19:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:19:58Speaker 06

  That's so funny.

• 2:19:59Speaker 05

  I got you, House.

• 2:20:00Speaker 06

  I got you. I'm gonna give him shit about that.

• 2:20:02Speaker 05

  And uh, so we roll and um, we go on these, the, the Swick boats, which are super cool. I don't know if you guys have ever talked to any of those guys. These things are armed to the teeth. They're like military, like interceptor-type boats. They got 50 cows, they got miniguns on them. I mean, they are, they are, and this is the first time we'd ever been around them. Well, we get on them and I'm like, dude, I weigh 225 without kit. I weigh like 290 with kid on and I'm like, you guys got like a life jacket in here? And the dude hands me this life jacket. It's like, it wouldn't fit my 10 year old. You know what I mean? I'm like, this is like a Snoopy life jacket that like a little kid would wear at the lake, right? I'm like, dude, I weigh like 300 pounds. I'm like, we weigh like 300 pounds.

• 2:20:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:20:46Speaker 05

  And, and what had happened was, the guys on the river had started getting wise to it, like you had brought up earlier, Dave. Like, they, they're not dumb. So they started IED in choke points in the river and, and most of them were kind of like right around where the bridges were, as they, you know, and it was, they would, they would hit those choke points. And so they were starting IED that and we're like, dude, I mean, dude, if we get blown out of this boat, like.

• 2:21:10Speaker 06

  Do you know if any of the swig boats have been hit by those IEDs?

• 2:21:13Speaker 05

  I actually have no idea, but I will tell you this though, those things are awesome and they fly.

• 2:21:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:21:18Speaker 05

  Um, and that, we actually, a quick side note, one of their gunners on the, on the minigun was sick. So as we're loading our guys on, uh, one of my best friends still to this day, um, they were like, hey, we need one dude to cover down on the minigun. Um, our dude got sick or is hurt or whatever, can pull one of your guys. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, hey, Tom, go, you go, uh, get on the minigun. He's like, okay. You know, Tom walks up, very cerebral dude. And he's like, all right, man, I just need a quick fam. He goes, power, trigger, 3,000 rounds a minute, you'll be fine. And walked away. That was his fam, right? He's like, okay, I got you. Yeah, you'll cut a house in half. Just, just aim, don't aim. I don't know. You'll be good. And so we cruised there, we get there unscathed, uh, thankfully, and we download, it's middle

• 2:22:01Speaker 05

  of the night and ISR had picked up that they were, they were getting smart. They were conducting attacks, but they were burying their weapons away because in Iraq, uh, it's standard, practice standard, but they are legal. They all can own one AK for self-defense, self-protection. That's totally within the law. Um, so these guys are smart. They keep their personal at home. They go dig their shit, conduct their attacks during the day, go back, bury it for the nighttime, go back home. Hey, I'm totally legal. You don't got shit on me. ISR picked up on it, started tracking. Well, they tracked it right to this pump house on the river.

• 2:22:35Speaker 05

  And they were, you know, they had them digging up weapons, getting in cars, going out, conducting their, their daily, you know, nonsense or whatever. And so we pick up on it. So they launch us. So we get at this pump house, we download, we start looking all around, like the external area. We're like, I mean, it's gotta be like dirt. It's like freshly, like, you know, I mean, you know, the difference between something that's been rained on and something that just got dug up. Couldn't find shit. So we're like, okay, so we fall back into this compound. There's no one there. It's like two o'clock in the morning. We set up cameras on the roof. We have our sniper team kicked out. They have a great hide site underneath this like 18 foot trailer, tractor trailer, but just the trailer part mildly high grass, perfect cover, great line of sight. Like, okay, we put a camera up on the roof. Perfect. We sit down, me and Jay are in the bathroom.

• 2:23:20Speaker 05

  And I, I explained this in the doc, but these are not like American bathrooms. It's like a hole in the floor and like, you know, that's it. And this little rectangular room, basically. So we're sitting there for hours and he's got the monitor right across from him, looking at the camera. We got snipers. We got radios on. Helmets are on the ground leaning, weapons are leaning up. We got eyes everywhere. No one's gonna walk past this. About 7:15 in the morning. I'm sitting here leaning up against the wall, half droning. Me and Jay have been talking all night. He's leaning up against that wall facing this way. And all of a sudden I just see a shadow in the door. I just assumed it was one of our dudes. There were like 14 guys in there, right? I'm like, oh, it's gotta be one of the dudes being like, hey, I'm but, and I look up and it's an Iraqi.

• 2:24:05Speaker 05

  First of all, how the fuck did he make it in here without anyone seeing him? Right? So it was like the last thing I expected to look up and I was like, yeah. And like, I was taken aback for a second, right? I was 7:15 in the morning. So I just instinctively, like I, I don't even remember standing up. Like I was just on my feet all of a sudden. And I just grabbed the dude and like started like put him down on the ground. Like I'm not roughing him up. I'm just getting control of him.

• 2:24:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24:26Speaker 05

  I get him down and Jay's like, where the, all I remember is where the fuck did he come from? And I'm like, I have no idea. I'm like rolling him up, right? So we get him, we move him over to the building next door, inside the same pump house. And we have the turp and docks over there and the, and the, and they're talking to him. We go in and start talking to him. And then all of a sudden we get a radio call. And it was, we were, we split, we landed in two elements. About 14, 15 of us occupied the pump house. And then there was this main road and this really, really bad market up there. And our other half had split up to another house that was right off the main road, but had great eyes on like the market itself. I'm not gonna say this was Somalia Bakara market, but it was someplace you didn't, you were not welcome. Yeah.

• 2:25:10Speaker 05

  And they were not sh- not scared about letting you know that. They were, they were more than willing to come out and fight. And so we hear, first we, we hear the snipers and they're like, hey, a car just pulled up. And we're like, say again? And they're like, hey, a car just pulled in by the river. And we're like, okay, stand by. So we leave the turf with the medic and the, and, and the detainee and we roll out to the front gate. And they're like, hey, they're digging shit up. And we're like, oh, our first customer of the day. All right. And we're like, okay, you know, my concerns like, hey, Jay's like, hey, just keep eyes on, blah, blah, blah. Let me know what you see. And they're like, okay. Couple of seconds goes by, it's like, oh, they're digging up RPKs. Okay, we got RPGs. Okay, yep, AKs, but okay.

• 2:25:52Speaker 05

  This is the whole, this is the whole package. And all right, go ahead, take them out. And so the subsonic ammo suppressed, I mean, it sounds like a BB gun, right? They must have been within like. Oh, like a hundred meters. Yeah.

• 2:26:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:05Speaker 05

  They just had a great hide site. They had the high grass with the overhang from the, from the tractor trailer. It was beautiful. And um, that should be a, a, a case study for how to be a good effective sniper from close range. Like you. That's pretty bowler. I won't, I won't lie. Yeah. No, it was, it was impressive to watch.

• 2:26:21Speaker 06

  And really, really kind of a rare opportunity for.

• 2:26:25Speaker 05

  For snipers.

• 2:26:25Speaker 06

  For snipers.

• 2:26:26Speaker 05

  From not a distance that's over a couple hundred meters. And they were well within.

• 2:26:28Speaker 06

  But actually doing a sniper mission, like it, it like, snipers really got relegated to a lot of overwatch.

• 2:26:34Speaker 05

  Or rooftop security.

• 2:26:35Speaker 06

  A lot of rooftop security, stuff like that. Like rare for them to be able to build.

• 2:26:40Speaker 05

  Well, the problem was there was no rooftop to get on. So it's like, hey, we got it in place and we have them.

• 2:26:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:44Speaker 05

  They were a waste if we don't use them. But look at this place. We scouted out at night. And then when we, you know, they got there and then when the day rose, we were like, hey, how's your position? Do we need to relocate you before activity starts? They're like, dude, we got a great hide here.

• 2:26:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:56Speaker 05

  All right, fucking keep what you got.

• 2:26:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:58Speaker 05

  What you got.

• 2:26:58Speaker 06

  That's fantastic.

• 2:26:59Speaker 05

  And um, so they shoot the, the three guys and they ended up standing like side to side, like in a row. And uh, they take the two on the outside. And then they both go to the one in the middle and engage him. And two on the outside drop, the dude in the middle starts running. Adrenaline probably, I can only imagine. He runs a little ways.

• 2:27:20Speaker 06

  Cause they're using subsonic.

• 2:27:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's not over penetrating, right? And they're not wearing kit or plates or anything. So I mean, eventually it's gonna kill you. But like, the two dudes drop and the one guy takes off.

• 2:27:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:31Speaker 05

  And runs around like the far side of the compound. So as soon as that happens, they're like, hey, we got a dude running.

• 2:27:37Speaker 06

  We got a maneuver element.

• 2:27:39Speaker 05

  And so we split out from the main gate, go around, two dudes are down in the grass right there. Jay comes around, stitches third dude up coming around the corner.

• 2:27:50Speaker 05

  All legit.

• 2:27:52Speaker 05

  SSE on the bodies, get them out of the way.

• 2:27:54Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:27:55Speaker 05

  Rebury the weapons.

• 2:27:56Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:27:57Speaker 05

  Move the car.

• 2:27:57Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 2:27:59Speaker 05

  Reset.

• 2:28:00Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:28:00Speaker 05

  And wait again. Cause we knew there were more groups than just the one.

• 2:28:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:28:04Speaker 05

  So it was just like rinse, wash, repeat, bro. Like, we're gonna do the same damn thing. And so everything's back to normal. We go in and start re-interrogating the pump house operator. Like, dude, we know you know, you can't dig 20 feet from your building and not know anything. Let's, I mean, stop. I mean, let's stop fucking with each other here, right? Like, we're not, no one's punching you, no one's being rough with you. Just, let's be honest. Oh, mister, I don't know. It's like, dude, I've heard this many times before. And I'm like, and all of a sudden, hey, we got a vehicle headed down towards you guys. And it's coming from the house that was up by the market. And we're like, what? And they're like, there's a vehicle coming down towards you. So they engaged the vehicle. Thinking it's a V-Bed, vehicle borne IED. And vehicle stops.

• 2:28:46Speaker 05

  They get out and have an element from that house go clear that vehicle. Immediately that house was burnt because the market had woken up.

• 2:28:56Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:28:58Speaker 05

  It was, they were, everyone had suppressors on. Everyone was suppressed on that mission, with the exception of the machine gunners, which we were like, stay down until shit hits the fan and then you can open up. But every M4 on that mission was suppressed. Then you see four dudes come out of a house down this big, wide open field to go check this car out. And the dude's shot up pretty good, but alive.

• 2:29:18Speaker 05

  And they grab him and they start dragging him back to the pump house because we're closer than dragging him back to the, to where the market was. And this guy screaming and shit, well.

• 2:29:26Speaker 06

  Are there still guys in the, in the house also?

• 2:29:30Speaker 05

  We, when we split the island, there were probably about 10 dudes still in there, including our company commander who was in there, ended up taking, he refuses to. He's like, I'm not giving myself an enemy marksmanship badge, but he was standing in a window and a round hit one of the metal window panes. And ricocheted and like a piece of shrapnel hit him right underneath his Oakleys and we were like, oh sir, shit, you got shot. And he was like, no fuck I didn't. Don't ever tell anyone I got shot. I'm not giving those kids enemy marksmanship badges. I didn't, I scratched myself shaving. We're like, okay. And, uh, so we dragged the guy back and then all of a sudden, that's when all hell breaks loose. The market realized we were there.

• 2:30:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:30:07Speaker 05

  And they just start hitting that house. They didn't see where they had drug that dude to. They just knew that he came this way. And they had these big eight foot wall, 10 foot walls. They had this cement pad in the middle. It gave you like an extra three, three feet. And if you stood on your tippy toes, you could just see over the wall to engage. So they're engaging dead ahead from where the market is to where this house is, but we're on their flank.

• 2:30:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:30:31Speaker 05

  And they have no idea where they're at.

• 2:30:33Speaker 06

  And how far is this house from the pump house?

• 2:30:35Speaker 05

  Probably 200, 300 meters, well within M4 range. And so we're like, and they start engaging on our guys and we're like, okay, game on. So we're on their flank and we just, they didn't stand a chance.

• 2:30:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:30:49Speaker 05

  And, uh, I mean, we, we, we jacked a few people's days up to say the least on that day. And then once that happened, that element completely collapsed back down the pump house so that we were all consolidated, which is good. But then they started lobbing mortar status all along. And they had the Jenga trucks, you know, and the Hiluxes with like mobile, uh, mortar platforms. And we didn't have any like close air supports brought daylight. So like 160 thing flying.

• 2:31:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:31:17Speaker 05

  So we had marine like Hueys that were providing air cover.

• 2:31:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:31:20Speaker 05

  They were shooting at the Hueys from the street.

• 2:31:23Speaker 06

  You can't get the air force like the, the, the AC. The pilots wanted to fly, but their, but their leadership wouldn't let them. Yeah.

• 2:31:30Speaker 05

  They won't let them. And so it was just us. We were just stuck there, just sitting duck all day. And I remember asking a mortar guy, I'm like, and these guys aren't shooting like 60s. They're shooting like. Eighty ones, like, big rounds at it.

• 2:31:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:31:45Speaker 05

  And I look at one of the mortar guys, who was one of the snipers, he was a mortar guy before he went to snipers. And I'm like, "Hey, John," I'm like, "What happens if a mortar round lands in this, inside this compound?" He goes, "Oh, we're all dead." "Okay."

• 2:31:59Speaker 05

  Simple answer. "I don't mind simple, but thank you for cutting to the point." And so we sit there all day. They're coming over the top of our head, exploding in the river behind us, landing short in the field, just all over. None of them obviously landing in the compound. So it gets to be towards the end of the day. And I'm sitting there, and a dude I'd been, went through RIP with is there. And I'm like, "You know, it's my last day. Fuck it." I was like, "I've pulled so much guard. I'm gonna get up on the copel on top of the roof, pull one more guard shift and call it." So I get up there, he's like, "I'll come with you." So you got two, two NCOs up there chilling. We got kit on, our helmets are sitting on, you know, on the ground, we're just laying there, leaning up against like a conduit for air conditioning or some sort of unit.

• 2:32:43Speaker 06

  So you're getting hit by mortar rounds, or they're going, they're shooting, but they're on mobile platforms, so...

• 2:32:49Speaker 05

  Oh, and all our air support left.

• 2:32:50Speaker 06

  All your air support left.

• 2:32:51Speaker 05

  It was just us.

• 2:32:52Speaker 06

  But there's nobody for you to aim at, because they're just, they're wherever they are.

• 2:32:56Speaker 05

  They're, they're just prey and dropping them and hoping they...

• 2:32:59Speaker 06

  And they're just trying to hit, but, but they don't have any, like, FOs out there.

• 2:33:03Speaker 05

  There's not like a, like a, a, a point of origin site that they're launching. There's no pit, right? Everything's in trucks to keep it moving. At this point, the Hueys that the Marines had supplied have already turned around and beat, feet. It's just us. And we're just waiting for nighttime for the boats to come back. We have no exfil plan.

• 2:33:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:33:19Speaker 05

  And it's daylight. We called to see if Task Force would fly for us.

• 2:33:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:33:23Speaker 05

  And they, same thing you just said, Dave. They were like, they said no. And we're like, "I guarantee you, the crew of that is itching to go, and someone being that aircraft's worth too much money."

• 2:33:34Speaker 06

  Same with the AC-130s.

• 2:33:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:33:36Speaker 06

  Those, those guys wanted to fly, but the command is like, "We'd rather lose troops on the ground than an AC-130." One hundred percent.

• 2:33:47Speaker 05

  So...

• 2:33:50Speaker 05

  We get up, we're sitting there chilling. It's dusk, beautiful sunset for a shitty day, honestly, always is, right? And I'm like, yep, I look at my watch, I'm like, fucking done, dude. Done. All I gotta do is get on this stupid boat, drive back to the stupid base, get on a stupid helicopter, get on a stupid plane, fly back to the States, and I'm done. Soon as we stand up, we are shoulder, I mean, our shoulders are touching each other. My right, his left. Soon as we stand up, we're silhouetted, single sniper shot comes, rips right between the two of our heads. And the only reason I know, my right ear started ringing, his left ear was ringing, we both dropped down on top of the roof, and I had lost it at this point, I'm like, I'm so fucking tired of being shot at, dude. All I was thinking was, oh, I'm pulling, I'm gonna do a good D, pull one more.

• 2:34:36Speaker 06

  I'm just trying to survive the next 24 hours.

• 2:34:38Speaker 05

  That's it, just get me the hell out of this country, right? I'm all, the finish line, my toe is touching it. And we dropped down in our first turn down the courtyard, he just has a parent moment, he's like, "God damn it, that's where we wear helmets!", like, it would have mattered for a round that big. Helmet would have just been one thing more to pass on the way to my brain, right? And like, so we climbed down from the roof, and the boats show, at nighttime, boats show up, we get on boats, drive back to the base, I get off, it's about daybreak. By the time we get everything, you know, squared away, I download, I'm shucking, I kept like two mags for me just for the ride back to Biop or Balad, I don't remember where I flew out of. Shuck like all the rest of my rounds out of my mags in the ready room, drop my, you know, whatever I got with me and stays there.

• 2:35:22Speaker 05

  And took two M4 mags and my M4 with me. And I took some pictures up on the roof that morning, that are, some of them are in, some of them are actually meant to be funny, like the Charlie's Angel one is meant to be funny. And we take a few pictures, and that was it. And I got on a helicopter, flew to the main airports there in Iraq, and Biop or Balad, I don't remember, and flew home to the States, and just like that, it was over.

• 2:35:49Speaker 06

  So you got home, you didn't come home with your unit, you got home. And how long did you have to out-process?

• 2:35:58Speaker 05

  Nine days, four of which were weekends, like, five days together. And I'm not making the shit up. I showed up to a meeting on a Tuesday in civilian clothes and she said, I can't have this meeting. The instructor was like E8 and she's like, you can't be in here in civilians. I said, well, I'm not going to be here next Tuesday. I get out of the army in four days. I leave on Saturday and this is only, this meeting is only once a day. And she was like, well, you can't be in here. And I was like, you're going to have to get the fuck over it. And this is in front of like, all these other people getting out, all in their uniforms. And I'm mouthing off to a master sergeant as an E5 in civilians. Like, fuck yourself. Give me the brief. I'm leaving.

• 2:36:38Speaker 06

  And so she gave you the brief?

• 2:36:39Speaker 05

  She gave me the brief, yeah. And I got out in five days, man.

• 2:36:42Speaker 06

  And, and this is one of the things that the army is great at. And this isn't just Rangers. It's just like, you just came back from a combat zone.

• 2:36:50Speaker 05

  I almost got my head blown off.

• 2:36:51Speaker 06

  Four days ago.

• 2:36:52Speaker 05

  Three days ago.

• 2:36:52Speaker 06

  Four days ago, five days ago. And now, uh, welcome to the civilian world.

• 2:36:58Speaker 05

  I'm listening to me E8 tell me I'm in the wrong uniform.

• 2:37:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:37:01Speaker 05

  And you want to talk about trying to bite your tongue? I didn't have the ability at that point to bite my tongue.

• 2:37:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then, and then you're back on the block, right? Then your first Civ Div and?

• 2:37:12Speaker 05

  I got back. Uh, I left on the 21st? 21st I'd left? No, I had to wait till the 23rd because my truck had seized engine. Because, uh, on the deployment before that, we were parked in gravel. You know 275 gravel parking lot?

• 2:37:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, the old gravel.

• 2:37:30Speaker 05

  Well, I got in a slow drip and, uh, I lost all the, the oil. And because it was gravel, there was no slick.

• 2:37:36Speaker 06

  You didn't know, yeah.

• 2:37:37Speaker 05

  So I was driving home on I-5 after we got home from Ramadi 1, left lane, 80 miles an hour, rush hour, in my whole car, every light on, turned up and I lost all control and I had a seized engine. So I had to get my truck fixed before I could even leave. So I get home, have to deal with getting out. My truck is deadlined. I had to take that, get a whole new engine put back in it. And then get my U-Haul, pack all my stuff up. And then I start driving across the country. I think I got to North Carolina at Greensboro like the 26th or 27th.

• 2:38:05Speaker 06

  So, so then, now you're home?

• 2:38:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:38:09Speaker 06

  And, and like, the world is your oyster, right?

• 2:38:12Speaker 05

  Should be. You would think it would be. I've never felt so alone in my entire life.

• 2:38:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:38:17Speaker 05

  And that was one of the things that it took me a minute to realize, actually, kind of making my hair stand up on end, thinking about it is. I didn't realize that I was never alone, right? Like if you're, if you're, when you're in, in the military like that, whether it's stateside or you're in combat zone, like there's always someone with you.

• 2:38:33Speaker 06

  You're going through it as a team.

• 2:38:34Speaker 05

  It's ingrained in you. Where's your, where's your, even from basic, where's your battle buddy, right? Or where you get to battalion, where's your range buddy? You never go anywhere by yourself. And I didn't realize that. Like if you're, if you're in the middle of Afghanistan and you gotta go to the bathroom, someone comes and pulls security for you. There's no, you're never alone. And all of a sudden, it was cricket, cricket. And I was like, I didn't realize how alone I am right now.

• 2:38:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:38:58Speaker 05

  And didn't realize I was that dependent on all those guys. And that they were dependent on me.

• 2:39:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:39:03Speaker 05

  We were all codependent, right? But like you don't see that, cause it's that far in front of your face.

• 2:39:09Speaker 06

  Is it, is it codependent or interdependent?

• 2:39:11Speaker 05

  Probably, it's probably a better word to use.

• 2:39:13Speaker 06

  You know, um, and, and it's interesting.

• 2:39:15Speaker 05

  I don't know, I think there's a flash of codependency in there too.

• 2:39:18Speaker 06

  There probably is, but, but there's also, it's also interesting because it was the guy who never wanted to hang with the other guys. That was always sort of the oddball, right? Like the guy who.

• 2:39:33Speaker 05

  We had our few.

• 2:39:34Speaker 06

  Right, but, but he didn't wanna go, he didn't wanna hang, you know, whether it was to the bar or go to the movies, but he wanted to do everything by himself.

• 2:39:41Speaker 05

  We had a couple of them. What'd you do night? Ah, he's in pajama pants at 10, I'm going to see the late night. Are you, you want anyone to come with you? Nah, I'm good by myself.

• 2:39:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:39:49Speaker 05

  I never went anywhere by myself. We were always at the bars together, a group of at least five of us.

• 2:39:53Speaker 06

  But you wanted to be like.

• 2:39:54Speaker 05

  That was part of it.

• 2:39:55Speaker 06

  That was like, those were the.

• 2:39:56Speaker 05

  How many times you see frat boys out by themselves?

• 2:39:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:39:58Speaker 05

  They're always out as a group. We were frat boys with guns.

• 2:40:01Speaker 06

  Those were the stories that you would tell like following week, right? Was, was like.

• 2:40:05Speaker 05

  What happened at the bar last night?

• 2:40:06Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:40:06Speaker 05

  Oh dude, I cracked this dude in the face, right in Olympia, right in front of the police station, right? We had one dude take eight tasers. He was celebrated in battalion for being a badass for taking eight tasers.

• 2:40:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:40:17Speaker 05

  Case, case got dismissed due to excessive police force, but.

• 2:40:20Speaker 06

  But did he get RFS'd for that? Holy shit, that's amazing.

• 2:40:23Speaker 05

  Court had the paperwork and everything. They dropped the, the DA dropped the case because they hit him with eight tasers.

• 2:40:29Speaker 06

  If the glove does not fit, you must quit.

• 2:40:32Speaker 05

  No, he's, I showed, I would believe it was a lie until he showed me the paperwork.

• 2:40:36Speaker 06

  That's wild.

• 2:40:37Speaker 05

  And he was like, dude, they dropped the whole case.

• 2:40:39Speaker 06

  So, so.

• 2:40:39Speaker 05

  He was one of the snipers that shot the dudes on the pump house.

• 2:40:41Speaker 06

  Really?

• 2:40:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:40:42Speaker 06

  Nah, I, I, I.

• 2:40:45Jack Murphy?

  Served with one gentleman in Ranger Battalion who came through the gate belligerently drunk and opted to fight the MPs.

• 2:40:54Speaker 05

  Ah, it's never gonna work out.

• 2:40:55Jack Murphy?

  It did not work out well, but when they had him on the ground, they decided to fill him in and stomp him a few. And so the whole thing got thrown out because of excessive force.

• 2:41:05Speaker 05

  Same thing.

• 2:41:06Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they went above and beyond.

• 2:41:07Speaker 05

  Yep, and he took the seventh taser and turned around to like all the cops and like hulked out and said, is that all you fucking got? And then they hit him with eight and that dropped him to the ground and he's got, I mean, he burns cars all over him. From the fucking Bronx.

• 2:41:21Speaker 06

  That, that, that is legendary.

• 2:41:24Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, I'm not gonna say his last name, his first name's John, he's a great dude.

• 2:41:27Speaker 06

  That, that is legendary. It's, um, but, but so you now, after four years of, let's not even talk about the combat aspect of it, but four years of having a purpose, having a mission, having a family, some you hated, but they were still your family.

• 2:41:52Speaker 05

  Always.

• 2:41:55Speaker 06

  Now, you're sitting where?

• 2:41:59Speaker 05

  Greensboro in North Carolina.

• 2:42:00Speaker 06

  By yourself?

• 2:42:01Speaker 05

  I was living with my girlfriend.

• 2:42:03Speaker 06

  With your girlfriend?

• 2:42:03Speaker 05

  Full-time job, but when she left for work in the morning, it was just me.

• 2:42:06Speaker 06

  And, and?

• 2:42:08Speaker 05

  But I was, I was productive as shit, like dude, housework was done.

• 2:42:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:42:13Speaker 05

  Everything, all the clean, bed made. I mean, we, we weren't dirty people. I have OCD. She's the same. So like our house is already clean, but I'd be like vacuuming lines in the carpet because I'm bored. And then it'd be like nine o'clock, I'd be like, oh, I'm going to get shitfaced because there's nothing to do.

• 2:42:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, and so that's, that's what you do is you get drunk because it passes the time.

• 2:42:30Speaker 05

  I'd be wasted by noon.

• 2:42:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:42:32Speaker 05

  And then I'd be going back at about three for another case.

• 2:42:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:42:35Speaker 05

  And that'd be hiding them in the toolbox of my truck so she wouldn't know about it.

• 2:42:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, and, and how long did that go on for?

• 2:42:40Speaker 05

  Hmm, three and a half months.

• 2:42:44Speaker 05

  So she moved and was like.

• 2:42:47Speaker 06

  Till she was done with it?

• 2:42:48Speaker 05

  We got back together after that.

• 2:42:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:42:50Speaker 05

  For another years after that, but it got to the point where I wasn't able to pull myself out of it.

• 2:42:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:42:57Speaker 05

  And she deserved better than me, honestly. I mean, I.

• 2:43:00Speaker 06

  Deserved better than what?

• 2:43:02Speaker 05

  What I was giving her.

• 2:43:02Speaker 06

  Where were you?

• 2:43:03Speaker 05

  I was not putting out what I should have been putting out.

• 2:43:06Speaker 06

  And, and so where, where did the change start to happen for you or what? What, can you, can you tell us about that?

• 2:43:14Speaker 05

  Sure. Um, so the first year was incredibly hard. After her and I split, I moved back up to Boston. Uh, and was doing shipyard work with my dad again. That's like my fallback when everything, anyone, you know, anything would happen growing up. And, um, so I was up there from probably May of oh seven till July, uh, I'm sorry, to December of oh seven. And I called my mother, who I did not have the greatest relationship in the world with at that point, uh, due to some of her activities. And she was like, hey, your old room is still here. We have, you know, my brother and sister were still in high school. But your room is still here. You have your own bathroom. Come down. There's more opportunity for you down here.

• 2:43:59Speaker 06

  Where was she?

• 2:43:59Speaker 05

  South Carolina.

• 2:44:00Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:44:01Speaker 05

  Greenville to be specific. And, um, so she's like, hey, move back down here and, you know, there's some opportunity down here. I've told people about you. And maybe you'll have a better opportunity here than up there. You know, I mean, I know you're tired of working in the yard, right? And so I'm like, against my, what I thought was my better judgment. I was like, okay, you're right. I'm, I'm not doing anything here. I'm just drinking myself to death. Right? All right, let's try something new. That, that didn't work. I moved down. I was home for two weeks. And, uh, my stepfather had borrowed my truck and went to Ace Hardware to go, uh, get some shit that wouldn't fit in his, his car. And he ran into this guy that worked at this unbelievable company, North American Rescue. They make the cat tourniquet.

• 2:44:42Speaker 05

  Um, a ton of bandages that you guys have seen, uh, trauma dressings, gauze, stuff like that. I'm not a medic, but, uh, the guy that was in the, in the parking lot was the third range of battalion senior medic and he was with R and D as well. Saw the ranger tab and scroll in the back of the truck and approached my stepfather and said, hey, are you in battalion? He goes, no, it's my stepson. He goes, is he in or is he still, is he, you know, still in or is he out? He goes, no, he's out. He goes, how's he doing?

• 2:45:10Speaker 05

  Right, and my stepdad, to his credit, he looked at me, he was like, "Not well." "Just 100%, like, not good to this stranger in a parking lot, like, not well, dude." And he, like, handed him a business card, he goes, "Hey, have him give me a call, we'll go to lunch." So, unbeknownst to me, that lunch was an interview process. So, we go to lunch, I don't even remember where, nowhere special. Have lunch, we shoot the shit for a little bit, takes me back, shows me the office, shows me the facility, shows me where we're gonna be moving to, the new building, all this, yeah. And he's like, "Hey, we got a trip coming up in two days, we're flying down to SOCOM, to brief SOCOM in, uh, was it Tampa, I believe, right?"

• 2:45:50Speaker 05

  He's like, "Yep, we're gonna private jet it down there, and we have a PowerPoint presentation we're gonna put on for SOCOM. You're interested in coming?" I was like, "Yeah, let's go." And I felt like I was like, "Oh shit, did you say SOCOM? Fuck, let's go."

• 2:46:03Speaker 06

  But he hasn't said anything about a job yet.

• 2:46:06Speaker 05

  No, he just asked if I wanted to, he just wanted to see if I wanted to come, you know? And so we go down there, and I walk in, and like, one dude looks at me, he's like, "Waterhouse?" And I'm like, "Oh my god, what are you..." I see this dude I hadn't seen in like, three years.

• 2:46:18Speaker 06

  Had you been, had you, in this time, had you been in contact with your old guys?

• 2:46:23Speaker 05

  Hardly at all.

• 2:46:24Speaker 06

  Or did you, you'd cut it off?

• 2:46:25Speaker 05

  I talked to Jay a little bit about football.

• 2:46:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:46:27Speaker 05

  Uh, 'cause he was a huge Seahawks fan, if you remember. Um, I talked to him about football a few times, but not really, I was, I-

• 2:46:35Speaker 06

  Once you're out, it feels like you're gone, right?

• 2:46:37Speaker 05

  I felt completely out of the loop, you know, it's like, I don't know, I almost felt like me calling them, especially because I was drinking, and my doing the drunk dial call, you know, like-

• 2:46:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:46:46Speaker 05

  You're calling back the next day after you look at your call log, like, "Hey, sorry", like, when you're apologizing for shit, you don't even remember what you said.

• 2:46:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:46:53Speaker 05

  Problem. And, uh, so no, so we, we do the SOCOM thing, and I, I see a dude I hadn't seen in a long time. And like, I kinda just like, fell back into it, and we give the brief, and I'm like, he, we get home and we land, and I'm like, "Hey, thank you so much, you know, for, for allowing me to come along, that was, that was really cool, it was good to, you know, be back around the guys for a minute." And he was like, "You want a job?" I was like- He goes, do you have a job? And I was like, I'm looking. He goes, are you really looking? And I was like, not really. Nah, not really at all. I had no VA benefits or anything. And I was a broke ass soldier that had no direction. And so I got the job. And he was like, we'll start you out at like $45,000 a year. That was more than I was making in the army and he shot at, so yeah, let's go.

• 2:47:39Speaker 05

  So I started working there. I worked there for about two and a half years. And I will, I will attribute that company taking a chance on me, even though I was a non-medic for taking a chance on a vet. And that changed my life for us. That's cool. Started to change my life. I mean, it took them, it didn't happen overnight. Sure. But it was, it was that morsel that I could like see that I was like, hey, this is tangible. Right. I can, this is something I can do. We were doing a lot of training, helping a lot of like SWAT teams and, you know, there were some soft guys that came through, through there too. And we got a facility built in this warehouse and, you know, there was, you know, Conex boxes you could, you know, do shit and do medical stuff in. Definitely 99% geared towards the medical, but one of the things that was cool is I brought the tactical side too. Right. So, I mean, we thrive ourselves in, in, especially in soft, on tactical medicine, right? Right.

• 2:48:24Speaker 05

  So like I was able to look at, they're doing all their med stuff and I come up to a dude and be like, do you really think you're pulling security in the right place right now? You know, I mean, something the medic wouldn't be able to, or necessarily pay attention to was what I was focused on. Right. You're hiding behind a tree that's this big. I mean, how many times have you heard people say that to you when you're going through training? Were you sleeping in range? You see that giant oak tree? You're hiding behind one that's this big. Why don't you move two feet to the left? Yeah. And so like, I kind of found my niche in there. And then we started to, you know, I went to a bunch of trade shows, was able to talk the craft and be able to talk to, you know, EMS guys, you know, SWAT, SWAT medics and army medics about like, you know, hey, here's some of the stuff that's in the pipeline. Here's what you need to know. Push tourniquets on your guys, you know, blah, blah, blah. And like, so I kind of developed like.

• 2:49:09Speaker 05

  A knack for the verag- the vernacular of like what how a medic would talk to his dudes.

• 2:49:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:49:14Speaker 05

  And I remember one of the first things I did after I kind of got ingrained in this is I called all the dudes that I was in that were still in. And I was like, go to the medical classes, dude. Cause once you get to be a tab or an NCO, you're like, hey, privates, go do medical shit and you'll sit in your room and play Xbox. Cause fuck that. I know everything. I don't need to. I'm like, go to the med classes, dude. We were just really lucky.

• 2:49:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:49:34Speaker 05

  That no one really like, we didn't need to implement that as much as we possibly could have, right? And so like, that was the first thing that jumped off the page with me was we didn't pay, we didn't give that enough mind. We were focused on doing warfighter shit.

• 2:49:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:49:48Speaker 05

  But that's a, that is just as equal, if not as important a component of it. And it was, it was always kind of brushed off to the side as an afterthought.

• 2:49:57Speaker 06

  So do you, do you think that um, this being sort of the start of your, is healing process, is that the right?

• 2:50:08Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 2:50:09Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:50:10Speaker 05

  I think acceptance first and that be, that is what began it to me. I was like, yes, this happened to you. Yes, you feel these things, but this, this can't be. I want my time there to be something that I did and in a hell of an experience that I shared with all these dudes, but it is not what defines me a hundred percent as who I am as a human.

• 2:50:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:50:33Speaker 05

  It is, it cannot be the catalyst for everything that is David Waterhouse.

• 2:50:39Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:50:39Speaker 05

  There is other parts of me too. I like to golf, man. I like to, you know, I like to grow cucumbers and tomatoes and shit like.

• 2:50:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:50:45Speaker 05

  You know, like that's, that's not every. Yeah, I'm a dad. Um, you know, I'm going to my kids' band practice and, you know, school plays and stuff and you know, it's like, that's not what solely defines me.

• 2:50:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. So during this, during sort of your dark period before this job and even after it maybe, but during that, did you know, did you know what was like? Did you know you were in a dark period? Did you know what was eating at you? Or did? Because obviously, it's a number of things, right? It's operator syndrome. It might be post-traumatic. It might be TBIs. It's a loss of purpose. Like, it's a lot of things. But did you know that? Or did you just like? Was it just like this morass? And you just felt down and didn't know what to do about it?

• 2:51:35Speaker 05

  It dragged on for a minute.

• 2:51:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:51:37Speaker 05

  And more than that.

• 2:51:38Speaker 06

  And so was it getting a job? That somebody like taking a chance on you? Or was it getting this job to put you back in the community? That you loved?

• 2:51:53Speaker 05

  Both. And I don't talk about this in the documentary. But that job was amazing. It saved my life for sure. But I still wanted to have fun. I worked there for two and a half years the first time. And we had a change of command, if you will. And I remember going to work one day. And I was like, I can't do this anymore. Because I didn't. They had changed the culture of the place when it was bought.

• 2:52:21Speaker 05

  And I remember walking in for the first day. And on-company time. On-company computer. I mean, I was salaried, so it didn't matter. But like, and I walked in, I sat down at my desk. And I was, I had all my, you know? My frames, picture, you know, a platoon picture from each deployment. Some cool guy shots, some awards, some, you know, my POW MIA flag, my American flag. And I was looking around and I was like, what the fuck am I doing here? This sucks.

• 2:52:50Speaker 05

  And I Googled triple canopy. And I went to work for a defense contractor as a private security personnel back in Iraq in 2010, 2011. I couldn't get enough. It's a drug.

• 2:53:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:53:00Speaker 05

  And I did a couple of rotations over there. And in Baghdad again, I was close to the embassy where I was back in before. It was crazy to see how that had changed. But I Attributed to, you know, someone that's, you know, addicted to, you know, like opiates or drugs or some sort, like, once it's in you, like, it's always gonna live there. Like, sometimes it's gonna be a little, a little spark, sometimes it's gonna be a bonfire, but it's always gonna be lit. That pilot light's always lit.

• 2:53:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:27Speaker 05

  And I don't know if that goes away. From what I have talked to a lot of dudes, and it's okay, I don't want it to go away to an extent.

• 2:53:32Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 2:53:33Speaker 05

  But I don't want it to consume me or control my life. Those are two different things. It's okay to feel that, but...

• 2:53:38Jack Murphy?

  Where did the documentary come into play? Like, when did that come up on your radar? How did that come about?

• 2:53:44Speaker 05

  Well, I, uh, there was a, the director of the documentary, Sean, actually lived right next door to me. And, uh, he was, I've known him since he was seven years old, uh, when we moved in next door. And he loved to do the Army in the Woods thing. And, um, when I came back, he was, he's about my brother's age, about thirty-two, thirty-two right now. So when I came back, he was like in his late teens, he was under twenty, maybe nineteen, twenty, something like that. And I came back and, you know, I'm like, you know, he's super been in the military or interested in the military for his whole life. He wanted, his thing was, you know, he wanted to be like Marine Force Recon was his big thing. And, but he was, you know, unable to get in or whatever. And so he started coming over and

• 2:54:29Speaker 05

  we just kind of, almost like a therapy session, and me just like telling him, or like showing him some videos or some pictures and stuff. Like, oh yeah, here's this, you know, here's, you know, when we were on this mission, this, that. And I'm showing all of it to him. He's like, dude, we should write this down. We should write a book. And so he started taking notes, just in the garage, with the two of us just sitting there smoking and joking, you know. And he started writing the shit down. And he was like, dude, people would wanna read this. Now, this is like ten years ago, longer, fifteen years ago, that he started doing all this and jotting all this shit down. And he's like, you know, we got to like four hundred pages of this manuscript, right?

• 2:55:09Speaker 05

  And like we were on like the second deployment. I was like, dude, this thing's gonna be like a three thousand page book. Like this is not something that we can tell this way. And we don't know anything about writing books. But we both like movies, we both like docs, we both like, you know, fall asleep to a movie almost every night, you know? And so we're like, well, let's just try our hand at it. And he'd done a lot of video footage and stuff like that. And he'd always had an interest in film. So we're like, well, the stuff's starting to escape me a little bit. I'm not quite as sharp as I used to be. Maybe we should jot this stuff down. And maybe just put it, you know, try it on camera. That way, you know, my kids can see, you know, that's why, you know, he's a little, he's a little off from center.

• 2:55:52Speaker 05

  And, you know, here's why, before I start, you know, losing all this information or, you know, it starts to run together too much. And then when we put it all together and it was like four days, three and a half days of shooting, the first day was an absolute waste. I had never spoken on camera before. Takes a moment. And, you know, the thing like I, when I was growing up in high school, my mom made me take debate and debate too. And I hated her for it. But then when you're up in front of the RS or the Command Sergeant Major and the battalion commander giving a brief and you can like articulate, I'm like, thanks, mom. I appreciate you pushing me through that. Hated you at the time, but it actually served me. And so I, I don't have a problem talking in front of people,

• 2:56:35Speaker 05

  but the camera doesn't give you any response. Right. You don't know if you're the comedian that's bombing. Like if you're bombing in somewhere, like you're gonna know, the audience is gonna let you know you suck. Right. Staring at the little blinking red light on the top of camera is strangely one of the most intimidating things I've ever done in my life for the first day. Yeah. And so like I went home and I was like, that was terrible. That was just terrible. And.

• 2:56:59Speaker 05

  I was like, okay, so I got in front of the mirror and I was like, alright, you can cheat shit out of yourself. And I started like coaching myself like a NFL player, like watching tape. And I had him send me a few clips and I was like sitting on my front porch, I must have watched him like 20, 30 times the first night. Cause we were filming three, four days in a row. So I knew next, you know, tomorrow I'm back on this. So I went home and did my, my studying. And got back the next day and we filmed for about two and a half more days after that. Got about eight and a half, nine hours of footage. Cut it down to, I think the doc comes in at about 154, 155. Um, and, uh, and we were able to, you know, he was able to do a great job condensing it down and, and doing a great job editing. And, uh, we, I still, when it was all done, I was like, I still don't know if anyone's gonna watch this.

• 2:57:45Speaker 05

  And he was like, let's just kind of beta test it, send it out to a few people, gauge their response. And the response came back pretty overwhelmingly that like, hey, this is something people might wanna watch. And so we just kind of, on no, we had no idea what we were doing. We've never.

• 2:58:01Speaker 06

  And how long ago was this that that happened?

• 2:58:05Speaker 05

  Two and, two and a half years ago, probably when we started doing the filming. It took about six months to edit. And then we did, uh, entered it into a bunch of film festivals and then we got very positive review back from that. And then we started to look at, okay, well, we won some awards, uh, you know, honorable mention and a few, you know, a couple of good awards and. Okay. Well, like, well, let's see if we can find a way to put this on a streaming platform and kind of just. Reached out to Amazon Prime and they were like, yeah, it usually takes between six to eight weeks to get some feedback. You know, yes or no. And like 10 days later, they were like, yeah, it's a solid yes.

• 2:58:42Speaker 06

  That's phenomenal.

• 2:58:43Speaker 05

  And then just like that, it happened. I mean, it was literally, it was literally like that. And it was like, hey, you, you have a movie on Amazon Prime now. And I'm like. I'm not prepared for this and like I had another little mini melted little mini meltdown. Like my wife had to take my phone from me for like two days. She's like, you, you were about to freak the fuck, not like out of happiness. I was overwhelmed because I was getting calls from people I hadn't talked to in 15, 20 years.

• 2:59:10Speaker 06

  That's amazing though, isn't it?

• 2:59:12Speaker 05

  And they're pouring out like, hey, this story helped my wife understand me better. Like she sees like what we went through and I always equate it to, you know, and I know I, I briefly mentioned it when we were chatting earlier, but it's like, man, me and my wife have been together for 11 years, like nothing I say, unless I'm like, get your shit, get in the car is gonna be like as effective as someone else saying it to you.

• 2:59:36Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:59:36Speaker 05

  Cause you just, you're around someone all the time. You kind of get dismissive, not on purpose.

• 2:59:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:59:40Speaker 05

  Hey, I heard you. I've heard this story before, whatever.

• 2:59:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:59:43Speaker 05

  But if someone else responds to that and tells the same story to that person, like all of a sudden it's got a different, takes on a different shape, right?

• 2:59:51Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:59:52Speaker 05

  And so a lot of the guys were reaching out, like my wife and my kids and my aunts and uncles and grandparents and mothers and fathers have seen this and you know, now all of a sudden they're like, oh my God, you were there with this dude while he was doing all this shit? It was like, yeah, I was in the same platoon with him the whole time.

• 3:00:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:00:07Speaker 05

  You know, with Tony and, and you know, even though, um, Nick was in third platoon, like we all, first and third platoon, I always got along. No one really liked second platoon. First and third, we were right above each other on, on the floor. So we, we, we shared enough space. We shared the same hallway.

• 3:00:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:00:22Speaker 05

  Uh, or the same stairway. So like, but, and that's just that fun shit. Like ECO doesn't like ACOs. Yeah. I mean, that's like sibling rivalry and shit, right? Everybody loves each other.

• 3:00:32Speaker 06

  Isn't it weird though, how that whole like authority thing is that, that you can tell a person you're intimate with, you can tell them a hundred times, like something or, or like you say, like this is what I went through and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:50Speaker 05

  Heard you.

• 3:00:51Speaker 06

  I heard, yeah. But then they watch somebody, they watch somebody completely different.

• 3:00:57Speaker 06

  On the screen, say the exact same thing and it's like, oh my gosh, this is crazy.

• 3:01:03Speaker 05

  And that was the thing that blindsided me. I did not see that coming. So like, I thought it would be fun for the boys and for the kids. I had no idea that I'd be sitting here in Brooklyn, New York, having a great conversation with you, Joe. You know what I mean? Like, I never saw this in a million years.

• 3:01:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you, you don't really understand like how it's gonna affect people downstream.

• 3:01:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, you're like, I hope this goes over well, but if it doesn't, I may be, I may have mud on my face, you know, like, this could piss a lot of people off. And if, you know, if people don't react the way that it's intended to be, you know, trade.

• 3:01:34Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 3:01:34Speaker 05

  Um, and you just never know, but you know, everybody, all the boys have just been amazing.

• 3:01:39Speaker 06

  That's cool. I, I think, I think that

• 3:01:45Speaker 06

  I, I, there are, there are always gonna be haters, for whatever reason. There, there will always be haters. But I, I think that

• 3:01:53Speaker 06

  as long as you tell the truth as you know it, and you know, there isn't, uh, there isn't a lot of, you know, sort of self-promotion, and there isn't a lot of, um,

• 3:02:12Speaker 06

  fabrication. I, I think that's where guys start to

• 3:02:17Speaker 05

  Veer off that path.

• 3:02:18Speaker 06

  Veer off that path.

• 3:02:20Jack Murphy?

  Is this a commentary on current events there, uh, Mr. Park?

• 3:02:23Speaker 06

  It's a commentary on eternal events, um, some of which may be current. But, but, you know, it's, it's one of those things, I, because, you know, Jack and I have talked about this on the show is that, uh, you know, Jack says that like, he gets, you know, requests from kids, not kids, but adults, all the time, saying, hey, I'd, I'd like to know more about what my dad did in Vietnam, because he's gone now and he never talked about it. And, um, and the thing is, is if he had talked about it, they probably wouldn't have listened, because it's your, it's

• 3:02:59Speaker 05

  It's your dad.

• 3:02:59Speaker 06

  Because he's your dad.

• 3:03:00Speaker 05

  Dude, my kids are not.

• 3:03:01Jack Murphy?

  And also when you're a kid, it, yeah.

• 3:03:04Speaker 06

  You know?

• 3:03:05Speaker 05

  I love my children more than anything in this world. My kids are not the slightest bit impressed by me. You wanna talk about being humbled out, right? Where you like, you go out and people were like, I do, I was standing in the gas station the other day and I'm wearing my socks hat and I'm like, I look over and this dude's just like, I'm like,

• 3:03:23Speaker 05

  I didn't even dawn on me, I'm like, eh, why is this guy fucking bad dogging me in line? And then I'm like, oh shit, he may have seen the fucking thing. And he's, not a lot of people where I come from in South Carolina, wearing Red Sox hats with a, you know, fucking cabin scroll on their forearm at the gas station buying a pack of smokes or something. And I'm like looking at this dude and I started to get uncomfortable and I'm like, oh, he probably doesn't know where he recognized.

• 3:03:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:03:42Speaker 05

  My kids completely unimpressed. They, I'm just Dave to them.

• 3:03:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:03:46Speaker 05

  They don't give a shit. And you know what? Then I did my job right.

• 3:03:48Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:03:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:03:49Speaker 05

  I don't want them knowing like any of the shit that we're talking about.

• 3:03:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:03:52Speaker 05

  They know now, they're old enough, right?

• 3:03:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:03:54Speaker 05

  Fifteen, thirteen, sixteen, fourteen, twelve now.

• 3:03:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:03:57Speaker 05

  They're not dumb, they've seen the, they've seen the movie at this point, but

• 3:04:02Speaker 05

  I don't want them to look at me as like Ranger Dave. I want them to be like, hey, that's the dude that comes to my band practice. So that's the dude that, yeah, tell me, you know, I love you baby, you know, you seem tight, you good, you need anything, you know?

• 3:04:12Jack Murphy?

  Do we have questions for, for Dave?

• 3:04:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:04:16Jack Murphy?

  I, it, it's interesting. I mean, I've had, you know, old school veterans from back in the day even tell me that they would not want to come on this show and talk simply because, yeah, go ahead, you can light up. Um,

• 3:04:33Jack Murphy?

  they just don't want to come on a show like this. Like it's happy to like, they'll have a coffee or a beer with me and talk about it. But they're like, I don't want to go on something like this because like it'll completely change my kids' perceptions of me. And, and like when they say they're kids, they're talking about like forty year olds. You know?

• 3:04:51Speaker 05

  They're always going to be your kids.

• 3:04:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:52Speaker 05

  My dad told me this when I was a kid. He goes, you know what the biggest problem about kids is? You fuckers never go away. And I did, I thought, I was like, you're a dick dude. And then I got to be a parent and I was like, yeah, that dude's a hundred percent right.

• 3:05:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:05:03Speaker 05

  No, we're always going to be with, they're always going to be your children.

• 3:05:05Jack Murphy?

  Their kids remember them as like a loving father and they don't want to change that perception for them.

• 3:05:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:05:11Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 3:05:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:11Speaker 06

  Well, and they, the other thing is, what I was going to say is, like your documentary, um, I mean, our show hopes to capture the same thing, right? Our show hopes to be a personal documentary, um, for all of our guests where whether it's their family that watches it or people who, you know, are trying to find out more about their parents and their parents may have worked with this person or done similar things that, you know, there are pieces of history that, that, personal history that...

• 3:05:47Speaker 06

  I mean, it's it's an honor to capture that.

• 3:05:50Speaker 05

  And that was one of the things, you know, there's so many guys and I know you guys had, uh, my brother told me you guys had like a Lurps guy on from Vietnam the other day. I'd love to have a conversation with him. I mean, I I used to work with the guy, uh, Tom Eagles at North American Rescue. He was the most decorated medic from Vietnam. Spent six years over there.

• 3:06:07Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 3:06:07Speaker 05

  Unbelievable. Yeah, he's just, I mean, he's but he's late, you know, he's he's he's passed away a couple of years ago, but unbelievable guy.

• 3:06:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:06:15Speaker 05

  And actually introduced was part of the the team that introduced the original granular quick clot to the army. He was kind of spearhead that program. I mean, I know that used to burn a lot of pills, better than what we had at the time.

• 3:06:25Speaker 06

  Sure, sure.

• 3:06:26Speaker 05

  And so, I mean, he was just instrumental in that. And, you know, to sit down and hear his stories was just incredible. Yeah, you're just like, just a totally different, like, theater of war, like, time and place, civil unrest, I mean, just all the different dynamics that were going on and just to listen to him. He was one of the last, you know, the embassy picture with the helicopter taken off?

• 3:06:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:06:47Speaker 05

  He was like on the bird right before. He was like one of the last dudes out, yeah. And it was pretty crazy.

• 3:06:52Speaker 06

  Um, and and so, uh, be before we get to the questions, tell us about this.

• 3:06:59Speaker 05

  Okay, so, uh, FFH Foundation is Further Faster Harder Foundation. Uh, it is a company that was started, uh, further faster harder, uh, further faster and fight harder is obviously part of the range of creed. So we we played on words like that. It is a nonprofit organization that my brother, um, is the CEO and, uh, founder of, co-founder of. And we are, uh, we were just kind of getting off the ground. We're a nonprofit, but we've we're putting together our first documentary now, uh, which is about the impact of Hurricane Colleen, uh, Helene, excuse me, on the on kind of the Florida Gulf Coast and the Carolinas and Georgia and North Carolina. And so we started that foundation.

• 3:07:40Speaker 05

  It was kind of in response to the documentary coming out where we realized that there are so many dudes similar to me and the people that I know that have stories to tell. And want to, you know, in a way, talk this out so that they're not walking around just internalizing all this, right? And what our main objective is, whether it's through art, storytelling, is to give those vets that have been somewhere, that may feel alone, that may feel like they have a story to tell, that want to tell. And we've been lucky to be afforded this platform to be able to tell our story.

• 3:08:20Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 3:08:21Speaker 05

  And what we want to do is open up that platform to have other veterans be able to tell their stories and explain how they feel and how it impacted them and their family members. And hopefully through all that, you know, have a healing,

• 3:08:39Speaker 05

  just a healing feeling, you know, like you're not alone, like, you know, you're not the only one that did this. I mean, we don't have to be from the same unit, from the same branch. We don't have to serve the same time. That's all irrelevant, but like, you went through a lot of things to do what you did to serve this country. Some good, some bad, some indifferent. Do you want to talk? Do you want to, you know, help? Maybe you saying something could help someone else out.

• 3:09:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:09:05Speaker 05

  And I just think a lot of people don't have that platform. And so that's what we tried to do, and my brother especially has worked extremely hard with Further Faster Harder Foundation, giving people that platform to be able to help other people as well.

• 3:09:21Speaker 06

  And where can people find that?

• 3:09:23Speaker 05

  There is a Further Faster Harder Foundation, is it .org? Yeah, Further Faster Harder .org. Further Faster Harder .org? And is there any other place to? Instagram. And that is the hashtag.

• 3:09:41Speaker 05

  FFH underscore foundation.

• 3:09:43Speaker 06

  Okay, and the links will be in the description below. And then in terms of, before we get to the questions, in terms of like your healing, your process, outside of, you know, finding new purpose, finding other things, have you pursued like a psychedelic ganglion box or psychedelics or therapy or like, are there any things that have made a difference for you?

• 3:10:10Speaker 05

  Gummies.

• 3:10:13Speaker 06

  Gummies?

• 3:10:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, gummies have helped a lot, both CBD and regular.

• 3:10:18Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 3:10:20Speaker 05

  Nothing anything serious.

• 3:10:21Speaker 06

  They like calm you or relax you?

• 3:10:23Speaker 05

  It calms me enough that my brain isn't running a thousand miles a minute.

• 3:10:26Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 3:10:27Speaker 05

  And like I said before, I have OCD, so you're already dealing with that is like kind of something that is the sink clean or the dishes done.

• 3:10:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:10:34Speaker 05

  And then you add this in if you know you're having a day and like that just takes the edge off, man.

• 3:10:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:10:38Speaker 05

  When I went to the VA, and no offense to them, I mean, I'm a hundred percent permanent in total, right? Body's pretty banked up, but one of the things they were like, hey, you know, you have chronic pain, you know, you want like oxys or roxy's and I was like, absolutely not.

• 3:10:53Speaker 06

  No, yeah.

• 3:10:53Speaker 05

  I was like, no, and they're like, well, what do you do? I was like, well, I smoke.

• 3:10:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:10:57Speaker 05

  You know, I'll take some gummies or whatever, just to chill, that's it.

• 3:10:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:10:59Speaker 05

  I don't do anything else. I said, all I want is my eight hundred milligram ibuprofen, that's it.

• 3:11:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:03Speaker 05

  I went there three times, but the third time, the guy looked over his glasses, he goes, you fit the model of non-seeking drug behavior. You can have anything you want. And I was like, I don't want shit.

• 3:11:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:12Speaker 05

  All I want is that.

• 3:11:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:13Speaker 05

  Natural shit and I'm out.

• 3:11:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:15Speaker 05

  And that is, you know, thank God we're kind of getting into the, a little bit more of a society where that's more socially acceptable.

• 3:11:23Speaker 06

  Right, and hopefully.

• 3:11:24Speaker 05

  Especially here in New York.

• 3:11:25Speaker 06

  Hopefully one of these, one of these days, the VA will catch up with us.

• 3:11:28Speaker 05

  I have a feeling it's not long off.

• 3:11:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:30Speaker 05

  Because a lot of people, when I told them that I told them that, that they were like, you're never gonna get a hundred percent disability because you told them you smoke.

• 3:11:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:38Speaker 05

  They've never brought it up ever again.

• 3:11:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:40Speaker 05

  And that was like five years, seven years ago.

• 3:11:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:42Speaker 05

  When I first started the process, so.

• 3:11:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're gonna self-medication.

• 3:11:46Speaker 05

  And my VA's in Asheville, North Carolina, which is a hippie town that works too for me.

• 3:11:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:49Speaker 05

  So I mean, yeah, I'm not, I'll take every advantage I can.

• 3:11:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:52Speaker 05

  But yeah, no, just, just little thing, I mean, nothing crazy.

• 3:11:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:55Speaker 05

  You know, I'd much rather be coherent and.

• 3:11:57Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:11:58Speaker 05

  I don't want to be a vegetable, I don't want my stuff, you know what I mean?

• 3:12:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:12:01Speaker 05

  I'm not a drug dude, but up, up, yeah.

• 3:12:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:12:05Jack Murphy?

  Joe, thank you very much. Thoughts on National Guard Ranger Battalion rumors?

• 3:12:12Speaker 05

  As far as I know, and I'm a little out of the game, but as far as I know, I do not believe you would have to enlist for active duty in order to get into Ranger Battalion. Unless they have changed something dramatically, there is no path from the National Guard to like a RIP contract, or a RASP, excuse me, it's different now, Ranger Assessment and Selection Program is what it's called now. There is not a direct path from the National Guard, no matter what your MOS is, to get into Battalion that way. However, it may be something, if you were interested in going to Ranger School to get your TAB, that may be something like an enlistment bonus, or something that you could do to potentially get that like written in.

• 3:12:54Jack Murphy?

  I think there's been like this informal, maybe it's been written about like some white papers in defense magazines, that should we have a National Guard Ranger Battalion?

• 3:13:03Speaker 05

  Kind of like there's an SF, uh, okay.

• 3:13:05Jack Murphy?

  But I would argue, no.

• 3:13:08Speaker 05

  Do you really want those people running around America all that much?

• 3:13:10Jack Murphy?

  Being a Samurai requires complete devotion to the art of the blade. You can't just do it part-time.

• 3:13:17Speaker 05

  It's not a half-assed job. You can't do it and go to work at a factory for five days and do it twice in two days. It is a lifestyle that you have to be complete, it's like being in the NFL, you're either in it or you're not.

• 3:13:27Speaker 06

  I would say, so I think SF Guard works, because I think that, that bringing in civilian skills into the Special Forces Arena helps.

• 3:13:38Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 3:13:39Speaker 06

  I would say that if they ever thought about a Ranger Battalion, or a Ranger Guard Unit, it would have to be modeled after a SEAL Reserve Unit, which is, you can only go if you've been actively.

• 3:13:54Speaker 05

  Previously, yeah.

• 3:13:56Speaker 06

  Because you have to have that, that foundation of knowing what everybody else is doing at all times.

• 3:14:07Speaker 05

  Well, I think that's one of the huge things that's overlooked in general, is one of the things that I didn't notice, even though I was like, hey, I want to go be an Army Ranger, this is what I want to do, I was pretty certain before I went in, that's what, I was 100% certain that's what I wanted to do.

• 3:14:22Speaker 05

  I had no idea how the structure worked until I got to battalion.

• 3:14:25Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:14:26Speaker 05

  I was like, oh, okay, I see the tiers now. I see who I enjoy working with. I see who I'd rather not work with depending, yeah. And I think being on that level and operating at that level kind of opens your eyes to like just the whole power structure of how not only like elements break down, but like what elements do what.

• 3:14:46Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:14:46Speaker 05

  And SF mission is different than a Ranger mission, which is different than a Delta mission, which is different than a Dev crew mission, right? Everybody's got their own little area of expertise. Like, it's gonna be hard for a 25-man SF unit to secure an entire airfield. You need a company of Rangers, 100 dudes to do that, right? But I mean, we can't take a city. We need conventional forces, but divisions to do that, right? So getting to the point where you understand the hierarchy, not that it's a hierarchy of I'm better than you. It's a hierarchy of necessity of battle space and understanding that. And I think that's one of the things that I was blind to coming in. I was like, oh, they're all this. And it's like, no, these are the specialties and here's the differences.

• 3:15:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:15:32Speaker 05

  And certain things are applicable in places and certain things aren't. And which is why we have the diversity we have, which is why it works.

• 3:15:39Speaker 06

  I, I.

• 3:15:39Speaker 05

  Send, send 100 Rangers to Africa or to, you know, to Colombia for, it's not gonna work out.

• 3:15:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:15:46Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? Like, I'm just being honest.

• 3:15:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and they're, they're like, even just on a, like a fundamental level, like, I don't think anybody does fire and maneuver the way Ranger battalion does. Like, you know, fire team movements, like, I'm up, he sees, like, nobody does that the way Rangers do it. Nobody does.

• 3:16:12Speaker 05

  But they are the.

• 3:16:15Speaker 05

  Obviously, the considered, right? The most elite.

• 3:16:18Speaker 06

  Light infantry in the world.

• 3:16:20Speaker 05

  In the world. And there's a reason for that.

• 3:16:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:16:23Speaker 05

  We train.

• 3:16:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:16:25Speaker 05

  They, there's no, this is not a nine to five. This is a, we'll fucking let you know when we're done with you.

• 3:16:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:16:30Speaker 05

  And then, then you can go get shitfaced and party in the barracks.

• 3:16:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 3:16:34Speaker 05

  You go out and burn the town down or whatever. But like, you're getting your work in first.

• 3:16:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:16:39Speaker 05

  Always.

• 3:16:39Speaker 06

  And for reasons like, and for reasons like that, I think that the only way you could ever look at having a, a guard unit is, like I said.

• 3:16:49Speaker 05

  Previous.

• 3:16:49Speaker 06

  If, if their previous service, the same way the SEALs do.

• 3:16:51Speaker 05

  No, I, I, I think that, that would, I agree with you.

• 3:16:54Speaker 06

  Um, Joe, thank you very much. Which, uh, SMU impressed you the most? CAG, Dev Group, HRT, The Hill?

• 3:17:06Jack Murphy?

  Who's tougher, Force Recon or Navy SEALs?

• 3:17:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:17:09Speaker 05

  I'm not in the business of, of saying shit about anyone. I have my opinions based off of operational experience with every single one of those units you just mentioned, including some ones you didn't. Uh, I, with unequivocally, uh, Delta is the most professional organization I've ever been around in my entire life.

• 3:17:27Speaker 06

  Um, 375 JR, uh, Jay, we're really sorry, but you know, 375. Um, Houston checking, checking in. Shout out 375 BCO. Rangers lead the way, Jay. Um, Luis Vasquez, great interview as always. I hope you're having better luck with your new home appliances.

• 3:17:50Jack Murphy?

  I'm not catching that reference.

• 3:17:55Jack Murphy?

  Thanks, Joe. Bueller?

• 3:17:57Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah.

• 3:17:58Jack Murphy?

  Bueller?

• 3:17:59Speaker 05

  My fridge went down like two years ago, but I got a new one.

• 3:18:01Jack Murphy?

  Maybe, maybe you've already backed your refrigerator.

• 3:18:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:18:05Jack Murphy?

  All right, what else?

• 3:18:06Speaker 06

  Uh, Grayman0621, is that a Marine Corps MOS 00621? I don't know.

• 3:18:13Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, I believe the Os are Marine Corps stuff, uh, like, uh, I think infantry's like 0300 series or something like that.

• 3:18:19Speaker 06

  And 08 is artillery, but I don't know what 06 is.

• 3:18:21Speaker 05

  I'm not sure.

• 3:18:23Speaker 06

  Um, I hope everyone has a blessed, uh, a blessed, aren't, a blessed weekend. Uh, I think a blessed weekend.

• 3:18:31Jack Murphy?

  Thank you.

• 3:18:31Speaker 06

  Thanks.

• 3:18:32Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 3:18:32Speaker 06

  Um, M. Corbin, thank you very much. Uh.

• 3:18:40Speaker 06

  Why would Delta pass on a rigged chicken coop in Iraq that 75th had no problem handling?

• 3:18:46Jack Murphy?

  Did you catch that reference?

• 3:18:47Speaker 05

  I do.

• 3:18:48Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 3:18:49Speaker 05

  We were in Ramadi. Um, and we hit this, we hit this objective and it was, I remember, the reason this sticks out in my head is because me and another team leader were forced to carry thermal barrack charges in an assault pack. And I mean, like, he had five, I had like four or five, like, we were loaded down and that's on top of kit. And we had hit this, this objective that had shitload of chicken coops, we were clearing chicken coops. Ended up being, by the time we were done with that target, we were walking off and little birds were coming in on minigun and rockets to destroy the objective that we had just left. So that may be what they're making reference to, if that was someone that was...

• 3:19:29Speaker 06

  Do you...

• 3:19:29Speaker 05

  That's the only chicken coop story I have.

• 3:19:31Speaker 06

  Was there a lot of, uh, resistance?

• 3:19:33Speaker 05

  Oh, we didn't shoot anyone, we just let CAS take care of it.

• 3:19:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:19:37Speaker 05

  They came in, it was like something out of a movie, we were walking out and they were

• 3:19:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:19:41Speaker 05

  And just lit the whole damn house up.

• 3:19:43Speaker 06

  I think that, those were like, um, those were sort of like later on war lessons, right? Because CQB was the sexy, CQB based on hostage rescue was the sexy, it, it was what everybody wanted to do until people started getting shot and realized that there are no hostages on target. And it's like, why are we rushing into these rooms? When we can either clear them from outside or

• 3:20:13Speaker 05

  Shack the building.

• 3:20:13Speaker 06

  Just call CAS.

• 3:20:14Speaker 05

  Shack the building.

• 3:20:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:20:16Speaker 05

  And it did become, and I'm, this is again, personal speculation, but I, I do be thinking, I, I do think towards the end, it became a, a numbers game, like, is it worth losing a $60 million aircraft or maybe getting a guy or two killed?

• 3:20:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:20:31Speaker 05

  And that's unfortunate, but that's war. I mean, that's, that is the unfortunate part of the job.

• 3:20:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:20:39Speaker 05

  It is what it is. We're told to go, where to go. We don't have a say in it.

• 3:20:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:20:44Speaker 05

  I mean, obviously, I probably wouldn't have stayed in Ramadi too that long if I had a say in it or gone periods.

• 3:20:48Speaker 06

  And honestly, SOF had a lot more say than conventional troops did.

• 3:20:51Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, big time.

• 3:20:51Speaker 06

  You know, I mean, conventional troops are like, hey, you know, put a cop in that valley, surrounded by all these mountains and see what comes out, you know, and there's like 20 guys there that are combat ineffective as, as an assault force.

• 3:21:09Speaker 05

  You know, it was funny. I was, uh, I can't remember if it was Restrepo or Coringal, um, that came out, but I was, I watched both of them. I don't, it's been a while, but I was sitting there with my wife watching it and I'm like, oh, this is really good, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden there's this face on screen. And, uh, his last name is Hal. He was our, he was our PL on the crash site. And then all of a sudden I'm watching the movie and I'm like, is that? Oh my God, that's, that's my old PL. And he was at, uh, in the Coringal.

• 3:21:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:21:39Speaker 05

  When that was going on. So I saw him on camera.

• 3:21:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:21:41Speaker 05

  I was like, holy smokes.

• 3:21:42Speaker 06

  Dee, did we have anything on Patreon?

• 3:21:45Jack Murphy?

  The, the documentary, people can go and find it on Amazon Prime right now.

• 3:21:50Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 3:21:50Jack Murphy?

  Finding it as a Ranger is the name of the documentary. Uh, we, we watched it just before we did this interview, so I hope you guys will go and check it out. It's pretty awesome. Listening to David like kind of walk through his whole experience in Ranger Battalion, but also telling the story of your platoon and what they experienced and what they went through.

• 3:22:11Speaker 06

  It's a, it's a good Christmas movie for your kids.

• 3:22:15Speaker 05

  If you want them to have nightmares until, you know, for.

• 3:22:18Speaker 06

  But no, but do check it out. It, it's on Amazon. Check it out. Support a veteran.

• 3:22:27Speaker 06

  Get on it. Get her done.

• 3:22:28Jack Murphy?

  Anything else you want to throw out there before we get going? Anything you want to promote or, or tell people about?

• 3:22:34Speaker 05

  I, I, not as much. I, I really want to, to get people funneled to the foundation.

• 3:22:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:22:39Speaker 05

  Cause that, you know, for us helping, you know, and we always said this as we started, if we can help just one person, this whole thing is worth it. And, and I think if I had to, to, to leave it with one thing I want to leave the audience with is. Especially for those veterans out there, you're not alone. And I think one of the biggest things that I got out that I felt was that I'm all by myself. And again, we stem back to that. I haven't been alone in so long, I just didn't notice. And I think a lot of people get out and they don't have a good support network. Like, they don't have family, or they don't have good siblings, or siblings at all, or people that they can talk to this about. And I think that creates, for a lot of people, a sense of isolation. And what we're trying to do is help them, you know, not only realize, hey, you're not alone,

• 3:23:22Speaker 05

  but you have a voice, too. Like, you went through and experienced a lot of things that most people in this life never will. And it's okay to feel certain ways, but it's also okay to talk about it. And, you know, sometimes being tough means being tender. I hate to use that kind of cheesy terminology, but I've laid myself open to try to just get this off of, like, this is more than one person can handle for an entire lifetime.

• 3:23:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:23:45Speaker 05

  And we all need that network. I mean, and I think that's really the message that the foundation, especially, is trying to, is to promote, is like, hey, you know, if you need help, reach out. Like, talk to people. Shit, email the foundation, we'll get back to you. Like, we genuinely care, and we want to help everyone and anyone we can. And it's hard, it's hard to let that barrier down, but, um, you know, for, it certainly helped for me.

• 3:24:16Speaker 06

  So, that is furtherfasterharder.org. I would ask everybody watching this, and everybody who does watch this, and everybody who listens to this, to please go to their website, give them, just send them five bucks. Like, just get involved in the, in the most basic way you can, if that's all you can do. We deeply appreciate it. If you can do more, if you can contact them, if you can volunteer in some way, please do that. But it's furtherfasterharder.org, link is in the description.

• 3:24:53Jack Murphy?

  And we will be back, actually, I think tomorrow, we'll be doing a bit of streaming, uh, probably, with Christmas music. Uh, the Team House Christmas party.

• 3:25:03Speaker 04

  Christmas music and my commentary.

• 3:25:06Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and if you guys have some, a few questions for us, I might be willing to answer, depending on how deep into my cups I am at that point in time.

• 3:25:15Speaker 06

  The, the deeper he is, the more willing he will be to answer.

• 3:25:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it, yeah, it's inver- there's this inverse logic to it, yeah. Um, David, thanks for coming and telling your story, man.

• 3:25:26Speaker 06

  We deeply appreciate it.

• 3:25:27Speaker 05

  The pleasure was all mine. Thank you guys so much for having me up here. I mean, I can't tell you, you know, just every time we're able to do something like this to get the word out, you know, it helps, helps every single one of us that are out there on the street.

• 3:25:37Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 3:25:37Speaker 05

  And their families as well, you know, that's.

• 3:25:40Speaker 06

  Reach out to us anytime you have anything going, like, we'll, we'll plug it, we'll promote it, we'll put it out there to the world.

• 3:25:45Speaker 05

  That's awesome. I just, I can't thank you guys enough for the opportunity. Thank you.

• 3:25:49Jack Murphy?

  Anytime, man. Uh, so we'll see you guys tomorrow evening, I think. Uh, so take care out there. Everyone have a nice weekend.

• 3:25:58Speaker 04

  And Monday, we have Jack Murphy.

• 3:26:01Jack Murphy?

  Oh, right, yeah. Monday, we're gonna have our stream where we'll be talking about We Defy. So get your questions ready. If you have questions about the book, um, I'll be happy to answer them for you.

• 3:26:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, and also subscribe to the new Eyes On YouTube channel. Thank you.

• 3:26:15Jack Murphy?

  Subscribe to the Eyes On YouTube channel. There's gonna be links down in the description. Thank you, guys.

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